When Danika Dinsmore first invited me to do the 3:15 Experiment in 2001, I was curious, excited and afraid. My night terrors, I had discovered, typically occurred about 60-120 minutes after I went to sleep. In fact, one of my tricks in assessing whether something is a night terror or not is to check the time: if whatever is there is there when I’ve been sleeping for about an hour or more, it is most likely a night terror and not some scary visitation or burglar or murderer or whatever my mind had conjured up.
But still, I was afraid–what if after getting up at 315 and writing I went back to sleep and an hour or so later had a(nother) night terror? was it worth it? I decided to go for it anyway, and this week’s Poetry Train submission is from my second night of the experiment in 2001:
August 2, 2001 315am
no night terrors this night
yet
i lie in wait
is it better to toss and turn
restless
or to sink into sleep
only
to experience extreme
fear
which lurks
the night
just before
dreams
————————
8/2 too
the alarm sings
the little dog is excited
he’s just gotten to sleep
i know cuz he kept me awake
he likes to sleep right next
to my belly
whether it’s hot or cold
he circles himself there
when it gets light
birdlike
he gets restless
active
see I am trying out a
brightly lit blue phone
to find easy in the dark
it has already been moved
under the bed
still it glows
so he’s a busy dog
looks for fleas mostly
it’s an exciting chase
he yawns and licks my nose
he knows my name
for him I am special
Night Terrors banished by frankinscence and myrhh!!
It worked Friday night and Saturday night: no night terrors (that I remember anyway!)
What I did: Friday night, about 9pm, I lit a 3 Kings charcoal, placed several nuggets of frankinscence and myrhh on it, and my husband and I sat outside on the deck and talked. I was very stressed out, but as we sat there, and as I inhaled the incense along with the fresh rain cleansed night air, and added more resin as the resins burned out, I began to unwind after about an hour. At about 90 minutes, I felt a wave of relaxation, a wave of release; I felt like I was light, not so weighed down by my troubles, not so overwhelmed by my anxieties, and the requirements of my life. I felt like my head was balanced lightly on my shoulders, and my body balanced lightly on my feet. I felt as relaxed as if I had just had a 90 minute massage, and I was ready to go to bed, ready to sleep, and to sleep peacefully. We sat a little longer, then came into the house and put the burning remains in our shower as we brushed our teeth and got ready for bed so that the scent infused our bedroom.
On Saturday, I burned the resins on and off during the day and the evening. I didn’t ever simply sit with the resins burning, but at the end of the day, I felt relaxed and ready to go to bed.
I wonder if it can be addicting? something to check into… I just realized that a root word in frankincense is incense.
new moon 3/7 signals more change
It was just an intuition that I hadn’t had a chance to follow-up–that the changes started with last month’s new moon and powered by the full moon/lunar eclipse would still be in action through the following new moon…Today I read on astrology.com:
On (Friday)March 7, the new Moon in Pisces marks a new lunar phase and a fresh beginning. Uranus conjuncts this new Moon, giving you a fresh perspective that inspires important change. Surprises and sudden events are also a well-known feature of this conjunction – stay tuned!
Night Terrors & aromatherapy
I’ve had Night Terrors for as long as I can remember–I just didn’t know what they were called until about 15 years ago when someone diagnosed the strange realistic hallucinations which caused my heart to beat faster than imaginable and for me to scream and to sometimes jump out of bed –and then forget the whole thing in the morning–as a sleep disorder called night terrors. She also told me that there did not seem to be a cure or medication to help.
About 8 years ago, I started taking omega 3s. A positive side effect has been a reduction in Night Terrors as long as I take mega doses of omega 3s. With all the stress due to the activities of the Church of the Asshole neighbors, I have found that even with significant doses of omega 3s, I am still having Night Terrors.
Last week when I purified the house with the frankinscence and myhrr…I had peaceful sleep! But I didn’t smudge every day and subsequently, the Night Terrors are back.
In subsequent posts, I will share some of my Night Terrors, some of the poems I’ve written about the Night Terrors, and information as I find out about it.
An Extra Day to Blog: February 29, 2008 aka Leap Day
Today is Friday, February 29, 2008–aka Leap Day. Leap Day comes once every 4 years to help our calendar play catch up since each year has an extra 6 hours to it (4 x6 = 24).
