(Wednesday, October 9, 2013) The morning after our return from our Fool’s journey to the Black Hills, I stepped onto our digital bathroom scale. It read out my height, then my age, but when it got to my weight, it said “0.0.” So I stepped off the scale to allow it to reboot. Again my weight registered as zero. I had to step off and reboot a third time before the scale registered 116.9 pounds. Just a shade of my former self.
My Tai-Chi teacher says we are doing shadow work, accessing what physicists call dark energy. What Mary Ziemer and the lucid dreamers call black light.
(Monday, September 30, 2013) I’m on an extended journey: maybe walking around the world. I come across a white clapboard building. It’s a church, but with no steeple, just a large, square-topped tower. I pick up a booklet of classes offered at the community. Many are taught by the founder, whose name I see in the dream but have forgotten. A Germanic name.
I think that to outsiders the church members might seem eccentric, even bordering on cultish. But to each other they are a close-knit and happy family. Like the School of Metaphysics.
I find out that the founder has passed. His spiritual community is full of grief. Who will teach now that he is gone?
Sign at the Mendota Bridge
Day notes:
I received the IASD magazine in the mail today. Ernest Hartmann passed away August 7 from a heart attack while riding his bike. He was not a founding member of the IASD, but he absolutely was a spiritual father.
On my walk today a small white sign was posted near the Mendota Bridge. It gave the Caring Bridge address of a man who had had a heart attack at that spot on September 14 while riding his bike. The sign let everyone know he was OK.
When I wake, I have a passing thought of Robert Larsen, founder of my Tai-Chi school, who taught at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Dr. Hartmann was from Austria.
Dr. Hartmann developed a standardized scale to measure “boundary thinness.”
I had another dream a year ago or so about Dr. Hartmann. I wonder why the connection seems deep. I don’t recall ever speaking to him. I was one of the people who received his lovely book of poems in the mail last year.
(Monday, September 30, 2013) I’m on a circular-shaped island with coworkers. The island is the high ground left after a flash flood. We discover that the flood waters are so salty that we can bob on the surface as though swimming in the Great Salt Lake. It’s impossible to drown, which thrills Larry McGowan as he is not physically fit. And anyway, the water is quite shallow. We head out to swim and play and explore.
I paddle westward, and am horrified to discover beneath the clear water hundreds of dead animals: sweet, tiny dogs who were trapped by their leashes and unable to flee to safety. I’m anguished by the fact that humans have caused this great loss of innocent life.
Day notes:
When we began driving out of the Rapid City blizzard on Sunday afternoon, the ditches were lined with dead cattle. It turns out ranchers lost between 20% and 90% of their herds. Animals were still dying of pneumonia days later. When we arrived in the Black Hills I remember thinking that the pastures dotted with hybrid varieties of beef cattle should have been full of bison instead. So in that way, the hybrid small dogs, so far removed from wolves because of genetic manipulation by humans, are very much like the cattle. The human interference in their genetics and environment doomed them in the storm.
The coworkers in my dream are the people I snowshoe with in the winter.
(Friday, October 11, 2013) Louis Hall called to say that Larry McGowan died on the way to work this morning. He didn’t have many details. Larry had a medical emergency, maybe a stroke or heart attack, and crashed his car. He was the same age as I am, 56. In my morning tarot meditation, I drew the four of cups: “sorrow.” Great Salt Lake: tears, mourning?
