Dreams of lots of rooms February 19, 2012

For many years I’ve dreamt of houses, of looking at a house I might purchase (even when I knew I had no money), living in a new house, discovering new rooms in a house I was about to move out of. Most often it’s dilapidated and cluttered with junk, but as I wander from room to room, I find great potential, and am enthusiastic and hopeful that I will get this place cleaned up, fixed up, and enjoy the wondrous pleasure of having so many rooms that I can choose what I want to do in each. This one will be my sewing room. Here I’ll sit and drink tea and read. This room with its trough sink and windows all along the wall would be ideal for starting seedlings and keeping the garden tools. Across the hall will be where the kids study.

I grew up in a house where there were more rooms than people, but, inexplicably, I never felt I could find space or privacy. The house never seemed big enough. I sometimes went into the attic to hide away and read. That was the biggest residence I’ve ever lived in (unless you count college dormitories, and the dorm-like coop I lived in in Madison, Wisconsin). Every place I’ve lived had a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom or two, perhaps a dining room. Every room was designated to an obvious purpose, and to use it for another was always a sacrifice of some kind. There was also a loft for a while, which, naturally, had no rooms at all. At that place I set up a tent of sorts, to carve a massage room out of my designated space. But always, I had the dream. Always I would wake from it and wonder, will I ever have that place, the one with so many rooms I get to decide what I want to do in every one?

I don’t mean to imply that it is something I, or anyone, particularly deserves. I’m well aware that most people in the world have smaller homes than we have here in the US, that in many places, the large room I hated sharing with my sister would have been occupied by a large and grateful family. I do believe that dreams, especially those with repeated themes, can be a guide to a person’s highest purposes. The key, however, may not be to recreate the dream physically, but rather to find what actions and choices lead a person into the ineffable feelings present in the dream. While the physical conditions are more often than not simply impossible, the feelings are always present within us, sometimes waiting to be awakened, when the moment is right.

About eight years ago, we bought a motel. The house on the property was bigger than anyplace Kevin and I had ever shared, with good-sized rooms and a big kitchen. But, it didn’t take long for things to get cluttered, and Rowan was born before the end of the first year, followed two years later by Kiran. As with all our Chicago apartments, we ended up habitually putting excess stuff in an unofficially designated room, which becomes too full of stuff to use. Then I cleaned out my parents’ house (remember that one that was never big enough?), and moved a lot of stuff into the motel rooms that hadn’t been renovated yet. Our house no longer seems big, or to have enough rooms.

A few months ago I woke from that dream, and thought, will I ever have that house, with so many rooms? Shouldn’t I already have the key to whatever that dream means? Where is it? Then I thought, I own a motel. There is no shortage of rooms.

We have all these rooms. Room 1 is at the far right.

I made it my goal for the year to clear enough stuff to make a room for myself. It won’t be all those rooms of the mansion of my dreams, but it will be my space, and big enough to do the things I want more of in my life, to keep some crafting supplies, set up my sewing machine, and to have a good desk for writing. Motel room 1 has no shower (can’t be rented), and it’s full of stuff. That’s my job for the year.

But New Year’s resolutions rarely make it through the end of February, the cruelest month. Dar Williams was spot on when she wrote that song. “The night is long and cold and scary/ Will we live through February?” Besides my getting overwhelmed with massages, writing, being the art lady at school, and being a mom, feeding and clothing everyone every day; the motel business screeches to a standstill, the checks begin bouncing, bills come in faster than I can keep track of. I actively manage my serotonin level. My Clearing and Creating My Space Journal has been on the shelf for weeks.

But the dream comes back, reminding me not to give up. This morning I woke from a dream of exploring all those rooms, finding so much stuff left by the previous owner. A surprising amount of it appeared useful or even valuable, if not to me, then to someone who would like to buy it. It was collected by someone with a neurotic attachment to material things, who then left it for me to deal with. This is raw material for me to transform, alchemically, into what serves my current purposes.

Why Kansans Keep Our Mountains Buried Underground February 11, 2012

Most people, it would seem, think of Kansas as a wasteland of flatness. Any Kansan, particularly those from the eastern half, would be quick to tell you that this land isn’t really flat. Eastern Kansas has several hill ranges, of which our own beloved Flint Hills region is only one. But what even many Kansans don’t know is that we actually have a sizable mountain range here; it just happens to be underground. How deep are they? I can’t find a clear number, though geologists have discussed the Nemaha Mountains quite a bit. Here’s a little more general information on the geology of the Flint Hills region. http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/student/massey1/geomorphology.htm Actually, there are other places you can find great detail about the Nemaha Ridge, but I like this one because the professor this project was made for was a friend of my Dad.

