Hello dear friends and welcome new subscribers! Already tucked into September, and yet with so much summer to review, I’ll be posting another article next week too.
Bye bye FB
Facebook broke up with me. It wasn’t consensual, and it wasn’t anything I did. But a bad actor got in and I was hacked so bad that FB gave me no room to appeal. Oh, I’d become disillusioned, as we all have, but I always came back. Sorry I don’t know anyone’s birthday anymore, and can’t contact you on Messenger or Instagram or WhatsApp. Some of you lucky ones were never part of that FB gang, and now I’m starting to remember what it’s like to experience life without that filter. I don’t miss it too much, I confess. The Substack Notes app seems to satisfy the scrolling habit, and please come find me there. Now FB is out of the way, I just may find the mojo to write this Substack more often.
Some recent journal entries
My words fall away flow away barely formed fall like all the dry leaves of the arbutus and here we sit beneath these ever-falling leaves a book unbound
The Long Train
Finally the energy of summer has shifted away and in the more moody, clouded, overcast of morning, I find myself able to write again.
Ideas were working away, percolating in the background, sending out their rhizomes (to mix the metaphor) as I tried and failed to make sense of next steps, even the simple ones of “what now?”
Clouds make it possible to think, much as light makes writing more possible. I’m in the flow of process, so can only note what I glimpse going by, like a passenger on a train. But once in a while we stop at a station and I can see passengers and their baggage being let off, and that’s a relief, I can tell you. Then there are strangers, new ones, bringing their bags on. I watch them, wondering who they are and what they are bringing.
It appears that we are all on this train. I’d become familiar with the passengers who had just left, got to know their stories. Some of them were disruptive, some had stinky baggage or weird-smelling lunches. Good riddance. It was definitely time for them to go. But here’s the thing: they left of their own accord. I couldn’t have made that happen if I tried.
But did I mention that the train is me, only me? Talk about soul train! Fated destination, set at birth or before. Major stations and track switchings are already established in the route. But accommodations and changes, like a long stop in a snowy mountain pass for days, were not predicted. Or the delay from extra load as several unplanned cars attached at one station stop. I guess someone radioed ahead and agreed to that.
Well, this last stop was really a big one as so many passengers left and only a few new ones came on. The train became lighter once the added cars were uncoupled and their contents were no longer adding load to the engine. Did it seem like flying? A little.
I sit, as I do each day, in the dome car, with 360° views of each side and the sky. If I turn around, I can see where we’ve been. Staring straight ahead I can anticipate turns, hills and oncoming tunnels as well as all the days and nights, weather, and seasons.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned the recreational station stops. At refueling and for our general well-being, we all step off the train from time to time. So good to feel my feet on the stability of true ground. These stops might include excursions into town for curios and restaurant foods or specialty coffee. At longer stops there can be hikes in nearby nature, forest, field and stream, if the weather permits. Sometimes at these stops I might just nap in the quiet of the unmoving, empty train.
Actually this train isn’t for travel or transportation, you see, unless you consider “metaphor” as transportation. I do. What does the mythic book call it - Boundaries and Passages, or rules and portals? Bridge or train or vehicle. I heard of one that goes through the pathway and another that goes over the threshold or one that goes into the portal. Vehicle? Mahayana or Hinayana? Merkaba?
Another sort of train ride - I’m watching this while listening to John Fahey
Pen Magic
I am back with pen in hand, ready to receive and cooperate, or transcribe. Here’s the process:
The secret is to open to the place where contact reveals emergence. Invocation helps with that, but it needn’t be worded. Just opening, sitting with pen and paper ready, can be enough sometimes to tell everybody engaged in this that the moment is upon us to unify energies into the moving tip of my handheld pen.
I set an internal timer that tells me I will be here for a time, so the improvisation can unfold and not be truncated before it can self-reveal. A new page begins a new contact with the pen’s old companions.
When the old man in the hills sits outside on a stump with the fire circle behind him, the breeze moves small bunches of herbs hanging from the roof of his small house, just to the left, or out of frame. He is improvising on an instrument older than Turkish, playing a song 800 years old, about a tree lamenting being cut down to become a waterwheel to grind wheat. The lament is beautiful, and lasts till now and beyond.
Forget time. Live life. We are all repurposed material over all of time in the earth-line of creation. And so I write and “waste time” instead of what? building or creating in the worldly sense.
Finally, accepting becoming older, I feel what has always been at the core of me, a part that is quiet and empty. And now he is singing the old lament.
If I am looking to do something, I’d better act fast. There isn’t much time left to deepen my participation, calling on and using all that has been. When I say each moment is an opportunity, I don’t mean that in a trite way. Each percept is a portal to the passageway. That’s a lot to filter, but it can be orchestrated into a beautiful offering. Condensed to simple essence.
I remember when I was a little girl there was an unexpressed message that I wasn’t permitted to lie on my back on the ground and look at the sky for very long. I was supposed to be standing up, doing things. No one told me. I just thought it. Well, now it is different.
Unapologetically, I sit and observe the sky of my mind, writing to tell you how dreams show what I need to understand, like the old chicken that clucks and calls in the yard while the singer tells his tale, which is an old tale in song.
I would love to step now into my new older self like a perfect suit of clothes designed for this time in my life. Something to remind me of my current being, my past accomplishments, and my unknown future. Part of this world and the next.
There are such dreams that I need to recognize, and when I do, I always find my way. Now I can see and accept it wholly, there is a simplicity of relaxation away from all the seeming disparate details.
In a pattern/interdimensional constellation that moves over time the details are deep in resonance with one another. Alive as our living cosmos, outside of time, its movements are the indication of life. This life is eternal, not fleeting, not of this world. It is held here in our consciousness as pure percept, hidden in and behind all seeming things, beings and events.
A pinpoint of consciousness has no place to stand, only hovers and moves imperceptibly from constellate point to point, and at the touch of this awareness, the points extend, join, form geometric simples activated to link together like chemical diagrams. They are in sound and in sight, and their scent is beauty. A hand of my consciousness points a fingertip to activate a constellate world that exists both afar and nearby. It sends food to the energies. Fuel. One beneath the rays of the Sun. Not our visible solar system sun, but the actual brilliant light of the SUN as One.
I’m here to observe and account. Forms display, open and reveal intricate workings of light through filaments exchanging powers. They float and flow in a space that contains them. I, too, am in this space, floating and contained, nurtured through the rays that beam right through my pinpoint of awareness, and may, by some wonderful means, splash over into my silent self here on earth, holding the tiny, tiniest filament thread of connection to that pinpoint. It sends directly to my pen point by invisible filament from sun to conscious point to earth-self to body to hand to pen. Earth-self mind conditions this communication, converting it to language.
I thought it was all waves. And it usually is. But for this sort of thing it is all filaments. The brilliant web of living constellations. Not only stars but cells and pebbles and thought-forms, histories, stories, everything. Then we see that Great Unification, the creative unfoldment into light at the threshold of iteration.
I’ll be posting another article very soon - there’s so much more to tell you about.
Thanks so much for your kind attention to my writing. It means the world to me to be able to share these inside thoughts with you.
All photos are my own.
Thank you, Carol. Love to you and James.
Lovely reflections, Carol!