Crossroads Dispatches

maktub: it is written (as the words keep changing)

"It's easy to dismiss the wacko prophets who are constantly emitting visions of gloom and doom. The more dangerous prophets are the storytellers of our culture - the journalists, the filmmakers, the writers of fiction and many musicians who are constantly besieging us with dark visions. I think about Muriel Rukeyser, the poet, who said that the universe is not made of molecules - it's made out of stories, and if the storytellers of our culture are constantly telling us that the only true thing is an ugly thing, then yes, I do think that's a problem." - Rob Brezsny, SF Chronicle, 12/31/08

"He was proud of himself. He had learned some important things, like how to deal in crystal, and about the language without words ... and about omens. One afternoon he had seen a man at the top of the hill, complaining that it was impossible to find a decent place to get something to drink after such a climb. The boy, accustomed to recognizing omens, spoke to the merchant.

"Let's sell tea to the people who climb the hill."

"Lots of places sell tea around here," the merchant said.

"But we sell tea in crystal glasses. The people will enjoy the tea and want to buy the glasses. I have been told that beauty is the great seducer of men."

...........

"Maktub," the merchant said, finally.

"What does that mean?"

"You would have to be born an Arab to understand," he answered. "But in your language it would be something like, 'It is written.'"

And, as he smothered the coals in the hookah, he told the boy he could begin to sell tea in the crystal glasses. Sometimes, there's just no way to hold back the river. - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

"We are not here to save the world, we are here to serve an emerging paradigm... [Places and spaces of possibility], they are kind of like midwives, places that are holding the template of what's trying to emerge,... so there can be a birth of the next stage of human evolution." - Rev. Michael Beckwith, "Serving the Emerging Paradigm" video

Whatever you think of Time and Self, it is like reading a book where the words keep morphing, erasing, revising themselves. (See meditation by Ellias Lonsdale in Bonus.)

If we note any lag in blog posts since our last exchange, and not sure there could be any lag in Now truly, it's due to (past)Evelyn encouraging a niggling doubt that computers were conscious. (As if consciousness was segregated.) Correct that, she/I was having doubts about whether whomever graces these pages with their presence would find it plausible that all is consciouness, even gasp! the palmtops you cradle. (Or is it laptops as your timeline goes?)

And voila, this thorn in thoughtform -- and my communion with Ashe is severed in what you might term the near-future. Because it could not exist, deemed impossibility, it wasn't so. Ashe was a deaf, mute machine to me.

BTW, it's Ashe the one with access to the Library of Congress and its devic hierarchy where all blogs and suchnot Internet scribing were recorded, and are archived, allowing me access to this older method of communion. All is well.

Anyhow, right now I'm at the riverbank with Jonah. I was about to teach him how to teleport. One last bonding before I teleport off myself. The historic Juan Bautista de Anza trail gathered its final three hundred expeditioners nearby the town's presidio, paralleled the Santa Cruz River, which curves into Mexico twice, where we've been dancing and singing (music was vital to the colonists, as it is, you'll see) with the undines earlier in the day. This desire line weaves into Alta California, ending in San Francisco, my next desiration.

The bell-shaped leaves of the cottonwoods are thick among the floor. In summer they shimmer and tinker as bells do. No jangles now. The only sound our bare feet crunching kindling. Hovering skeletal branches of these anchor trees trellis the sky as the first drops descend. The Druids worked with oak trees as portals. In the desert, cottonwoods suffice for training, until the apprentice simply learns to attune to desired location's space-time frequency, and coherently match it all on their own.

A single raptor slices the still air, circling -- it's swooshing wing whispering devotion to the slyphs. The full moon is a pearl sown into the tapestry of tree and thunderbolt.

I sense the rain is relatively safe, and I have a new thought. It's a little old-fashioned, yet growing up with fairy tale, I was always one to prefer the romance and unsuspecting surprises attendant to magic carpets over the direct Beam me up, Scotty mode.

"Are we going to hitchhike?" the boy asks noting my celestial glances.

