Druid Journal

This post is taken from my journal of the second day of my ten-day fast and meditation to gain clarity on my career path.

Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010

Today I was feeling a little odd, or a little off, from the raw vegan fast. I didn’t have many cravings, but was often pretty hungry and felt a bit unbalanced, light … ungrounded. I had some tea, and that helped a lot.

Anyway: today we had a little breakfast at home, and then went to the grocery store. Afterwards we went to the café and wore ourselves out with work, then came home, had a light dinner, and went for a walk. Lots of our talk today was about planning our trip down south, as well as the insanity of Beck’s recent “restoring honor” rally.

Dreams and Meditations

My dream last night was something about going to an underground bunker, decorated in a Victorian or steampunk style, like the hideaway of Captain Nemo. I was traveling with a bunch of weird social outcasts — mutants and half-animals and the like. There was a long dream sequence of going through the wilderness — looking rather like a rocky moorland — with our guide, and finally reaching an elaborately hidden entrance to Nemo’s headquarters.

Interestingly, this was the second night in a row I dreamed of half-beings, mixed-up beings. Hmmm…

When I woke up I wanted to continue the meditation from last night, in which I was trying to get a firmer connection with the Moon. I visualized myself rowing away from the shore, past the Isle of Smoke, and onto the open sea, where it got progressively choppier and the waves got larger. A storm came up, and the waves grew to be literally over a hundred feet tall. Riding up and down the waves, I was thrown around and nearly drowned, but I managed to hold on to the boat. At last I was hurled against some rocks; the boat was smashed, and I was seriously hurt — particularly my right side. My right arm might have been broken. I don’t remember ever being physically hurt in a meditation before.

I crawled away from the sea, up on the rocks, over a little crest, and then saw a beautiful sight: a vast, still pool of water, encircled by a rocky cliff and a shore decked with black sand speckled with white flecks. And the Moon filled the pool; it was about half-risen, and it reflected in the water. Silver fish swam everywhere in the pool. I could still hear — and even feel — the pounding of the surf beyond the wall of rocks, but there was no way the surf would get through. I had a feeling, looking at the rocks, that in fact they were made by the surf — they were shiny and shell-like, pearly, as if they’d been built up or compressed by the water. As if the very force of the ocean were what made this sanctuary. Meanwhile, the Moon itself wasn’t just a blank disk: in it I could see two faces, shifting back and forth: one was a half-lidded smiling face of the Buddha; the other was a horned man, Cernunnos. These faces I understood to represent my own Moon and Mars (both of which are in Pisces, the watery sign of the fish).

Is this another half-being, like in my dreams?

One final thing. I tried to get a sense of how this sanctuary fit into the larger geography of the Inner Landscape. The line of rocks around the pool, I saw, are like the inner curl of a conch shell; the outer curl sweeps around and follows the edge of the Ocean all the way past the World Tree to the Observatory, and then Apollo’s Temple and the Abyss / Mountain. I wonder if the inner pool in some way reflects the larger territory of the Sun.

I’m not really sure what a lot of this means; I don’t know if the Moon is trapped here, protected here, or both. It is incredibly beautiful the way it is, and it’s hard for me to imagine it needs improvement. Certainly it is very similar to the Pool of the Sun at the far edge of the Sun Prairie.

The Card

Tonight I drew the second card of the Storyteller spread: The Dream.

Seven of Jewels.

My interpretation of the card, off-the-cuff, is the link between physical and supernatural. The card shows a Buddhist symbol of ascent from physical up to spiritual, with the something-teen levels involved. I don’t remember the specifics of the symbol. I think I’ll look it up before I meditate on it.

The classic interpretation is waiting for the harvest. The Buddhist deck interpretation elaborates on this, particularly with regard to the order of the elements in rank of subtlety: sun, moon, air, fire, water, earth. This, then, is the nature of my quest: to integrate the baser elements with the lighter ones by creating this ladder (the stupa). They are not irrevocably separate — there is a path between them! This is the path I must walk. Oh yes — and the stupa is a kind of axis mundi.

I think I need to meditate more on this sequence — this sun, moon, air, fire, water, earth sequence. I wonder if the line of hills (the spiral away from the Moon) has something to advise there.

Ok, bed.