Miércoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol 5.

Ja, ja, so I'm experimenting with the blues. Makes me jones for the White Stripes, who do blues very well indeed!
Parenthetically, I had a good quote today. Gustavo asked me what "aloha" means, and then I got into this explainy thing because he didn't think Hawaiians had their own language. And he was like, "you're like an open book, like an encyclopedia." And I go, "naaw, I'm not an encyclopedia. Yet. I'm just a dictionary." Which caused much laughter!

*****

[do the salamander] 4/2/08

spent my misspent youth
just a-learnin to do
the salamander
when the shit hit the fan
you do it quick as you can
the salamander

keep your ear to the floor, your eye on the door
ain't no tellin when the felon comin back for more
the salamander
do the salamander

when you're out all alone
just a-tryin to get home
you get the feelin
there's a card on the stack
got his eye on your back
for more than stealin

when it ain't safe to run then you got to hide
paintin shadow to shadow until you're safe inside
the salamander
do the salamander

he was born in a fire
but don't you call him a liar
the foe deceiver
ain't no shadow of doubt
when you've got to get out
he's a believer

ain't no stranger to the frying pan
turnin screams to speeches turnin fists to hands
the salamander
do the salamander

*****

Was thinking about invisible friends this morning as I came up to the spot where you can see that tree leaning out over the water by Wolfe's Point. Already in full sunlight, which warmed my heart. Kept walking and thinking about how I really need to keep myself open, keep drawing on that ambient energy, otherwise I'll go nuts with frustration. I could tell my thoughts about them were making the little ones happy and as I tsked fondly at them I did open up and start absorbing! Lovely, lovely feeling.

I'm tentatively starting to think that in terms of energy absorption into the personality, I can class air and earth as "vertical draw" elements, and fire and water as "horizontal draw." What this means is that it's most effective to draw air and earth type force directly from one's physical environment, through the top and bottom of one's body field respectively. Water and fire draw most effectively from the energy of a situation, that is, an active endeavor or encounter involving more than one being. (No wonder I'm better at using earth and air!) Note I said being, not person. You can almost certainly get fire energy from, for example, herding cattle on horseback. And the horse would get the upload as well, especially if it's got good teamwork with the rider!

This has some parallels to some things I read in Gareth Knight, but on the whole the occult texts I've read are strangely silent on the topic. The topic being direct energy exchange between a personality and its surroundings. It is one of those things that living creatures are doing constantly but humans don't often recognize as a real, disparate process. It's hard to notice it if you haven't got the cognitive structures in place to do so; we dismiss the signals as subjective, the byproducts of cognition. Kind of like how the pores of the skin "breathe" oxygen out of the air. You don't notice that it's happening, but if a person's body is completely covered with thick paint they will eventually suffocate and die! Similar type of mechanism under ordinary conditions.

This bears directly on another issue on my "things to ponder" stack. That issue being, since I have invisible friends, what the hell are we to each other? What can I rightly ask of them and what should they rightly expect from me? I know the basic nature of our relationships but very little of the specific content. I know my invisible friends, as my allies, can help defend me against inimical invisibles. It's a big, tangly ecosystem out there, as big and tangly as the visible one. We are up to our knees in it all the time--but most of our attention is fixed on larger problems that the little ones have no frame of reference for. The symbiosis there can be compared to the birds who sit on the backs of water buffalo and help them by eating the insects in their fur. I know my greater access to different forms and larger amounts of energy than my friends can work with is of value to them. Think of a pack of hunting dogs, or a flock of friendly crows, enjoying the guts of an old-school hunter's kill. Except all the "killing" and "eating" is non-material.

So anyway, it seems relationships with invisible friends can affect one's ability to draw energy from, or project it into, environments and situations. This is an excellent direction for further pondering! Relationships between elements and absorption methods. Relationships between invisible friends and their influence upon absorption in various circumstances.

Oh, and by the way of a postscript.
Something about my in-dream symbols occurred to me today. The the little girl I have mentioned many times may be identical with the spider I had seen in previous series of dreams. A person's in-dream symbol set grows as their personality grows, one sensory display morphing into another. This mirrors the person's growing relationship to the noun (person place or thing) represented by the symbol. The spider I only saw in three or four dreams--that version of the symbol for that thing only lasted a couple years. It was always a confrontation, with me approaching the spider unawares, the spider making a move towards me, then me reacting with unreasoning terror and attempting to flee. The "mama's house" dream, I think, marked the change of symbol from spider to little girl. Now our relations have gradually improved to where I trust her enough to ask for directions, but not enough to accompany me to the place the directions are for. Hey! That's big progress for the symbol of the personification of the sum of one's fears!

Now if I only knew with more exactness who-and-what the referent was...then I wouldn't need the symbol. :p Stupid universe, always making important things hard to do.