{"id":160,"date":"2010-05-11T07:47:17","date_gmt":"2010-05-11T07:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/?p=160"},"modified":"2010-05-11T07:47:17","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T07:47:17","slug":"the-ceremony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/the-ceremony\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ceremony"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My most vivid recent dream, I find myself participating in a large  gathering of people in an island setting.\u00a0 It feels very politically  charged, racially charged (because I am a foreigner clearly, yet somehow  being welcomed into the local indigenous community) and the various  players in that transition project themselves onto me and what I  represent to them.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the day of ceremony begins.\u00a0 I am in a huge hall that seems  like a throne for a kingdom.\u00a0 The ceilings are 50 feet high, the room a  hundred yards long seemingly and 25 yards across.\u00a0 The walls were strewn  with windows so that no lights were needed inside during the day and  they both curved up to meet at a center line down the middle of the roof  so that there was no flat place above the inner structure.\u00a0 The wall at  the front of the hall (and the back far behind me) was essentially  shaped like a leaf &#8211; flat at the bottom and pointed at the top.<\/p>\n<p>Before this wall I stood with the Chief and his court waiting for a  ceremony to begin.\u00a0 What was this ceremony about, anyway?\u00a0 Was I being  married into the tribe?\u00a0 Was I having a spiritual bar-mitzvah?\u00a0 Was I  going to be strapped to a fire-ant hole and left to deal with the pain  in a coming of age ceremony like I&#8217;d seen in movies?<\/p>\n<p>My attention seemed more concerned with the court than the chief.\u00a0 I  could still feel their disdain, and their acceptance because I had the  love and trust of the chief.<\/p>\n<p>Everything was coming to a climax.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t know what this ceremony was  and somehow neither did they.\u00a0 Everyone just seemed to be looking  around and waiting for something to happen.<\/p>\n<p>Finally a signal snapped everyone into attention and I was presented by  the chief, standing side by side towards this leaf shaped wall.\u00a0 Then,  he bid me to step forward alone.\u00a0 As I did so, at that moment a black  robed old woman appeared from the crowd pushing past the court and king  determinedly.\u00a0 Her cronely form was not weak, and her black eyes pierced  my heart, her presence enveloping me as she took my arm and led me  outside of the temple hall to the beach and walked me long enough for  everything else to disappear.<\/p>\n<p>The dream shifted and upon this beach, the wise crone and I came across  an animal lying in our path.\u00a0 &#8220;This is my mongoose,&#8221; she said.\u00a0  &#8220;Mongoose&#8221; I repeated, smiling &#8211; hoping that I wasn&#8217;t disrespecting her  in that way.\u00a0 The animal I saw was a fox, with a black hide, black face  with white marks, and a white belly and chest.\u00a0\u00a0 The forelegs were black  and the hind of each leg white as were the paws.<\/p>\n<p>The crone picked up her mongoose and set it upon her shoulders, carrying  it towards me.\u00a0 Only then did I notice that magic was starting to  happen.\u00a0 The back legs of the mongoose had a distinct shape flanking the  rear haunches.\u00a0 The back of each thigh was almost metallic and shaped  like a serrated clamp not unlike the shape of a bottle cap, but twice  the size and inverted as though they were clamps to grasp onto something  of that shape.<\/p>\n<p>The fox looked at me calmly, with no will to escape her master holding  her legs and body draped over shoulders.\u00a0 Only her head was propped up  and tense as though wishing it had a rock to lay its weight on.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;See her legs,&#8221; the crone said matter of factly.\u00a0 &#8220;My mongoose can be  set upon the legs of an eagle.&#8221;\u00a0 And true to form when a wise heart  meets vision, will and energy &#8211; an eagle did appear, the mongoose  looking up as it flew over the crone&#8217;s head and it leaped into the air  and clamped its rear haunches onto its legs.<\/p>\n<p>It looked like an eagles&#8217; mating ritual where they fly mirroring each  other by the legs.\u00a0 The crone and I flew over them watching, now as one  being.\u00a0 From our perspective, mongoose was above the eagle who was  flying upside down.\u00a0 The mongoose was growing wings of her own, pushing  out against the resistance of the wind beating all sides of her.\u00a0\u00a0 As  the mongoose&#8217;s wings grew and grew, she took the form of a black raven  as large as the eagle &#8211; both with 9 foot wingspans or so.<\/p>\n<p>As the now fully emerged raven felt propulsion of her own in the wind,  the clamps in her legs were the ones to feel pressure now, lifting the  eagle higher in the air with her force until the clamps themselves gave  way.\u00a0 The raven flew right.\u00a0 The eagle now upright flew left, and I  awoke from dream vision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My most vivid recent dream, I find myself participating in a large gathering of people in an island setting.\u00a0 It feels very politically charged, racially charged (because I am a foreigner clearly, yet somehow being welcomed into the local indigenous community) and the various players in that transition project themselves onto me and what I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/the-ceremony\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Ceremony<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dreams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162,"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucidtmedia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}