To tell this story, I have to start at November – this may be long.
I had my first dream with a certain South American tribal brew on the Sunday night. On the Monday it pissed down all day, constant. And heavy. And I – gripped by a desperate sadness largely inexplicable to me, but related (I sensed) to certain aspects of my visions – cried heavily all day long in bed in my dark cold bus. I was so sad I couldn’t muster the will to drive the bus back to Moseley, although there was no real reason I needed to, it’s just where I always gravitated back to for a feeling of home. After the first couple of bouts of crying, I felt compelled to go and be in nature instead of a dank and grim wet bus so I went heavily off to the nearest park – a site with a particular personal history which I was in the process of letting go of. After mooning around sadly for a bit, with a bit of sitting on a tree stump and feeling slight relief from the desperate crying urge, I needed a piss so I found a bush and bent over. Whereupon my gaze fell upon a ring, all clean and shiny in the wet dirt. I felt instinctively it was a gift from the spirits of my South American dream plants and put it on – feeling I should never ever take it off, feeling it was a sort of talisman – part wedding ring, denoting my marriage and commitment to the universal will, part protective charm, keeping the positive energy of the plants with me for as I long as I kept faith with their teachings.
As I walked off I felt a surge of the happy warm love energy from the previous night’s dreamings and felt comforted, brighter about what I was facing in my sadness. I headed lightly back to the bus pondering the nature of this love, over the huge expanse of grass and joined the path through the trees – whereupon the ground offered up another gift:
When I got back to the bus the sadness returned in wave after wave throughout the day – I knew this was part of the deal with the plants, part of a process of integrating the dreamings into my waking life, and submitted to it entirely. But that’s another story.
What’s also another story is that this turned out to be the same day that Hopey died. [And in trying to find the old blogpost to link to there I discovered another synchronicity - which I may or may not lay out for you another time]
So. I kept that ring on for months, but my commitment to the teachings of the plants slipped back, partly because normality had been so sharply upturned with Hopey’s death but maybe also perhaps because I hadn’t finished with my vices yet. I slid deeper and deeper into them – eventually, not long after I got back from Tenerife (which had been an orgy of vice-ing on my part), I took the ring off. I’d lost the glow and had failed in too many attempts at being good. I took up praying on and off for a few weeks, thinking that might be a better way of tackling my insatiable hunger for bad things, but it wouldn’t stick. After a month or so more of disorganised intoxication, I realised I’d stopped trying to do anything about it, and started trying to accept it instead of giving myself guilt-trips about it all the time. That’s when the Dajjal slipped through.
At the first visitation – when I didn’t know who he was and what he represented – I mistook him for a good sign from the universe, telling me it was ok to be drinking like I was and I should just be happy with it – “Enjoy yourself” (you won’t get that reference unless you listen to the original post). And I did. Every day. So that when his next manifestation came, I wasn’t feeling so good about it any more. But the Dajjal already had me by then – the vices seemed too good to be able to drop. And the alternative – living sober in this shitty awful declining civilisation – too bad to contemplate.
Soon after these encounters, I put the ring back on – partly in fear that the dark side of my own mythology would drag me down into total submission to the Dajjal and I’d become a selfish grouchy alcoholic fuckup – but mostly because it felt right, and I felt wrong for taking it off. Soon I started to formulate a rescue plan for myself. I needed to return to the dreaming plants.
This had always been part of the overall plan, really. You don’t just go to these plants for recreation. I went with the intention of developing an ongoing relationship with them, to pursue a regular re-connection to the universal consciousness energy, and its manifestation as the Perfect Self that lives at my core – in other words, to get off the piss and fags and thereby unblock my positive energy, with the intention of radiating it to the world in whatever way the plants’ insights might lead me to.
I decided to perform the brewing and drinking rituals myself, alone, this time. A recently-fired interest in Chaos Magic - with its emphasis on each individual finding their own methods of tapping into “magic” energies by keeping their beliefs flexible and using what works for them – convinced me I was right to seek out my own path in this way rather than going along with the rituals prescribed by my first guide, valid and good though I believe them to be. I cycled up to Tyseley in the rain to collect my plants, and felt a ritual had already begun with this spontaneous burst of effort, a demonstration of my commitment to make this the day I would take up my lessons again.
After I dropped them back at home, I set out on another mission in the rain: to procure supplies for the brewing – among which a mega-load of bottled water for boiling because tap water is full of body- and mind-rotting chemicals which are anathema to the purity and higher consciousness of the plants. As I left the house with my trolley I started to think about how it felt to be sober, and how suddenly it felt ok and not dull and hopeless because it was going to get me back in touch with the good energy again, and out of the grip of the Dajjal – this thought excited me particularly because it meant I was going to start getting good signs reflected back at me from the universe again instead of the one-eyed evil judder-man kind. I thought of my rainbow umbrella – one of two that had come into my possession as good-sign gifts from the universe a few years ago – I was thinking about my plans to include it as part of my ceremonial altar for my dreaming ceremony.
Just then, as I rounded the corner to the main road, a rainbow umbrella came towards me, sheltering someone in its massive colourful perfectly-domed embrace.
After the long walk up to Moseley for a tiny bottle of spirit vinegar (acid to tease the spirits out of the plants and into my brew) I was coming back down the hill and mulling over in awe the direct instantaneous communication between me and the universe that the rainbow umbrella had represented, and immediately came another rainbow umbrella (with a person attached).
One of the characteristics of the visions I experienced during my first dream with the plants was that the surface of everything was refracted rainbow patterns. I have a long and complex personal mythological history with the rainbow. It’s always been connected with the idea of home, and of finding my way “home”, and the journey I’ve undertaken the last four years to shake up my paradigm of what “home” is to me and where I can feel “at home”. One thing I’ve learned is that “home” in the external world is always temporary, and it doesn’t do to get too attached as if this one rooted spot is the only possible place you could operate happily from. The real home is somewhere within and beyond the rainbows that surrounded me in the visions, and it’s eternal, and I’m always there really even though I go off exploring the physical world most days. To maintain this connection while I explore – to ever be directed by it in all my decisions and manoeuvres – therein lies the key. Therein I wish to be.
Posted in Diary, Synchronicity