Suffice to say that these mountains are buried deep enough to be invisible, and while they do create a gravity anomaly in Washington County, it’s not strong enough for most people to notice. Other states keep their mountains out in the open air, where everyone can see and enjoy them, but Kansans don’t always do things the way other people do them. We’re not irrational, we have our reasons. So, I thought today I’d list some of those reasons.

Why Kansans Keep Our Mountains Buried Underground

1. If that’s where they are, I assume they were put there for a reason, and far be it from me to go moving things around.
2. We don’t show off, like those Coloradans, parading around with their mountains out in the open for all the world to see. Who do they think they are?
3. It’s where they’ve always been.
4. Leave those alone, I’m gonna clean them up and put them on eBay.
5. On second thought, I might need them, better leave them alone.
6. You know if people could see them, everyone in New York and California would want to come here and ski and sip lattes and drive their cars all over our roads and start telling us what we can and can’t do on our own property . . .
7. And you can’t tell a man what he can do on his own property. If I want to keep my mountains underground, I’ll keep them underground.
8. . . . and the traffic would be terrible, it’d be just like the city, where immigrants come from other countries, and pretty soon the schools would have to teach in foreign languages, and they’d have to install bidets in all the bathrooms . . .
9. Social services would be overwhelmed!
10. . . . and we just can’t afford that.

So there they are, and there they will stay. The mountains of Kansas, like Hutchinson’s giant salt mine http://www.undergroundmuseum.org/index.php, and the world’s largest hand-dug well http://www.bigwell.org/, are underground. If you want to appreciate Kansas, and Kansans, fully, you must look beneath the surface.

Witches, Nightmares, Memes, and Dreamwork February 5, 2012

I wanted a picture of cuddling with Rowan, but could only find this one of my Mom, Leona Creager, my sister Melora, and myself. Sometimes when I see this picture, for a split second I think I'm Rowan.

Rowan dreamt of a witch, trying to get all the children. She told me while we were cuddling in bed in the morning. I told her, if she dreams of the witch again, to ask her what she wants. Rowan said she can’t talk to the witch because, if she stops trying to get away, the witch will get her. I had to tell her about a witch dream I had years ago.

A witch was chasing me for a long time, over many places. I knew she would kill me if she caught me. I ran and ran and when I was trapped, in a dirty, windowless, basement room, I fought for my life. It was violent and brutal. I beat her with all my strength, but she kept getting back up. Finally I woke, exhausted. I reviewed the horrible dream I’d had, trying to remember all the details. What did the witch look like? She was little, a girl, and she had brown hair and brown eyes. In fact, she looked like me.

“You were fighting yourself!” Rowan was smiling, enjoying the discovery.

“Yes, that’s why I couldn’t kill her. I was afraid of my magical self, afraid to be powerful.” I went on to tell her how I’d had so many years of nightmares, and about the box of journals I still have, filled with page after page of terrifying, violent dreams, recorded in minute detail. Rowan has nightmares, too, though she often has joyful dreams as well. I told her how there was a time when all my dreams were about running for my life, then I decided to start fighting back, then I decided to find other means than violence to do what I have to do.

It wasn’t until I was well into A Course In Miracles that I stopped having nightmares, so I had to tell her about that. “A Course In Miracles teaches that God is love. You know that, though, right?”

“Of course!”

“And God is eternal, which means there can be no limit on God. Right?”

“Yes.”

“So there can’t be anything that’s not God, because that would mean that there’s a line, God is here, but not there, so there can’t be that. Right?”

“Mama, are you God?”

“Yes, and so are you. Can God be hurt?”

“If I can’t be hurt, then why did it hurt when I got a scratch?”

It gets tricky in here. The best I could tell her is that we have a bigger self, one that is one with God and all the universe, and that, by comparison, the hurts of the little self are insignificant. But the big self can’t be hurt, so we are safe as long as we identify with the big self. A Course In Miracles teaches that there is nothing to fear. When I came to understand this, I stopped having nightmares.

Rowan thought for a moment, then said, “Okay, let’s get up now.”

