Month: February 2024

Sunday, June 8,2003

So here I am alone again. I take a nap, then let myself out to walk. I walk up and down the streets of Inverness looking with no success for a place to eat. (It is early for supper, and I am picky.) I finally find a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place that is mostly but not entirely take-out. It has a couple of tables. I have chicken and corn soup, Kung Bo chicken and Chinese tea. Delicious. I walk back to the B&B. shower, lay out clothes for the morning, and pack.

I spend some time running through the “river of life and health” meditation, then removing psychic cords to and from everyone I ever made an agreement with that does not now serve me and others. If I am to do my work, I need my energy. I cannot have it siphoned off or – it occurs to me – diverted into cliched paths.

I go to bed, and wake at 11:30 p.m. to note an image from a dream. A three-story-high pitcher surrounded by a tree, in the countryside. The pitcher surrounded by some liquid – water? – for the countryside. I note, “Robert will know.” The next morning, it occurs to me the image may have been a pun: “the big picture is contained within the big three.”

Monday, June 9

At 2:45 a.m. The only thing I remember from this rather entertaining dream is giving my old college friend Dennis a boot in the tail because he got me in trouble with the congressman I am working for. I tell him that when I’m 83, I’ll still be circling round him to avoid the return kick. At 6:40 I note that I visited my friend Kelly during the night, I think, and did the water meditation for and with her. At 7:15 I am up, packed, waiting for breakfast and the start of the day. I pull out my journal.

“So – friend David – we were interrupted in a very interesting conversation some while ago – when the plane landed in Aberdeen.” And we are off on a discussion of the relationship within us between other lives. David says, “You have within you connection to every other lifetime you are primarily connected with. Which ones you are connected with is in itself a measure of you as an individual. This may not be obvious. Those you are closest to will most closely influence you. This is how it will seem to you. And if you are compounded of primary influences that hate each other’s values, you will find yourself a battlefield, and maybe one side or the other will be overwhelmed, or maybe they will fight over every little thing, or maybe your life can be a means of reconciling them. But in whatever case, you are primary because you are at the point of application, the present from your view of reality. For each of the influences in motion, each of them is the one in the point of application, and you are the influence from afar. So it is continual flux and war of movement, you see.”

“I am sitting here in the front room of the B&B waiting for breakfast to begin in a few minutes, wishing I were the man I saw in the mirror after we visited Pluscarden.”

“And maybe he has reason to wish you could make the trade.”

Breakfast proves interesting. There are two couples from Sweden, on a driving holiday, having come over on a 24-hour ferry. They aren’t quite sure they’d ever heard of Swedenborg, though part of that may be my pronunciation. When I ask them what their religion is (they not having heard of Swedenborg) they look puzzled and say “Christian.” I say, “Catholic,” and they are a bit shocked and say no. Then I remember and say, “Lutheran” and they agree. “Christian”: The reply bespeaks a uniformity of culture we don’t have and I wouldn’t want.

In a while I am on the bus to Fort William. I say to myself, “what a luxury, to be traveling alone,” and I hear the words and wonder why I am so often tempted to again join my life to someone else’s rather than giving it to all and none.

On the bus, I interrupt my reading of  Bede’s Life of Cuthbert to mull over something David had said. “Well, it is curious, but I have felt those unconscious or semi-conscious urges, or curiosities, yet even as I have felt them, I have felt that they were somehow not me and not mine. If they well up from not the so-called subconscious but from our connections to other lives of ours, this would make sense.” But it is too hard to write on the bus, so I return to reading, and finish Bede on Cuthbert. I understand Cuthbert, and I rather think I understand Bede, which is something I suspect the educated of our day may find impossible to do. I have a nice lonely trip to Fort William.

We immediately transfer to another bus that will take us to Oban, but this trip is not solitary. I am chatted up by a Scot who had lived in Mull 10 years and in Canada for three. He was born in 1937 – just nine years before me – and is retired from a career as an engineer (among other things). He remembers the Yanks being all over Glasgow, in a part of town the Germans had bombed, which had then been cleared for the American cantonments. He remembered them maneuvering all over, driving their four-bys, and then suddenly disappearing and never coming back. After D-Day, of course.

