All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Fairy Lanterns, Madia, Purple Vetch, Chinese Houses

 (April 25, 2023)

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ROOMS THAT DREAM:

APT. 31

   In Apt.31 you are nothing more and nothing less than who you were the day you explored the backyard when you were five years old. You remember letting the mantis pray for several minutes on your index finger and letting the ladybug journey around your hand and then trying to catch blue dragonflies that were hovering over the bird bath. You remember the tortoise finding its way into the crawlspace under the house and the soft fur of the dog and the fragrance of the red roses floating in currents through the air--a time before you were ever abused or traumatized or vilified or demonized, a time before you started accumulating the negativity of suffering, of shame and guilt and regrets and betrayal and upheaval and poverty and loss. You can return to this time because in Apt. 31 you perform a mental purification process. You sometimes experience a sense of blissful liberation, something you rarely even experienced as a child, because you have released all the negativity accumulated in your energy field, and you have become like a child again, without hatred or fear, a child with great curiosity and love for insects and reptiles and animals and flowers and all the other creatures of the earth.

(You realize that you are still on the right path because you find a story by Justin C. near the back door....)

Fairy Lanterns, Chinese Houses, Madia, Purple Vetch

 (April 25, 2023)

PENDULUM DREAMS:

THE HOLE

   As we scrambled down to the hole, I slipped on wet moss and then almost lost my footing on unstable stones. I shadowed my Dad and my older brother, Tom, until we reached a small stone promontory jutting out into the deep pool. Finally Dad set down the tackle box and baited our hooks with writhing worms. I soon lost track of time, lounging on the smooth stone and gazing at my line where it disappeared into dark water.
   Suddenly a gray spider with long legs and a large, bulbous abdomen crawled out of a crack in the rock and lumbered towards me. I leapt to my feet and reeled in my line, keeping an eye on the spider, which continued to approach as if totally unafraid or unaware of me. Then to my surprise other gray spiders, four, five, six of them, crawled out from the crack in the rock and marched directly towards me.
   At the same time, Tom, who had been fishing from a rock about ten feet away, dashed up river without any warning. Terrified, I jumped over the spiders, hoping they wouldn’t somehow latch onto me and bite me. Surprised that I had escaped unscathed, I sprinted after my brother, soon discovering that most of the stones in the river bed were not fixed in the ground and not stable. My brother scurried across them without losing his balance, so I did my best to keep up, not wanting to be out-done.
   Eventually, far from the hole where my father was fishing, I encountered a large rock in my path, which proved a great challenge to climb over, mainly because it was smooth in some places and sharp in others. I slipped several times, realizing as I got higher that if I fell and injured myself, there was a good chance that no one would find me. At that point, some latent power in me surfaced; before I knew it, I reached the top of the rock. I had a strange feeling that I had lost time, almost as if I had blacked out, when that power within me took over.
   As soon as I climbed down to the river on the other side, I looked around and could not see my brother anywhere. I turned and examined the rock I had just climbed over and realized that I would be risking my life to go back the same way. At that point in the river, the hill back up to the road seemed even more treacherous than the way we had found to get down to the fishing hole.
   A wave of panic swept over me. I crouched down next to the rock and tried to figure out what to do next. Then the strangest thing happened.
   As I gazed at the river, listening to my breath and the rushing water, my fears melted away completely. A wave of peace washed over me. I recognized the same peace in the trees and the grass and the rocks, in the river and the sky. I wanted to sing, my soul in tune with the earth and its creatures, and I did sing, a song called “Rocky Mountain High,” for what seemed like a long time. I didn’t know it then, but my soul had surfaced from deep in my subconscious mind, and I felt timeless. I knew in that forest I would feel free of time whether I was twelve or fifty-five because of the peace of the Earth and a fervent exultation connecting me with all things. I finally remembered that I needed to find a way back to my family. I suddenly realized that my father and mother would be devastated if I did not return. Since the hillside next to the river was unknown to me, I examined the rock again and determined the safest way possible would be to climb back over.
   On the way back, I hiked along the top of a small rise next to the river into an area that seemed to have been cleared by someone, and immediately I felt an eerie sensation, as if a presence was nearby, animal or human, I couldn’t tell. I thought at first that my brother was hiding nearby behind an outcrop of rock. Fearing an ambush, I plopped down on a smooth stone and waited to see if he would leap out at me, and my mind shifted to a state alert to any subtle signs of movement. I heard a lizard scuttling through dry leaves and saw a rattlesnake slithering through the grass about twenty feet away. I watched a blue bird flitting from the ground to the low branches of an oak.
   I was near a long, flat stone blanketed by moss, with tufts of grass sprouting out of it. Curious as to why grass was growing out of the rock in so many places, I pulled up one of the tufts and found a smooth cup underneath. I pulled up a few other tufts and found other cups of varying depths. Perplexed, I surveyed the area and noticed five large oval indentations darker than the rest of the earth.
   “What is this?” I asked myself.
   “Native Americans lived here,” a disembodied male voice replied.
   “Native Americans? You mean Indians?” I wondered. No answer. “What are these cups in the stone?” I asked.
   “You will find out,” the voice answered.
   “When will I find out?” No answer.

