Dear Paco,

I just want to say this in response to your dialogue with Russ. I have read your work over the years, along with yours and my exchanges, and I feel an impulse to tell you what you already know I am sure—you are a Great Lover. Your dreams, perhaps encapsulated by the dream, “I have an Aphroditic responsibility,” demonstrate this truth clearly. From the two-year old’s experience with the honeybee to your more recent “Mary-Honeybee-Lute” dream, love shines forth in you. Cosmic love! You have access to Cosmic love and the Guest knows when he/she is welcome, thus bringing his/her reality through you in beautiful ways to the community, starving as it is of that love. All your life, you have faithfully taken up the Aphroditic responsibility your dream assigns to you. All the reader has to do is read your dreams if anyone wants to know and feel how Cosmic love presences. (Customary) words fail and the heart opens! The possibility of a new way of speaking arises…

Much warmth to you and Russ, who knows how to pace with you gracefully, to bring this love forth into actuality.

John

 

Dear John,

I know you know how welcome your reflections are, in your response to ONTSO #7. I thank you once again for your kind thoughtfulness.

From the moment I first registered, then recorded, that dream of Mary—Lute—Honeybee, I knew with fair precision and unusual clarity just how valuable and important it would prove to be. For me, of course, but also for anyone else “with eyes to see.” Or as Blake put it, not just with “eyes of flesh,” but also “eyes of fire.” That’s why I write about dreams in the way I do. If I intuitively feel that a dream has collective import, I want to write about it—if I can—for others. Why? So that those who are inherently suited for such work—and it is definitely a lot of work—may be spurred to inquire into their own dreams, in search of the “gold” dreams so often contain, even when they frighten us. Or especially so!

With the advent of the honeybee dream, it was also quite obvious that, once again, I was being gifted—and “saddled”—with a tremendous responsibility.

I’m also pretty sure you understand the dimensions of such a multi-faceted responsibility that goes in so many directions and on so many levels. Such an important word: Response + ability = the ability to respond, i.e., the ability (and therefore the sacrificial willingness), to re—spond. That’s one of my favorite etymologies:

Re = again, plus spondere = to betroth, to make a promise. In return. It bespeaks a relationship to something or someone other than one’s own conscious ego-personality.

So, the responsibilities that you and I both carry and take seriously imply that it is not only for ourselves (i.e., out of sheer egocentrism) that we make such efforts as we do. Knowing that we are giving up a normal life of following the “norms” that others take for granted, as if those were the only sources of value.

It’s a long road of labor that we tread, as our “personal practice,” a road and value that few—among our now eight billion souls—recognize. Russ, of course, is one of the very few. And we are only two among those with the good fortune to have shared the vicissitudes of that “path” with Russ, who I am sure has mentored and guided many over the active years of his practice. In his depths of wisdom, he generally eschews the inflationary dangers of “praise,” but I mention it anyway! I know that Russ does not get “puffed up.”

I hope we can offer some of these reflections to others—perhaps even this “ONTSO” project might provide a forum to share. I generally leave those decisions to Russ.

Hope you and Anita are thriving, if that’s the right word. I like the Spanish verb aguantar. Which means to hold up or endure when faced with difficulties. So when I come to the coffee shop that I favor, I speak Spanish with the staff, who form much of what’s left of my “social life.” Mi sociedad. In effect, mi segunda familia!. Sometimes when they ask how I am, I reply: “Aguantando,” but I say it with a laugh or a smile. Because I actually do find it funny. Being old is a pain in the ass, but funny at the same time.

Take care, John.

Paco