Analog

Lately it seems - for good or ill - I'm compelled to experiment with my own image. Questioning what it means to have this form. Who or what is this person who appears this way in the camera's eye? Must one be attractive to look at, as I was always told, or is it okay to be ugly, distorted, deformed? 

Most of all, what if a person's inside doesn't match their outside? Can an image capture the nature of person's soul?

It was with this kind of  thing in mind that I was playing around with various photo filters. (Also, not gonna lie, just because they looked kinda cool.) I went through lots of them before I tried the "bad TV" filter as a lark. Bad TV. How cute! How nostalgic! Except I threw it on, and there "I" was. My true nature. It didn't work on everyone...just me.

Intrigued, I tried it on scads of photos. baby pictures, teenage Halloween parties, the grab shot of me on the night of the dreaded stocking incident downtown. The pictures were not more attractive, but they were more true. 

No matter what time of life the photos were taken, the distorted photos seemed more real than the unaltered ones. There is my answer, I suppose. Strange to think that all this time, my soul has really been an analog TV on the blink 

Go And Catch A Falling Star

The summer, which began mere moments and also a million years ago, is beginning to dwindle. It's been full of far too much and nothing at all. Among those moments  -  during that hazy period we called July  - was the appearance of comet NEOWISE. While it was faintly visible from the end of our street, it wasn't quite visible enough to be sure you weren't imagining a milky streak in the sky. With this in mind, we headed into the hills above town to have a look.

We traipsed up and down the roads around the lake while bats flitted and wheeled above us. I broke away from the squabbling others (the hills were too steep, the walk was too long) and followed my instinct up a trail that led above the tree line. After a space of that particular summer quiet while my eyes adjusted to the dark, I suddenly saw. As otherworldly as any star but seeming all the more so for its novelty, the comet appeared, faint, but most definitely there, and before the others arrived - just for a moment -  my own secret. 

image source NASA 

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/comet-neowise-over-washington-dc-0

The Word On The Astral

Since last February, I've spent many nights beside my altar rock with my eyes on the sky. Not that this was at all unusual previous to that, but as it was more and more clear that the grasp on consensus reality was becoming wobbly, my inclination for observation and note-keeping took hold. 

After all, what is the sky but (to paraphrase Yoko Ono) an old friend who is always there for you? If nothing else, you can depend on the positions of the stars. 

 

When you spend so many hours in silent vigil, you notice things. Changes in air temperature. Small errant breezes. The patterns of clouds as they gather and disperse. These are things detectable with the 5 senses. Next come the things that are disputable by those means. That whisper - was it a faint voice or the sound of leaves? Those flitting shadows, the mysterious shapes in the smoke from your fire? Do these things have significance in themselves or only in our interpretation? Here we emerge into the territory of the witch and the mystic, and as strange as it is, I am comfortable here. 

Then there is the third level, where the realm of the astral merges with the conscious mind. While just about everything that occurs here is up for debate to the rationalist, the mystic must trust that her experience is true. 

So what comes of these nights spent with the stars and my maps and conversations with ghosts? 

The word on the astral is that things will never be the same.

You may not notice, though. They've always already been forever changed. 

How Soon Is Now?

A cool night on the slide toward summer. Just unseasonable enough to be mistaken for fall. In brief moments like these, when the two seasons reveal themselves as the mirror twins they are, I always feel a bit uneasy, as if I'd mistaken dusk and dawn.

Which is how I'd come to be sitting in the dark, staring at the silent heavens and thinking about time. The air like chilly fingers creeping up my spine. 

An old memory comes drifting in from some far-off place - the first time I'd heard that song by the Smiths, and how it sounded not only like loneliness, but loss. 

It occurs to me now that the question in the title was never answered. 

All Is Void

Another year on the planet. Time scrolls out behind me in a seamless flow. Just moments ago, it seems, I was a child, a wild creature; beyond good and evil, beyond gender, even. Just pure existence in the fresh morning air. 

In many ways I feel no different than I did then, only that the world forces me into this shape or that shape and so little of it has to do with my true shape at all. 

Now we are here, watching the last flare up before the flame out of the old order, the one that refused to step aside to let the new take its place. The seamless flow halts for a moment, and I wonder what the shape of the new world will be. The future is a void, the story yet unwritten, but I'm old enough at last not to be afraid. 

High Mysterious Union

It's May, and the owls and whippoorwills call in the night. Soon the cicadas will begin their summer song.

Here on my rock, I watch and listen. I think about signals and transmission lines.The electrical hum along the wires. Waves bouncing off the blue sky.

Mathematical formulas become sigils if you think about them long enough. Arcane frequencies resonate in time.

