Dream/meditation journal: 5 minute read
All talking is talking to oneself. – Unknown
Love, anger, bereavement, trauma, grief. Intense emotions create levels of attachment to persons and places, items, or even whole lifetimes. In such cases a trace of our personal energy signatures can remain associated with the object of our attachment. When this happens, we feel disjointed, foggy, dissociated from our present moment, confused, and more often than not, depressed.
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Dream/meditation journal: 8 minute read
I’ve now been visited by three shamans and a hot-pink tiger. My dreams have finally got my attention. For more than a month, I’ve been unable to shake a rare bout of depression. It’s beginning to dawn on me what has occurred. It’s time to get help. Now I face the paradox of approaching the transcendent realms from my starting point in the mist-cloaked valley of neediness. Can such a gap be bridged? This is one function of the drum.
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Dream journal: 3 minute read
I pluck the envelope from the air and open it to reveal the contents: little scraps of paper and post-its with scribbled notes, sketched diagrams of floor plans, an ink-bled page with the church’s schedule photocopied too many times, and many bits of red crepe paper confetti. Red the color of poppy petals, of Ruby Slippers, of the heart’s path.
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Dream journal: 3 minute read
Something is wrong. For roughly the past month I’ve felt sad, disconnected, listless, apathetic, isolated, anxious, and marginalized from my own life. Wait. I know this.
Holy shit. I’m depressed.
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Creative non-fiction: 2 minute read
The sun’s warmth touches my skin in a tender lingering goodbye, while the air carries the faint, mysterious smell of ice. It’s one of those early fall days that’s perfect for running. I’m a good half-hour into my ten miles, just crossing the shipping locks, when I notice a flock of tourists peering over the guardrail into the water below. They’re chirping like sparrows and reaching for their cameras. Curious about what’s causing the out-of-towners to flutter, I pull over to look.
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Dream journal: 5 minute read
All I remember of my appointed task is that it involves finding parts for things and piecing them together. A sense of mild urgency pervades, a feeling that my job is important both for me and for the collective with which I find myself associated. At one point, the urgency reaches a pinnacle. Something happens and I fall.
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Dream/meditation journal: 2 minute read
It takes a while to calm my racing thoughts. Aware that this is only a 15-minute meditation, I let myself off the hook for anything monumental. “Just take whatever impressions come. Accept them for what they are,” I remind myself.
Dream journal: 2 minute read
What will become of these
my many lives,
abandoned each morning abruptly to their own fates?
— Jane Hirshfield
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Dream journal/memoir: 5 minute read
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
– Paul McCartney/John Lennon
The invaders do not look like us. They are tall and deathly pale. Their hair, worn long and often braided, is a nearly gray ash-blonde. They have facial hair, uncommon among our own men. The clothing they wear is equally strange. In leather pants and Norwegian sweaters they are plotting genocide.
CAMILLA WELLS PAYNTER 