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Preparing to Write The Dreaming of Trees
Deb Templeton (Apan, Mexico, March 2017) On this project, I am the writer, and thus I find myself sitting at the intersection of many roads, multiple dimensions, several cultures, and a vast sea of possibilities. It's my job to channel. To find the underground water and the ways to let it spring and surge and teem and torrent. How do we prepare ourselves for that deep work in the darkness, and how do we ready ourselves to throw open all our inner dams and doorways? How to free up energy pathways and synchronise synapse patterns so as to draw up the deep deepwater with its microscopic traces and crystalline energy trails left over from the old world, from the world into which it was new-born? I have to make of myself a channel, a conduit, a conscious watercourse, like the aqueducts and canals at Nezhualcoyotl's palace in Texcoco, Mexico. He was a philosopher-poet and ruler, and he knew about channeling thought and image - and water. He ran canals from the cloud-topped mountain of the raingod to a dry, cactus hill circled with infinity pools. Freshwater surged and splashed and the queens and concubines dallied in dancing light and freshness and flow. Here I sit in a small house hugging close to the earth on a lava plain, with thunder rumbling and rolling around the far reaches, mountain rimmed. I see the straw Brigid's cross that I have brought from Ireland and left on the mantelpiece for Nicolás, for blessings on this little house. It's very domestic; Brigid, the hearth-goddess calling down happiness and protection on a home. The old magic of image and incantation. What signs need to be made or talismans worn to call forward the kind of benediction that the artist asks for? To assist us in dropping down into the dreaming place, and in catching the tides which we know to ebb and flow, which are called by moons and seasons and changing winds. When the dusk drops and an inner silence softens the air, and you find yourself centred and soulful, how to put that listening to the service of a specific artwork, the pristine precisions of a particular creative task? How to open oneself into a spacious awareness that can draw in the vast multiplicities; not narrowing perception, but opening the doors of it, as the man said. Expanding into wide open mind spaces in which things mix, and myths and meanings emerge. Becoming the downstream river, in full spate with spring tides from many tributary streams. I have been reading Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming by Catherine Shainberg, and I am struck by the simple details of the place she describes as she moves into her intuited and long-awaited meeting with her teacher (the mystic, Colette). When we are in the midst of these pristine, profound moments, the ruminating mind stops and we receive instructions, clear and simple. That the door is blue matters. And that the air is just so, the light pearling and not bright, the dust underfoot, and the smell of woodsmoke on your clothes. Everything matters, just as though it had been written long ago and memorised by heart. We have to notice. How many trails of bread-crumbs leading home have we failed to see? How many times have whispered words echoed unheard in our ears? Look for a wooden door, a pane of blue glass, russet tiles. You will know the moment by the woodsmoke in the air. Signs, signals, messages from the unseen world. How have we missed them? How we have not noticed what happens in our subtle vein systems, in the steady flow of the river of the heart's secret talk? The church stones, the dry river bed. You remembered them when you saw them, didn’t you? The dry river bed. You remembered that this was the way home. And then you forgot again, because your mind flooded with fatuous nothingness and the ego went clamouring, banging on the door, insisting and demanding its dues. The deer or wolf or buffalo standing shy in the trees dropped its antlered or its woolly head and went away. Shainberg says that we are always dreaming, that the doorways and portals to the dream life - where we think and know through wordplay and image wisdom - are always available. The meaning-multiplicities layered into the visions of the night dream float up out of the aquifers, out of the deepest drench of seabed or groundwater. Our nervous systems have their roots in that nutrient-rich river system. As writers and artists, we have to open to its rising flow. We have to let go of the day's hold enough to be flooded, to be washed out of ourselves. I am letting myself be seduced by the tobacco light, by the smoked air, by the half-sleep; I am letting myself be carried beyond this dulled, domestic and prosaic world into the other world. Today, these are the spells that take me there: light falling through thunderclouds onto the last stones of an old hacienda, streaks on my shoes from the river dust, the ghost of the thought of a girl running barefoot through corn husks to her unlawful lover... resanctifying the church stones. A fire ablaze in the goddess hearth, and the lineages of this world and the other world swirling together in woodsmoke. |