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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (April 22, 2020)
Wednesday, April 22, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon In the PINES By T. Lee Brown Connecting in the weirdness In addition to earning a handsome salary with robust benefits as a free- lance writer*, I do some coaching, readings, and cre- ativity guidance for folks around the U.S. and UK. In the last few weeks, friends and clients have brought up the strange reconnecting brought about by the Recent Weirdness, or RW. (I can9t bear to call it C19 or come with a new corona pun). Some of it9s literal: long- lost pals seek each other out on social media. Distant cousins gather for Zoom dance parties. Artists and writers delve into National Letter-Writing Month, plas- tering envelopes with good- ies from The Portland Stamp Company, sending them out to Instagram followers in far-off lands. But some RW connect- ing is more mysterious. Confined to their homes, stripped of the busywork and socializing that keeps them perpetually distracted and striving, the newly unemployed tune into their inner life. In the uncertain quietude, they sense the con- nections rippling through an unseen, etheric realm of visions, meditations and intuitions. Dreams become colorful and intense. Some people feel volcanic like Belknap Crater or Mount Saint Helens, their sleeping minds erupting with the hot magma of dreams. Some reasons are obvi- ous: following an evening of dystopic Netflix viewings, peppered with news alerts on their phones, stressed-out sleepers wander post-apoca- lyptic dreamscapes, chased by monsters from the id. Old traumas re-emerge, attended by new worries. With no alarm clock to force people out of bed and resume the day-to-day motions of pro- ductivity, they have the lux- ury of dream recall. Experts deconstruct this into mechanisms that sound rational and scientific. Here is how the sleeping mind plays out its daytime anxiet- ies, they say. Here is a sim- plistic explanation for why the dreaming mind brings a certain person back into our waking consciousness. But many experiences defy such explanations. A local woman finds herself receiving messages from the deceased loved one of a newish friend. The mes- sages make no sense to the woman; some seem down- right silly. But the friend immediately knows what the dead loved one is talking about. Each message cor- responds to something con- crete from real life. When one person fol- lows Alice down the rabbit- hole of sleep, they find their estranged sister waiting every night. Another finds her dreamworld visited by an old flame. Friends who haven9t spoken in years reach out simultaneously on their phones. A man who avoids superstitious, New Age claptrap finds him- self pulled into conversa- tion with the ghost of his mother. What to make of all this? A Jungian might say that our collective unconscious has been wildly aroused by the RW. An old-school ratio- nalist might assert, <Piffle! It9s all in your imagina- tion.= Some fundamental- ist Christians might say it9s none of our business to even think about these things: psychic phenomena feel threatening to them, some- thing to be filed away under <sorcery.= Some people believe that we are the universe commu- nicating with itself. We pop out the way mushrooms do from the forest floor, then reflect our sensory findings NTED LADY I A P Antiques back to the greater collective consciousness 4 or God, or the Great Woo, enter your preferred word here. Western-European types used to believe that mush- rooms were individual plant-like things. Now it is known that for many mush- rooms, each morsel appear- ing above the soil is part of a larger whole, a giant fun- gus connected beneath the earth via enormous mats of mycelium. You can call that an <organism= or you can call it a <colony.= Perhaps it is both. Scientists consider the largest organism in the world to be a mushroom over in Malheur that spans over 2,000 square acres and has lived over 2,000 years. Like each mushroom, each of us appears to be a separate, individual con- sciousness 4 at least if our beliefs were formed by certain cultures, such as the America I grew up in. In other belief systems, our interconnectedness is per- fectly obvious and a rather ridiculous thing to ignore. From quantum physics to biology, from science fiction to the labels of Dr. Bronner9s soap bottles, our culture brims with suggestions that we rugged American indi- viduals are, in fact, All One. Perhaps we are all jew- els, shards of mirror in Indra9s Net. Or, as the gentle Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, we are both wave and water. We emerge out of the vast ocean and surge toward the shore; then we subside back into the vast ocean. It9s a nice way to think about our inevitable, looming deaths. Personally, I suspect our view of what we consider space-time, and therefore of the universe, is so paltry and limited that we can9t possibly grasp (literally or linguistically) how these things work. Perhaps we don9t need to. Perhaps con- necting with each other and our pulsing, living planet is enough 4 through whatever means we can. *Sarcasm alert! & S ONS E K A L B CLEANING SERVICES Windows • Screens • Gu ers Residential, Rentals & Commercial Cleaning Free Estimates! Call or text Jeff Blake at 541-420-3020 541-904-0066 141 E. Cascade, Ste. 104 •I﹐L&B At Eurosports Food Cart Garden Corner of Hood & Fir Nothing says quality like true hand-forged ironwork CCB# 87640 PHOTO BY ALEX JORDAN Enhance the look and feel of your home or business environment with our hand-crafted iron products. “Your Local Welding Shop” 541-549-9280 | 207 W. Sisters Park Dr. | PonderosaForge.com 5 541-549-9631 | 506 N. 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