A few weeks ago I found myself musing about Terrence Malick’s films. My guess about why they came up is that it was a result of holding tension, psychological tension. For quite some time I had been feeling blocked in my creativity. I was still recovering from a concussion and neck injuries from a bike accident. I experienced pain whenever I attempted to write, do photography or paint. So I stopped. Working in my Pilates studio and doing jobs around the house were more than enough to exhaust my limited energy and left me with constant headaches and body pain. I couldn’t force myself into something that I sensed might make me unable to work or maintain the house. Yet my soul wanted something else and this created the tension I mention above.

Out of holding this tension and through the pain I began to have dreams that were different than ones in the past. Perhaps I was ready to receive them. I’m not sure. These new dreams did make me curious. What might be stirring internally that I needed to allow out? I decided to try writing a poem not based on a dream I had had, but on what might arise in a new way if I let go of creating meaning from that dream. Before going to sleep one night I lay down on my bed pen and notebook in hand and waited for something new to arise. In the past I wrote from making things up from inside my head. I call this egoic writing. It never felt satisfying at a soul level. It mostly felt willful, like I was imposing myself on the creative process. So I stopped writing. Laying in bed I said okay Mike write whatever comes up no matter how stupid your inner critic says it is. Yes my inner critic, which I’ll write about in another blog.

I told the inner critic to take a night off and waited. In the past I could lay still for hours and absolutely nothing would come. Just a grey soundless void. Not this time. I pictured the images from the dream I had. Nothing. A few minutes later, wait what was that. A voice- words. My analytical mind, inner critic generated, cut in. Who is that? That’s not real. It’s just your mind playing tricks on you. GIVE UP!! I settled that down by saying screw the analysis and wrote the few words that I had heard. Gradually a poem formed. Something new.

Russell Lockhart has written that dreams are about the future. This isn’t about making your dreams come true or finding the egoic meaning of dreams. It’s about negative capability in relation to the dream one has had. Being able to lay doubts, analysis, understanding, knowledge gathering aside and wait for an inner voice to speak. This voice, which our logic and reason saturated civilization says doesn’t exist or is the voice of madness, is coming from somewhere else. A place one can’t prove to others. If one has experienced it then you will know the truth of it.

I spent a number of nights like this. A few poems took shape. Not Robert Frost poetry by any means. I realized that this wasn’t the point. I expanded my sources. Instead of dreams I would wait for internal images or voices to arise spontaneously and then write poetry from there. I learned a different way of handling my creativity and my pain.

Back to Terrence Mallick. Laying in bed one night I was working on a poem about storms, climate change and human storming. Suddenly images from some of Mallikc’s movies came up for me. The inner critic cut in. Pah, older white man, movies based on men, white men, heterosexual relationships. Oops stop I said to myself. That’s actually not what Terrence Mallick is doing with his films.

I explored his work a bit. I came across a site called Stories of Old on You Tube where the creator talked about his view of Mallicks work. I was particularly struck by his comments on the film A Hidden Life. I had been attracted to this film for quite a while particularly with the rise of fascism worldwide. Although it is about an older white man being victimized, which is our default mode of being in the West these days, he chose his path out his own peaceful integrity not out of being a passive victim or violently reacting to being victimized. The Stories of Old narrator said what Mallick was going for was the state of Being-Open to the Other-even to Nazis. This struck a deep chord in me. I mulled this over through the day. I lay down that night and brought this aspect up again, the resonance of it. This is the poem that wrote itself. It doesn’t have a title.

Being-Open

What if I become the dog in my dream?

What if I become the otherness?

The Other

Open-Being

This has led to many new possibilities.

The next three blogs are based on a sequence of  three dreams, one per night, three days in a row, three weeks ago.

First dream:

