I
It was already dark as we entered the path of the circle. Drawn into the ancient riverbed was a great Medicine Wheel in the fresh December snow. At its center rested a Grandfather Drum, and beneath it, a Manitou stone from a sacred site in far mountains.
I had made the Medicine Wheel for our friends and their son to experience for the first time, in acknowledgment of their heritage and connection to the land on this day, the Winter Solstice, the first day of the Native American New Year.
The Medicine Wheel is a kind of Calendar. Aligned to the Four Directions, it marks the cardinal points of the compass, but also the stages of our lives. It is an evocation of the universal Circle, and the number zero, the symbolic emptiness from which all things spring.
We carried a traditional offering of corn, rolling the kernels off one at a time as we walked. On the following day turkeys and crows would come and walk the circle as they received the offering. We have made many prayers meant to take their form in birds— doves, turkeys, and crows lighting in the snow, becoming labyrinths, peace signs, and spirals. Living dreams of beauty and abundance. Of gratitude, becoming.
We began our walk at the Eastern Door. Hayden, an eight year old boy with touseled hair and eyes like Hershey’s Kisses, carried the long Lakota sage wand as he led us around the circle. He was to keep the torch burning for the duration of the walk, as the smoke trailed outward, and over us, blessing the land and ourselves as it rose with our prayers.
We stopped at each doorway in succession, acknowledging the part of the circle we were in. The East is the beginning. The first light. The Eagle, its guardian who flies closest to the sun. The South is the prime of our youth. Coyote, the trickster and hard lessons. In the West we enjoy the fruits of our life’s work and the healing Bear of self reflection guards us there. And the North is the time of transition. Buffalo represent abundance and prayer there and connection to family and ancestors.
As we traversed the perimeter we at last returned to the East, full circle. From there, we would turn to the center and gather around the Drum. A smoke offering would rise from atop the white stone, now covered in snow, as we sounded together the heartbeat of the earth.
And to dream.
Together, through a child’s eyes, we would dream the world we wish for everyone.
II
This is how the world has been made since its beginning. Our ancestors have always known this, and now today, science has brought us full circle in acknowledging that form follows consciousness.
The world is a great dream.
We have re-learned that water is an immediate conduit of intention, changing and adapting to our thoughts, feelings, and prayers instantly. We have rediscovered the wonders of crystals, conduits of electricity, of thought, that vibrate, ingest, and store information across ages.
We live in a dream factory.
The earth’s surface is nearly seventy percent ocean and her mantle composed of nearly seventy percent sand. Silica, quartz, granite, feldspars, gneiss, fill the bottoms of the seas, beaches, deserts, sandstones, and riverbeds flowing with the dreams that make a world. We too, are composed of water in this proportion, flowing about, across, under, and through every corner of this planet.
From the branches of rivers, to the branches of trees and leaves, sunflower seeds, and bees, our very bones and limbs are vibrant with the perfect mathematics of the Divine Proportion. A paradoxical ratio that reproduces itself with every function and yet within its trail of finer and finer divisions seems to extend on forever without repeating.
We live in a landscape that is itself magical, infused with the clarity of geometry so perfect that our mathematics fail to confine it. The star tetrahedron, the six-pointed Star of David, is a two dimensional representation of this proportion, a sort of graphic image of perfection made manifest in this realm. At one time, this knowledge was kept hidden within the Mystery Schools, as symbols are tools of invocation, points of contact between realms.
In the landscape of Vermont and New Hampshire are three mountains and three lakes, mapping a perfect star tetrahedron. Two intersecting triangles, the Masculine of the mountains of Mansfield, Washington, and Ascutney and the Feminine, Silver Lake, and Lakes Willoughby, and Winnipesaukee. At the region’s center, Barre, Vermont husbands some of the finest granite in the world.
Many consider this region a Starfield; a kind of cosmic point of contact. The healing center of a continent whose sacred geometry is connected to ever larger patterns intersecting across the region, the continent, and the globe.
Within this system of geometry is a network, a web matrix of finer and finer energy-conducting lines in the mantle. There are many stone structures and water features that are connected by this system of planetary communication. A kind of invisible but tangible nervous system. Stonehenge, Stone Calendar sites, temples, the great cathedrals and holy sites have been built on energetically focused points where lines intersect.
