Clay fountains

On the night of the 16th, it was very foggy, cool and otherworldly outside. I found the darkest spot I could find and sat for some deep breathing. With the woodstove going all the time, I'm a bit dried out even though we do keep a pot of water on it all the time. With my eyes closed I found a steady breath and drifted into a dream I had long ago. It was another dream about the old black woman that holds court at the abandoned overpass. This time as I wait at the edge of the woods for permission to come over, she briefly glanced my way and with a disappointed look on her face waived me off. She gave me the get lost look and I remember being embarrassed in front of all the other ladies that were there as I left. I wondered what I had done. Now with 10 years of time past, I know I do things of my own ego and go directly against what is asked of me because sometimes I just don't want to do it or just don't have the energy or emotional maturity to follow through.

I've been struggling with ego lately, so the reminder of that dream was timely. When I write, I try to write from the heart with the intention of helping people and sometimes I receive what I think is overly-harsh criticism. It sucks the air from my lungs and takes it out from under my wings. After an attack on something so personal, it feels like a stone on my chest making it harder to breathe. Then the house designs I've been working on for two years were also torn down and criticized by a close friend. I don't think I was expecting too much of anything from sharing these creations, but I certainly didn't expect to be treated this way. I'm getting used to letters and emails to some in my family being ignored, but that happened again recently too. So with all this happening at the same time, I've felt like just giving up.

After sharing these experiences of the last month with a couple of friends, I got some wonderful advice. The first was to be a fish net and just let it all flow through me. Not holding my hands out to receive it, but keeping my hands down and just letting it be what it is. Then the next advice was to have no expectations when I create or share something. Basically do it without any ideas of how it will be received, just do it. My hurt feelings all stem from ego I guess in that I had hoped they would be liked. The funny thing is, the writing and designs were liked by others, but I let the few bad comments outshine the positive ones. The reminder of the dream helped in that I know that even though I'm working on being a real human, things aren't always going to be rosy with butterfly wings. I will not always be accepted. Sometimes people can be ugly and harsh, but it isn't that way forever.

After more deep breathing and brain drift, I saw a dusty, dry shelf/basin come out of my chest. It was shaped to hold water with a ledge around the edge. The shelf was shaped in the general form of the breasts. Where the nipples would be there were two spouts where water should fall over to another lower level. It was an unused fountain. In it a rusty colored, acidic sludge, sitting stagnant in the slight recess formed by the ledge tilting slightly backwards. In this stagnant water sat large and small black rocks of debris scattered all about. Up the sides of the basin where water once flowed was an ancient looking ring of white calcified deposits and residue covering most of the inside of the basin. The residue was thick and impenetrable. Some rocks partially blocked the exit of the spout that would restrict any water from flowing that did come. The landscape all around was bleak and barren. The outside of the fountain was cracked, dry and clay baked.

Then I looked up at my third eye, which seems easy enough but I still find it rather hard to do for more than a few seconds at a time. Fresh water started dripping in to the shallow recess of the basin and mixed with the rusty colored sludge. Then the water stream increased a bit and became steady. The rocks started moving towards the spill overs and plugging the exit. The more the basin filled, pressure started compressing all the black rocks. They started tumbling and the blackness on their surface started flaking off and being washed away. At the tip of both spouts, a large black rock started becoming a diamond, shaped slightly like a pyramid to fit the shape of the basin and the exit of the spout. The other smaller stones began revealing themselves as all sorts of beautiful precious stones of every color. The stones were becoming smooth and highly polished.

Water started flowing more and more freely around the stones the diamond - now only slightly blocking the exit. The water was spilling into a similar basin below that jutted a little farther out and was coming out of my belly with it's own single centered spout leading to a place I could not yet see. The water dissolved all the deposits up the sides and began flowing completely clear, revealing porous clay. With the residue gone, the clay basin started absorbing some of the water making it softer and a darker, richer shade. On the outside of the basin it was damp to the touch now. With the clay basin now soft, the stones started settling into their rich stream bed. With the stones being lower into the clay, now the exit was completely free of blocks. The stones sparkled in their clay bed through the shimmering, free flowing water and the diamond added dynamic light and rainbows. Unexpectedly a loud audible sound came out of my mouth that I didn't intentionally make. I watched the water flow into my belly basin that was also going through the same transformation.

Then seeds from plants entered my holographic, barely visible mouth (that till that time I hadn't even noticed) and merged with the falling stream of water. The seeds sunk into the clay between the stones. On the exterior of the basin, flowers and plants of all sorts began to grow and bloom from the seeds. They weren't as visible as the basins were, their colors had an odd darkness to them and they were slightly holographic or transparent. Like a reflection in glass. Their colors were irridecent and were in outlines of lazer blues, greens, pinks, purples and oranges. Dark green ivy dripped and hung from both basins and created a cool, dark, lush shadowy place full of life.

Then angles or fairies and little transparent hummingbirds and butterflies began attending the flowers and hovered near by. In the level of the belly, water flowed freely through the center spout and fell into space.

When I came out of this waking dream, the feeling I had was that this represented the changes my body is going through after being transformed from a vessel made of dried white vitamins, pills, tablets and junk food to one made of the wholeness of Mother Earth. It was a wonderful waking dream and is another example of why I would love to have talent in drawing.

EDIT: removed the dream that was posted. Couldn't get it out of my mind and it bothered me that it was here. Hopefully I can forget it and I'm sorry I even posted it. Last night I dreamed I was a fish swimming right into a big bunch of briars that went into my mouth. If my mouth had been closed, I wouldn't have been full of prickly thorns. That'll teach me.