Somewhere, beyond the range of ordinary perception, the invisible conversation goes on and on.

Silence

Last night I dreamed about our house in Victoria. As often in my dreams, it was in a state of disrepair, dusty and abandoned, only resembling the real place in basic structure. It was an uneasy dream. My children were there, along with my step-son, but they were insubstantial, as if they'd been drained of their vital force. All their ages seemed wrong. In fact, everything about the house seemed wrong. 

From the hallway appeared my (now grown) son, but as the 8 year old he once was, an angelic, curly-haired boy. In his hands he held a gift tied with red ribbon. 

"On my birthday, I was silent" he said, unnervingly, before I woke.

Today the weather was the perfect sort we hope for all year: warm, but not too warm, dry, but not parched. Bright sun, soft breeze. I enjoyed it, despite the sickly dream haze lingering in the back of my mind. Why think of these things when the vanilla scent of the whitebrush is rising and the air is alive with bees? But sometimes a dream won't let go

It's not that I hadn't noticed the date. I had. The 4th of May. I'd seen it at midnight, even. Yet for some reason, it hadn't registered. 

"On my birthday, I was silent" says my eerie, angelic child. 

Suddenly, I remembered. It was the anniversary of the night we'd left Victoria, arriving here on the edge of a storm. And it's ironic that I'd forgotten, really, considering I'd titled the post about it "The Persistence Of Memory"

This bright day was nothing like the dismal drizzle of 8 years ago, though the feeling of uncertainty is the same. It has not escaped me that this time, the uncertainty belongs to everyone. For 8 years, I've been perched on the edge of this rock watching the world change, and now it finally seems to have caught up with me. 

It has also not escaped me that in the dream, my son was holding a gift. 

Not long ago, a friend who'd experienced a similar life upheaval around the same time said, "I feel like everything since then has been leading to this. Like I was made for this." 

I understood what she meant. This journey has been agonizing at times, yet here I am on the edge of this rock still, riding out these crises - national and international - in relative safety. To be doing so in Victoria doesn't even bear thinking about. For once, this unforgiving landscape holds me like a cradle while I wait to learn what needs to be done. 

In this post, I wrote about keeping the old key to the storage unit I'd rented back then as a sort of talisman. What I didn't mention was that the key is tied with a red ribbon. When I realized what the dream meant, the symbolism of the red ribbon on the gift box was immediately clear. 

Now that mourning the past is over, It's time to reclaim my autonomy.

Isolation

Me. Day 46.

Height: 5' 6"
Weight: 105 lbs.
chest:: 34"
waist: 24"
hips: 34"
Wrist: 5"
Shoe size: 6 (US)
Hair: 24"
Age: indeterminate, possibly ancient

From here on my patch of ground, I measure things. The length of the grass. My body. Time. It all changes gradually, like cloud shapes on a still afternoon. It's not that I mind the isolation, I don't. It's an opportunity for quiet reflection. Sometimes, however, there's a risk of equating this with helplessness, and so I measure things, assuring myself of some gradual progress, like the sun across the sky.

I try not to think about stilted dreams and unfulfilled longings. No, that's a lie. I think about them all the time. I think them quietly to myself, where I don't have to defang them with humor, or make them pretty for public consumption.

 I think about jealousy, and envy, and how I sometimes suffer them myself even while trying to deflect them from others, even though I know all this competition is a social construct that's been ingrained in us, and lacks much inherent value of its own.

I think about philosophy, and psychology, and the strictures that come with studying the mind when it doesn't account for the soul. I think about the soul, too (do they think and feel, can they be quantumly entangled like diamonds?) all the while knowing that all of our best answers are guesses.

And then there is reality itself, and the perception of such, and whether reality changes or only our perception does. ("Reality" according to Nabokov, being one of those words that mean nothing without quotation marks.)

I think about these things during chores and in between lessons, and while I'm conditioning my hair and polishing my skin (because expectations of beauty are still high even in a quarantine) and hoping that I will understand more by the time this is over, but knowing that I may not ever understand anything at all.

At the very least I will keep on with my measuring.

The Ace Of Crowns

It's the last day of March. Spring has sprung. The earth has revived in vivid color, and here I am without having written a word. A global pandemic will do that to you.

It's not as if there's been no inspiration. It's not as if magic and mystery have come to end. On the contrary, things are more phantasmagorical than ever. It's the way of things in a crisis, I suppose, what with our consensus reality straining at the seams.

No, I'm just tired, really, tired and inclined to be quiet right now. There is too much to say, and a lot that shouldn't be said, and it's beyond me to sort out which is which.

