It’s always a question, when preparing to speak with others, of where to begin. Of finding the thread that leads into that invisible place where what wants to be spoken lives, waiting to be drawn out, given breath that will enter into and mingle with the cells of lungs, the cells of blood. That’s how that part of Mystery that wants to be spoken, wants to be sung into existence, takes on a body and comes out to play in the visible world.

It’s like the poet Mary Oliver says:

Spirit likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders
and all the rest…

And what we want to begin to open up tonight is an imagination of the Spirit of Air, an imagination whose currents we’ll be invited to feel our wings lifting into again and again throughout the joyride of this weekend of sharing and celebration.

In many ways, the phrase “Spirit of Air” is redundant, isn’t it? The word spirit literally means breath – and so, to speak of the Spirit of Air is as much to say the Breath of Air. If not redundant, it’s at least obvious, right? Contrast this with “Spirit of Earth, Spirit of Water, Spirit of Fire” --- breath of earth? breath of water? breath of fire? What?? The left brain lodges a serious complaint! That makes no sense whatsoever!

But if the left brain could be said to have a problem (I’m not saying that it does), it’s that in its urge to take over the world, it has rubbed out all the convolutions in itself in which a poet, or an artist or a mystic might consider hanging out. So left brain says “Excuse me? Breath of Earth? Breath of Water? What planet are you from?”

But the right brain, the dreaming/poet/mystic-shaman primordial heartmind says, “I dreamed I was breathing under water” or “I dreamed of being buried alive, and yet I could breathe!” And doesn’t everyone, no matter what their hemispheric persuasion, sometimes experience being fire-breathing mad? All the elements are suffused with Spirit-breath – because Spirit is the invisible, animating essence of the Great Mystery. And don’t you love how we praise those moments when even the Spirit in us is taken by beauty by saying: “It was breath-taking”? Frankly, it makes me wonder what kind of beauty we must be beholding when our last breath is taken.

The word “inspire” means both to breathe in and to creatively quicken. Again, this naming in language of the animating quality of breath, of air. So I turned to the Spirit of Air in a prayer for inspiration for this talk. And what presented itself was the thread of a remembered dream.

In the dream...

I am walking home from my office, carrying my laptop computer in a pack on my back. My cellphone rings.

I’m quite the typical denizen of the electronic age in this dream as you can see!

I put the pack down near the stoop of an apartment building I happen to have been passing when my cellphone rang, and by the time I fish it out, the phone has stopped ringing.

Have you noticed that when a bell or a phone rings in a dream it’s usually a call to stop and pay attention to what’s about to happen?

So what happened next was that I saw that laying on that stoop in the midst of some crumpled newspaper and other litter was a wingfeather of a magpie. A beautiful, bright white feather with a dark, almost black band of iridescent green. It kind of took my breath away, this wingfeather strangely out-of-place in such inglorious surroundings, and I reached my hand toward it in wonder. When I did, it lifted an inch or so off the stoop toward me and then settled down again. You know, almost as though it were saying, “Thank you for seeing me! I see you, too!”

Spirit so, so longs to be seen. Ancient Sufis put these words into the mouth of Originator of the Universe: I was a hidden treasure longing to be known. Isn’t that beautiful? I was a hidden treasure longing to be known. They call this the Divine Sigh --- again, an image of breath. The sufis say the Invisible All-One’s loneliness and yearning for the Other is what brought all the worlds into being.

And here in my dream is the wing feather of a spirit being – a bird, a swimmer in the air – cast aside like so much litter, but immediately restored to dignity and buoyancy in the presence of mutual seeing, mutual beholding.

Magpie is said to be an oracle, and in the East, as well as in Native American tradition, it’s regarded as an omen of joy and good fortune, and a lover of shiny things. European folklore takes a dimmer, fear-based view. It sees Magpie as an omen of death. And hey – that’s true, too: an omen of death of the dispirited, mechanized Western worldview!

But back to the dream:

After this blessed encounter with the Spirit of Air in the magpie feather, I am continuing homeward, when I’m drawn to enter a small strawbale building I’d never seen before, though I walk this way everyday. Is it a restaurant? I’m not sure. I enter into a kind of a foyer, where a young family is gathered. A baby girl is lying face up on a blanket on the floor, and she is the first one I am drawn to interact with. I get down on the floor and we look into each others’ eyes, both smiling, and I talk to her and rub her belly and we laugh and laugh.

This foyer, as it turns out, magically opens out into a village of unique, exquisitely colored, handmade strawbale dwellings with welcoming open doors, where young children are engaged in imaginative play and adults in a variety of creative pursuits. I won’t take the time to go into each encounter I had in detail, but the gist of the overall experience is that I’d been led to a place where calm and lively are not opposed, where work and play are not opposed, where child and adult are not opposed, where sadness and joy are not opposed, and I’m filled with a deep, expansively happy body-knowing of what an astonishing power for good human imagination can be.

Then I remember that I need to retrieve my computer backpack from where I’d left it, and I try to retrace my steps.

Isn’t this typical? Heaven’s gate opens up in some way in our lives, some clear unifying experience, and we’re grooving with it for awhile …..aaahhhh…. you know? Goldilock’s found the Buddha’s Middle Way and everything’s just right. But after awhile – days, weeks, hours, minutes; it varies – old habits of mind reassert themselves and we’re running back towards small mind again.

That’s OK. Spirit can use that, too, by reflecting it back to us in dreamtime.

So in the dream I’m retracing my steps and this takes me, incongruously, into a darkened multiplex style movie theater where a film is showing, and the flat, grey light being reflected off peoples’ faces as they stare blankly and uniformly into the screen contrasts so starkly with the colorful, ensouled world I’ve just been in that it momentarily horrifies me, and I quickly leave the theater.

It’s a not-too-subtle picturing of how the regressive urge to retrieve the computer I’d left behind somehow leads me into a parallel universe of virtual reality. It’s a reality that pales utterly in comparison with the vibrantly animated, living world I’d miraculously stepped into after I’d put my backpack down to begin with, and encountered the magpie feather. Can you feel that?

For awhile now, I’ve been paying attention to how daily interaction with the computer actually affects me. And I’ve noticed a lot of not very encouraging things. I say “not very encouraging” because for me, as for a great many people, the computer has assumed a status of near indispensability in my daily life, and it would be a comfort to know that the downside of that dependency is insignificant. I don’t watch much TV, myself, but what I’m saying applies pretty much across the board to the screens of all kinds that we stare at.

At the most basic level, it’s an activity that fairly dramatically separates us from the living, breathing world around us, and if you follow the implications of that out – you know, half the human population staring into a screen most of the time, separated from the sensual, organic world – it can get pretty horrifying. What happens to the Soul of the World, which – as we’ve seen – is a hidden treasure longing to be known? What happens to the world when its soul is not beheld and praised through our moment-to-moment delight in it? Here’s a way to get a feel for that: what happens to infant humans whose parents do not engage them face to face, mirroring delight in their existence?

Living here in Montana, we are blessed with a surround of Beauty that calls us into itself in ways that are nearly impossible to refuse altogether. But even we are not immune to getting sucked into the linear, hard-edged world of screens and all that it spawns, pumping up left brain while right mind starves.

The ghostly, artificial light of the screen is an apt metaphor: it’s a source of false illumination, false enlightenment. By its addictive qualities, we know it for what it is: a usurper of consciousness.

This isn’t a computer bashing talk. I wrote these reflections on a computer. But when I asked the Spirit of Air for a thread into what I would say tonight, this dream returned to memory. And in its images I hear Air saying, Talk about the real world, the original world, the world that Spirit makes.

