Doodly-Doo Time

Either Andrea, my writing teacher, is psychic or I have pre-cognition. On Friday, I awakened to an idea thrumming through my head that I could distill the essence of a process I witnessed at camp last weekend by giving it poetic expression. 

Earlier in the week, my beloved had put on a Joni Mitchell album during dinner and one old favorite song was also running through my head. 

The convergence of the two brain waves yielded an attempt to use Ms. Mitchell’s exquisite meter and melody to carry the thoughts about camper “K’s” transformation from being exclusively in her own bubble - reading non-stop - to interacting with others at the camp. The turn-around for K happened in less than twenty four hours. Camp worked its magic on this twelve-year-old young woman and I wanted to relay the story succinctly - in a song.

I started noodling with my images of K in the dining hall using the rhythms and notes of Joni’s “The Priest” and completed one verse before getting to the Creative Life Writing Class Friday morning - thinking I could finish it later. After our customary two minute meditation, Andrea played a song, “Queen of the House,” which was a parody of Roger Miller’s hit from the ‘70‘s called “King of the Road.” She gave us our prompt: take a melody we already knew and rewrite the lyrics...

Gob-smacked is how I felt. Had she been listening at my bedroom window? Or had I somehow picked up her vibes as she was noodling with ideas for a prompt to share with us, her students?

Either way, it gets my attention that there are so many things we do not know about mind fields, ESP, coincidence and communication. This is not the first time something like this has happened to me.

When I was a student at The Healing Light Center Church, and attending Monday night classes in Glendale, I would often follow a train of thought while navigating the traffic to get there. Driving often puts me into a meditative or creative space. Most of the songs I wrote came through while on the road. Half a dozen times, when I got to Rosalyn Bruyere’s class, I was astonished to hear that the topic for the night was exactly what I had been thinking about during my commute. How did that happen?

The song about the camper set to Joni’s lilting melody is beside the point. Maybe I’ll finish it; maybe I won’t. It was fun to sing to the class what I had completed by the end of our ten minute free-write, but what seems more compelling for me is that notion of “tuning-IN” to what thought waves are out there to be surfed.

If all communication is electrical energy of some sort, can we learn to tune thought waves in - much like we tune in a radio station? My honey and I often have similar dream themes to share in the morning.

Middle space is the place I and many daydreamers like to stare into... where thoughts just riff or drift with no urgency or compulsion. A.A. Milne’s poem reminds me of this meditative place...

Half-way down the stairs is a place where I sit

There isn’t any other place quite like it

Half-way down the stairs isn’t up and isn’t down

It isn’t in the nursery; it isn’t in the town

And all sorts of funny thoughts go ‘round and ‘round my         head

It isn’t really anywhere, it’s somewhere else instead.

The territory of the dream or reverie is valuable real-estate for humans. I fear we have polluted much of it with noise, worry, self-bashing, imperative actions and non-sensical compulsions meant to quiet the worry/terror. Each of us carries some terror scenario.

The terror-story is rampant and ugly. It has laid down a dingy film over the territory of gnosis, which might be described as the direct apprehension of deeper truths. We are left bereft of that ability to use “doodly-doo” time (staring into middle-space) for sweet and productive connection-making. No time to breathe deeply? No time for inspiration.

It is said that Einstein had a favorite after-dinner game. He would sit at the table and intently work at balancing a fork on his thigh. It would fall time after time. In that moment of the fork falling, he was said to have beheld worlds of insight coming to him - helping him to work out his theories. Einstein’s fork in free-fall is an example of the “in-between-state” - neither upstairs nor down, neither here nor there...

Yoga has a word for that peaceful in between place: dva-da-shanta. Shanti = peace. It’s the place between the horizon and the sky; the suspended place where the swing pauses before changing direction; the time between dark and dawn or dusk and night-time. Dvadashanta can be felt during meditation as well. It’s that space between the end of the exhale and the beginning of the inhale - where we just might fall into the vastness of our essential nature.  It is here where we may find our true connection to all that is. It is certainly a prime real-estate location to enjoy visiting again and again.

The Iroquois talk of a “Field of Plenty” from which descends, via the cornucopia, whatever is needed by Earth’s Children, when we ask and give gratitude for the gifts in advance. How do we know what humanity may need unless we get quiet enough to hear?

May you find adequate “doodly-doo” time for your Self this week! Perhaps YOU are the conduit for the next best thing to support life on earth getting easier and sweeter. I wonder what’s coming next from the Field of Plenty...

Out beyond all notions of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.     ---Rumi