Mystical Tarot Realms
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Foundation
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THE GLITTERING WEB
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
When I was young, I nearly stepped
into a glittering web large enough
to capture me. I stared, transfixed,
until I glimpsed a jewel with many legs
in the corner of the web. I galloped away
as though I'd witnessed the terrible weaver
of our fate. Soon I found oak trees growing
within the foundation of a house next
to the river. Alone, I inched along
the top of the foundation wall until
a disembodied voice stated, "You will
be back in thirty-five years." I dashed
in terror along the path until I found
the web torn apart, fluttering in the breeze,
the spider gone. I returned unexpectedly
thirty-five years later.
I did not attempt to grasp the water
as I pondered the river. I did not mourn
all the torn webs. I sat quietly, waiting
to hear the voice again,
but all I heard were warblers,
my soul drenched with peace.
Suite No. 5, Seventh Movement:
THE GLITTERING WEB
I’ve had a number of experiences that suggest that we each have a destiny. When I was eleven on several occasions I heard voices that predicted the future. One day, for instance, as the rest of my family was fishing, I discovered the foundation of a house in the floodplain of the Kings River. Tall oak trees were growing inside the foundation where a house used to be. As I was playing on the foundation wall, a voice predicted that I would be back in thirty-five years.
Thirty-five years later I returned unexpectedly. I had no idea where I was most of the time when my family went fishing or took a long road trip, so I had no idea where the foundation was located. That day, I was simply driving down the one-lane road next to the river and happened to look down at the floodplain at just the right moment. If I had looked down a second later, I would not have been able to see the foundation.
Other predictions and powerful intuitions about the future also came true, usually many years later, one notable prediction being about how I would search for the remnants of Native American cultures. Perhaps every moment in one’s life is predetermined, or perhaps all of time exists at once and humans can only experience time as if in a tunnel. If that is the case, then the recent upheaval in my life was always part of my fate. Perhaps my wife was always destined to leave me after thirty years.
If our marriage is like a torn-apart web, perhaps I simply need to learn how to let go of the webs in my life. Perhaps I just need to remember them for what they were without even attempting to understand why they fell apart. My fate is to find the village sites of a people who had lived in the region for thousands of years, not to find the people themselves—they are long gone. My fate is to find the foundation of a house in the floodplain of a river with trees growing inside of it, not to find a family in a mansion by the river. My fate is to find peace even while finding the remains of what has been lost.
Pink Fairy Lanterns and Wood Stars
ONE PATH
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
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In the shade, the ravishing late spring flowers,
tier upon tier of Chinese purple houses, interwoven
with pink fairy lanterns, crowned by umbels
of evenly spaced Ithuriel's spears. Where
the embankment slopes steeply, I climbed
onto a rock by the rushing water. I felt dizzy,
leaning into poison oak. Women had ground acorns
in a stone at the confluence of those creeks.
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I had never been there before, but I
somehow knew a path would lead me
to another rock with mortars, above me
on a ridge. I found the path
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a few feet away running below
the branches of a huge oak.
I don't know if we can return
to people and places we love,
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Ithuriel's Spears
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but on that one path I was part
of tapestries forever changing,
the threads eternal,
not bound by time.
A kaleidoscopic blue and pink
and purple, the penstemon flower bloomed
where the path met with the other
village site, and I lost myself
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in the shade, near
the pounding stone,
near the pounding stone.
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Suite No. 5, Eighth Movement:
ONE PATH
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Thanks to my wife, I grew to love nature. I think relatively few people go out into nature anymore, even for fishing, hunting, or camping. Many children are terrified of anything natural, such as spiders or mice, and often react in a panic when they see unfamiliar creatures. I think people are afraid that they will find nothing but spiders and snakes and ferocious predators and dead animals in the natural world. In all the years that I’ve gone out into nature, I’ve seen only a few spiders and snakes and predators, and they wanted to have nothing to do with me. And it’s extremely rare to find a dead animal in the wild. But I have encountered ravishing beauty and massive trees and awesome mountain peaks, and I have often experienced a shift in consciousness that enables me to experience the spiritual dimension.
My theory is that the brain tunes to a vibration similar to the “Heartbeat of Mother Earth,” also known as the Schumann Resonance, which is on the border between theta and alpha brain wave frequencies. In other words, a person who is comfortable in nature shifts into brainwave frequencies which are produced when a person is meditating, using the imagination, daydreaming, experiencing a flow of ideas, or performing a repetitive task. Theta brain waves are associated with profound inner peace, mystical knowledge, symbolic visions, transformation of unconsciously held limiting beliefs, physical and emotional healing, inner wisdom, and psychic abilities--all of which I have experienced in nature.