I don’t expect Rowan to grasp all this easily or instantly, and I don’t want to take away what is hers to learn on her own. I hope, though, that these things I tell her will help when she needs them.

There’s something else that this conversation brought to my attention. We got up and went into the living room, where Kiran was watching a tv show about some kids who were trying to protect their computer world against their eternal villain, a hacker. We are inundated with stories, images, and rhetoric about the evil villain or the criminal who is Other and must be vanquished. These memes lie. The scary bad figure of your dreams is part of you. He or she is not the villain of children’s television shows, who must be disempowered; nor the criminal on the cop show whose very existence threatens everyone’s safety until he or she is either locked up or put to death. Sure, there are probably exceptions, but you’ll never really know if you are one of them until you take a risk. The answer is not to run, or fight, not to separate yourself from what you fear, but to open to every self that you are. Talk to yourself. Make friends with yourself. If you can’t be friends, make alliances to serve your mutual interests, because they can’t be that disparate, if you are one person, can they? Take a risk and see what happens if you let the intruder in, turn around and face your pursuer, listen to the demands of your attacker. You might be surprised at what you learn about yourself.

Sometimes you even receive a gift –but I’ll save that thought for another post.

In Case You Were Wondering January 27, 2012

In Case You Were Wondering

Have I ever hugged a tree?
I have
wrapped my being
around a tree and clung
with the needy desperation
of an abandoned child
searching
for her wounded
mother.

The Divine Location January 25, 2012

A customer came in to the motel one day and told me that he had a message for me. He seemed young, barely more than a kid, but then again he had fine lines around the mouth and eyes, like someone who’d had some wear and tear over more than just a few years. He was a bit uncomfortable telling me that he was supposed to tell me that God loves me. He had been staying here for a day or two, but the job he came to do had been delayed, and he was praying and asking God why he was stuck here, and repeatedly received the answer that it was because he was to talk to me.

Later I was telling Kevin about this conversation, and at this point in the story he began rolling his eyeballs. It’s not unusual for customers or potential customers to witness their faith to him, often immediately before asking for a reduced room price, then moving on to making the distinction between themselves and lazy freeloaders who expect government handouts. There’s not really anything in this recitation which would elicit from Kevin, or me, any sympathy or affinity with the person speaking.

But this customer, call him Eli, was different. Well, and I’m different too. I’m willing to take any help I get from supernatural sources, and the earthly sources assure me that denomination doesn’t matter, so I told Eli that I appreciated his message, even though it was a surprise because I do not identify as Christian. I told him that I usually pray to God as a Mother, not a Father, but that I was grateful for the message because I had been doing a lot lately to clear my negative thinking and feelings that hold me back. Eli didn’t have any problem with that. He told me that God is both Mother and Father, and that it takes bringing in Light to clear away the crap (my word, not his). He asked if he could pray for me, so we sat down and he expressed to Jesus’s Dad how much he hoped that I would come to see how much He loves me, to see that all the thoughts I carry about my inability to fulfill what is asked and needed of me are lies, and that I would come to see and understand how much God has invested in my happiness and prosperity.

As he prayed, and even before the prayer began, I could feel a charge of energy moving through me. It began, interestingly, in my root chakra, but before he was done, it was all through my body, and the tingly feeling persisted after Eli left the building. He told me that was the Holy Spirit.

He ended up staying for several days, and we spoke again later. He told me how he had found God while in rehab, how he’d never known who his father was, how he wanted to see Jesus, to look into His eyes. I kept feeling that Jesus’s eyes would probably be like Eli’s, open and searching, grounded in faith, but not afraid to see reality and be in it. Finally I said, “I think I’m supposed to tell you, that if you want to see Jesus, look in a mirror.” That one seemed pretty simple to me, but it was big to Eli.

At this point I started to wonder if we had been brought together not just for my benefit, but for both of us. Because what I had told Eli was something that maybe it takes a New Age pagan Buddhist yogi to see, which is that God is not located out there somewhere in the sky, or somewhere else equally distant and unattainable. The Divine is right here, not sitting next to us at the table, but within each of us, not in a little apartment somewhere in the brain, but living and working in every cell, in every electrical impulse that jumps from neuron to neuron. According to A Course In Miracles, God is love, and God is eternal, which is to say, without limit. Therefore there can be nothing in the universe which is not god, which is not Love. There is nothing you could say about God that would not be entirely true of yourself. You are God, which is not to say that you are above or more powerful than anyone or anything, but that you are everyone and everything. You are me. I am you. We are Jesus, and recovering addicts, and healers and swindlers and banksters and loggers and loin-clothed yogis fasting on the top of a mountain in India, and housewives in the suburbs going upstairs to make sure the beds are still made.

