Ask Dr. Druid . Day 50
What the Cactus Knows

This piece will read best for you
if you read it with your mouth as if out loud
[Ask Dr. Druid is designed to begin at the beginning. Click here.]

You can enter rem states as you're writing. That is, you write from inside the vision. Or you can wake from the rem state and write as you slosh in the shallows of the remembered dream/rem sea. What keeps you from completely surfacing when you rise out of rem is the silver-fish of a phrase or scene you use as a portal back to the dream. Scribbling down this silver-fish-phrase can keep the dream from sliding away into opaque depths. That's why I have my log next to my pillow and a pencil there too. A pencil writes at any angle so you can stay pretty asleep or in rem. This cactus piece was a rem vision I had from semi-waking. I wrote it down as if I were writing a letter to you.
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I find myself talking to a cactus. (Since I was a child talking to trees before I learned that one did not talk about talking to trees, 'talking to' meant 98% 'listening to' trees.) Or in this case, cactus. This was a proper desert with dramatic hilly ranges of lion-colored sand. I felt like la petite princesse -- well, ok, la princesse tres rondelette. If I looked thru the earth, I saw the bottoms of kangaroo feet nearer to my right and less far than at home so tal vez or perhaps this immense sand sea was In America del Sur?

The cactus was not a candelabra of my beloved saguaros, but one cylinder about 6 ft tall. It spoke by imprinting me with oneiroglyphs, as trees speak. It was reminding me, not meanly but with cactus-spine-sharp irony, that I had had a "stupid prejudice to the leafy and needled" when I was younger. That I had come "noticeably" late to the devotion to succulents and cacti. That I had even said roughshoddedly that iceplants had "fat leaves." Being chastised teasingly by a cactus leaves you helpless with abashed hilarity.

Cactus was very old but young at pith. The real rootnets, it was saying, are the in-the-dirt antennae of the flowering plants, the trees, the tomato plants, the corn stalks, the jungle vines, ++. It tuned something in my daedalus or central brain matrix so I could hear the hum/purr of their gossip + palaver with the bottoms of my feet. It saw me not as I see my own body, but, instead of 'skin,' as a swirling of 3D animated 'tattoos' of all the experiences which inhabit me. Cactus was +very+ caustic about the "care-less-ness of your species-ilk." It was vexxxed. "We don't mind you. We don't mind the squirrels and the rabbits either. But if you listened more with the ears of, the screens of your feet, you'd learn to be less noisy." In this tone, we took trez cool tour thru the filigree of the world's roots.

I had 'feelings' in my feet, not head nor heart nor gut. I also felt the pulse of my blood in my feet -- my feet beating, like small drums speaking to other feet? I felt feet-bottoms to feet-bottoms with the kangaroos. A new glot, feet-bottom-glot, or language to learn. Ham dumble. 

I've been looking lately at some spectacular altiplano desert picts of Bolivia by Gerhard Hudepohl.  I'm obsessed with the Green Evolution. And with teaching tele + oneiroportation to cut down on fossil-fuel combustions.

Re-start scribbling down your visions either as you drift to rem or as you return from rem. You are a rem reporter.
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Notes:
..rem .. I use rem as a general term for the imaginative states of vision and nightdream. I see all our experiences as dreams along a spectrum of kinesthetic persistence. So what you tend to refer to as your 'daily life' would have great stretches of K1 or the first level of kinesthetic persistence. The continents of the geography of your experience. There are many stretches of dreamy or drifting semi-perception thru your day which are the lacunae (little lakes) or unkickable parts of your experience. (People are are proving that matter exists by kicking the boulder and saying "Ouch!")
..le petit prince , from the book by St. Exupery, spends much of his time alone with his single rose. The joke here is that I feel my self in this vision like the little prince, but a girl, and because I'm chubby rondolette rather than petit or little. Tres (tray) means very in French & my franglais or fractured French for that is often trez -- also a small droll because in the proper french you leave off the "s" sound unless the next word starts with a vowel. Thus the French would never say Trez droll, but it amuses me.
..suguaro is pronounced soo-whar-oh.
..oneiroglyphs .. 3D glyphs from oneiro or dreams; cf hieroglyphs made into scenes.
..daedalus bridge .. It's fun to re-ember the firefly-fraught tale of Icarus & Daedalus. Now nobody has ever done psychology like the Greeks. Well, they invented the word psychology too after all. (Jung called astrology the accumulated wisdom of the ancients.) Daedalus & Icarus are captured on some dullsville island. Daedalus, the master craftsman, talks to them local bees and uses their wax plus the feathers of cormorants and makes fine wings for him & Icarus. Daedalus extols the middle way -- not too high or the sun will melt the wax, the structure of your dear wings, or too low lest the curling crests of waves catch you in their idly tricksy grasps. Oh well we all know that Icarus flew too high, wings melted, fell into sea. Daedalus, however made it to the mainland. Hurray for, say, sensible madness. I like to use his name as the master craftsman to honor the the corpus callosum, the middle of the joined-brain, the daedalus bridge, the powerful middle way, as it were -- the wings-crafting place where the brain joins all its forces in a rhapsody, a woven song.

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If you know or are an agent, aspiring agent, editor, or publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.
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