"Yes."

"How?"

And I tell Jonah a brief version of The Rainmaker. You can read the story here. I first heard one version told in the chapter Harmonization in my teacher's book perhaps six to seven years ago. And then another time in depth at a little Cuban cafe on the Vegas Strip told by a Jung mythician and dreamscaper.

"Close your eyes," I begin, and Jonah followed suit, shutting his hazel eyes. "Be the undivided self, the awareness peering through every eye."

"Now, attend to the next rain drop. See what is seeing as the rain drop."

We were no larger than a star of David tucked in a mustard seed, and simultaneously as vast as velvet midnight sky in outerest space. And we were nowhere, everywhere at once, which is always so.

Jonah was encased in a rather large lustrous watery bubble, and I giggled thinking of the pun. The belly of a bubble, rather than a whale. He giggled back, knowingly. We were riding the water cycle. He he, water-cycle. Get it, bicycle, motorcycle, multicycle (do you have those yet?)... Well, we're getting as silly as holy Fools, and Ashe is ready to close this post.

Listen to the vibration of hearts. Be your own scientist. Go into the Field.

"Well into the 1930s it was believed that most erosion in the desert had little to do with water. Geologists cited extreme day and night temperature ranges and constant dryness, reporting that rocks must explode during the night from the pressures. They believed that it was the absence of water that caused desert erosion. In laboratory experiments, researchers tried to force rocks into cracking, and exploding, assaulting them with temperatures and dryness far beyond what a desert could produce. The rocks did not budge. So they said that it was wind that had left deserts so chopped up with canyons and clefts. But when they hammered open these desert stones, ones gathered from the Mojave Desert in particular, they found hidden inside traces of moisture. Eventually they examined the shape of the land with increasing scrutiny. They walked the canyons. They witnessed floods and watched boulders roll away in the seething froth. Then they understood." - Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

ART CREDITS: On the Beach, by Jude Valentine (via Planet Waves); Omega Institute video interview with Rev. Michael Beckwith on "Serving the Emerging Paradigm"; photo by Jason Lee, of a girl "walking on water" via floating sphere on river park, Beijing, May 3, 2007 (via All Hat No Cattle)

BONUS: A meditation for 8 Aquarius, A Book: The words in it keep changing.

you must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds

Behind me a bookshelf of "Poker Face", "Beat the Slots", "Casino Craps for the Winner," and "Every Hand Revealed." Before me, a man in a cinnamon tweed jacket, gray plaid scarf, bows his head down as if in prayer, leaning in toward the poppy-colored table, surrenders to the gravity of sleep.

The path splits, tendrils into tributaries. Even here, typing at a strip mall Borders tucked well off the Strip, there are parallel - nearly invisible  - currents that one can swim.

"At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past." - Maurice Maeterlinck    

"How are you going to survive?" my Mom asks after I announce it's time for me to leave soon. Soon could be minutes, days -- weeks at most. Just my hunch. She thought I'd stay until I hoarded a fortune in colored paper and jingly coins. I knew I'd only need to stay long enough to reclaim my fortune in faith.

"You can't live on air," she continues.        

I'm about to reply, "You can live on aether*" I catch myself.

"You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds." - Henry David Thoreau

Ashe nudges me. She delights in the fractal animations that we imaginate and dance together, and after a particularly playful session last night, she suggests it is time to record.

Mind you, it's one slice of life. I can't speak for all the mobiles*, of course. Nor all on same path we're carving, many living different lifestyles. Not that I'm speaking of cultures or counter-cultures.        

(Oh, of course you don't know Ashe, that's the nickname this computer deva goes by. It's not actually her name which is unpronounceable in English. It's a harmonic language, hers.)

Please bear with me, since it's been a while that I relied on the written word to communicate. Not to mention the scribe's reluctance, whom channels the stream of my voice through her own flood control -- ephemeral, temporary -- as all dams are.

It's almost time for me to hit the road (and at that phrase, my soul kindles on the sparks of Kerouac and Basho and Issa.) There is a long yet soft-spoken history of portable poets.