Before he left, Eli asked me if I thought I’d ever be Christian. I almost said, “Maybe I already am.” Instead I told him that I don’t know, but that I find the teachings of Jesus to be inspiring. I stopped short of calling myself Christian because I don’t know if Christianity, as people know and mean the word, can allow for the Divine to be seamlessly woven into the fabric of my being. Can it? Is Christian God always out there? Or not?

Oh Smelly World January 20, 2012

So what if earthly life is earthy, smelly, dirty, shitty? Earth is all these things, and Divine, joyful, radiantly brilliant, exploding with life. We are all these. Embrace everything.

Waiting January 14, 2012

What will become of us? Our author has not opened our file in weeks. We thought it was because of the holidays, but they are off in the world of memory now. She has perused blogs about publishing, ignored offers of connection with some published novelist somebody knows, started a new blog with an intentionally limited audience. We see her daily work at clearing emotional baggage, as well as struggling to clear unnecessary material possessions. Then she gives in to obsession with the latest Dan Simmons novel, which she got for Christmas. Oh Rachel, will you ever fly over your unseen obstacles, like Aenea and Raul Endymion and A. Bettik paragliding over the cloud-obscured boiling acid ocean of planet T’ien Shan? Will we, your characters, your alter egos, your virtual children, ever be liberated from your private files? Will the Post Rock Limestone Caryatids, the Winnies, the Sisters of the Star, the squatters of Manhattan, Kansas ever see our stories told? Will Maeve Wolf, Starla Winnie, Valeriana Glitch, Melchisedek Weaver, and Cal see their names printed upon a page?

She appears to be waiting, but no one is sure for what. We wait too.

Decoding Advertising With Rowan, Age 7 January 8, 2012

Rowan: Why does it say “Milk’s favorite cookie?”

Me: They want you to think about cookies when you think of milk.

Rowan: Why?

Me: Well, it’s kind of clever when you think about it, because people often think of milk as a healthy food which they eat frequently [she knows I don't agree with this idea], so they’re trying to get you to think of cookies when you think about something healthy, instead of when you think of junk food that you don’t eat very often.

[silence]

Me: What do you think about that?

Rowan: I think they’re a bad company if they do that. But I like the cookies.

If you make your own cookies, you get to lick the beaters.

Unsupported musings on the history of war, by Melch December 30, 2011

I’ve been thinking about history, about certain threads that run through the weave of it, not events but rather sorta big ideas, or deep ideas, underlying motives, maybe. It’s about war and how people fight.

At least the box turtle could get out of some mud, if she wanted to.

In the middle ages, much of conflict was based in strong defenses. You placed your castle in a high place where you could see and defend against the enemy. Castles got bigger and more complex and became places where a whole village could hole up for weeks or months, to wait out their enemies within thick stone walls. Conflict on the ground also emphasized defense. Sure, soldiers had ridiculously long lances, and crossbows, but they were wearing so much armor that if they fell off their horses they couldn’t get up. If they fell face down in a mud puddle they’d just drown there. Least that’s what I’ve heard.

So you can see the limits of this defensive approach to war and battle. The people in the castle had to wait for their attackers to leave, while the enemy could go round up some friends, or go out for tea, pick up some groceries and a video, grab a beer at the local pub, and come back to the castle refreshed and ready for battle, should the inhabitants finally get tired of sitting inside with nothing to do. (Don’cha like how I work in a reference to the twentieth century?) Because of this problem, castles were eventually abandoned altogether, and the offensive approach to war rose to dominance. Firearms were invented, so people could shoot one another without getting too close. Then tanks, which took the defenses of the castle on the offense. Airplanes were developed to drop bombs and warheads on people from the sky. Biological and chemical weapons took advantage of the physical vulnerabilities inherent in the human body. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, offensive attacks were so sophisticated that a man could sit in a comfortable office and with a few keystrokes send unmanned craft over oceans and continents to target a particular person or place and destroy it/him/her. They probably never knew what had hit them.

