Sunday, December 28, 2003

Dream Interpretation: the 9 dot exercise Dream: I'm in some kind of class or workshop. We meet outdoors, sitting at long conference tables. A lot of my energy and thought goes into remembering exactly how that 9 dot exercise goes. I remember the first step of the solution, but not the entire problem. How many straight lines are you supposed to use? How do they go after that first one that goes outside the box? At some point I think "I don't have to figure this out before I wake up. I have the book, The Art of Possibility, and the solution is in that." (So either I had already wakened in the night, or this was a semi-lucid dream.) Finally though I do remember how it goes. I work it in my mind, not out on paper. Interpretation: Waking and washing my face this morning, the thoughts that came were things like "Why have I been reading all these books for guidance? What makes me think that these authors know more than I do about how to live my life? Why don't I just make my bowls and see what happens?" Also, I thought "if I knew for sure that I'd succeed at whatever I set out to do, then what would I do now?" This struck me as a good free writing exercise for this morning. Let the pen go and see what it tells me. It's as if "other people's ideas" can be a kind of 9-dot box for me. Maybe my full aliveness is outside this box. The dream seems to be telling me, too, that knowing the first step out of the box is enough. I keep thinking I have to know it all, have it all planned, have the full solution before I can wake up (and live.) Not so. It's funny that I'd have this dream the night before celebrating finding and buying the land here - celebrating the power of visualizing. Together, the dream and the anniversary could be telling me to visualize outside the realm of what I now believe is possible. Why not? 10:19:00 AM    comment []

25th Anniversary of Stonebank Farm - the power of visualizing This is another personal holiday for me: the anniversary of our buying this land. On December 28, 1978, it became ours. We were living in the Atlanta area, on almost 2 acres of land, doing our best to do homesteading, "back to the land" things in the suburbs. Actually, we did pretty well with it - two greenhouses, big garden, strawberries lining the driveway, etc. Here, though, was real woods. Our 22 acres ran from one small stream up a hill and then down to a bigger one. There was a big spring we could use for a water source. The ridge had mountain views in all directions. And the woods felt friendly. It wasn't the most beautiful forest. Just a few months before, it had been logged. Slash was everywhere. Still, there was something appealing about it. Oddly enough, one of the things I loved about it, and still do, is the smell of it in winter. We'd been looking for land for several months. Every trip showed us more about what we wanted and didn't want. Finally we wrote out exactly what we wanted and began visualizing. "It's Thanksgiving, 1978, and we've found our land. It's..." and we said exactly what we wanted - south slope, spring, $1,000 or less an acre, etc. Real estate agents had told us we couldn't find what we wanted for the price we wanted to pay. We ignored them and went on visualizing. Sure enough, we found it before Thanksgiving. Today is the anniversary of the closing. It's a tribute to the power of visualizing, especially when two or more people do it together. Years later, we had a weekly "energy circle" here with three of us. We'd visualize together, how we wanted the following week to go. This is how I was able to make my first bowls. If you are frustrated because other people seem to be able to visualize and you have trouble with it, I can recommend some resources. The book I recommended recently, Ingrid Bacci's Effortless Living, has a chapter on it with specific exercises to help. And of course the classic text is Shakti Gawain's book, Creative Visualization.  The links are to www.amazon.com, which seems to have the best prices these days. Also amazon makes it very convenient to buy the books used. I've had good experiences buying used books for very little money there. I have no stock in amazon, nor any affiliate status or any other reason to recommend them except that I usually buy there myself. Now the question is: what to visualize next? Thinking about how we found the land, it seems completely foolish not to use this power. It's like having millions of dollars and never bothering to use them for anything. Or is it billions? 10:00:46 AM    comment []