Dervish Tree

February 17, 2014  

I dream I am watching two babies, both male, clothed only in diapers.  

I somehow know that I am looking at Jesus and John the Baptist as infants.

digital, slightly rendered

linville gorge, nc

october 2012

"The God of the Sufi is the God of all, and he is his very being.  

The Christ is his ideal.  

Therefore, no one's savior is foreign to a Sufi, for he sees beauty and greatness and perfection of a human being in everyone's ideal.  He does not mind if that ideal is called Buddha by one person, Krishna by another, and Muhammad by yet another: names make little difference to the Sufi: his ideal does not belong to history or tradition, but to the sacred feelings of the heart.  So how can he compare the ideals of the different creeds, which dispute in vain about historical and traditional points of view, without making any impression upon each other?  The ideal of the Lord, the Lord in the form of man, is the outcome of his heart's deepest devotion.  

One cannot dispute and argue about an ideal like this, nor can it be compared: so the Sufi believes that the less spoken about this subject the better, for he respects that one ideal which people call by different names."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Volume IX - The Unity of Religious Ideals

Part VI - The Ideal of the Sufi

~

Rodin's Legacy

"You alone are real to me."  

Lou Andreas-Salome

Holga CFN 120 / 120mm Fujifilm / iso 100
Spring 2012 / Lake Lure, NC

Then I remember watching a man and a woman - wary strangers - moving through aisles of books and glossy papers in a museum shop awkward in the silent room since it is closing time and all of Rodin's sweaty monuments will soon again be alone.

And I think of what Rodin may have said to Rilke and that it is written down somewhere and codified and glorified but I am too distant or too shallow to delve in.

Somehow the man catches a whiff of the woman’s body-smell and goes a little crazy and is transported back about thirty years to that time he could not count and the place he never left.

Who knows what was really spoken between the two and like a gong being struck the man’s chakra system is jolted and he gets this sweet churn in his lower chest like God has just kicked him.

Circling slowly like a summer trout waving behind a rock the man tries to get a second sense of her but that curious admixture of greediness and shame simply runs him out the door.

Music starts to play while his discord and confusion continue and traffic begins to flow like platelets of blood and buildings rise in the distant dusk and the man presses the accelerator and swivels his rear-view mirror the first of many times.

~

Sturm
"...and I still don't know" - Rilke

Kodak Brownie Hawkeye / 120mm / FujiFilm iso100

re-spooled to 620 format / slightly rendered

Western North Carolina / Spring 2012

I am standing in a room with my friend Jesse and I look out the back window to a scene of devastation.

I realize am not in a house but a two or three-story building in a small town and I am looking across a wide expanse toward the back of the buildings on the next street.  There is a divide of some sort, like a shallow gully. 

There has been a terrific storm, and I see the destruction.

Bricks are strewn about and the dirt has been washed away exposing the underneath of sidewalks.  I see where a creek once crossed the gully area and emptied into a drain pipe.  Everything is wrecked since there must have been a flash flood. Roots are exposed, bricks and pieces of concrete are exposed yet the buildings are all standing but quite damaged.  

I am surprised because I surely thought I was in a simple residential house but now I realize I am in a building looking out over a scene of storm-havoc.

~

I dream I am in an old basement and there are pipes overhead and several unlit rooms beyond me.  I am getting ready to take a shower and I am naked near an old-fashioned bathtub.  The shower head is hooked over one of the metal pipes overhead.  I slide the shower head over the bathtub and turn on the water.  I let the water run for a while before I stand in the tub.

I am thinking, "this place belongs to Dave."  

I take a very long shower and the water is running all over the floor.  I am very aware of taking a long and self-indulgent shower.  When I finish I look around and the floor is flooded.  I take a large towel and begin to soak up the water.  I keep mopping up from room to room and the water is all over.  I go into the next room and there is even more water but only about an inch deep.  

My towel is soaked and is of no use.  I look down into a heat vent in the floor and think the water may drain down this vent.  I don't clean up all the water before the dream ends.

~

I am in a house getting myself ready for the day, getting cleaned up and showered.  I am shaving.  There is shaving cream on my face and as I look out the window I see a nearby two-story house on fire.  

It is a raging fire with black smoke and flames coming from all the windows.  

I think to call my friends who are in a firetruck close by attending another fire.  But I don't have my cell phone.  I think what to do.  Finish shaving or go to find help?  I look for clothes and find only underwear.  I look out the window again at the terrible house-fire and realize no one could survive this if they were trapped inside that house.

~