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No need this morning to look far for what first strikes the eye: fog outside, and a window-screen in the foreground. As with our own human consciousness, what’s up front and in our faces draws the camera’s auto-focus to the screen, in spite of one shot (in a series of attempts) where I thought I’d finally gotten the camera to focus on distance. Probably could have, too, if I knew my camera better. When the human eye focuses on distance, the screen blurs and fades. Right there is a whole chapter of spiritual practice, attention and mechanical behaviors. Where’s my focus? What am I looking at? I decided the indoors version with the foregrounded window screen should stay — it was still offering something to think about further.
Fog-weaving, and awareness. With temps well above freezing, and enough snow to melt and turn to low-hanging mist, it was a perfect day to drive in and out of banks of fog as the elevation changes in our Vermont hills. Often it’s easy to slip into altered states of consciousness, walking a fogged-in landscape. Driving through one, it’s much less safe to try!
About a year and a half back, I wrote about fogweaving with Lugh while climbing our local Mt. Ascutney:
Fog-weaving at such times needs so little effort. The climb quickens the breath, and the cool air is lush with oxygen. Without the chatter of any human companion as a distraction, and with the fog collapsing the field of vision to just a few dozen yards in any direction, your attention narrows in on step after deliberate step. Light trance comes on like cloud itself. Without thought you can slip through to the “realm next door” between one step and the next, and you may sense the god dreaming on the peak. And rather than needing human action or imagination to weave or conjure vision, the fog itself curtains or reveals what is already there.
Awareness is a tricky thing: we move each day into and out of so many different kinds of awareness that we often don’t notice they’re best for different purposes — they’re most definitely not interchangeable. Or as I try to explain this phenomenon in the page on Magic:
… each day we all experience many differing states of consciousness, moving from deep sleep to REM sleep to dream to waking, to daydream, to focused awareness and back again. We make these transitions naturally and usually effortlessly — so effortlessly we usually do not notice or comment on them. But they serve different purposes: what we cannot do in one state, we can often do easily in another. The flying dream is not the focus on making a hole in one, nor is it the light trance of daydream, nor the careful math calculation. And further, what we ordinarily do quite mechanically and often without awareness, we can learn to do consciously.
With the tickle of a dream the previous night to set the tone, I woke with another dream in my head early this morning: I have a son who’s seeking me out.
(In the category of “too much info” but helpful context: it’s even possible such a child exists. My graduate school girlfriend turned down my marriage proposal, warned me she’d never tell me even if it turned out she was pregnant, and on that note I opted to leave the U.S. and the whole intolerable situation in the fall of 1987 to teach in China. We haven’t been in contact since. So — to cut short any further confessions — I woke this morning wondering, yet again, what the dream could be saying.)
Looking up close, I see screen. Focusing on the distance, I see fog. Where’s my focus? What am I looking at?
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A Druid Way 