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Posts Tagged ‘reptile cousin’

They say it’s a city that tests your mettle, whatever that is.  I don’t think the last couple of generations were born with any mettle, but some of us slip through these tests anyway.  It’s difficult to speak about coming to New York in order to wake up the capacity for compassion and empathy, when so much of the city tells you to shut these things off as a matter of survival.  The important lessons that one might learn in the desert can be taught here, but never comprehended, not in the same way.  With these cautions in mind, I checked into a room, and began to prepare for the time ahead.

I would be working with one of Castaneda’s disciples, is how it was explained to me.  It wasn’t something I could sign up for, it was a chance encounter where I was simply staring at the sidewalk cracks in St. Paul in just the right way, I suppose, and a friend of hers recognized some look in my eye.  That time, I recall, was one of the more disturbing phases of my young but still exhausted life, and I can’t imagine the look was promising.  But here I would find myself, two years later, getting ready to learn how to dream.

If this was going to be one of those shaman’s apprentice workshops where you get to meditate with aging singles and listen to electronic drums, I could have been happy.  Those are easy, and even at the worst, the only thing that happens is you might see a ghost, or perhaps a reptile cousin living in the head of one of your new friends.  This, however, I knew nothing about, only because it was not for anyone else in the world.  This is how it was explained.  I felt lucky and cursed at the same time.  Living through it, however, makes me feel much the same.  But I dream differently now, and there’s something about hunger that is never filled that keeps me in a state of perpetual unease.