Thursday, October 25, 2007

The landscape dreaming

Faithful readers,

it's time for a quick update on my adjustment to life in the southern hinterlands. North Central Florida is a place of delicate beauty, most of which has gone unnoticed by me as I tend to focus on picking the sand spurs out of my feet and the ticks out of my various nooks and crannies.

But check out this sleepy eyed view of a local cementary, complete with banana spider:

and just so there's no question as to the mythological framework of this place, ie the dreaming of land:

This is a place of fragrant breezes, big skies, and quiet mornings. It's also a place of stories, deep roots, and long memories. My friend Raven lent me the book Cross Creek just before I left California, and this book has turned out to be a spiritual guide to this area.

Here is what Marjorie Rawlings sez about entering a grove - she's talking about orange groves but I feel it with the live oak savannahs too:

"Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another." (p15)

A big theme for us has been walking down the trail and running straight into spider webs. The spider webs on the trail are thresholds like Rawling's rusty gate, and they are showing up in dreams too as signals to pay attention. As it turns out I'm not the only blogger paying attention to spider webs and dreams either. They're more than a call to alertness, but also a reminder of interconnection.

5 comments:

LV_Raider said...

that is a beautiful freaking setting.

I wish I could look out my window and see trees like that!

Jacob Haqq Misra said...

Interesting that you mention spiders as a reminder of interconnection. My introduction to lucid dreaming stemmed from an encounter with a spider.

I just came across your blog from Dream Studies. I'll certainly be sticking around!

Unknown said...

Hi Dreamcrisp,

That's an amazing picture evoking in me a desire for a new landscape (okay... I admit, New Jersey doesn't have beauty like that), even if it's in my dreams. And how cool that the spider web just hangs there like a gate or portal to the grove, which has it's own aura of mystery and age.

Blogging is new to me and I love it. The blogosphere (right terminology?) is an amazing place to just hang and listen to stories, connect with people, and learn from each other. It reminds me of my days in graduate school hanging out in a dark bar with a bunch of like-minded intellectuals: sometimes repetitive, mostly exciting when the creative juices got going!

Thanks for the link, the picture, and your always-interesting musings and thoughts.

Laura

Anonymous said...

In Georgia, a few hundred miles N of your own private Paradiso, the woodlands in the summertime are fraught with spiders. For those of us who hike the same woodland trail every morning, this means that morning time is web-clearing time. It's merely annoying at first, but within a few weeks the tenacity of the spider becomes nearly oppressive. I've wiped out webs and found them rebuilt and intact within the hour! Every morning - a new crop of webs. The worst are the ones that cover your face, and you can see the spider scurry away, into the safety of your hairline. Now, at last, spider season has come to a close. Personally, I couldn't be happier. I know there might've been something I was supposed to be getting from all that spider web action, but I was too damn inconvenienced by the spiders' lessons to take any of it to heart. Maybe it's just tenacity. I wondered why they always rebuilt in face of constant destruction...and they probably wondered why the Homo Sapiens punished himself (and his baby daughter in her front-end loaded hippified Baby Bjorn) every day. Tenacity. More important that faith, if you ask me. Thanks for the thoughtful posts, pirate. They improve the blogosphere!

Ryan said...

thanks ya'll! your encouragement is what keeps me blogging. tenacity is good, but comments are better....