Between the psychic jolts and the glitches and the breaking apart of things that must be put together again, it's a lot to handle. That's not even accounting for the very real fear and grief we feel amid the onslaught of change.

That said, if cracks have appeared in our world, there is no reason not to find the joy that's hidden in them. I daresay there is every reason we should.

"The death card means change" says the fortuneteller to the nervous querent in every cliched movie scene, but if you ever wanted a real-life example, this is it.

If our foundations have cracked, our own integrity has never mattered more. If you have to choose between helping yourself or others, which will it be?

The card has been laid. The change is at hand. The only thing left to do is decide what it means to you.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Gazing Toward The Unseen

7 AM on an overwhelmingly ordinary morning. Everything as it's expected to be. Suddenly, there is a brief, flickering moment when the uncanny crosses your path, or you've crossed it. The faintest breath of another world existing beside you.

It is always there, hidden in plain sight.

Soularoids

Sending bits of this world to live in other worlds.

Secrets

Last summer, I mentioned here my long recurring dream of mailing tiny letters to tiny mailboxes in hidden locations around town. I've never known what it meant, but as it happened, I was buying Valentine cards for my son's class when I came upon just such a mailbox, and what's more, these tiny envelopes with slips of paper inside them. They are very tiny indeed (see dime for scale) much like the ones I'd dreamed of.

Did I immediately hatch a plan to write secret messages inside and sneakily conceal them around town? Of course I did. Am I going to tell you what they were? No way.

Some secrets can only be revealed by the whims of serendipity.

Destinata

image source

Sometimes, no matter how much you would rather it be otherwise, the Fates are insistent that something unpleasant is in store. You can try to bargain, or plead, or witch your way out, but the Fates are having none of it. In that case - forewarned being forearmed and all that - you can hope  that it comes quickly and that things will be better when it's done.

If you are really lucky, in spite of obstinate Fate, you'll have a goddess at your shoulder to push you out of the way. To peek at the other players' cards when life seems like a game.

I'm really lucky.

Thank the Goddess.

Let Me tell You Something About Magic...

This may be the only lesson I will ever give, so listen close.

Magic is like water. If you put your hand in it,  it will disturb the flow. If you have a light touch, you can guide it. if you are too forceful, it will splash and go where you don't want it.

That's the thing that no one bothers to tell you about magic.

The Crocodile's Daughters

image source

On the night of February second, I had two most unusual dreams.

First, I was floating hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, looking up through seemingly endless gradations of dim blue light. I was telling the story - proleptically, I assume -  of how I'd made it to the surface, despite the odds. As I began to swim upwards, though, I began to wonder if this wasn't just a comforting story, one I was telling myself to disguise the fact that I hadn't made it after all.

There was music in the dream, very fitting:

The second dream was more complex. In it, it had been discovered that an author had left behind an unpublished manuscript when she'd died. It told the story of a researcher who'd become aware of a race of shapeshifters, the daughters of Sobek, the crocodile god of the Nile. The daughters, in their human form, blended seamlessly with humanity. The only clue to their true nature was their ability to disappear completely. Therefore, the researcher could only trace the presence of the shapeshifters through their absence. 

I woke up feeling uneasy. The dreams had seemed alien to me, profoundly foreign. As if I'd got someone else's dreams by mistake. 

The meaning is unclear.

Or perhaps it's that I don't want to know. 

The Twelvetide Fortune-Telling Method, Part 2

As promised, here are the dreams I had on each night of the twelve days of Christmas. According to legend, each dream allegedly predicts events in each of the coming months of the year.

This time, I've kept them (relatively) short and (hopefully) sweet, and omitted my attempts at discerning what they might mean, as I'm clearly not good at that, if last year was any indication.

...

Dream, December 26 -
"Last night, I dreamed that an enormous electrical pylon crashed to the ground and started a fire. I could see sparks and flames emerging from the wires."

A few days after this dream (Dec. 28) I happened to drive a few miles out into the country and came upon this:

There were no sparks or flames, but the broken electrical pylon bore a startling resemblance to the scene in the dream. Much like last year, the first dream prediction came (partly) true before the month was even over.

Dream, December 27th - prediction for February
"Last night I dreamed first of envelopes that were addressed with garbled letters and numbers. A sorceress demonstrated a magic spell to sort them out. I was awakened by the sound of a book falling off the shelf - it was The Dream of Heroes by Adolpho Bioy Casares.

After falling asleep again, I dreamed that the word Socialism had been outlawed in the UK.  The country was full of uniformed officers carrying sensitive recording equipment to catch anyone uttering the word."

