eMaybe 1972?

look up
you see clear water and dead leaves settled on the stream bed
look again
stars reflect on the waterskin that must be in the night sky overhead/
behind you since you are looking up.
But the space disorients. Are these the same stars?
Wait,  they shine on the water and through the leaves
from another sky beneath – beyond the stream.
It's not dark, no, not night, either.
Every element is waiting.
What does this mean?
And suddenly, though they were always there,  there are layers and layers of water skins and stars reflecting and retreating, refracting.

In that almost wake state, someone asks
Can you walk through these walls?
Yes but not easily.

I'm half-hearted about tracking my dreams these days. Consider it retirement haze since there is no reason to get on the Royal Road. I do remember them,  but they know I'm not serious. They ebb away as last night's dominant memories truck over them.

Get serious!  Gear up! What's a little discomfort in the sleepy re-rendering? Ignore the nag - what for, what for?
So I enroll in a 6-week series of online classes on dreams. I'm not a beginner, but I need accountability, and a community, and talking heads, and there are methods for interpreting.

But today, my psyche throws a curve ball: investigate your own Dream School. Consider its curriculum, its required texts, the "scaffolding" of symbols & codes, the puns and (hidden?) intent.  She (my psyche) throws out a dream memory to make her point: Too long at the airport gift shop buying - once again- earrings, late for my flight, only to  pull out the backing of the dream on the airport mezzanine and surprised, find it's all a black void (avoid?) 

Repeating symbols on foreheads, creatures, helpers, horses, houses and environments. 

I'd almost forgotten why I started this section: dreams and their corollaries.

There is a bed
Of straw and a golden
goose with an
Alchemist symbol on
Her wing – that I can’t find
In the books
I search and search.
A coupling of pi and  jupiter.

She pecks, this goose,
at the 3-braid cord.
But the small brown bird
In the branch over there
She knows how to break it she has
Been with me all
The long time.

My dear mother, Eunice Blanchard Poethig died on Palm Sunday, March 25 2018 at 7:00pm.  My youngest sister, Erika, and I were with her.  A Filipina nurse named Vida (yes) had arrived to take her "vitals."  When Vida couldn't get a pulse, she shifted the medical equipment. Then she stopped, peered, whispered, "she's not breathing."  Mom had been actively dying.  But this, I had not expected. Eunice was. Then she was not. 

The afterwards is dream-like. Tears, calls to siblings, dad on his way down from his Independent Living apartment.  We dressed our mother in clothes that Johanna had selected, laid her out on the hospital bed she'd kept trying to escape. Dad sat beside her, head bowed, and held her hand. The nurses arrived to mark her departure. They called hospice, who contacted the Illinois Cremation Society. These are the protocols of death. My mother's body stayed warm, but turned a kind of caramel white. Her death grimace softened.  Joy (yes) her minister, arrived to help us pray, and sing, and say a bodily goodbye. I climbed onto the hospital bed to lie beside my mother's body for the last time. Joy, bless her, finally went home. A cheerful hospice nurse arrived. The next shift's caregivers paid their respects. When Precious, a Nigerian caregiver on "graveyard" shift, learned Eunice had died, she gave a great shout of grief that caught up all the hidden sorrow in that place -- mothers sick or dead in faraway places (West Africa, Asia, Latin America) and souls on the Memory floor unable to let go. 

Finally, inevitably, the Cremation Society man wheeled in a gurney which held a velvet casing. A nurse helped him shift mom's body onto the gurney. With great care, he zipped up the case, leaving her face for last.  It was almost midnight.  

There were so many tasks after that Monday breakfast -- social security calls, her death certificates, her closest ally Anita and Beatris (above)  doing the work of closure: emptying out her room, redistributing her goods to Chicago's Brown Elephant, determining the memorial.  I remember little details, that Anita ordered Lebanese sandwiches for lunch.  Erika organized a "Presbyterian shiva," that brought an overflow of well wishers to dad's apartment. I hid in the back room. Easter Sunday we sat in the Lakeview church celebrating a resurrection thick with grief. Grief is exhausting.  I returned to California to continue teaching the semester. While others had an inkling of her presence, I couldn't feel Eunice, so mired in the entanglement of her dementia and excruciating physicality of her last months alive.