What did you do with your “extra” day? Did you use it to blog????
Benefit for Art City 3/8 3-??
“FANDANGO AMERICANA”
Proceeds from Fandango Americana will help re-construct the Westside Ventura icon, Art City. This innovative collective of artists has been part of the community since 1985. Art City has recently undergone great struggle, having to tear down most of its existing building structures in
IN VENTUCKY: Poets David Oliveira & Al Young
The Tuesday Night Poets present:
730pm February 26: David Oliveira + 0pen mic
The Artists Union Gallery 330 California Street Ventucky
This Wednesday, February 27 from 12:45-1:45 in LS-8
The Oxnard College Speakers Series presents…
Title: What’s Happening on Earth: A Poetry Reading by Al Young
In celebration of African American History Month, Al Young, Novelist, Editor and California State Poet Laureate will read his original poetry and will speak from his heart and experience about creativity and human survival.
Al Young will be visiting here also Monday April 21: 12-1245pm he will read and discuss poetry and poetics; 130-230p he will read prose and poetry and discuss writing and the writing process. There may be an evening performance with a jazz trio, a slide show, and a panel discussion on arts, academia, and environmental activism.
Here’s a video of a news broadcast about Al’s work as poet laureate:
i would rather be an oak than a eucalyptus
For the Poetry Train this week, my offering is a poem based on a freewrite I did a few years ago out on Santa Cruz island, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Ventucky. It was published in Artlife Limited Editions 20th anniversary issue as a concrete poem in the shape of the tree (which you can’t quite tell by this scanned image). I am not talented enough
as a blogger to make a concrete poem in this space yet!
If you’ve read any of my recent posts about rituals and burning maybe you will see why I chose this poem for this week.
i would rather be an oak
i would rather be an oak
coast live oak: quercus agrifolia
hundreds of years old
a graceful granary for acorn woodpeckers
but to be a eucalyptus
wouldn’t be bad
i would grow fast & furious
vast horizontal branches
extending toward sunrise
& yes to the stars
heavy with leaves
i sweep the ground
i would be a huge billowy sail
with the wind we would r i d e
you could swing your way up to my crow’s nest
we’d find our way
you could hang on my branches
& bounce back
i would cover the ground with
my rich intoxicating menthol scent
a thick carpet of leaves
nothing can compete
the earth embraces me
damp & cool
i would be young forever
my peeling bark would never betray my age
a new skin every season on my limbs
freshly shaped & pruned with each passing storm
my leaves would never go gray
but always red & tawny, crisp & fresh
i would be home to virginia
great horned owl: bubo virginianis
sheltering her
she protects me from
corvus corax: raven
ravenous, raucous, rude
hidden in my branches, she perches high
scoops up unsuspecting
spermophilous beechiyi: ground squirrels
devours them, digests them, regurgitates them
my carpet of leaves decorated with
skulls, ribs, tibias, teeth
no you wouldn’t leave children with me
i would be a grand & ferocious eucalyptus
elegant, colorful, intimidating
a maiden aunt not a matriarch
until a freeze does me in or
a fire weakens me and
fallen i become
porch for house wren
yard for sceloporous occidentalis: blue belly lizard
balcony for tyranus verticalus: western kingbird
nursery for peromyscus: deer mice
bench for humans
a blaze on the beach
my ashes would drift
& i would travel the earth
don’t brush me aside
let me land on your tongue
& you have me forever
purification: pine, frankinscence and myrhh
Following our smudging ourselves and the house with white sage on the eve of the lunar eclipse and embracing our house with a circle of protection (a smudged string we encircled out house with), the following day I burned pine incense and Tibetan Purging Incense Powder, then, on the advice of Lucy in the Sky, I learned how and why to burn frankinscence and myrhh on the third day.
I knew frankinscense and myrhh were biblical–that the Three Wise Men or Kings had brought gold, frankinscence and myrhh to the baby Jesus when he was born but I had no idea what they were or what they looked like or what to look for. As a child I thought they were some rare exotic magical substance. Now I know that both are resins made from saps of trees–incisions are made into the cambion layer, the living layer between bark and hardwood (deadwood) which encircles the tree. Sap, the tree’s blood, oozes out to harden into a resin, a hard substance that will melt when heated, and in melting, releases scents which go directly through our nostrils into our body, our lungs, our hearts, our bloodstreams, and which we eventually breathe out through the pores of our skin.