Ederberry, Sambucus Nigra, Black Elder

Last night it was cold but clear and the moon was full. I spent a long time with the Elderberry tree that provided a nice harvest for us this year. I asked her to teach me, like I always do when spending time with her. When I reached a state of ease, many thoughts and images came to my mind and I'd like to share a few of them.

~~~THE VORTEX~~~
Recently I've been enamored of the vortex. Once you fall in love with them, you see them everywhere. I discovered this love after finding out that DaVinci was fascinated with them. When I stare at the water in the creek I watch them being created after passing a rock and follow till they disperse.

Last night I got that image in my mind of the spiral on the surface of the water. Then the image tilted slightly so that I could see under the water, as if the creek had been cross sectioned. When a spiral or vortex in the water is created, it exists much more than just on that surface plane, though that's all that can be seen when you look at the water. At some subtle and not so subtle level, that vortex would go all the way to the creek bed if another ripple or vortex didn't merge with it, changing it's energy course. On the surface of the water, the spiral pulls slightly down in the middle which also would affect the air current above. The movement of the air over the water has to be affected by these tiny vortices, disturbing it into the same pattern. I imagined this air in the shape of a vortex cone above the water surface just as it is below.

To see the whole movement, the whole vortex that was created, is to see the whole thing. The conical vortex in the air above, the flat spiral display on the water surface and the vortex below the visible water surface. All together make up the whole movement of energy.

I saw my inner most core as a bright white/silver thin filament of spinning light and continuing out of the top of my head into another dimension and out below into another dimension. This filament was the eye of a vortex and depending on the dimension it existed in determined it's shape. As it exists here in this material dimension that I see with my eyes, I saw that the "thickness" of this dimension spun off vortices from the center and created fractal material organs and body held in place. In the dimension above and below it existed only as a spinning cone.

In this material layer, these other vortices spinning off the center filament created a mirror image on each side and created the brain, the pituitary gland, the eyes, the thyroid, the breasts, lungs, heart, ovaries, kidneys and for men testicles. I saw the whole me, the "me" above in a conical vortex spilling over, down and around; the filament continued into this material plane and spilled out and below in a mirror image of the "above". It all sort of looked like a butterfly and it was all me.

Here is my very crude attempt at drawing what I saw. The little loops in the middle are the organs and the horizontal squiggly lines demarcate the different planes.







































~~~THE OLD BLACK WOMAN~~~

Then I flashed to a dream I had a long time ago about a black woman, a wise woman, holy woman holding court on a rickety, rusty old metal folding chair. When I first saw her many years ago in my dream, I thought for a second she was the old hag that would paralyze me in my sleep and choke me. I no longer believe it's the same woman. In the dream, she was surrounded by what looked like a long abandoned road intersection near an over pass. Only a few outlines remained and most of the concrete had long since been taken over by the weeds. She sat near the crumbled overpass whose road that passed under lead into nothing but trees. The overpass had huge chunks missing and was covered by dangling, old, long, thick green vines. All around and milling about were a couple dozen women dressed in rag-a-muffin, hippy child clothes. Most lay around in the grass, most to themselves, waiting their turn to talk to her. The first time I saw her, was when I popped into this dream and someone was leading me through a dense woods and underbrush. We came to a clearing and stopped there. That's when I saw her. I had no idea why I was there or who she was. My guide waived to her and waited as we arrived at the edge of the woods and we were waived over. She was still too far away to hear her, but I saw her lean down with a smile to the woman who sat on the ground at her feet and could tell she asked her to give us some time.

As I walked towards her, I half smiled and nodded, nervously, at the lady now having to wait on me. When I arrived she told me many things and wrote her name with a fire stick in my mind as I drifted slowly upward into awake. I saw the name still glowing on my mind and saw that it was long and beautiful, but as I woke up she reached up and snatched it entirely out of my mind. Argh I screamed as I woke up frustrated that I couldn't hold on to it. I was able to hold on to a location or maybe some other indicator called Beth-so. That name seems vaguely familiar, maybe it's from the bible and has nothing to do with any of this?

Last night when sitting at the Elder tree and I popped back into that place, the name Cashandra popped into my head and I think that may the name she originally gave me. I saw her again last night in full court with the ladies waiting to speak to her. I felt that they were other women just like me tapped into her from other locations, not necessarily there with her in physical body.

When standing in front of her I got a tingly thump in my appendix area and could feel the energy really swirling around. As I asked her questions, I would get an immediate response from either my body or my surroundings. The wind, leaves, my sinuses popping and gall bladder gurgling and even a distant gun shot spoke the instant I'd ask her a question.















~~~THE ELDERBERRY~~~
As our night was coming to an end, when I closed my eyes I could see a very small stout man, about 2 1/2 feet tall, with huge front rabbit like teeth waiving me to come down into a hole at the base of the tree. I opened my eyes and didn't see a hole. I decided to just stay where I was since I was alone, it was dark and very cold out and no one really knew where I was. Then I saw the image of the beautiful dark juicy elderberry, I saw it infused with moonlight. Then there were many of them on a cluster. They floated above my head soaking up the moon rays then shrunk down to an incredibly small size and permeated through my skin. I got the feeling that they were filling tiny dark, buck-shot scattered holes in the deepest parts of my soul.

Then I saw them moving from the dimension of my soul into my physical body and filling in tiny holes in the lungs, and going to small, hard, dry and crusty places and making them soft, juicy and full of life and directing dark oxygen rich blood to those places.

After all of that I was bobble headed and wandered back inside to try to get some of it on paper.