 I’m riding on a narrow mountain highway on a bike tour of New Zealand. I see lush vegetation on one side of the road and a precipitous drop off on the other. Enjoying myself as I ride down the winding mountain side, I feel the presence of the mountain, feminine, immense, timeless darkness. I also experience a feeling of transition, a movement through and down, much more than a descent in altitude. After a time I reach the bottom of the mountain. On my left I see a gas station, convenience store and restaurant. Feeling hungry I walk in to the restaurant. I ask for a seat. I’m told the only seat is with a family. “I’ll take it”. Once I’m seated I introduce myself  to my meal mates,  a mother, father and their daughter. They are from Mahia they say, which is not too far away. They also have a son but he isn’t with them at the moment. The comments about their son feel odd but I don’t ask further questions. I eat and talk with them. Afterward excusing myself I walk over to the gas station with my bike to check the tire pressure. Then I stuff puffed white popcorn into the spokes of the wheels as an offering to the goddess of the mountain. Walking my bike towards the highway I see a young man in a wheel chair near the convenience store. I go over to speak with him as I suspect he is the family’s missing son. I say hello. He doesn’t speak or lift his eyes. Thinking he wants to be left alone I start to walk away. He raises his hand which stops me. Lifting his eyes to look at me the young man motions towards the highway. I realize he wants to come, to ride back up the mountain with me. Thinking about his desire I know it will be very difficult for him, slow for both of us. Still there is something about him that says we need to take this journey together.  Okay come on, I say. He turns his wheel chair around then we move through the parking lot to the highway together.

Rather than working on the meaning of this dream, the symbolism of the crippled boy, and the masculine connections among others I have a desire to relate to the images with active imagination.

I first explore the dream by looking for a Maori translation of Mahia. There are two defintions “place of indistinct sounds” and “to do”.  Ah, the vibration of Eros is in the air I think to myself.  I feel I am on the track of something new. Keep going I say to myself. Finding a quiet, open space in myself, I bring the imagery of the dream and the two definitions forward. I wait.

After some time I see and hear the following exchange- as I turn to walk away from the young man he holds up his hand to stop me. I notice he holds a piece of paper offering it to me. I reach out to take it. As he hands it to me he murmurs whenua moemoea (land of dreams). At this point I stop the imagination.

For the rest of the day I consciously hold the imagery as I go about my daily routine. I have the second dream of the series during the night. Later the next day I have an urge to go on a bike ride with my camera. While I ride I continue to be with the imagery of the piece of paper. Returning home I stop, as I often do, on a small curved black bridge over Whitemud Creek. The sun is low being late afternoon. Looking down in the creek water I relax opening my heart to the moment. After a bit an inner voice says here is the image on the paper from the dream. Take it.  The picture is below. 

At home now I gaze at the picture for quite a while.  Slowly moving back in to a relaxed state I continue holding the image in the picture.

Suddenly a voice arrives from within saying great mountain, queen of the world, smoke rises from your head, fiery white heart and water. She is water and the future.

Readers might take the imagining from here. From indistinct sounds a form or image arises out of which new paths can branch out endlessly, each something new.

Water is rising.Share:

Brushing my teeth in the downstairs bathroom I notice something odd in the mirror over the sink. At first I think it is a floater in my eye but since it is on the left side of the mirror near the wall I turn left out of curiosity. To my surprise and delight a jumping spider, black with two thin white stripes on its back, is hanging down on a silken thread from the door frame. I watch as the spider climbs back up the thread a few inches. I say “hello little one, thank you for joining me this morning”. I feel the something new its presence brings in the moment. I turn back to finish brushing my teeth. Looking back a moment later to check on the spider’s progress it has disappeared. A little voice in me asks “how could it move so fast?” I grab the towel off the rack on my left. As I start to dry the sink I see something black in the sink. I look closer, a spider leg. Damn. I lift the towel and there is the lifeless body of the spider. I begin to feel pain in my heart at my thoughtless unconscious act. An accident yes but my tiny inner voice had warned me. I wash the spider down the drain. “What are you doing now?” the inner voice says. My heart feels my mistakes. I hold my hands to my chest in prayer for this tiny being which didn’t need to die at my hands. Two days later I continue to feel sad and heartsick over what happened. Yes, over a spider.

I want the reader to know why this experience touches me so much. This particular spider had been attempting to make contact with me for over a week, hanging down on a thread from the wall over the small round table I work on with my computer, going up and down the thread in front of me, hovering at eye level, it couldn’t be missed. Sometimes it would jump around on the floor around my feet. I ignored its dance, smiling at its antics but not taking the movements seriously. Still it persisted. While this was going on at night I was dreaming new and different dreams, new patterns, water in many, I felt different somehow. I was also attempting to make deeper connection with an old man, a steward or green man of the earth, water and air who had been in my dreams. But I missed the connection between the two streams.

So I have turned to write about this death, the missed weaving of threads and how gathering them now brings me to something new.

Surfing the internet one comes across numerous videos of animals saving other animals, humans saving animals and animals saving or helping humans. Are these stories anomalous, a figment of my or our wishful imagination in a time of ecological degradation of the Earth, maybe something that makes one feel better about accelerating animal deaths. Yet we have video evidence and a lot anecdotal stories from friends and others of these kinds of events. Should I dismiss all of this as nonsense?