It is a long and amazing story but it worked out that Lucy happened to have the keys to a store which carried what I needed. She let herself in, found what I needed, figured out the price and the tax, found a blue velvet bag to put the resin in, and away I went. The nuggets are small, about the size of you littlest fingernail. But what to do with it?
On an abalone shell which had belonged to the grandfather of one of closest friends and former housemate here, I put Three Kings charcoal and resin on top, then I lit the charcoal. (You can also light the charcoal and then put the resin on top). I put a few nuggets of each on top, and as they burned down, I added a few more. (Side note: the charcoal powder created by the resin was used to make kohl eyeliner! I haven’t tried this yet.) I smudged the outside of the house first, from bottom to top, with extra care on all the windows and doorways, then the inside. Before we went to bed last night, I burned a bit more.
Since burning, cleansing and purifying with the sage, the pine, the frankinscence, and the myrhh, my bouts of sleeplessness, my dreamless stressful nights have been transformed…I am tired, sleepy when I should be, and my mind my body relaxes into a dreamful, restful, problem solving sleep.
and then this morning (Sunday) we went to church!
everything’s hitched to everything else
John Muir wrote that if you tug on something, you’ll find it’s hitched to everything else in the universe…and that would include you…and me…and the church of the asshole neighbors.
Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything is part of everything else.
Everything has energy.
Everything has spirit or consciousness.
still with me?
Or, as the Beatles put it, “I am he and you are we and I am she and we are altogether” or something along those lines:
Everything has energy.
Some energy feels good: we desire it, we feel good in it; feeling good give us energy and sustains us. Positive energy creates more positive energy.
Some energy doesn’t feel good: it makes us uncomfortable. Even if we don’t know why, we don’t want to be around it; negative energy saps our energy, makes us feel bad. Negative energy creates more negative energy.
Being surrounded by members of the church of the asshole neighbors for many years now has created so much negative energy that it has become debilitating; it has sapped my energy to the extent that I am having difficulties balancing their negative energy with our positive energy, and finding it downright impossible to find the energy to right their wrongs (for example, to provide the DA’s office with information they need to enforce the restraining order, to provide my insurance company with the information they need to determine if they will file a motion to enforce a settlement agreement, to help the city enforce code violations by my neighbors which are impacting my property etc). In addition, this toxic energy has impacted negatively on my relationships with my family, my friends, and my employer.
What to do?
Positive energy can be created, evoked through prayers and rituals; making positive energy can be as easy as making love, lighting a candle, sharing a hug, expressing positive and hopeful ideas.
Sometimes more powerful rituals are needed, rituals which will protect a home and its inhabitants from the negative energy raging around it (failing hillsides, drug deals, trespassing, fights).
The two days prior and the three days following a lunar eclipse are particularly powerful days for creating change, for changing energy. It is a time of flux, a time of energy balancing, a time for cleansing, reflection, renewal. Energies run high and powerful.
We are using the energy set in motion to cleanse, to replace undesirable energy with desirable energy, to replace hatred, anger and fear with love, love, love. We cleansed the house in the hour before the eclipse with white sage and love. Four of my closest friends and my sister “smudged” the house, inside and out, by burning white sage leaves which banishes negative energy. Smoke was wafted across doors, windows, mirrors, the perimeters and then into the center of rooms. Windows and mirrors outside, and the outside perimeter of the house was smudged, so that inside and outside, from floor to ceiling, had been touched with smoke and cleansed. Finally, we smudged a roll of string and wrapped it around the perimeter of the house, and part of our property, particularly in contested areas (where a neighbor assaulted me and where he cut into our fences and gates) as a circle of protection.
***From the Element of Fire Comes this smoke,
which is Air.
From the Element of Earth Grows this plant,
which is Water.
I call upon the Elements and the Blessings of Spirit
To please cleanse our home
For the good of all.***
While this is a lovely rite which I found online at ambrosia’s website , we kept our intention simple and focused on banishing hate and bringing in love, with the emphasis on having loving thoughts and feelings.
more soon…
art predator 