You hear that? Air didn’t say, the world that Spirit made. Air said, the world that Spirit makes. That’s because creation isn’t something that happened, it’s something that’s happen-ing…. now …. now…. now……now

The real world, the original world, the world that Spirit makes is not outside us. Here’s a secret: it’s not inside us either. We’re inside It. In other words, we are in no way separate from the world that Spirit makes except in as much as the perceptual conditioning that begins on day one of our lives trains us to believe we are.

You know, isn’t it interesting that the word adult forms the root of “adulteration” and “adultery”? I mean, let that one in. There’s an implicit recognition of the spoiling and secret betrayal involved in what we become over time through the process of conditioning and socialization.

All the great spiritual traditions at their authentic, visionary core (and now quantum science, too) teach that spirit and matter are not two separate things, nor even two things joined. Spirit and matter are one process: now in wave form, now in particle form, now in wave form, now in particle form, now in waveparticle form, now in particlewave form, now….now…now.

So the real work of a life basically boils down to patiently deconditioning and deprogramming ourselves, so that the original, unfragmented, un-timebound , always moving consciousness that we Are can come out and play. That’s what re-wholes the world.

The English poet, artist, and mystical-madman William Blake was both beholding and being-held by the original mind, the All-One, when he announced ecstatically: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time!”

Check this out. Turn to the person next to you. Look into her eyes. This can be awkward. We’re trained to look at people, not into them. So be patient while the awkwardness settles out. Keep looking…….. See spirit grinning at spirit grinning…?

Spirit likes to dress up like this,
ten fingers, tens toes,
shoulders and all the rest…

Get how much more interesting it is for the All-One to dress up in all these different forms? Not to mention as trees, earthworms, magpies, clouds. And it is the Spirit of Air that inspires that game of dress-up, of creating – because the Spirit of Air is none other than Imagination, a realm in which all is always in movement.

When we are in the lifting, shifting, breeze-ing, gusting, flurry-ing, rising, breath-taking and sometimes downright tempestuous current of creative imagination, we are ourselves actually within the invisible body of the Spirit of Air. Are you feeling that?

Here’s what the mystic poet Rumi has to say:

No one knows what sometimes makes the soul
wake up so happy.

Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil
from the face of God.

A thousand new moons appear.
Roses open, laughing.

Hearts become perfect rubies
The body turns entirely spirit.

Leaves become branches in this wind! 

There’s no answer to any of this.
No one knows the source of joy.

A poet breathes into a reed flute,
and the tip of every hair makes music.

I thought the dream had ended after I left the movie theater in shock, and that I had awakened. The next thing I know, I’m sitting up in bed, working at my computer, recording this dream, imagining I’m awake…!

The poet Novalis said that when you dream that you are dreaming, you are close to being awake – spiritually awake. Dreaming that you are awake has to be the opposite of that! Here I am, thinking that the shock of the stark contrast between living reality and virtual reality had awakened me, really awakened me – but no, I’m actually still asleep tapping away at my computer.

Fortunately, the Spirit of Air and imagination doesn’t give up. The longing of Spirit to be seen and engaged with is unquenchable. So, guess what? It resorts to calling me in the proven way: my dream cellphone rings.

I rise from my bed to answer it, but where is it? The ringing seems to be in the living room – and as I cross the threshold of my bedroom, I realize for the first time that I am, in fact, dreaming. (Novalis would be happy.) I think to myself: “Ah, phone ringing. Pay attention to what’s about to unfold.” Consciousness has suddenly taken on a profoundly translucent, calmly expansive, shining quality, and the hallway that I enter has the same beautiful, handmade, strawbale walls of the homes I had encountered and so delighted in earlier.

Initially, the hallway opens out into white, unformed space – no walls, no ceiling, no sky, no earth – nothing. Then I become aware of two invisible spirit companions, one behind my left shoulder and one behind my right, and together we move toward this space, upright and effortlessly, my feet not touching the ground.

(In one of his poems, the mystic poet Kabir puts these words into Spirit’s mouth, Are you looking for me? My shoulder is against yours. I am the breath inside your breath.)

In the dream, as we move, these Spirits of Air and I together, I am imagining the parts of this dwelling that do not yet exist, and as I imagine, so it becomes, instantly.