We reach Oban at 1:15, and I buy a ticket for the Caledonian MacBrayne car and passenger ferry to Craignure, on the Isle of Mull. (CalMac runs all the ferries to the western islands.) I sit with my journal on the jetty, catching up. At about 4 the ferry leaves. For some reason, all that goes through my mind, the whole trip over, is Auld Lang Syne, playing non-stop. What’s that all about? I watch the wake of the boat organize itself into more or less parallel lines, which quickly dissolve and form new arrangements and non-arrangements. Within the pattern are patches of whitish-green alternating with the deep green that is around them, and is outside the wedge of wake. And atop the green and the whitish green is white foam in intricate patterns like lace. It could be part of a lovely painting.

A Cal-Mac ferry

It’s about a 40-minute trip, and I enjoy it greatly. The ferry boat is big enough, and broad enough, and the waters protected enough, that it is a very smooth ride. Three decks to the ferry, with a restaurant, a snack bar, a gift shop, you name it. There is even a small arcade with video games for the teenagers. You can stay inside on padded upholstery or can go up to the outer deck at the stern and sit on benches and participate in the day. A majority of the people choose to be outside. I find it chilly, but I’d have to be carrying my coat in any case (nowhere to pack it) so it isn’t a problem. Of course, while I’m in a coat and none too warm, others are in shirtsleeves and seem quite comfortable.

At the very end of the trip, as we are organizing ourselves to debark, a 30-year-old kid strikes up a conversation with me. He had been listening to my conversation with the man on the bus, and was also going to Iona. We sit on a bench in front of the little tourist center, having an hour to wait for the bus that will take us across the southern end of Mull to Fionnphort and one last ferry ride to Iona. He had just graduated seminary, was engaged to be married, and was taking his last summer of freedom to travel around Europe. Our conversation is not entirely comfortable; too many theological areas that we have to step around. After a while an elderly Scot and his wife sit down next to me, and he and I get talking about the war, D-Day, Churchill, etc. He had worked for Union Carbide, and in the 1950s or ‘60s had visited their plant in West Virginia. Then comes the bus, about an hour and a half ride, and book and journal.

“So, David, how do I deal with this boy, besides being friendly and open?”

“Nothing more needed than that. Don’t be afraid to say what you believe – as you have been doing. It will be all right, and it will help you, too, to speak your truth. Good practice – or how do you expect to deal with the bus?” [Later I look at this entry and wonder what word was meant, that I wrote as “bus.” Maybe it meant, people in general, such as were represented by the other passengers.]

Fionnphort is a little place I never do get to see – any more than Craignure, Oban or so much that I pass through. A five-minute ferry ride and I am walking up the concrete pier onto the Island of Iona.

My first view of the island, from the ferry, is disconcerting, an English-looking countryside: a series of ordinary houses strung along the coast, each surrounded by neat fenced fields. It looks so domestic, especially after Mull’s deserted look. So what did I expect? Something wilder, certainly.

Within minutes I am at the Finlay Ross B&B, then across the way for an expensive but good supper. As I eat, I recapitulate the trip so far. It has been wonderful – mostly because of seeing Robert and Michael. I am very glad I penciled them into the trip. I sit and watch the sea through fogged windows. I have been too long away from the sea. I take a short walk, but it is really too cold for the clothes I am wearing. I worry about having trouble with asthma, so I retreat indoors for the night.

Sunday, June 8,2003

I awaken from a dream, and make the effort to record it: “I am in the church that Michael and I were in yesterday. There is a service going on, I think. Two women go up to the priest – he is in the aisle. They want his help, but I from behind one of them say, ‘I know what you need, my dear, and I can help you. But it can’t be right now. This is not to do with you, just I don’t have the time right now.’ This is accepted by all concerned. From within the dream, I am concerned lest it be 8 a.m. when I’m going to awaken (alarm set) but am glad to realize that it is not yet that, but about 3:30 real time. As we were coming out of the church – but still inside, in the aisle, toward the door – there was something. The woman to my left didn’t figure directly in the dream, but the dream concerned the four of us, among so many strangers I did not know.”

I note that the priest and the women accepted that I had the knowledge and ability to help the woman. It was not presumption, nor a vying with the priest. I could help her as he (the church, I think) could not, and all concerned knew it. But not just yet – I had something else to do first. I stressed, it wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t help right away, it was that I wasn’t yet free to get to it. But I would be.

After the dream, I lie in bed and do the “river of life and health” meditation. I feel an obstruction at about my stomach, the will-power chakra. I feel the dried-up earwax in my right ear getting liquid, and I think, “no, not onto their pillow,” and forget about it. (In the morning, after my shower, I find the ear full of liquefied wax that comes out easily with tissue. Only a first step, I think, but a first step.)