Rather it’s my sense we are witnessing, like my experiences with the spider and these videos, a change in how I and others filter information. Let me explain.

The information (sensory and intellectual) a human being allows as “real” is largely based on the prevailing belief system/story of the society one lives in. From ancient Greece and Rome, to Christian medievalism, the Renaissance and finally in our Enlightenment based scientific modernism, each of these civilizations had a set of beliefs with filters determining what information was acceptable and what wasn’t, what was fact and truth and what was “fake”, a lie or just not to be believed. It is also obvious from the historical record that we have changed our beliefs over time, but how? For the most part these beliefs and the associated filters are lived mainly unconsciously by the society’s participants allowing and promoting collective behavior. It is only when the problems faced by a society cannot be solved by the existing belief system that its biases and filters become visible. Because the belief system isn’t able to solve its problems faith in the truth of the story or stories underpinning the society’s beliefs starts to wane. This leads to a crisis of meaning as the accepted beliefs provided the narrative with which to live a meaningful life at least in a collective sense.

Our civilization is using more and more money, technology and planning in attempts to solve the growing number of issues our society faces.  And yet despite our efforts we have growing social inequality, the sixth great extinction of animals and plants, destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems and potentially catastrophic climate change.  Is it as some people say we simply haven’t had the right application of reason, money and technology to fix the problems? I would suggest it is becoming clearer day by day the “right” solutions make the problems worse and as faith is lost why we have soaring rates of depression, anxiety and suicide. Our own souls do get what is happening to us and the world even if many of those affected do not understand what is at the root of their despair.

As meaning is lost human beings struggle to find something else, something new to give them some sense of why they are alive, of how to live. This experience brings me back full circle to the animals, to the natural world and our relationship to it, to the filters we have had in place in our modern world. As they fall away or are discarded by loss an individual is more able to begin to experiencing new ways of seeing the world, internalize them and discover something previously rejected as real.

Rather than seeing the natural world as a clockwork machine, soulless, and strictly instinctive as our present beliefs suggest one begins to find the natural world has a soul, is alive, vibrant and responds to our gestures. We start seeing videos, hear or read stories that express a different way of relating to the Earth and its abundant, beautiful and complex life.

However, some people perhaps more fearful than others harden their beliefs seeing the old belief system as the way through impending collapse. They have faith in old solutions like technology, war, and economic growth, even as collapse continues. My soul is not drawn to the old solutions but to life based on a deeper relationship to the natural world. How does one open to something new, to new ways of seeing, how do we remove or at least start to change the filters of our previous ways of seeing life? Here’s a short story of how this happened to me.

The day after I killed the spider in the sink I’m riding my bike on some trails in the river valley. I’m still feeling the resonance of my actions. After about 30 minutes I stop to drink water on a pedestrian walkway over an Edmonton freeway. Taking my water bottle out of the pannier I notice a reddish brown beetle resting on the lip of the pannier opening. My intuition says this little insect has been travelling with me for a while. A long time ago I would have blown or brushed the beetle off of my pannier. Remembering the spider experience I recognize this little beetle might have a desire to be where it is, being more conscious and aware of its own needs than I could ever be. As I look at the beetle I notice warm love in my heart, a valuing of its life, its being, then my heart says being with is enough. I drink my water and we cycle on. I don’t know when the beetle left me.

Having this experience left me open to other happenings around me. Riding towards home on the same trip I cycle out from under the Quesnel Bridge spanning the river here. I hear ravens calling in excited tones. Looking back over my right shoulder I see three ravens up on a steep grassy side hill beside the bridge on ramp. The wind is strong, side-by-side they are leaping up in the air gradually floating down to the ground. I slow down to watch. Over and over they leap up. I have seen crows do this very thing in strong wind near the river on a few occasions. My intuition and what I see (different filter) tells me they are having fun playing with the wind. I finish the ride home feeling different, more settled, excited too. Yes, more alive.

I killed a spider that wanted my attention, I let a beetle be, maybe to rest or take a ride, who knows for sure, and I see ravens playing in the wind. Is this anthropomorphism? Or by taking off my filters, maybe wrenched off by killing the spider, being observant, open hearted, seeing clearly, noticing and relating to inner resonances, I experience something new, find deeper meaning and soulful relationship with the natural world. New experiences of truth, beauty and love.  

 Share: