Daily Archives: June 18, 2014

Dreams

Sometimes, I Remember

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Beltane                                                              Summer Moon

Dreams. A couple of nights ago. I had a staff and walked with it. Each time it struck the ground, always at an angle with the head of the staff facing forward, a message from the earth, from the ground of all being came to me. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what they were.

Last night, a very peculiar dream. I lived near an ocean, had just moved there, and the news programs on tv had stories about the red sea. In my little community, a village similar to Conwy, Wales which I visited in 1995, the long time residents laughed. “Red sea. Nah. Red kelp.”

When I went to the ocean to see for myself, the red in the water rippled and flowed in long wet strands of ocean plant life. A bronze colored kelp. When I went back inside a building near the water and climbed some narrow stairs to a room that looked out over the ocean and the swirling kelp, however, I got an ever bigger surprise. There was an eye. The kelp like strands were a body covering for some huge ocean creature. Not a whale. Unknown, but huge, larger than ocean-going cargo carrier and tucked in very close to shore.

Running back downstairs, I moved out on a crumbling concrete path to a large rock that sat by the ocean. Up on it was Sam Eliot, the movie star. He just nodded toward the ocean and I went around the rock’s edge to look out over the water. I couldn’t see water, just the long strains of kelp-like body covering.

Further on, down on a row of shore side businesses, sausage and lemonade stands, curio sellers, I found another vantage point from which to look out on the ocean.  From this angle I could see a head in blue and white, almost neon like, glows, and it was a huge human face, something like the drum major on the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

I got the feeling that these two gigantic creatures, one human, one aquatic, were about to confront each other, though it didn’t feel like a battle. More like an important moment of contact between two modes of being.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

Light’s Victory, Dark’s Begun

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

We’re close to the Summer Solstice. Those crazy Scandinavians are getting ready to get naked and dance around bonfires. I figure it’s all those long cold dark days in winter. I wouldn’t want to try it here. Imagine all those mosquitoes biting you in places no mosquito had ever found on you before. Still. I admire the abandon, the ecstasy these rites release. Dancing sky clad (as the Wiccans have it) honors the bond between earth and fire, person and sun, light and dark.

The Solstice celebration is an astronomical holiday, not one legislated in the halls of Congress or Parliament or the Diet, nor is it a day celebrated solely for a religious or cultural reason. No, it marks an actual celestial event, one with consequences here on earth. Since the Solstice marks the moment when the sun is at its highest (69 degrees here) and therefore pouring down more energy on a given square yard of earth than at any other time, this is the moment of greatest solar strength throughout the year. Due to a lag in warming, June is the coolest of the summer months, but the increased solar energy will begin to demonstrate itself in July and early August.

I’ll comment more on the Solstice on Saturday, but here I want to note my contrary reaction to it. The signal moment of the Solstice for me is the beginning of the sun’s decline in height, heading toward its nadir on December 21st. Just as the Winter Solstice can be seen as the moment when the light begins to return after long months of increasing dark, so the Summer Solstice can be seen as the moment darkness begins to return after long months of increasing light.

If you’re a child of the dark half of the year, finding the cold and solitude of the winter months, especially on that sacred night, the Winter Solstice, inviting and nourishing to your soul, then you might join me in rejoicing at its return.