I've had several years of dream drought.  She arrived last week.

In the dream we siblings are clearing various rooms, selecting, packing, giving away. (We have also closed down dad's Independent Living apartment in Chicago and settled him near Scott in Philadelphia, and this dream closing felt a little like that.) I am lying in bed in last the room. Mother comes in and stands at the left corner of the bed. She is tall, younger, placid.  Had she been coming down the hall? I'm surprised, and say, "mom, I didn't know you were here!"  She silent, suddenly at the right corner of the bed, whisking her arm briskly, back and forth.  I wake.

When I am ready to leave, will she come for me like that: softly, wordless, gesturing, "I am not like this anymore"?

The wind chimes clatter;
You look up.
When a sudden and strange light
breaks from behind your eyes,
you begin to talk,
and pick at the chip in your coffee cup
til you realize, surprised, that
your lover's voice is violet.

When snared like a lynx,
you wrench free,
gasp like a fish thrown back
weeping silently
and unashamed
while her breathing beside you
reminds you what is warm and plain.

You can return,
but by another way
to our place in the Laniakea,
to the space
where, deep
as a deep sown seed
your life unfurls
while you turn, restless
as the dark earth stirs
under the furrow:
a sweet bright green.

DREAM 1: Thurs, Feb 5 Chicago, 2009,  Parents in Chicago
I plucked Inana’s songs, Sumerian goddess, from mom's shelf, initiating a hypnagogic night in Hyde Park Apt 614.  But I snatch one remarkable fish from the dream flow.  A black immense cosmic space, tiny stars, then Milagros appears. A tiny figure in the dark, but a little like Mary Poppins.  She's wearing a starry-heaven metallic hat --I can draw it. Pink, light circuitry. I wake and muse: Milagros?
 
That day, my Chicago-Oakland flight is cancelled in Denver.  Looks like only flights available will arrive in SFO at 11pm. My chest is tight with anxiety, so I invoke Milagros and feel a distinct warmth. Customer Service finds a formerly non-existent seat on a United flight into Oakland. Milagro, a practical angel. Thank you! 
Arrived in Oakland and got to Jo and Chris by 9pm without my luggage.

DREAM 2: Friday, Feb 6 Johanna's TV room in Oakland
Feast of nuns (Hebrew not Catholic)
I prepare a special dish to share with people who will teach large classes. It's flat, like quiche, with special ingredients. Unusual, rare, maybe magical.  We're in an European old stone house (I don't usually dream of European landscapes). Five people arrive together instead of their designated times. I'd scheduled everyone too close.

Delfina is one of the 5. She says "I looked it up" and shows a white piece of paper. At the top is a line of Hebrew nuns, vavs and zayns. (I was learning the Hebrew letters in Chicago).  I can't write them here, but like this (don't know how many in the line). I noticed that the first was a nun and was violet.
  111111111

 Yes! These are the symbols for the ingredients in the order to be added.  It was simpler than all the elaborate directions in my recipe. I wasn't certain we were going to use it because there was so much going on.
But the image kept appearing - 1111111
 

Dream 4a&b:  Feb 9  Watsonville
Dream 4a:  Horse heaven, Jaguar Heaven
I'm on a motorbike-bicycle to get a Horse Heaven/Latitude Tee shirt.  The brown boy is peddling fast. It's near closing time. Outside the market, men (Filipino?) are hanging around, playing cards, drinking coffee. They look up. To a particular man, the boy asks, “Lo-o?” which I understand as ‘closed’?  (but in Khmer it means beautiful.) The man nods, gestures to go back in. He’s in charge. “Sa likod,” I ask? I think in the dream that we are speaking Tagalog.  We go down into a gloomy textile open market. Most stalls are closed in the low light.  Feels deserted. On the way, I take out $20: two crisp $10 (round trip) and one $5 for a tip.  I can’t decide. If I give it to him now will he still take me back?
We get to the back stall of textiles that is still open. There a room in the back with tall shelves filled with merchandise. There’s still time. The shopkeeper, the guardian, has what we want on the table in front. But then we move back to where there are three really smart people, self-confidently aware of their star power. The line is full now.