Over-Soul

   Suddenly the image of a woman rose into my mind’s eye. She wore a green dress covered by flowers and stars and held a golden cup in one hand and what seemed like an emblem of rulership, a scepter perhaps, in the other. On her head she wore a crown suggesting the phases of the moon, her jet-black hair flowing all the way to the ground. A few animals, a bobcat, doves, and farther away, a stag, remained in her sphere, and each seemed less like companions than symbols of different aspects of her. I blinked, and the woman disappeared, but she unexpectedly surfaced again in my consciousness a few moments later as if stubbornly reasserting her ubiety.
   Startled, and afraid that I had been gone too long, I dashed wildly back to the hole, only to find that my Dad and brother had vanished. Why had they abandoned me? I felt like I was falling into some black pool of suffering connecting me with the other people and creatures of the Earth. The black pool seemed bottomless, and I began to understand the pain and loss of others throughout history even though I knew that I had not experienced anything close to what many had suffered.
   But I felt it keenly. “Why is there so much suffering in the world?” I whined, tears welling in my eyes. To my surprise, I received an answer, not verbal, but visual. Life forms that had once lived in the area quickly passed before my eyes, including dinosaurs and extinct animals and the first people, and I knew that they had all suffered to a greater or a lesser degree, but then I felt the deep peace of the Earth again, as if the Earth itself were communicating with me, showing me that all life is part of the peace at the deep core of existence, no matter what suffering has occurred throughout the ages.
   Still stinging from a sense of abandonment, I climbed the steep incline back to the car, stopping now and then to orient myself and catch my breath. When I found the road, I discovered that the car was gone. I could see a silver car parked down the road a ways, but the blue Dodge had vanished, leaving me stranded in the wilderness, with only a single-lane road, a thin gray thread of humanness, connecting me to my home in Fresno, CA.
   “Why did they leave me?” I wondered. No answer. I stared down at the river, which I realized would just keep flowing no matter what happened to me or what I did. Suddenly my face itched, and I suspected that I had brushed against some poison oak.  When I scratched my cheek, I felt hair on my jaw. I looked at my hand and saw a ring on my finger. I suddenly remembered my wife and children, but the rest of my past had vanished. What did I do for a living? How much money did I make? Who were my friends? Did people like and respect me? None of that seemed to matter in the peace beyond understanding that pervaded the mountains.
   That car down the road...was that my car? Had I fallen and hit my head on a rock? Was I in shock? I had a headache, but I could not find any signs of blood anywhere. My father, I suddenly remembered, had died a couple of years after we had discovered the fishing hole. My brother had moved to a different state. I began remembering my family and moments of vision and exultation, but so much of my life in the past forty years had lacked the spark of divinity, the harmony and peace that earlier in the day seemed to hold everything on the planet and in the cosmos together. "I wish that sense harmony and peace would unite us, not just the sense of weariness and suffering that binds us together," I thought.
   Then I remembered those who had tried to harm me, so many people scrambling around, trying to get a leg up or to stay on top. Over the years I had just kept returning to the forest, journeying far enough into a state that corresponds with the frequency of my soul. In the forest, I could always let go of fear and let peace wash over me.
   I got in the car, and a moment when I had slipped on a rock flashed through my mind.
   “Did I go so deep into that forest that I forgot forty years of my life? Or did I fall and hit my head somewhere?”
   I shifted the car into gear. No answer.

Go on a different adventure.