Again at 6:15 a.m. I am up to record a dream:

“An experience that was almost suffocating in its intensity. I went into a church and proceeded down, down, down stairs to lower and lower – older and older – levels. I could see I was below the level of our civilization, where the steel foundations for it, the support of the structure, were. Construction was going on and I was concerned that I not interfere or get hurt. At a passageway, a ladder in front of me, a wooden ladder, very tall, of the A-shaped kind. A worker was sitting high up on the wall to the left. The ladder was tilted away from him [tilted onto one set of legs, on the right, its left-hand side in the air] though it was not falling. I gently pulled it down to sit firmly, and walked under it. I came to a level still far above the depths, I thought, though far below our time. But they had a press operating there, though it was not printing, but before printing. They asked if I would lend a hand for a few minutes – and hours later I was happily still there.

“They were not signatures but single sheets 8 ½ by 11 or larger, and were first individually written and colored – in many colors, not just red on black – and the sheets were collated and bound. It was full color printing, before printing, each sheet being individually prepared. [Here I sketched a sheet with the left third of the page being design and the right two-thirds being lines of text.] “The dream ended there for the moment.”

As striking as the dream was the sight of my eyes in the mirror. “The eyes that I see in the mirror here are mine and yet not. They are calmer, more tranquil, wiser, with lines under them as of age and wisdom. Perhaps partly Bertram’s eyes. [He is a priest of the middle ages with whom I am connected in the same way as with David.] This is a fine start to a visit to Iona, is it not?”

At 8 or so I take a little walk, waiting for breakfast, thinking, the trick will be, as always, to bring the results of a transformation into everyday life – or where is the transformation? As I am communicating with a flowering plant, a curious bird comes very near. I could have reached out and touched him, had I not thought he would fly away. He stays with me quite a while as I walk, and I naturally think, “he likes my energy.” But of course it is more likely he is someone’s pet, accustomed to surveying everyone in sight.

When Michael sees me he asks how I slept and I say “great, and I had a great dream,” and I tell him. So we start talking about dreams, and he tells one he had had as a boy that was very affirming and meaningful, though he has never known why it affected him that way. I lead him through it, questioning what each symbol means to him, and much of the meaning of the dream comes clear. I tell him I will send the dream to Robert and see what else Robert can get out of the parts of it that elude us. But what we do get is important. I recount the dream here, as Michael says he has often told this dream to others, including children he has taught.

In the dream, he as a child was in an octagonal room, with a table and a bowl on the table. On one wall ahead of him and to the left was a table on which was a coffin containing an old person. Ahead of him to the right was another table, on which were two coffins, containing two people who had died in the prime of life. He went to each coffin and stared at the bodies with interest, but not with revulsion or fear. In the bowl was a powder made up of ground-up bird wings. He ate some of the powder and knew he could fly. He woke up very happy.

He had known this was a significant dream, and for 40 years, he had prized it, but had not understood it. I lead him through the dream symbol by symbol, asking him what each one means to him. (“What’s a bird?” “Something that flies.”) Then it is merely a matter of retelling the dream using the meanings rather than the symbols. The meaning that emerges is simply that death is not something to fear. He is immortal. And the allusion to flying has another meaning, given that out-of-body experiences are a major interest of his. As a point of interest, the first significant death he experiences – one of his grandparents, I believe – occurs within the year following this dream.

(It is obvious that we miss much. For instance, why an octagonal room? Why two bodies in the prime of life rather than just one? But I have no doubt that Robert will be able to furnish what we miss.) This discussion takes us through breakfast. Then we go to Findhorn and sit and walk around and look in their bookstore. We agree, we’re glad it exists, but it isn’t for us.

We drive to Inverness, have a bit of a time finding a B&B, but finally do, and Michael and I say an affectionate goodbye. I tell him, “I was getting a little tired of paying for everything,” and he laughs, because in fact he hasn’t let me pay for a thing either day, saying I treated him when he was in Virginia. His prodigal generosity is almost overwhelming.