Dream, December 28th  - prediction for March
"Last night I dreamed of a campfire in the dark woods. In the shadows at the edge, half-seen faces flickered in and out of sight."

Dream, December 29th - prediction for April
"Last night I dreamed I was boarding a plane. The destination was unclear."

Dream, December 30th - prediction for May
"I was wandering around lost in a conference of some type. My husband was off doing his own thing. I tried to befriend a gingery-haired man, but he kept alternating between friendly and cold, so I finally gave up and moved on.

I was wondering what to do next when a white-haired man with blue eyes approached me. He said "I've been looking everywhere for you" and handed me a paper with instructions. I wasn't sure hat the instructions were, but I was glad to have them. I asked the man his name. He smiled kindly and said "Dublin."

I woke briefly, and after having committed this rather strange dream to memory, fell asleep again. This time, I dreamed of a dark and snowy forest - it seemed to be in Russia. I was being told the story of a man who lived there. He had once been a humble goose-herder (though a very excellent one) but had since risen to great fame.

He told me the secret of his success: 'It's not what you are, but what people imagine you to be.'"

A couple of points about these dreams - first, I've come to think that the name Dublin was a reference to "double" rather than the city, and he perhaps represented my animus - a male version of myself.

Second, when looking for information about goose herders, this previously unknown-to-me fairytale called "Death and The Goose Hearder" turned up, which is quite intriguing on its own.

Dream, December 31 - prediction for June
"Last night I dreamed that I was standing on the road at the edge of town, watching a solar eclipse with drnelk."

Specifically, this was the road leading toward Austin, if that has any particular relevance. Dr. Nelk is a twitter pal of mine, and after telling him about this, he did show me photos he'd taken of the solar eclipse last year.

Dream, January 1st - prediction for July
Last night I dreamed of my cousin Nancy. We met at an unknown house on a lonely road. The dream was convoluted though, with no real storyline."

Dream, January 2nd - prediction for August
"Last night I dreamed that I invented a tofu and barley grass powder concoction. It tasted so wonderful that I took to the streets, trying to convince passersby to try it."

Again, if it means anyhing, the streets I took to were again on the side of town leading toward Austin, at the big shopping center there.

Dream, January 3rd - prediction for September
"Last night I dreamed...nothing."

Well, there's always got to be one, eh?

Dream, January 4th - prediction for October
"Last night I dreamed that my spouse and I had split up (amicably) and were moving out of the house. As I was preparing to leave for the last time, I went back in to get my good camera. Suddenly the house was full of rooms I'd forgotten were there."

Note - this is the first time I've ever dreamed of an amicable split with my spouse, though I do sometimes dream of a more acrimonious one.The house we were leaving was not one I'd ever seen before, except in other dream permutations.

Dream, January 5th , prediction for November
"Last night I dreamed the lyrics to She's So Cold by the Rolling Stones. Clearly my inner Mick Jagger is a judgmental prick."

I felt this was taking a poke at my age, or my looks, or both, which I suppose is better than the third option, death.

Dream, January 6th  - prediction for December
"All night I dreamed of wandering through endless shops and supermarkets, passing between automatic doors."

Once mre, this seemed to take place on the northeast side of town, so if there has been any common motif running through these dreams, that would be it.

...


There you have it, Now we wait another year (provided the world lasts that long) and see how everything has worked out.

In the meantime, happy dreaming!

The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously

Okay, that's a wee bit of an exaggeration. It hasn't been dangerous at all. But it has been interesting, 

When I decided to give the twelvetide fortune-telling method a shot last year, it was mainly as a lark, to try a different form of divination and bring old folklore into modern practice. I hadn't the foggiest notion what the results might be. Now that a year has come and gone, it's time to review. What came to pass? What was a bust? Let's have a look, shall we?

The original post is here

Prediction for January:

Aside from China's landing of a probe on the dark side of the moon and running various tests (as mentioned in the original post) at the same time, I also became acquainted with Before The Moon Falls, by The Fall, a band that had only vaguely entered my awareness before. 

These two items I consider to be predictive hits. As for ballerinas and plunging to my death, nada. 

Prediction for February:

Aside from Trump's plan that didn't work (does anyone even remember which one it was? ) this one was a bust. No hair accident, no driving the old men crazy, not even anything particularly amber colored. The closest anything came to this at all was discovering an odd shade of lips gloss (Pac-Man Pinky pink ) that seems extremely appealing to men of a certain age. But this is pretty wide of the mark, and what's more, it happened in December. So yeah, I'm calling it a bust.

Prediction for March:

 Yeah, no.

