Poetry of Nature | Early Summer | Geoff Oelsner

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"All creatures share one breath."

~ Geoff Oelsner

Dear PON Friends,

In our Northern Hemisphere, Summer Solstice arrives on June 20 at 10:42 PM EST. It’s the longest day of the year and marks the sun's most northerly point in Gaia's sky.

As the light gets longer and brighter, I’d like to invite a dive into the dark, into night, sleep and dreams; dreams that can throw light into unexplored corners.

Do you ever write down your dreams, or tell them to a trusted other, or let them work within you during the day, or work with them, alone or with trusted others?

For our upcoming group, think back to your first remembered dream, to recurrent dreams and themes, to nightmares, and revelatory Big Dreams. Don’t neglect memorable dream fragments. What places are featured in your dreams?

Let’s free write and share about all that.

I’ve been going to Night School for 70 years now, beginning with the first dream I can recall: I’m 5 or 6 years old, lying on my back in bed. A television set appears about 2 feet above my head and I suddenly understand that I can change the channels!

The memory of this dream realization came up again just yesterday in a conversation with a friend, bringing a fresh felt sense of clarity, freedom and power.

Around the time I first started writing poetry, inspired by my 9th grade English teacher poetess Virginia Scott Miner, my dreams became increasingly vivid. I went through big openings at age 17. From that time, dream meetings, lucid dreams, out-of-the-body experiences, hypnagogic and hypnopompic visions and energetic streamings…such programs often aired on my…channels.

Almost all my dreams happened in places, sometimes in rooms, often in open spaces. Some of these dreams brought me into incredible intimacy with the land, sky and sea. Some places were well-known to me, some seen for the first time in dreams of varying lucidity; in some I related with other personae; in some I travelled in vast aloneness; in most I moved about in my dreambody or took the position of an observer.

As time went on, in some dreams I merged with meadows and mountains and waters and skies and jubilant birds and trees as pure awareness. I experienced these dreams as openings into Tao, portals into Nature:

FIRST WAYS OF FLIGHT

When in my teens

I found a wakened way

to fly my slightest dream

across the prairie, wireless,

tree to tree. Then some trees

splintered into fence posts

in my dreams, and later

became phone poles. Barbed wire

and taut black talk-lines

sliced my flight. They stung

and nettled my dream-body,

just as they overhung and netted

this country. Encroaching suburbs

sometimes held me from

full span. Clenched fists

of smoke from factories;

dense inner cities pulled

on me. Yet I was willingly

drawn down to certain altars,

shrines, archways, parks,

side roads, homes, and human

gatherings where primal silence

reasserts itself. Then I could begin

to glide once more on amber

waves of light East-West

above the land. My being

sought sanctuary in mountains

and rivers, at estuaries of Spirit.

I rested in slow-breathing meadows

far from men. Night after night,

God moved me in vision-flight

beyond a life I had thought mine,

on through the gray where worlds meet,

into a country where all colors

are sacred and alive.

~ Geoff Oelsner

"beyond the waking wings"

Snow Geese by Leslie Oelsner

I tried to write about some of these early dream awakenings. I still do. I find that journalling dreams in the present tense tends to keep them closer to memory, to me. I tend to slip into the past tense when I pour them into poems.

What places and animals and plants and minerals and people and other beings of Gaia, celestial or spiritual appear in your dreams? Sometimes in mine a given place is very much infused with human presences. In rare instances, I have shared the same dream with another:

EVERYTHING’S SPEAKING

She bore eight children

in that cabin on the ledge,

and when I came to stay a night

with friends who'd bought the place,

I heard them

running in and out

the screen door,

in the yard.

That family hated leaving there.

But their father met his match

in moonshine from a nearby

shady grove.

Above his head

the Virginia sky reeled

and thin-boned trees

swayed on the upper ridge

like dreams of unborn children.

They lived there twenty-three years.

High cliffs of rain

ached down on us all night.

In early morning,

clouds glyphed out over the plain,

leaving the moon

to disturb our sleep.

Swimming the floor,

it shifted through our dreaming hair.

I stirred her, my friend

next to me in a down cocoon,

and we inched out of our bodies;

slipped through the backdoor

and up the ridge in moonlight.

