Dreamways

The dance of shadow and light; known and unknown; familiar and other

"Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that.  This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week.

I found this in the Fall, 2007 Wilson Quarterly

RED TAPE: Rebirth Certificate

Upon the death of a "living Buddha" a Tibetan Buddhist monk believed to be a living reincarnation of a buddha from the past, the Dalai Lama or a lower-level lama confers the mantle on someone else, and the cycle of reincarnation goes on. But in July, the Chinese government issued "Reincarnation Regulations for Tibetan Living Buddhas."

http://www.parabola.org

"A series of irrelevant incidents had brought me, for the first time in my life, into a college astronomy lecture. It was long before the days of audio-visual teaching techniques, but the lecturer had invented his own. He leapt from one contraption to another with an attention-riveting agility. First it was a projector showing a series of slides which, he explained, had been taken by a fixed camera that recorded the position of each of the planets at the same hour every night for a year.  read more »

"After six days I could not bear to hear any more from Eli. Each day of snow seemed endless, trapped with a sulking boy. Eli paced, muttered, slept, and also ate my cupboard completely bare, down to the last potato, and emptied the little bundle he brought, too, which would have lasted me the whole evil month. We went two days without anything but grease and crumbs of bread. On the seventh day I handed him his gun. He looked at it in surprise, but finally went north.

Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Winner

In the midst of another day's news of political wrangling, the weakening dollar and a belated investigation into Blackwater, I found an interview with Dr. Wangari Maathai who spent the afternoon planting trees with children in Seattle.

Amy Goodman, producer and host of Democracy Now!

I went to see Amy Goodman at the Central Presbyterian Church in Denver on Friday evening. Her message is to challenge the mainstream media to give Americans the whole story. She travels throughout the country, broadcasting from colleges and small towns, and speaking at fundraising events for independent radio and TV stations.

I wake each day to stretch across the threshold of sleep into the curtained morning light, searching for the wisps of dreams that have lately vanished with only the hint of a lingering scent, like a lover disappeared in the night. There are feeling tones that will sound through the day, triggered by a voice in the alley or a snippet of news on the radio. These cues keep the door ajar as I water the garden, sweep the walk, and close the house windows against the coming heat of August days in Denver. But the familiar substance of my dream world remains out of reach and out of sight.

As mentioned earlier, the practice of active imagination includes coming into relationship to the full spectrum of one's self. The African Ancestors helped me to do this by teaching me to focus my attention in much the way a camera's zoom lens functions. Thus I was able to gain perspective via the panoramic view and then engage more objectively during the face to face encounters with my various shadows.

Dreams are just the beginning of a much broader journey into the mystery of the unconscious realm. (Barbarah Hannah: Encounters with the Soul, Sigo Press 1981.)

Last September I dreamed that my friends and I were feeling at a loss as to how to proceed with our lives in a world that seemed so hopelessly identified with the mundane details of each day. And just at that moment, I received a phone call from James Hillman, Jungian Analyst, author and teacher. Hillman was inviting me to join him in an effort to reinvigorate the field of dream analysis by widening our perspectives to include the full scope of waking and sleeping dreams. As we talked on the phone, a white piece of paper floated into my open hand.  read more »