Prior to my aunt Mary dream I have a dream that has a similar feeling of expansive, simple space. It takes place in a large hotel/conference center that is nearly empty of people. One room contains a wooden stage with no presenters and no audience. I have been instructed to meet with our ad agency creative team. I wander through a few areas before we find each other. They stand together in the corner of a big room with a high-ceiling, near a door.
We perform the same opening ceremony that Jill Purce uses at her retreats. I turn and face them. I introduce myself and make slow, receptive eye contact with each individual. One at a time. We honor each other.
(Thursday, July 5, 2018) moon third quarter Aries / tarot World reversed / 53rd anniversary of godmother Marguerite Wolf’s passing
I am with my aunt Mary (who passed nearly two years ago). She doesn’t feel fully present. She is slightly irritated or distracted. Not the powerful, emotional, controlling-yet-supportive woman I knew.
We are traveling in the area where she owned a farm: the flat, nurturing earth of Belle Plaine, a few miles from the Minnesota River. There are very few trees, but the soil here is among the richest on the continent. It is moist, jet-black and deep, the remnant silt from eons of flooding in the valley.
Mary is searching for my new home. She wants me to find a smaller, one-story cottage that still sits on a generous acreage. This is not the place that I would choose to reside, but I understand why she is trying to simplify my life. My uncle Marvin had two massive strokes. He spent five years in a wheelchair and could only say “yes.” It was a stressful, difficult time in her life. Even so, she made it to age 97-and-a-half.
As I rise up from the dream toward waking reality, I decide she is telling me to give my house to Cullan and Hillary if Chris passes, and build a mother-in-law cottage with a studio on our land. My cousin Tim Murphy and his wife live in Mary’s house. Their daughter and her husband share the house and property.
Day notes:
I worked on my clay book yesterday that goes with Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary and Black Wolf Romeo (for the MCBA submission).
I spent nearly two hours on the phone Tuesday night with Mary Chan. Some of our conversation was about her work as a realtor. It sounds like she and her husband Vance have made a few million dollars investing in rental properties around the country.
Belle Plaine means “beautiful plain.” Plain of existence? One definition of plain is “not beautiful or attractive.” Another is “lucid, coherent.”
I have discovered a few prescient bits about the IASD conference from 2017-18 dreams. I like Victoria’s use of the word “prescient” over “precognitive.”
Pre-Conference Dream 1:
“A very distinguished writer is seated on a brown leather couch in the lobby, interviewing potential Paradise Valley conference attendees. As I wait to speak to him, I notice the lobby door: a large, heavy, hand-carved oak barrier, designed to protect visitors from dangerous brown bears. The bears sometimes still find a way in, through the massive door. That’s how powerful they are.
“People are carefully constructing thoughtful, complex questions for the writer. Entrance exams. I casually ask an off-the-cuff question. ‘You got it!’ he exclaims and I am admitted to the conference. I am surprised. So easy. I don’t even remember what I ask. He treats it like a rhetorical question.”
I think this is about the writer Roc Morin from the San Francisco Chronicle who interviewed attendees throughout the conference and interviewed me on the last day. He wore a copper-colored costume to the dream ball. At first I thought this was about the well-known writer Gregg Levoy, but he was a presenter, not an interviewer. Funny that in the dream people ask “the interviewer” questions!
I still am unsure about the grizzlies. “Native lore often speaks of Bear as a disciplinary spirit animal that meets out judgment on bad-mannered humans … Bear totem animal teaches the laws of boundaries, both for self and others … Bear is also known as the cave bear, a spirit animal of protection. The cave is symbolic of ancient mysteries and the secrets of inner power … Many tribes have called this space of inner knowing the Dream Lodge, where the death of illusion of physical reality overlays the expansiveness of eternity. It is in the Dream Lodge that our ancestors sit in Council and advise us regarding alternative pathways that lead to our goals. The female receptive energy that for centuries has allowed visionaries, mystics and shamans to prophecy is contained in this very special Bear energy.” We had multiple, powerful conversations at this conference about the Divine Feminine. And, the global professor of shamanism, Stanley Krippner, approached me at the gallery opening about Black Wolf Romeo. Unfortunately, our conversation was interrupted.
Pre-Conference Dream 2:
“I arrive in the registration lobby. Under my right arm I carry the doll-sculpture I call Edie. She is created not by me but by the great ceramicist Akio Takamori (who passed away unexpectedly last month).
“From registration I move to the gallery where I have volunteered. I am not well-received. I don’t fit in. I don’t exhibit the standard, middle-class academic sensibility that is desired here. But there is a set of mounting tools needed by the gallery that I am able to fire, to temper, so that they are strengthened and made more useful.
“I move through other rooms in the conference, rooms full of people. Out of the corner of my right eye a transparent tarot reading appears, floating in the air above the heads of the dreamers. It is hard to decipher the cards because they are not fully manifest. They arrive from the spirit realm. I think the Fool is at the top of the spread but I can’t be sure. All cards seem to be from the major arcana.”
I did carry in my clay pieces to the conference. Refused to ship them. I won no awards at the art show, and the process of putting the gallery together this time was very negative. As we all waited in vain for the art show organizer Julie N. to appear, I threw up my hands and said, “Let’s put this together ourselves.” One of the gallery volunteers was Carmen from Rome. She had just completed publication of her tarot deck, a four-year process. But she only brought a single deck, so I could not buy one for myself.
All of the women who put the show together are now pushing back against Julie. Kim sent out an email praising her, which is unbelievable. Julie sent out a shocking, insincere “thank you” email to all of the exhibitors but did not include the other volunteers.
Conference Dream:
We did some chanting in our morning dream group. Bonnie said she heard me chanting in my sleep. That was a pleasing story, confirming the power of my daily overtone chanting.
Conference Waking Dream:
The same “hoo, hoo-hoo” of pigeons I heard in Glastonbury was there in the Valley. I drew the World Dancer from the tarot the morning we left for our trip, also the same as my journey to England.
Post-Conference Dream:
In Sedona I dream of a white vortex. Chris stands with a suitcase next to Mark Blagrove, pointing at the tornado that is spinning on the ground behind me.
