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. Pine St.
Mon-Fri: 7 am-5:30 pm | Sat: 8 am-5 pm
chainsawsatsistersrental.com
“Sisters Businesses are Here to Serve” page to find curbside pick up, delivery, and more.