I wake & Google "horse latitude": Either of two subtropical atmospheric high-pressure belts that encircle the Earth around latitudes 30°–35° N and 30°–35° S and that generate light winds and clear skies. Because they contain dry, subsiding air, they produce arid climates in the areas below them (i.e. the Sahara). The Southern Hemisphere, which has more water area than the Northern, has the more continuous belt of subsiding air. The belts contain several separate high-pressure centres and shift a few degrees away from the equator in summer.
 
DREAM 4b Milagros  back in her star hat: “I saved it for you.”
In a lecture hall, a woman is talking from the dais. I have a seat up near the front to show I’m interested and will do well. But I'm sharing that single seat with a short woman in a yellow pant suit. When I get up to give her the seat – its not worth it to sit this way – she falls backward on her head.  I walk down the wide middle aisle, back to the seat I first had, but now it’s taken.  There is nowhere to sit. The lecture hall is now filled.  I don’t care if I’m walking in full view, I’m looking for a seat.  Then, on the right, a woman in a hat with a star on it gestures that she has a seat for me. It’s in the back.  When I get over to her, she says to me conspiratorially, “I saved it for you.”
Wake up. Draw this:
 
     x
------- -------
-------  -x----- - my first seat
-------  ------
-------  ------
 -------  -------
-------- xxxxxx - lots of people sitting, no room
--------- --------
----xx--- -------  - where we sit

When I do a dream reflection, I realize that the woman in the hat is Milagros.

 "Ah, the emotions of supernatural beings reflect the meaning of human existence!"
Jenshi chuan, T'ang folktale

Jesse, the buddhist santa cruz therapist, listens and reflects. She helps to pan for gold.  All the nuggets say: time to go.  Time from the administration dungeon, a profession I no longer fathom, the classroom, students I love. Time to seek integration. Why, why do I linger?  She listens. At the end of our last session, she is quite still. She leans back, then forward. She says, "do not become the fox."  I nod and shift on the soft couch, not quite comprehending. The room is warm and dark. I check the lithograph of birds above her head. 

I imagine Kitsune no Yomeiri, the eerie fox wedding in Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurasawa's film Dreams. No, not that fox. She means the wild fox, the fox of fools.  The monk who becomes a wild fox for 500 lifetimes because he mistakes the question of cause and effect.  I don't know this fox, or how to follow the warning: Take Notice. I google wild fox koan and find Japanese Zen master Dōgen Zenji's wild fox koan.

What are the multiple moral and contradictory messages of this koan? Why a fox? Why not to become a fox?

There are countless Ch'an/Zen medieval commentaries on the wild fox koan. Dogen offers several treatises on Hyakujo and the Wild Fox. He first gives a conventional interpretation of the koan, but towards the end of his life, he shifts towards a more imaginative and supernatural interpretation. Why did Dogen change his tune? 

I go to Hein (1999) to understand these fox-persons in the koan.  In Japanese lore, foxes are demonic (the nine-tailed fox) and shape-shifting tricksters. One can be possessed by the fox. They populate folklore and popular texts. (Bathgate 2004), so there actually is a connection between my fox wedding and jesse's wild fox.  Hein reviews the sermon of Chinese abbot Pai-chang Huai-hai.  In this sermon, the non-human monk confesses to fei-jen, the term for spirit possession in East Asian folklore, indicative of the six realms of transmigration. The fox/monk is liberated by the "turning word" of the abbot who responds that even the enlightened must submit to causation. Now liberated, his fox corpse is found on the temple grounds and he is given a monk's funeral at the abbot's instruction. The fox, Hein offers, is a door between realms, both philosophical and folkloric. In this first rendition, Hein says that the koan might be less about metaphysics of causality, as it seems to be, but rather about supernaturalism and ritualism. This is about the fox-monk funeral that the abbot conducts.  You know already that I follow Dogen on this, from a formal reflection on causation to an interest on metamophosis and ritual action.

