More Than Enough

With my seventy first birthday arriving I have dreamed twice about time in the last week.  In one dream I asked the ancestors – huge spirits looming so large I could not see their faces – if I could spend one more night.  They tenderly assented.  In the second dream relatives who’ve passed on – two uncles and my grandmother – talked about one more year.  The year they spoke of was one that had occurred in the past, yet it was still yet to come in my future.  

Hmmm.  They have me thinking about time, about death.  I cover the basics.  Is there anything I really want or want to do that I haven’t?  Well, I’d like to finish the third novel of The Blue Child Series.  I wouldn’t mind a large slice of hot berry pie.  But, really, no, there isn’t anything else.  I am content, satisfied.  The doe has dropped her fawn somewhere nearby so I fill her water bowl.  On its edge a red squirrel sits unafraid.  I look above the roofline to see tall trees I planted decades ago.  I sit by the running water and the spirit comes as it always has – delicious, sweet, blowing away my self-imposed limits and fearful doubts.  What else could there be better than this?!

So, I move   on to thinking about time itself, and these thoughts converge with other recent experience.  In the night that powerful old woman from the Chehalis Tribe who ‘worked’ on me so long ago says she is still present, not as if extended from the past but as occurring in the moment.  I see her face, the candles on the altar.  So is the loving prayer placed on me by my father the day he died.  Right here.  Right now. 

I carry this past alive in the present.  It is still happening exactly now.  The drunk man I met on a dark street when I was eighteen, the one who sent me home – I met in the face of another man last week.  I nodded, put ten dollars in his hand.  And that Aboriginal man from Northern Australia, the one who sent me home again – the vision I had that night – is still alive in me, his presence never gone, never past. 

In this dream of vibration, of music and song, with this human apparatus geared to a small band of light, I meet the characters of this dimension over and over.  We needn’t wait to be ‘reincarnated’ to meet again.  These people, spirits or apparitions bring the mercies and the medicine I have always needed and desired.  There is no need for poignancy or sadness.  They present themselves in the psychedelics of this world and its possibilities.  After death when they are in the perceptual possibilities of some other world, I will know them. 

As I place one foot in front of the other walking across the floor of this familiar house, guided and accompanied by these, the world makes before me as surely as if I was some greater being stepping through the stars or following the path of the Milky Way.  I am reminded of one of my poems.  Who is coming?  Who have I called?  For what have I asked?  It is here.  “You have called them.  It cannot be undone.”

All the love and magic I have ever known surrounds me like a golden aura.  Past pain has only served to make love bigger.  The spirit is beside me, around me and fills me up.  It feeds my essence, protects the boundaries of my soul. 

I took psychedelic mushrooms once, quite by accident – and, no, I didn’t date him again, though it was a rather amazing experience.  But I think some of us don’t need them.  If we turn our spirits loose, if we see what we see, hear the music of the drums, it is more than enough.