Tag Archives: brain

Skating in the Morning

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Love.
Integrate the research.
Dream the bright shadow man who asks a question,
gets an answer
and continues on his way
not needing to be nice
and polite
and stalled
at the intersection.

The top of my coffee is a micro-climate,
a biome of steam trails on the brown sheen.
Hot skaters cut across the dark, circled in ceramic.
I blow them into swirls and then tip them into my mouth.
I can be a morning monster, too.
I can smile and chuckle and swallow.
No one, to my knowledge, is injured.
I walk away,
the powerful mouth of destiny.
I am a humble monster and say a prayer
of thanks and request:
May there always be more skaters and coffee and heat.

This is the other side of love,
the consuming, the ingesting, digesting,
letting fall away the unnecessary,
discerning what the hell that is.
So many looking for meaning
and I say from my detached brain:
We make our own meaning.
Then I’m stung,
the dream of the Buddhist yellow jacket wasp
teaching outside the church.
My dreammaker called that in,
a balance to this meaning making:
a lover’s opening to the facts
and a happy monster’s spitting out bones of the past.
All these monsters and lovers inside the source,
the Great Mystery.

I want to feel it in my skater body
and stop grieving for the bones.

When we channel the souls of the incoming
it is a sacred thing.
We need to be clean.
We need to let them choose the best landing pad.
We need to surrender
to our own strength,
commit to serve the path of possible.
The shadow of our human world is resisting the wise
monster mouth and eating all the wrong things,
never full.
Spit out the bones and let them return
to the constellations,
or mountains,
or reefs
of possibility.

Feel this heart yearning.

Preparing,
asking directions,
walking.

Where Memories Are Stored

From the Editor

 

 

First:
Businessmen in tribal masks.
Fearful cell phone call.
Crime or no crime?

Next:
Sleeping baby – inverted – held by a businessman in a ritual – sleeps peacefully anyway.
Dark, little prince.

I dream on:
Miniature fleshy tree.
Attached where the faucet would be behind a sink as in the old kitchen in my childhood home.

I look at the tree over the top of the counter, at child height.
The tree: white and pink, also with a fresh green hue and wrinkles in its surface, somewhat like old bark, but so alive and fresh.
Of gelatinous, semi-translucent material with darkened pink lines along the outer surface of the wrinkles.
Near the trunk of the tree stands a perfect, miniature collie dog, an inch long!
It moves?
I bark at it, one clear sharp bark.
It barks, runs toward me, stops within some energy field of the trunk, waiting, alert.
I am amazed at its minute perfection, thrilled at the wonder of its being alive and real and perfect in every detail.
I can barely take it in – I get to see such a thing – such a thing exists.
My heart and mind full of wonder and excitement.

Around the outside edge of the branches of the tree are fish suspended in an environment attached to the tree in which they cruise around the periphery, as far away from the trunk as is possible without becoming detached.
Sentient, aware, they move as fish do, undisturbed, slowly, not directly engaging, knowing something.

The tree is so vulnerable, no hard shell.
Anyone could reach out and crush its flesh so easily.
That is also the wonder of it – living, vulnerable, perfect, available, delicate, complex, mysterious, visible, in an ordinary place.

This is a gift dream, in recalling it, re-experiencing it and its wonder and pleasure.

Could the tree also be a map of my brain?
Plastic. Alive.

I wonder where memories are stored.

Recently, after this dream, I dreamed in sensual detail of bathing my infant son – sights and sensations in clear presence.
Another gift.
A gate is opening.

Where is memory stored?

Some say it depends on how old the memory is.
Some say memory is stored in individual neurons.
The route to the memory can be complicated, and perhaps changing.

And the collie roams near the trunk of something amazing
and the collie is a callee, and so am I.
We bark to each other.
The bark of the tree is evidence of vulnerability and life and growth and mystery. The collie’s bark protecting my vulnerable bark.

The fish eye me.
They are swimming at the edge of my tree of knowledge.
Peripheral fish patrol.
Peripheral nervous system – ganglia outside the protection of the skull and spine.
Message relay bodies.
Years ago, my son content in my lap, I called dreamy fish my home-defining swimmers – emotion messengers, body to mind – awakening.

A tree, and a dog and fish respond to my fearful cell phone call about tribal-masked businessmen.
My cells phoned.
What offices have I given to my office tower men?
What do I delegate to them to do with the sleeping prince baby?
I call my collie callee.
And spend time at the base of the tree, my ganglia fish swimming at eye height.
I height.
Child-I height.
See.
Relays amid old and young hopes and fears heighten my dog awareness.
I stand in wonder and excitation, my plastic brain growing.

What is this business, man?

Recall.
Distant memories not so far away.

 

Prehistoric Mammal Brain

Sister, Sister

If the prehistoric mammal won its sub-surface struggle with the octopus–like creature (They were almost as long as the boat.)
and if that animal evolved as a result of its struggle,
and if it then appeared as a scruffy lion climbing on board the boat, engendering (I think) naïve praise for its courage,
and if a mangy rat jumped out of the lion’s ear (What a survivor’s survivor!)
and scrabbled across the deck to who knows where,
and then I retreated to the cabin where there is at least organized space
and a door for protection,
should I be worried?

Is the lion my mammalian brain, come to help on the journey, and I just have to learn how to live with it?

Is the journey a short one, we are out in the bay, and are we doing research, or going fishing, or perhaps both?

I am compelled to warn the seemingly naïve shipmates that the lion is a badass.
And that is the word my nephew recently used on my birthday card:

Don’t stop being a badass.

So, my current mammalian brain – all about relating and community and nurturing – is this scruffy, buff-coloured, hunter/survivor, recently evolved from the pre-historic (before I could make my own story) state through struggle, unconscious-to-conscious.

I am of two minds (at least) about this emergent beast.

Badass is good for not caring what people think, which is my recent goal inasmuch as I need to go forward without being hobbled by the namby-pamby voices that block creativity and the good work.

And badass is an attention getter when it comes to making an appearance – clearly this sea-surviving, sea-going lion has made an appearance.

But how to have it not wreak havoc.

Or maybe that is the point.

My naïve research associates are perhaps sufficiently unconcerned about the havoc to allow the emergence,
and I will do my dance of fear and turn to the organized, contained space of the people who run this boat (Yay – someone who knows how to run the boat!),
and get ready for a sea cruise.

Questions:
Is the lion also a lying?
Where is the badass rat?
What’s it feel like to really be a badass (thrill shudder)?
How to do research on the ocean with a lion (and rat) on board…?

Can’t believe this object exists; thanks to artist Vera Balyura of verameat.com.

Can’t believe this object exists; thanks to artist Vera Balyura of verameat.com.

Dreams are the poems of science

I have a body, or perhaps I am a body, or perhaps a body has me.
In recent dreams I am so much in the body I can’t remember the dreams, events of sensation that pass as soon as they occur.
I believe this is a healing.
I am tired.
No prefrontal cortex need be involved to make meaning from the sleeping experience.
No mammalian brain is stimulated, and the reptilian?
It seems the body has its own brain: the location of body thought is in the cells and perhaps in subtle fields, and wraiths of experience are untraceable, but they exist.
They exist like anything else fleeting and untraced, untracked, registered and gone with no print, a healing trail read only in the better, the good, the relieved, the lessening of pain, the presence of hope and possibility.
We bend our heads, listening, looking, smelling, sensing, to understand and come into alignment with the healed, suspended in a state we cannot understand, and that’s a good thing.