Saturday, June 7,2003

Another breakfast at the hotel, then a cab to the train station at Crewe, a train to the Manchester airport, and a flight to Aberdeen. Traveling is easier alone. Although one might think that another person would help find things, and avoid mistakes, and share the load, in practice, it isn’t so. I watch myself traveling very efficiently, very smoothly, except for moments of confusion that a moment sorts out without much difficulty. I watch myself glide smoothly from the train through the maze to the right place to check in for the flight, and even my movements are smooth and sure, usually. Far more so than if I were with someone, my attention half on the companion. This of course has nothing to do with the companion and everything to do with the way I operate.

I like the British ways so much more than commercial-American. At Dulles airport, every 15 minutes came a strident warning that “for security reasons” you mustn’t leave your baggage unattended; unattended baggage would be seized for inspection and might be damaged or destroyed. Here in Manchester, a pleasant voice merely asked passengers “to reduce the number of security alerts by keeping your luggage with you at all times.” No threats, no stridency. Same message underneath, but all the difference in the world how it was delivered.

We take off at ten till noon. I’m nearly the only person who doesn’t have a seatmate. During the flight, I review the previous day’s events. My travel plans had proved practical. Seeing Robert first on Thursday and then going to the hotel and sleeping all those hours helped me adjust nicely. And I note that when Rita and I get together, usually three evenings a week, we usually end the evening with a meditation that comes through me from the guys. The content of those meditations involves not only the river of life and health, but a reminder to envision a blue flame on the foreheads of ourselves and of others – a blue flame signifying the consciousness that observes our lives, which reminder helps me be more charitable, less judgmental of others. Rita and I have been accomplishing things without even quite noticing it.

I write, “David, I like your country right well, despite the strangeness of little things.”

“And don’t think I don’t like yours, despite the same things you would cite. America was a dream to us, you know. It wasn’t by chance that I – you – were reborn in America. It carried the sense of spaciousness, of newness, of opportunity. It would have been too tiring for an older man, and too hard, not knowing the right people, to find compatible minds. But it was in the dream, eh?”

“And besides you had other things to do. What were they? Were you really [as we had gotten some years before] an editor on the Illustrated London News?”

“London Illustrated News, yes. Sub-editor, actually. Your friend’s [Kelly’s] glimpse of me was an accurate snapshot of my life then – being the grand old man (in a minor way) to my boys. I was the one who had been there and seen things and could tell tales.”

[But – maddening inconsistencies! The right title for the paper is Illustrated London News, not London Illustrated News. If I was really talking to David, why would he mis-name the paper he worked at? Why, in fact, make a point of “correcting” into error what had been correctly expressed? No way to know. Maybe I was just making it up.]

We’re down at Aberdeen at 1 p.m. and I have scarcely retrieved my bag before I am met by a smiling Michael Ross, the first time we’ve seen each other since we met in Virginia when he did his Gateway at TMI. Michael, who has been involved with out-of-body experiences since he was a boy, had showed me and my friend Nancy Dorman a couple of energy exercises that were so powerful it was all we could do not to “click out.” (That’s a TMI term that means going out so far that you bring back no recollection of it. Subjectively, one minute you’re here, then you’re back – but from where?)

Michael Ross on his home turf

Michael offers to drive me wherever I want to go, by whatever route I want, on our way to Findhorn. So we go round by way of Peterhead, Macduff, Banff, Cullen, Elgin, and Forris, talking of course as we go. Among the things we talk about are Robert and his great wealth of knowledge about dreams. We pass through great stretches of green, interrupted by buildings or towns. There is less of man in the landscape than in America. Nice, but one wonders what the people live on. We stop for lunch at Peterhead, and I find a postcard depicting Iona from the air. Makes the days I’m going to spend there seem more real somehow.

At Peterhead

Just before we come to Forris, Michael brings us to Pluscarden Abbey, which turns out to be a moving and memorable experience. Pluscarden, like so much else of the medieval Catholic presence in Britain, was destroyed by the Protestant revolution. Now it is being restored, and there is a small community of priests and monks living there while the restoration goes on.

When  we walk up to the buildings, I put my hands on the old unreconstructed stones, trying to experience it. Inside, we look at the stained glass windows high above us, and we are among the stone, and the atmosphere sinks in further. We come to a portion with pews and kneelers, and I get down onto my knees – an impulse I’d had earlier – and put my head in my hands. I fall – rise – into a state of deep reverence and surrender. It doesn’t last long (I am well aware of Protestant Michael standing next to me, though I get no sense of his judging me) but it is very deep. I think, it would be well to bring the holiness back into our lives, or rather, into life, into the life of our time and the time to come.