And why does Pai-chang receive a blow from his student after successfully cremating the old monk? The first of a Zen ritual of insubordination. A wake up?

Was jesse boxing my ears? Am I already a fox? Have I been a fox for these many years, possessed by the mistake of causation?  In Turning Word, James Ishmael Ford reminds us,  We are what we do.   Reflecting as a UU/Buddhist minister on this koan, he says, "whatever we are, unless we notice and take corrective action, we just become more of it."  

Shift, regret, act.  Now.
-----
References
Bathgate, Michael, The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities, Routledge, 2004
Heine, Steven, Putting The ``Fox'' Back in The ``Wild Fox Kōan'': The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious Elements in The Ch'an/Zen Kōan Tradition, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies Vol. 56, No. 2 (Dec., 1996), pp. 257-317 
__________  Shifting Shape, Shaping Text: Philosophy and Folklore in the Fox Kōan, University of Hawaii Press, 1999.

,Hummingbird hassles eagle.

 Oakland in the 1990s, I am sweating out my dissertation on a computer that unravels each day's work.  Some secret worm has burrowed in my hard drive. It's a dreadful curse,  like writing on quicksand. I type for eight hours, and the next day either nothing is saved, or some, or sometimes it sticks. But how do I know? Like Penelope secretly unraveling her day's weaving each night.  Will this misery ever end?  

I walk down to the Oakland Catholic cemetery, a mile from our house.  Victoria and I go regularly.  It's a blistery blue California day. Grave stones stand upright on the bright grass. The divine wanders among the dead; humans leave you to yourself.  I'm hiccuping with tears. It's nearly seven years. Am I going to get through this? Please, give me a sign.  

And YHWH, in a good mood, offers a Gideon moment: Test me.  Now, I like the Gideon story in Judges 6.  Gideon is no respecter of persons. The angel catches him threshing wheat secretly in a wine press so that the Midianites would not see him. The angel's there to recruit him for a manly job: take down the Midianites. Gideon declines.  "Pardon me, but we didn't make this problem."  But then he relent (it is God, after all). After a series of God-tests for Gideon, God gives Gideon the chance to test God. So Gideon asks for  wet wool on dry ground (done) and wet ground and dry wool (easy).  Gideon has to complete his impossible task, which YHWH says is a breeze, like a little league playing the Kansas City Royals (world series tonight).  Gideon wins. 

But I'm not thinking of all that when I say, "If things will be OK,  I want to see an eagle and a hummingbird together."  After that big declaration, I look around sheepishly and think: this is the fairytale of three wishes. You always f*ck up.  Which, in a nicer way, is what my mother says when she hears this story later: Don't test God. And she shoots me a strong look that I interpret as, How did I raise this one?

The good news is that my Gideon moment stops my tearful petition.  It's dusk. As the light turns rosen,  a conference of birds rise up in the tangled bushes that border the cemetery.  They twitter in gorgeous chaotic harmony. It's enough, I think, this bird anthem;  it's  answer enough. And up from the memory, I hear, first one line, then another, of a song I composed in my evangelical Minnesota days. A Malcolm Solbakken hymn Kari would love. I sing it to myself, surprised, but glad to remember it.
"Woke up drowsy this morning.
The sun was playing on my sheets,
she was elated with her light.
I breathed a psalm to the morning.
And as I closed the book,
the birds outside my window harmonized.

We've got a long way to climb
We can't avoid the winter storms
and intimately comes the night
but deeper still the greening
the earth gives birth before our eyes.