We sat on the sky's beach,

stars next to our faces.

Her body was white driftwood on that shore.

Then a sixth sense warned me

to leave her there

to receive what only she

was ready for.

Later, she returned

through the backdoor,

and lay beside me, whispering,

"Hold me.

The rocks are on fire.

Everything's speaking.”

Some dreams delivered songs I later sang, and locutions I recorded word for word as poems:

WORDS HEARD IN DREAMS

1966

"There are lonely precipices

far beyond the eyes of the fathers,

beyond the waking wings

of the hair of our beloved ones,

where basalt eyes bore far into the sand

and thrones extend endlessly

into the darkness."

1967

"Among all the loves of men

there is only one Beloved.

It is you, delicate dreamer.

When you awaken on the plains of solitude,

they will be a different place.”

1976

"Out of the darkness,

a star.

Out of the cool earth,

a bud.

Together they shine,

the starbud."

1982

"I have two eyes:

they’re X’s first,

crossed with womb-sleep,

barred at birth.

I bare them to

the glowing world,

an infant,

boundaryless.

And whilst I grow,

they fill with I’s--

identities that dawn

and set--

so as the busy suns

run by, they harden

in my head.

But when I love,

they brim with E’s.

My easy tears

unfreeze them.

When flowing E’s

grow single, fuse,

the I becomes

a SEER then."

1984

“All creatures share one breath;

the same One breathes all creatures.

A long breath pools in the pelvis,

spools from the lungs,

tying and twining all things

together.”

For years I titled all my dreams as a way of distilling their central message or image. I used the descriptive third person— he/she/it/they/them— to write or speak of them to my wife, to dream groups or to a tape recorder.

After studying Jung’s writings and learning Hal Stone and Sidra Winkleman’s Voice Dialogue approach, I began to use active imagination to dialogue with aspects of dreams— not just with people, but also with objects, compelling images and all kinds of life forms. Moving from the 3rd person to 2nd person, I homed into imaginatively addressing any given place, object, image or being by speaking to it and then sometimes speaking as it, and listening, further integrating and embodying it by voicing it in the 1st person.

This practice enriched my understanding of many a mysterious dream image.

To speak as any of these as “I” brought me closer to hidden regions of myself, and at times, in certain Big Dreams, closer to the I behind all our identities.

The following dream of place attuned me that more universal channel. It came as I slept in a farmhouse where we lived with friends in Athens, Georgia. It opened me energetically in a way that remained after waking up. To keep its gift alive and breathing, I wrote it as a song, as yet unrecorded:

IN THE WAKE OF A DREAM

I dreamed I saw a star down where the cellar door was half ajar.

It flared and darted deep into my heart-- a tiny shining ark

that sailed way into me. It came to stay as I lay there asleep.

It came to stay as I lay there asleep. Ta na na na na na na na--

in the wake of a dream.

I woke taking my waking slow, untouched by thoughts that stop and go.

The traffic of my daytime mind had vanished in the night.

I felt the morning light warm wet empty streets

and fill the fields as I arrived from sleep.

It filled the fields as I arrived from sleep. Ta na na na na na na na--

in the wake of a dream.

And as I lay there fast awake the shade was shorn as light did break

into my room and met a mirror turned toward the sun.

Reflections one by one dissolved into the dawn.

I sat up straight in bed and the morning yawned.

Sat up straight in bed and the morning yawned. Ta na na na na na na na--

in the wake of a dream.

Horses neighed in nearby stalls. A breeze eased round the farmhouse walls.

the air was full of sweet bird calls and softly melting bells

from steeples in the hills. The neighboring houses stirred.

I sat there being every sound I heard.

Sat there being every sound I heard. Ta na na na na na na na--

in the wake of a dream.

I invite you to see my poems as prompts to review features of your own dreams, giving some attention to the dreamscapes, the places where they’ve occurred.

When we meet, please feel free to free write and share anything you please, whether that be about your dreams, past or present, troubled or pleasant and whether or not that involves place.

May this dive into our nighttime minds bring us nearer to Nature and our True Nature.

May the coming summer season bring you unexpected blessings.

Geoff Oelsner

"I dreamed I saw a star"