Within our own history, certain sympathetic expressions of human intentions have coincidentally appeared along these lines. Avenues of Industries, Democracies, Factories of War, Birthplaces of Peace, Industries of Tobacco, Alcohol, Caffeine, and even Chocolate lay in sympathetic lines across the landscape. Our hometown lies on the line known as the Chakra Ley that runs from Quebec to the Caribbean. Along it are cultural and spiritual centers devoted to raising the consciousness of communities. Vermont Institute of Contemporary Arts, MassMoCA, Tanglewood Music Center, Clark Art Institute, and Leverett Arts Center, are found here, among others. Spiritual Centers are clustered along this line as well: Mahalo, Dzoghen, Manitou, Temenos, Woolman Hill Quakers, Vipassana, Stone Calendar sites, Starseed, Arkhom, among many others. Churches large and small, synagogues, and other houses of worship abound here.
We live in a dream antenna.
Here we also live on a giant outcropping known as the Chester Dome. A unique feature composed of white stone, three miles deep, that stretches from Newfane to Mount Ascutney, that connects us to the heartbeat of the continent through the star field, and through the matrix of the web.
As we can see and hear the events across the world through technology, others may also feel the results of our work here. We are blessed with a medium of communication as vast as a world. We are not as impotent as we so often feel, but empowered. Not all-powerful, but all-capable. We are not alone, we are assisted.
The earth is dreaming with us.
Her heartbeat, a pulse between the poles known as the Schumann frequency, at one time so stable that governments calibrated to it, has nearly doubled its pace in the past twelve years. The continents, which have drifted slowly for eons across the mantle, are now arranged in a magnificent array of order and power, conducting our thoughts and dreams like crystals and water, an interconnected matrix of crystalline structure.
We reflect the life of our planet. We manifest her gifts as her beloved children. Is it a wonder that we too have created the internet, using the same tools, silica and light and sound? That we too have created the world wide web? Our technologies and our lives mirror the beauty and potential of this truth. Like a world gone mad on Twitter.
We are in an age of transmission. A world of building community and order based on freedom and responsibility. And Dreams.
What is this that we all feel, but seem to have no words for? Many of us have left behind what passes for normal elsewhere to live here, among these treasures.
And to dream.
We are in an age of Transition. Today there is a passing of the torch. The Sage wand, if you will. From this circle, from the zero, from emptiness spring all possibilities.
Where miracles are possible.
III
It had been snowing as Hayden led us around the Medicine Wheel. With the sage torch burning, a small miracle occurred. A miracle is not the impossible, it is instead, more of a wonderful thing, something that might happen in a dream.
As we returned to the Eastern Door, a tiny ring of smoke rose from the wand into the still night air. A small, perfect thing. A pristine, white ring drifted out above us and lingered there, slowly undulating in the darkness inside the circle of the Medicine Wheel.
Hanging in the light of a flashlight was a wonder from the ashes of a torch. The Unbroken circle, both embrace of heritage and preparation for the future.
The ring drifted past each of us and began a slow turning. While remaining unbroken, it twisted into a Möbius Strip, a cosmic figure 8, a symbol of infinite potential across time and space.
It was an affirmation, a kind of currency of contact between us and our higher angels. A gift, a hailing from the spirits of the land. On this day we joined to raise the consciousness of ourselves, the planet, and beyond. It requires the old and the new, each generation contributing to the dream of a world ready, ever widening, deepening, rising.
We paused long enough to inhale a small miracle.
As we reached the center of the Wheel and lit the offering, white smoke rose around the drum, mixing with our breaths. As Hayden began his beautiful dream, we struck the drum from the four directions and a heartbeat moved through the snow into the stone beneath it. Into the field around us, into the water running below ground to the Williams River. It passed through the altar and the portal, the star gate, and into the star field of mountains and lakes. It was heard in Quebec and the Caribbean. It was felt on the corn covered volcanoes of Guatemala, and the mountain peaks of Peru. Whales sang of it in the ocean trenches and dolphins breached, breathing it into clouds, snowing on distant mountains.
It was 6:03 PM. An end to the advance of darkness, and the journey into light began.
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You can hear a reading of Hayden’s Dream as it was presented at the Vermont Institute of Contemporary Arts with this link to my SoundCloud channel here below:
Words and Imagery copyright 2014 Harry D. Hudson
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In 2008 I was introduced to Peter Champoux. His Book Gaia Matrix has influenced the work of many with a deeper understanding of our connection to place, the planet, and to worlds of insight. Thank You Peter for your devotion to the Great Work of our Age.