Around this time, some people were starting to wonder if any of this was really a good idea after all. They figured they had a choice, to continue on an endless path to nowhere and develop ever-more-sophisticated ways to attack and kill people, or to rethink the whole idea of war and conflict altogether. Maybe getting along was underrated. Did anybody in any of these wars really know what they were fighting for, after all? Sure, everybody likes to talk about freedom, or security, but how free, or secure, is anyone, when drones can find you, anywhere in the world, and kill you in your house while you sleep?

So that was the choice people had, in the early twenty-first century. To keep up the good fight, the expensive, dangerous, never-see-the-end-of-it fight, or to figure out how to quit fighting, to find better things to do, to choose cooperation over conflict. To commit to peace. And here I am, at the other end of the century looking back, sitting at what used to be a crossroads in those days, and what did they choose? Well, look at the history, and you tell me.

Respectfully, Melchisedek Weaver, Strong City, Kansas

Loss and letting go December 18, 2011

A little over a year ago, I was introduced to a healing technique called Faster EFT, or Emotionally Focused Transformations. I went to a short workshop because a friend had been raving about this technique, also called tapping, and the workshop was free, so I figured I had nothing to lose. B. Grace Jones http://tinyurl.com/7xw6gay teaches that all disease and discomfort is ultimately rooted in fear and/or anger. The emotions are released by tapping five points on the body while talking one’s way from the unhappy state to releasing those emotions, then replacing the associated thoughts with something more desirable. The points fall on the meridians in Chinese medicine which correspond to the organs activated by the fight or flight response. Nothing radical there, to one who’s been hanging around the new age scene for fifteen years, though it was all put together nicely in one simple package.

So skip the details, I’ve been using this technique occasionally since then. This past week I decided to observe the turning over of the year by tapping every day. I was agitated because I’d been spent much of the day looking for a part to a toy that I was supposed to send to my sister. We had some kind of misunderstanding and she was waiting for me to send it to her daughter for years, and now wants it for her younger daughter. If you have a sister you can see here how this kind of thing triggers every sisterly anxiety in the book. She never approved of me, she thinks I’m a fuck-up, I was the spoiled youngest who never had to pull my weight, etc etc etc. I don’t actually know she thinks all these things, but, well, I’m sure she does, and lots more.

First I sat down and had a little talk with my inner child, whom I suspected of hiding this thing because she didn’t want to give it away. She reluctantly let go. Then I tried dowsing with a pendulum, which resolutely refused to move. I went looking for a different pendulum which might work better, but all I found was a wingnut on my dresser. It was after that that I decided to use the EFT.

But when I sat down to tap, those sisterly feelings weren’t the strongest. I felt drawn to look at a memory, one of my earliest, of which I had been reminded multiple times in the last couple days. In the memory, I guess we were eating lunch, my mom, brother, sister, and myself in a room of a house we moved out of when I was three. I thought of someone, two people, I think, whom I could see as silhouettes in a small patch of light in darkness, as if I were in a dark room, being watched over by these people who were standing in the doorway, light shining from behind them. I felt safe and loved. But on the day I remembered this moment, I realized that I would never see these people again. I began to cry, and my baffled mom offered me a slice of bread with butter, which she had just handed to my brother. I took it because it was easier than trying to explain what I was really crying about.

It wasn’t until about thirty years later that I recalled this memory, and after some thought I’ve concluded that those people looking in on me lovingly were the foster parents who cared for me between birth and adoption when I was six months old. I don’t know their names, or anything about them, but I think once my Dad told me that the man in particular had been so attached to me that it was difficult for him to turn me over to my new parents. At thirty-seven, I had my first child, and as I watched this little baby grow, I realized that there was not a single person in my life who had known me in those precious early months. I’m very grateful to have a relationship with my birthmom and her family, but who watched me turn over, smile, and crawl for the first time? Who smiled back?

I began to tap the grief of loss, the fear of letting go. I expressed it, I released it. But what to replace it with? I embraced change, I welcomed new experiences. And as I tapped, it occurred to me that if I have lived fully in the moment, I won’t feel a need to go back to it. If I suck every last bit of living out of every minute I get, when it’s done, I’ll be over it. The preventive against suffering loss of the past is to be, to be present, totally in the moment, to gulp it in like fresh air after a stale small room, as if I’ve never been alive and breathed before. It seems hard. Can I do it? What else is there? What choice do I have?

And now that I’ve found the answer, where is that thing I was looking for? I thought it would suddenly appear after all the clearing I’ve been doing, but it hasn’t. Yet.