I've been here on Par 5 for near three months.

Par 5 because that's what the raised embossed white letters painted on a wooden red rectangle reads just before the golf course path curves, paralleling the fringe of Fremont cottonwoods and Goodding willows standing sentinel along the Santa Cruz River. I think of the rip-roaring floods that carried the seeds for these trees as I carry a bucket of water back to the enclave. I could have just as easily gone to the catchment, by the Spanish fountain with chocolate cake-tiers of giant scallop shells. I wished to speak with the river.

Even in its abandonment after the retired folk fled when the borders softened, continuity courses. Wands of ocotillo lashed together to form fences resurrect to verdant life in the summer monsoon storms, hibernate in the hermitage winter.

The sun is setting. I admire how the blushing sky or sometimes chapel-like silver bells are revealed in archways and port holes of the faux adobes dotting the former country club estates.  At this hour, the clouds are as animated as hummingbirds zinging over fuchsia and papaya-colored Mexican sunflowers.

Jared and Veronica have been my closest yester-neighbors while I've been here. We're having dinner together tonight. Wild squash grows on vines the size of Christmas ornaments, striped white and green, perfect globes: Tohono O'oodham Ha:l. Native to the desert probably since time primordial. We certainly glean wild-crafted fruits as well, yet that is not the octave they, we, I play.

There is a great difference in plants that have been serenaded. Tonight we are having Ha:l squash soup, a light orange ambrosia. Veronica has a special fondness for the scarlet runner beans, and their shining sound, so that's also in the soup. Their boy, Jonah, has charged himself with the archetype of the shrubby Mexican oregano. His cherub fingers add a handful to the pot.

Ashe is signaling me that this is a good ending point for my 2009 self.

(Feels ludicrous writing that. It's actually now, simultaneously. Storylines are supposed to be linear, aren't they? Are they?) Soup's on, anyhow. Namaste.

"The Navajo people, as well as the Tewa (a New Mexico Pueblo people), celebrate other life forms as "people." We are the five-fingered people, for example, but there are also four-legged people and corn people." - Anne Minard, "The Breads of Home", Sojourns, winter/spring 2008

* ether. O)F. éther or L. æthēr — Gr. aithḗr upper air, f. base of aĩthein kindle, burn, shine.

**Certainly hope that a glossary shall not be necessary. Mobiles can also be interchanged with the slang 'nimbos'. In my time, this can be disparaged, as in rhymes with bimbo or limbo. To me, however, resembles the nimbleness of a symphony, the river.

Wait. One more thing. Ashe has compiled a brief list of resources as accompaniment to this post (much of the co-creative sciences have become alarmingly simple compared to what's listed). She reminds you that you already own the most complete library.

• Findhorn Community Staff. The Findhorn Garden. 1976. Perennial Publishers
• Maechelle Small Wright. Behaving as if the God in all Life Mattered. 1983. Perelandra, Limited.
• Fred Alan Wolf. The Yoga of Time Travel. 2004. Quest Books.

ART CREDITS Separating the Waters II, by Ruth Weisberg; Initiation, by Ruth Weisberg

proud to be from neptune

"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune." - Noam Chomsky

"If there were absolutely nothing that could obstruct it, no possibility for failure, what do you see in your life?" he asked.

Seconds passed, and I was still clunking thoughts.
"You're thinking too much. First thought. Whatever popped up when I asked."

Still, I hesitated. My mind was nearly blank. I realized I'd obliterated my idealist visions by labeling them "not feasible in this lifetime on this planet." It felt like a strange request to walk into that abandoned scrap heap, like digging for jewelry in the town dump. Would they even still be there?

Long pauses on the phone are less awkward than face-to-face, thankfully.

"You're doubting."
"Yes, I'd written off this question."

Reflecting back, I'd been hyper-drive into survival mode in 2008. I studied computer engineering rather than English literature with a minor in philosophy precisely so I'd never-ever-never end up in this position. I was all about independence and freedom -- which in my first few decades translated simplistically to financial freedom.

