PHOTOS: Sunday morning walk, mid-February, with Puppy Shadow around Ogle Lake

Ogle Lake sits in Brown County State Park, a hilly, forested area 15 miles from home in Bloomington Indiana. So grateful to have the forest, and the water, nearby! And as we were walking, I also felt great blessings within and around me, and the astonished recognition that all is right with the world, despite the topsy-turvy emotional state I have been lately experiencing. Indeed, I notice now, in my 75th year of life, that I “process pain” by opening to multidimensions. Yes, the pain is felt in my 3D body, perhaps even more powerfully than when I was young, since I do not fear pain, do not try to banish it, but instead allow and honor the strong, heavy bodily sensations that are themselves so intimately tied in with 3D emotions. Here is where all the sturm and drang of human affairs on this planet plays out. Blindly, driven by selfish survival needs, we crash about, trying to get what we think we must have to fill that yawning hole in the center of our being. As if we are not enough already! As if even our pain, especially the delicious rich stew of our seemingly unbearable suffering, is not our sublime teacher! As if it doesn’t burn off the dross! As if we do not “become whole” precisely by eating our own shadows.

In talking this way about 3D life, I slip into a higher dimension, 5D, where I notice both my own and others’ inner lives, how rich they are, and how constrained by 3D contracts, forms that hold us in place and force us to learn those lessons. And I notice how the squirming aliveness of our various selves intersect and commune, sparking new avenues of mysterious generativity, yet often with less than full acceptance and understanding.

So in 5D I see/feel from a distance the great 3D drama of human life as  clashing characters on a stage, each playing an archetypal role, acting out certain inner impulses, and uncovering as we do, intense karmic pushback. Often, we repeat ourselves, or enact  variations on a theme, rather like a kaleidoscope, slipping round and round with different perspectives on the same archetypal play showing up, to present — at last! — the fullness of a well-rounded point of view that, because it has been more or less thoroughly “processed,” has expanded from point to panorama, a vast open field of possibilities. This breathtaking panorama awaits us when we release specific frames that bind us to expectations,  our own and others.

And even beyond 5D, to 7D. Not sure what that is, but I do feel/see it, the bodies and dramas of 3D, as they morph into 5D dancing, then — if we let them, if we dare to go further, further! — morph yet again into the invisible energetic realms of intense creativity where so much much more is possible than we can ever imagine down here in these heavy, gravity-held bodies — and even so, it’s all happening there just as in 3D and 5D, the very same story, but with different permutations revealing as concentric circles out from that center point of archetypal action — expanding circles that subtly, and with great and unknown purpose, suddenly or gradually evanesce old stuck forms and patterns into that mysterious wide open field of infinite possibilities.

Alone, with puppy Shadow, I stand upright in the forest by the lake, feet planted in the still dormant late winter soil, head open to the heavens, feeling the motions of 3D “me,” spirit infusing body, as “she” glides effortlessly down the trail, breathing the moment, relishing the morning.

See puppy Shadow with orange jacket on the trail, slightly left of center?

We stop to notice other people’s memories carved long ago. What is the all-too-human story behind each of these initials? Why did that person feel the need to memorialize that moment?

Last night it rained. This area, the inlet to the damned up lake, tends to be boggy anyway. Just glad the insects are not yet out!

About a quarter mile down the trail, I put my hand in my pocket to grab my iphone for another photo. . .  What? Not there? Increasingly frantic, I search the other four pockets (I’m wearing two coats), then back to the first pocket, astonished, no, truly alarmed!  I haven’t even finished paying for this damn phone yet! Can’t believe I actually dropped it. How could I have dropped it?

Forget 7D or even 5D. I’m back in the sturm and drang of 3D, desperate to locate a lost “possession.” (This reminds me of the remark that I want on my tombstone: “We think that on this planet what we are doing is moving stuff around. But really, everything we do with stuff is just an excuse for relationships!”) Oh, how I wished for a relationship at that moment! A companion with a phone on him or her, so I could say “call my phone, please!” But there I was with puppy Shadow, stuck on the trail, no, dumbstruck. How could I have lost it? And when? Where?

Gradually I calmed myself down. Went back into 5D where I could examine a wider field of vision in both space and time. Aha! It must have been when I stopped to take that boggy picture (see above). That’s about 1/4 mile back. I’ll look for it all the way as we turn around, but I bet that’s where I’ll find it. And sure enough I did. And again, briefly wanted a “relationship,” that same someone to take a picture of my phone lying upside down on the trail with his or her phone. Just to remind myself of what I can do when I’m not paying attention. When I’m not enough in 3D. When I “space out.”

On the way back, the sun actually tried to peek out of the clouds on this rather Heathcliffian day (you do remember Wuthering Heights?)

I kept looking for the big turtles that I often see around the southern shore of Ogle Lake. None. Instead, aha! a lone Canadian goose, hard to see, standing still and contemplative, through the weeds. (See him? Mid-photo, slightly to the left of midcenter, and off the right end of one of the logs.)

Of course I wondered what the symbolism of “goose” portends. And gravitated to this:

Goose reminds us that we all have our own “flight plan” that is totally accessable to us when we turn within for guidance. We may not always be able to totally see everything that lies ahead of us in life and yet we can learn to trust the wisdom within us that does know and has every potentiality provided for well in advance if we do learn to trust it.

Also, on the way back, gravitated to this old tree, the rich texture of its gradual decomposition.

Finally, driving home, I stopped at a usual spot, one which lifts me into the far horizons and reminds me of certain vast vistas in my homeland, the mountain west, north of Yellowstone. On this day of scudding clouds and haze, I could not help but see this photo as the visual image of my evanescing, melancholic interior state.