When I say “imagining”, I do not mean I am thinking about and deciding what the space should be, and then it happens. The process is way more subtle than that. In fact, I’m not thinking at all. It’s more like, having awakened within the dream, I am naturally in the consciousness where heart and mind are one, and when we humans are centered in that primordial consciousness, angels come to meet us. They are drawn to the unconditioned human heartmind as surely as a hummingbird is drawn to the nectar of a flower. The joy of that connection is indescribable – but not unfamiliar to anyone who has, at one time or another, found herself riding strong thermal currents of creativity. That current is the actual presence of Spirit come to meet us. Our job is the lift the wings folded at our backs, so that we can dance with the Winds of Spirit, dance with the Holy Spirit.

OK, so my very own beautiful strawbale dream home is unfolding before my eyes, and then… left brain kicks in and I begin to analyze what is happening. Nothing wrong with that – we can learn a lot through analysis. But as soon as that shift happens from imagination to linear thought, the new house fades back into white space. The dreammaker leaves me there, pondering, as I wake up to morning.

What gifts dreams are. Night after night we close our eyes to ordinary consciousness and the most remarkable imagination presents itself. As we come into interested relationship with the dream-making imagination we open ourselves to the potential of restoring ourselves to our birthright original mind, and therefore to a re-wholing of the Soul of the World.

Watch, in your dreams, for those images that belong to the poetry of air: birds, clouds, wind, flight, all buoyant, lifting movement, feathers, blowing leaves, gliders and planes, thunder and rain, balloons, kites, flags, windchimes. Such dream images can speak volumes about our relationship to the creative spirit of Air.

I still remember a dream that my friend, Sally, had about 20 years ago. It was at a time when joy in her daily work was at a particularly low ebb. She’s so dang smart and competent at whatever she takes up, that she can become fairly indispensable to any undertaking that she’s a part of – regardless of whether she’s doing her true, creative work. And that was the case at this time. Tremendous investment of time and energy, lots of exhaustion --- but no reward in the form of creative liveliness. What did she dream? She dreamed that she opened a box she had forgotten she had, and inside were five beautiful songbirds – all dead or on the verge of death.

It's like this poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado in which he says:

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an aroma of jasmine.

“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.”

…The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

For Sally, the visceral horror of the dead birds – not intellectual horror, visceral horror – was the wake up call she needed to catapult her out of what was definitely a dead-end situation as far as her soul was concerned, and into the patient restoration of the beautiful soul garden that was entrusted to her. Her spirit birds are singing up a storm these days.

It’s in the mutual beholding and lovemaking of Spirit and Soul that creativity happens, and the virtual world is sent packing.

Remember my magpie feather? Did I mention that magpies have a weakness for shiny things? Well, there ain’t nothin’ shinier than a happy soul.

To paraphrase Rumi: Your own transformation, like the play of the wind with a [feather], moves in you now – that near, that simple. Don't go back to sleep!

*   *   *

© Anita Doyle, 2008

Anita Doyle has been a certified transpersonal counselor and educator since 1983. She has a fulltime practice in soul-centered, evolutionary astrology and dreamwork, and has been a student of meditation and the I Ching for over 30 years. Her writing has appeared in Tricycle:The Buddhist Review, Parabola, The Dream Network Journal, Northern Lights and other national publications. She completed graduate studies in medicine at the University of Colorado, and is a diplomate of the Steven Forrest program in evolutionary astrology. Anita also served as a founding member and director of the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center in Missoula, Montana. To inquire about personal consultations or for further info, visit her website: www.integralbeing.org or click on one of the links below.

All Rumi quotes here are from translations by Coleman Barks. Kabir and Antonio Machado quotes are translations by Robert Bly. The complete version of Mary Oliver's poem Spirit may be found in her collection, Dream Work (1986). I do not, alas, know the name of the artist who painted the beautiful magpie image at the head of this piece. If you do, please let me know!

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