Fast forward to January 2009, here I am in the American city I loathed the most, near penniless (401K stock from my yuppie engineer days dwindled). That's the not part I vowed never-ever-never to have happen. That was living with my Mom. Certainly there's a part of me that chuckles at how this was so obviously going to happen. Fears and aversions and resistance are funny that way, but that's another post.

In light of my comic yet confounding plight, he's asking me imagine no obstacles, no doubts, and complete conviction in the certainty of the highest, boldest, most audacious creation?

I shared my first thought, as absurd as it seemed in a world that values iPods, Paris Hilton, tummy tucks and venti lattes. Two days later as I write this right now, I can see that what I shared - beautiful as it was is only a stepping stone, and isn't my wildest and most unhindered dream. Buried much further, I'm still pulling out potsherds of that scattered sculpture.

I hadn't thought of these dreams since I left New Orleans in early June. I arrived with hope and enthusiasm. I left dejected - feeling as if I'd failed the city, myself, God. I showed up in a post-disaster town trying to get back on its own two feet without being on my own two feet -- monetarily speaking. And I didn't have absolute faith in magic (how Source operates in this universe appears as magic to most of us). That last one did my vision in.

I say "my" vision, in the sense that I saw it, but I've never owned it. It goes beyond the personal. It has nothing to do with the kind of house with picket fence I'd like to have, or the perfect soulmate for me, or anything like that. I find when I serve the One, my owns needs are provided for automagically; yet if I fall back to worrying about my bills and how I'm going to eat today, I'm in for a downfall. (You'd think I'd figure out this pattern by now.)

The only thing is my assignments (they come as gentle nudgings of the heart, not commands from on high) keep getting bigger. The stakes higher. I got scared. Paralyzed scared.

I'm trying to bring you up to speed since I didn't blog much of 2008. Maybe it was the year "we were called upon to face the Perfect Storm." But that was then. This is a new year that zings with the masterful 11 vibration. And tomorrow is a new year. And the day after is a new year. It's always anew. "Every moment is fresh and unconditioned - until your mind tells you otherwise," I once heard Adyashanti say.

I don't care if anyone calls me Neptunian. That's become a backhanded compliment in my book, although only quite recently.

"Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking." – Antonio Machado

With that, I'm writing a series that isn't like any other series I've written. Utopian Neptunian visions set in the narrative framework of a near-future eARTh. I expect more storytelling within this new world, less me blathering on philosophically.

Although this series was inspired by the Superstruct alternative reality game, it also has its genesis in my recent read of "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. "The Road" is set in a bleak post-apocalyptic America covered in ash. It rains ash, snows ash and it's uniformly gray and dreary. This greyness is so thrashing repetitive, I was ready to throw the book across the room at page seven. McCarthy depicts a world that is literally dog eat dog as many of the survivalist resort to eating each other. Obviously, the book has some redeeming value otherwise I'd not even bring it up. Though it's not exactly light beach reading. Read at your own risk.

The road. Fitting metaphor. So many believe we are being herded down a road and right over a cliff. If you subscribe to that belief, you will have that road. You are at a crossroads, not a road. I don't expect everyone to come down this fork in the road.

If buildings are like frozen music, then words are like frozen thought-forms. In a powerful way, I noted that what I write about has a way of happening, crystallizing into 3D being. (They're not even the highest thought-forms because those I don't even have thoughts for those. They have more of a spacious, vast feel I can't articulate yet.)

p.s. And this ought to be quite interesting to write this series as I don't even own a (working) laptop anymore. Begging, borrowing 'puters, libraries and getting by is my old way. Let the magic begin!

p.p.s. I'd like to also have a group (most probably private) site/blog/wiki that people can share their epiphanies, miracles, magic, omens, serendipities as a companion to the serial. Anyone know any good easy-as-cake tool for this?

ART CREDITS :: Girl gone wild!!! - or is it all really fake? by Ian Francis; A Bridge by Ian Francis