Pluscarden window

But the sight of some Catholic literature in a rack raises resistances in me stemming back to my teen years. I have the same feelings of deep uneasiness when a priest – I suppose he is a priest – passes. My reaction is like a Protestant’s – and yet I was fully experiencing, savoring, what we might call the stone memories. As we are walking back to Michael’s car, I say to him that the Reformation, like the French revolution, was the equivalent of a nervous breakdown in its effect on our psyches – for current Protestants are likely to have good Catholics among their soul heredity, and certainly have them in their physical heredity. Thus they are at war with themselves, internally, life against life. Our stupid age, of course, believes that what is past is past, not knowing that feelings and other lives have no time. And even Catholics today are likely to be at war with other parts of themselves that have other values, other ways of being. And this confines the argument only to the west! What of the schisms between east and west, and both and Islam? And all these and others?

We arrive at the Findhorn community too late for things, but we walk around it a bit, and then find out b&b in Findhorn itself. We have a great walk out to the water in the late daylight. (It stays light in Scotland in June about 25 hours a day, or anyway from 3:30 a.m. to past 10:30 p.m.) Michael tells me of a dream he’d had, of visiting Findhorn on a beautiful day, when gale-force winds blow up, and overturn the old caravans he likes, the ones that went back to Findhorn’s early days. I help him analyze the symbols, and it resolves quite easily: the winds of change are going to overturn everything that is not substantial. In communities like Findhorn, presumably – intentional gatherings of people who would live spiritually. I wonder what else it means, how widely applicable it is.

I go to bed much earlier than Michael. I’m still adjusting.

Robert Clarke

Thursday, June 5,2003.

Manchester airport has a rail spur to the train station. Very convenient. I get the train to Crewe, and a cab from Crewe to Burslam, in Stoke-on-Trent, where Robert Clarke lives. The itinerary I’d printed up for myself includes the phone numbers of the friends I’m going to visit, so I borrow the cabby’s cell phone and call Robert to tell him I am on my way. I say “Robert…” and he bursts out laughing; says he knows from the accent who’s speaking. Accent? Me? I heard his clipped North of England accent, of course, but it’s funny to hear how broadly we come across to them.

Robert and I have not met before. My friend Colin Wilson had sent me an account of Robert’s work and manuscript on dreams and the meaning of our lives, and Robert and I spent some months exchanging emails, and I sent him my book Muddy Tracks, which he understood. Hampton Roads published his manuscript as The Four Gold Keys.

Sometimes people just click. It had became clear in our email correspondence that Robert and I saw things much the same way. But as soon as we sat down to talk in his front room, it was as if we’d been friends for many years. Dreams have told him that his last two lifetimes were in America, and David’s, of course, was British. We find a natural harmony between us, very nice.

I had penciled in this side-trip to England specifically because I knew that Robert was having health problems and I non-rationally knew that I could help him. And in fact, as soon as we sit down in the front room and his elder brother Ken fixes me an excellent cup of coffee, this is the first thing Robert and I set out to do. Because it could help each of you who are reading this, I will spell out the technique a bit. It is something The Guys Upstairs gave Rita and me in a series of meditations, and it is very powerful and cannot do harm. Of how many techniques may that be fairly said?

Get into a comfortable sitting position and close your eyes. Take a few slow deep breaths, briefly holding your breath after you breathe in, and again after you breathe out. Relax. Envision yourself in a waterfall, with the river of life and health flowing through you as well as around you. Those waters – our invisible support from the other side – flow through us day and night, or we could not live, but mostly we live unaware of this silent unfailing support. As the waters flow through you, from your head to your toes, become aware of obstructions in the flow. Pains, chronic or transient. Illnesses, serious or trivial. Anything that obstructs the free flow of the waters: See the waters quietly but effectively dissolving the obstructions. Do this whenever you happen to think of it. You’ll be surprised how many things come up and then go away. I have taken to using it for emotional reactions to situations, as well, visualizing the waters dissolving the quirk within me that causes unwanted emotions such as envy, nervousness, etc.

How does it work? Who knows? Who cares? One theory is that by concentrating our attention on the waters, and the obstructions, we focus our subconscious mind that does the moment-to-moment work of maintaining the body. My theory is that our physical body is laid down on an energy-body template, and once we adjust the energy body, the physical body readjusts itself to match that corrected template. But this is only theory, and as I said, who cares? What matters is that it works. Certainly it works for Robert this day.