Prediction for April:

Big hit with this one re: Bobo being our mail carrier, which I wrote about here. The catch is that it happened in March, not April. Aside from that, it's interesting to see how such dream imagery translated to real life (provided you believe in such things.)

Alas, still no word from Robert Reich about his feelings for me.

Prediction for May:

This was my favorite dream out of the bunch, and the one I was most hoping would come true. And it did come true, though it wasn't immediately obvious, as it turned out to be quite metaphorical, even for a dream. The key here is in remembering what a monstrance is made to hold.

It happened in two parts, the first in April (so again, a month ahead of time). I was unexpectedly sent something which was very meaningful to me, and I wondered how I'd got so lucky. The second part came in August, and fits in with the rare recording aspect of the dream (though neither Berber nor Moroccan). They were two parts of the same thing.

If it seems I'm being cagey about this, it's because it's one of those things that instinctively feels private and not for public display, so you'll have to take my word for it. This dream also gives me a hint of what the recurring motif of silver might indicate.

The carnival represents social media, of course.

Prediction for June:

A hit in my estimation, described here. Again, slightly early, but a little closer to being on time.
The bit about the tea, though, is still a mystery.

Prediction for July:

Not a darned thing. Sorry.

There were no real workable dreams for August or September, as one was an OBE and the other was more or less a blank. There was some imagery of farm houses in the OBE which I think I found when out in that direction recently, though. For whatever that's worth.

Prediction for October:

This one came to pass while running our little shop at the street market during the summer. Again it came early, in July, or maybe August. We went to eat at a pastry shop, and when going to wash up, I discovered a room much like the one in the dream, with velvet curtains on rings. However, it was not a dressing room behind the curtains, but a storage room. The restroom, quite unusually, had no mirror.

Despite things not fitting exactly, it did give me a dizzying moment of deja vu.

Prediction for November:

It's so hard to know what to say about this one. I did not meet a man or a girl of this description, I did not come upon a box of fire. Did I participate in casting a spell on myself? This is much harder to say. But, having thought it over at length, I realize how much this dream is interwoven with the next one...

Prediction for December:

Again, this one took shape in a way that diverged significantly from the dream imagery. While the aforementioned forum member has been mercifully absent from my waking life, the theme of following clues and searching for hidden things has been very present. Also, frustration with/ losing interest in a game and finding a key (though not a literal one) were strong elements this month as well.

This being the case, I would call it a predictive hit, but in such an allegorical way that it would make no sense to anyone not aware of all the details. In short, I couldn't have seen it coming, but in retrospect the story is there. Not sure this is much help as far knowing the future, though.

And because the twelve days of Christmas has only eleven nights, I threw in one more for good measure:

Prediction for January 2020:

There has been no sign of Christopher Eccleston or anyone else to save the world as yet. So, nope. Unfortunately.
 
All in all, the twelvetide fortune telling method was fairly good, as these things go, and certainly a fun and mystical activity for the holidays.

Next post, I'll lay out my dream predictions for 2020, and if they're anything like right this time, it's going to be a weird year.

20/20

May your vision be clear. 

The Sad And Strange And Wonderous Day

In my previous post, I wrote about taking photographs as I wandered through an increasingly mystical day downtown. The interesting thing about these photos is - it seems to me, anyway - that as the atmosphere became increasingly mysterious, the quality of the photos changed as well. Usually we perceive these things with the mind or the eye, but the camera, not so much. But this time, it was if some unknown quality was affecting the photographs. I felt this was sufficiently curious to deserve a post of its own. (Plus, the original was long enough already.)

In regards to my obsession with capturing the unseen, I feel this is as close as I've ever come to succeeding. 

The initial photos weren't bad, exactly, but they weren't good either. They just were. Like the one above. Or this one:

 ...and here. (though this apparently impossible to photograph door is the local equivalent of the church that doesn't want to be photographed, though that's another subject for another time.)

It was after I'd followed the pointing finger down the alley that things began to go strange. 

Perhaps this photo shows the faintest hint of being different.

The cracks in the pavement. Becoming a tiny bit weirder.

A lone sequin, like a tiny piece of sky.

The strangeness is in full bloom here, can you see it? 

There is something disorienting here, as if the rocks are shadows and the shadows are rocks.

'The shadows of the scattered leaves assumed a depth and vibrancy that seemed hyper-real."

This humble water meter cover (which has been there since I was a child) suddenly presents an intriguing optical illusion.

"a lens flare had created two spectral shapes on the steps."

Into the ravine

The looming figure.

 The watching landscape.

Whether others can see anything unusual in these photos, I can't say, but I do feel they came very close to capturing that certain amorphous quality.