Woke up bright from my dreaming.
Somebody called me to my feet
and I was standing in the light.
A stranger stood before me and
as he smiled I noticed something familiar in his eyes.

He said, sister, do you see me,
he said Kathryn, do you know me
he asked Kerry, do you love me?
and I cried: Lord!

He said, we've got a long way to climb
but I will walk with you
Together we will make the narrow wide
and as I love you love each other
I've conquered death so enter life..
--------------------
I sing it to myself as I walk home for supper with Victoria, and to bed.  Waking the next morning,  I remember the last stanza:
Around the world people are waking
some on their mats, some on the streets
and some are waking in their cells
Lord I pray this dawn now breaking
will break into the hearts and minds of those
who keep this darkness.

We've got a long way to climb...

Then I looked out our window and am astonished. A wild band of hummingbirds are whizzing through the garden.  Never have we seen this.  All morning, they buzz the air.  As I sit down to my computer, one flies up and peers at me through the window.  I get it!  I see it! 

Years later, at the Wisconsin lake, the bald eagle sits in the high branch of a white pine facing our island,  I kayak out to get closer and disturb a hummingbird nest set in the dark of the lower trunk.  They buzz out to shoo me away. 
For years, I called this a miracle.  Now, I wonder about the Gideon-God pact. What was my part of the bargain?  Jesse says: beware that you honor what you've been given, and not become the fox. 

Been interested in Balaam, mostly because of the donkey and angel. See below for a post of my sermon on this.

As I prepared, I learned more about Balaam.

Who is Balaam? A mesopotamian soothsayer who “sees” into the future, usually through dreams. But is he a sorcerer or a diviner? Sorcery, or  keshafim, was banned and punished by death in Israel (Deut 18:10).  In Mesopotamian law, it is also a capital crime.  Divination, nahash, involved reading omens, casting lots, interpreting oil or water, was practiced by the Levite priests who threw the urim and thurim.  Balaam is considered nahash (23:23, 24:1) and kesem (22:7, 23:23). This form of divination could be tolerated in Israel since it wasn’t incompatible with monotheism.  
Hackett writes that "Balaam is a diviner, a form of intermediary apparently acceptable in court circles in preexilic Judah.... a typical Yahweh-prophet, one who can only speak the word that Yahweh puts in his mouth, a phrase reflecting the paradigmatic description of a prophet in Deut 18:18.” ( Hackett, 1992, p 569). 

But Balaam is more than a mouthpiece for the Israelite god. The Book of Balaam is a set of plaster inscriptions of Aramaic/ Canaanite dated 800 BCE. It was discovered at Tell Deir ˁAllā, on the Ammonite site of the Jabbok River in the late 1960s.  He is a “seer of the gods” (ḥzh ˀlhn).   Here is an excerpt of Balaam's visions (or Bileam).

The gods came to him at night.
And he beheld a vision in accordance with El's utterance.
They said to Balaam, son of Beor:
"So will it be done, with naught surviving.
No one has seen [the likes of] what you have heard!"
Balaam Reports his Vision to His Intimates.
Balaam arose on the morrow;
He summoned the heads of the assembly to him,
And for two days he fasted, and wept bitterly.
Then his intimates entered into his presence,
and they said to Balaam, son of Beor,
"Why do you fast, and why do you weep?"
Then he said to them: "Be seated, and I will relate to you what the Shaddai gods have planned,
And go, see the acts of the god!"
Balaam Describes the Celestial Vision and Its Aftermath in the Land
"The gods have banded together;
The Shaddai gods have established a council,
And they have said to [the goddess] Shagar:
'Sew up, close up the heavens with dense cloud,
That darkness exist there, not brilliance;
Obscurity and not clarity;
So that you instill dread in dense darkness.
And - never utter a sound again!'
It shall be that the swift and crane will shriek insult to the eagle,
And a nest of vultures shall cry out in response.
The stork, the young of the falcon and the owl,
The chicks of the heron, sparrow and cluster of eagles;
Pigeons and birds, [and fowl in the s]ky.
And a rod [shall flay the cat]tle;
Where there are ewes, a staff shall be brought.
Hares - eat together!
Free[ly feed], oh beasts [of the field]!
And [freely] drink, asses and hyenas!"