Robert and I walk around his town, and have fish and chips together with Ken, who is a talented painter whose work (which seems Persian somehow, though neither of the brothers had seen this influence) makes a deep impression on me. And all the while, for four hours, Robert and I talk, not about trivialities, but about Carl Jung, and the spirit, and religion, and the plight of modern man. Then Robert walks me a couple of miles to the Sneyd Hotel Inn, where he’d made reservations for me at my request. I go to bed at about 4:30 p.m. their time, about 26 hours after I’d started my day in America. I awaken at 11 or so, make a couple of journal notes, and go back to sleep. A good start to the trip. A good day.

Friday, June 6,2003.

D-Day, 59 years later.

I awaken feeling intimidated, a bit. Is it being a stranger? Having no place of my own? Take heed, peregrine! I eat but little breakfast: scrambled eggs, served with underdone white bread, and coffee nothing like Ken’s. Besides, I don’t want to eat a lot. I eat too much and I am looking forward to losing weight if possible this fortnight, walking and moving about.

After breakfast, Robert walks up ot meet me and we walk around a little lake, and here and there, talking. After a bit he takes me into town and I meet his friend Jim. Then back to Robert’s house and we talk yet more, and do some more energy work. I see clearly Robert’s belief system about health. I work to convince him that illness follows obstructions in the energy system, and, the obstructions removed, the physical system repairs itself.

At one point I take a little nap, and nod off in the chair in his sitting room. I wake up, less than an hour later, remembering the last part of a dream. I had a bow and arrow and was aiming it at the sky, quite pleased, because things would be all right. When Robert rejoined me he came out of a brief sleep to remember dreaming of a rainbow, which, he said when I told him about the bow and arrow, was more or less the same symbolism.

In the evening we go to a pub, a real pub, not a tourist pub, and I enjoy it. (I find myself unable to order a “haff” pint of Guinness, and instead ask for a “hof” pint. It sounds a little phony to my ears, but to say it the American way would have sounded jarringly different.) At one point Robert gets a funny look on his face. I ask if he is in pain, and he says he is. I point to him across the table and send energy, but more important, I think, is the fact that I am talking to him, telling him what I am doing. To his surprise the pain goes away and stays away. We were expecting to be met by Robert’s friend Jim, but I suspect that he will not show up, and he does not. Instead, Robert’s godson Steve comes in and joins us, and I know why Jim was not meant to show up. Had Jim been there, the conversation would have been vastly different. But Steve is used to talking to “Uncle Robert” about dreams and spiritual things. He instinctively understands them. This 26-year-old with great alive eyes does not belong in this depressed midlands town.

After a while I demonstrate to Steve, and then to Robert, that they have an energy body, using the nearness of my own hand to help them feel their own aura. Steve, as soon as he feels it, jerks his hand away, startled. He is astonished – and now he knows, he doesn’t have to believe. I tell Steve that he ought to get out of the area, as the pressure of the environment holds him down. He and Robert agree. And I say – out of what knowing, I know not – that he might study to become an energy healer.

Robert says my book changed his thinking. He is quite complimentary about it, and embarrassed about it. I take a couple of pictures of Ken and him, my first photos of the trip. By then it’s nearly midnight. We say goodbye, feeling great affection for each other.

One day in April, 2003, I realize that I want to go to Iona, the “holy isle” off the Scottish coast famous as St. Columba’s residence in the sixth century. Within a few days, I plan the trip. I borrow a backpack and fill it and a small suitcase with sweater and sweatshirt, warm woolen jacket, flannel shirt, two dress shirts, a pair of blue jeans, and a pair of good pants. This in addition to the short coat I would wear en route. For reading material, I choose, after some hesitation, The Lives of the Saints (Brendan, Cuthbert and Wilfred), and The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. Both books are small, lightweight, and likely to match my mood.

Wednesday, June 4, a friend takes me to the Charlottesville bus station for the long bus ride to Dulles airport. I begin snoozing as soon as the bus starts at 9 a.m., figuring it will be long hours before I get to sleep in a bed again..

At Dulles, the woman at the check-in desk advises me to take their 1 p.m. to Newark, as they are experiencing weather delays all up and down the east coast, and it would be better for me to be in Newark waiting than in Dulles. Good thinking. As it is, the 1 p.m. doesn’t get off the runway until 2 p.m.. Then up out of the grey clouds into the bright blue sky, and 35 minutes later back down into the same grey overcast we’d left,  Departure for Scotland is scheduled 8:35 p.m.

Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport, although it does give one time to memorize the “security” announcements threatening to seize and destroy one’s unguarded luggage at the first opportunity. Also the no smoking announcements come every fifteen minutes. Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport.

The night before, Rita Warren had asked if she was picking up a bit of depression on my part. I said she was, and compared it to the apprehension I had had before I did my Gateway at The Monroe Institute in 1992, which my friend Kelly Neff had said was normal before a transformative experience.

Well, there I was with nothing pressing to do. Why not ask someone’s take on things? I wrote:

“For some years now, and increasingly in recent months, I have been in contact with what most would call past lives of mine. I don’t think of things quite that way anymore, but suffice it to say I have become aware of other lifetimes that are closely connected to mine. Being located outside time and space, these other lives are as “present tense” as mine. (We are all living in the eternal present, after all.) Of these other lives, the one who has shaped me most actively is a Welsh-born journalist, traveler, psychic investigator named David Poynter who lived from the 1870s to the 1930s. I am in contact with his spirit and he with mine, let’s put it that way. Since I learned the knack, I can contact him at will. In fact, in a TMI program in March, he came through on a tape recorder for the first time, which added a new dimension to our interaction.”

So here, sitting in Newark Airport (which, if you didn’t know it, is a smoke-free facility which promises to seize, damage or destroy your unattended luggage) I haul out my journal and ask him why the tension/depression/anxiety connected with the trip. “Why can’t I just do the trip as best I can and see what happens?”

“You are doing just that. Don’t be hard on yourself in an overbalancing way. But the other elements are there, too, we recognize

“Anxiety – lest plans not come through due to circumstances beyond your control.

“Depression – because you ask yourself `why am I doing this? I am not prepared, I am not even sure what I am doing, let alone why.’ You worry that you will go, return, and in between miss all your opportunities.

“Tension – because a good part of you knows better, a large part disagrees and both parts are waiting to see.”

Pretty good analysis, I’d say. Sitting unobtrusively on a bench against the wall in the waiting room, I play a TMI CD called “Catnapper” that lets you get a full sleep cycle in 30 minutes. It’s one of my favorites, and it works this time as always. I awaken refreshed. The terminal building is cold, and I am glad to be able to pull out a sweater from my backpack. Time passes, and the lounge very gradually fills. I spend some hours reading about the voyages of St. Brendan in The Lives of The Saints.

At nearly 7 p.m., I pull out my journal to ponder.

“Well, what am I to make of the voyages of St. Brendan? An otter who not only brings a fish, but firewood to cook it with! So much of it seems just Irish tall tales – and yet there is something at the root of it. That “something” is the character of St. Brendan himself. The tall tales mixed with the true tales – around him. So who was he really? His utter reliance on God shines through everything. But all their beliefs, their rituals, their world, really – it’s incomprehensible what it once must have meant. It doesn’t mean to us what it did to them. It can’t. And I was raised Catholic! I’m one of the few people left – or rather, my generation is – who can still remember even that shadow of the theology. But it wasn’t to us what it must have been to the people who wrote and read things like the life of St. Brendan. It’s almost inconceivable, now, that people could read that as non-fiction. I suspect there must have been a different sound to them – perhaps the difference between thinking humorous exaggeration straight fact. Yet there was more. They lived in a magical world, a world not shaped – cursed, I am tempted to say – by science as arbiter.”

My good friend Robert Clarke will explain to me how such tales are written, in effect, in code. Thus the otter carrying firewood is not meant to be a statement of fact but a  metaphor. It makes a lot more sense when he explains it.

Finally we board, we taxi, we fly. New England, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, and then the British mainland pass beneath us while we eat, we snooze, and we eat again, working our way eastward through five time zones. Through much of the flight, as previously through much of the waiting time in the terminal, I am in a no-thought space, not sleeping, not waking. A weird feeling, to be moved from this quiet near-sleep state to a waking state by the small jolt of the wheels touching down. We land at 8:30 a.m. local time, and by 9:30 I am through passport control, have retrieved my luggage and gone through customs (no one there) and am waiting in a British Midlands line to get my boarding pass for the 9:45 to Manchester, England. The temperature is about 50, so I figure my packing was about right.