Nonetheless, let us return to the Hebrew Balaam. He arrives at a critical point at the end of Numbers, which can be organized like this:
(1) Israel in the Desert of Sinai (1:1 – 10:10)
(2) From Sinai to Kadesh (10:11 – 12:16)
(3) In the Kadesh area (13:1 – 20:21)
(4) Detour to avoid Edom (20:22 – 21:35)
(5) Israel in the plains of Moab (22:1 – 36:13). 
  
Oracles of Balaam  (Numbers 22-24)
Balak, King of Moab is worried about the immigrant force of Israelies plowing through neighboring territories.  Following protocol, he hires the seer Balaam to curse them. Balaam tells him he will consult El about this, so he dreams and El or YHWH tells him he can't curse the Israelites because they are blessed.  Balaam says he can only do what El prescribes, so he can't curse the Israelites.  Balak, increasingly agitated, thinks Balaam is bargaining for a higher divination fee. So he sends messengers a second time with more gifts. Balaam goes back to dreaming. He receives the same answer (no), but then El permits him to meet Balak if he repeats what El tells him to say.

The little story I love  - his trip on the donkey and encounter with the angel is Chpts 22-24.  Like the jewel in the egg, we have the story I will tell next.

References
Hackett, J.A., Balaam, Anchor Bible Dictionary,  New York: Doubleday, 1992, 569-572.
Levine,  B.A. "The Deir 'Alla Plaster Inscriptions", in: W.W. Hallo (ed.), Context of Scripture, vol.2 (2003), 140-145.
Oppenheim, A. L. The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, Philadelphia, 1956
 Unger, M.F. Unger’s Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed.; Chicago: Moody Press, 1966,  799.
See this collection of dreams in the bible

Gendlin's  Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams  helped me, an undergrad caught up in the rip tide of U of Chicago. He taught in the Psychology dept and I now wish I'd taken a class from him.  But I was consumed by the auto-hypnosis experiments of the charismatic Erika Fromm in those years, traveling like Billy Pilgrim through self-hypnotic time zones, turning myself into a tomato, growing wings.  So recently arrived as a "mk" from Philippines, the transition was its own awful Wonderland. And I was slowly dissolving, besieged by nightly terrors.  My body stitched by worms, decaying in old blood,  teeth popping out.  Some days I woke so depressed my body ached. 

Gendlin's book was practical. His method gave me questions for the nightmares.  But more helpful was his description of Focusing: the body's affirmation though a buzzy, shifting feeling when I'd found the right interpretation.  My body was willing to reveal the riddle that the unconscious hid.  Whenever I named it (Rumpelstiltskin!) a surge of energy surged forth.  Many years later, Gendlin promotes "Thinking at the Edge" through his Focusing Institute.  

"Focusing is the murky edge…" the limit situation, the place in ourselves that is inchoate.  Our ability to focus helps us slog into the mud of our murk with a confidence that our intuition has its own GPS. 

Which leads me to Flow.  The wild red-haired Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, taught in our Common Core.  (You'd think I majored in psych.)  The impossible-to-spell genius was testing wellbeing at the school where "fun goes to die."   Flow, he says in this Ted talk, is a mode of self absorption that draws you into action and creativity. It strikes me as similar to the  mindfulness that Ellen Langer has theorized about for several decades now, as too, Seligman's notion of flourishing. Mindfulness and flow restore the body-mind divide through the intuition and imagination to give us a more expansive way of being past our social instrumentality.  They free us from the lock-down of our routinized life. 

Is this solipsim? We are on the juggernaut careening towards social change and its chaos: economic stress, personal hardship, conflict, disaster, collapse. Is positive psychology a panacea?  What might focusing, flow, mindfulness, florishing teach us about resilience?