One such experience occurred in late spring when I went hiking along a creek in Watt’s Valley. After hiking for a mile or two in the heat, I was exhausted and plopped down on a stone by the creek. After a minute or two, I noticed cups in the stone and heard women laughing. No one else was nearby. I had sat down right next to a Native American pounding stone. Suddenly I knew without a doubt that a trail would lead me to another pounding stone on a nearby ridge. I had no way of knowing this—I had never been there before. I scrambled up the slope and in a few seconds found the path. I followed it up the hillside and in a few minutes found the pounding stone on the ridge. As I walked on that path, I knew that the soul is not bound by time, that the spirit moves within fields upon fields of energy forever changing but eternal. I suspected that I had discovered a place where I had lived a past life.
I do not mention it in the song, but I also knew without a doubt that I would find other pounding stones on the ridge across the creek. Still exhausted, I climbed the slope on the other side and didn’t find anything, but I sensed a presence. Disappointed, I headed back home as the sun was setting.
I returned a few months later and discovered pounding stones and house pits on the other ridge, just as I had suspected. I didn’t find them the first time because of all the leaves and dirt and grass on top of the stones. Oddly, as soon as I found the pounding stones, I could see the house pits clearly as well, as if some inner sight had suddenly been granted me.
Every time I return to the city, I feel my mind shift back into the beta brain wave frequency, and I start to doubt my intuitive knowledge. Only one brain wave frequency is acceptable these days in our society, it seems, and people have come to fear intuitive knowledge as much as they fear spiders and snakes and ferocious predators and dead bodies.
Pounding Stone at the Confluence of the Kings River and Sycamore Creek
THE CONFLUENCES
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
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Descending the steep slope
on unstable stones,
I remembered--
from another life--
a vision of my return—
before the dam,
before the road,
I had seen my future self
among dark skeletons
of oaks and sycamores
preserved by cold water,
and bridge abutments,
like walls attached
to nothing—
As I lived the vision,
the river meandered
in the drought
as it did before
the dam, pestles still
near pounding stones—
ancient paths
still vanishing
in the grass.
Am I living
a vision
even now,
always
at the confluences?
Suite No. 5, Ninth Movement:
THE CONFLUENCES
At Pine Flat Reservoir, where a pounding stone juts from the steep, denuded slope halfway between Trimmer Springs Road above and the reservoir below, a soul path grows clearer. The canyon below holds the dark weight of suppression: buried beneath the water, at the confluence of Sycamore Creek and the Kings River, lingers the ancient village site of a vanished tribe, the reservoir stretching out like a vast collective shadow.
Under water now an old dirt road meanders through the village site between skeletal oaks preserved by cold water for over fifty years, the support columns of a bridge like abandoned fortress walls within the creek bed. Not far away, where Big Creek meets the Kings, a stone chimney looms above the cockleburs that have spread wherever the reservoir has devoured the oak woodlands.
A spiritual awakening can be strangely unbalancing. Legend has it that two out of three who enter the magical forest go mad. After my spiritual awakening twenty-five years ago, I began to suspect that other people, including my wife, were beginning to consider me strange, even deeply weird, while I was just content to go about living my authentic life. I'm sure some people will even consider a few of my songs kind of weird. That doesn't bother me. They are simply part of who I am now.
In a drought year, when I was exploring the former contours of the river and creek at the bottom of the reservoir, my soul flowed into a confluence of time: Even though I had never been there before, I suddenly recalled that I had in some other life envisioned what I was experiencing, and my soul not only foresaw my return but also knew that I would remember the vision that I was experiencing in that other life.
As I was living the vision from some other life, I sensed that my core self is like a vast watershed with forgotten trails and streams, transcending the comfortable "I" of my personality, transcending even what my culture has done to ecosystems and races. Somehow my soul knew of the devastation of this place beforehand and knew also that I would experience what the canyon would look like in a time of drought--after a dam had drowned it under hundreds of feet of water.
I have hiked all over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, finding Native American trails and village sites wherever I go, on public and private lands. The pounding stone on the steep slope is atypical. Most pounding stones dominate comparatively flat land where the tribe could build huts, on ridges or near water. The reservoir has eaten away the trails as well as the vegetation, so it is impossible to know how the stone connected to other sites, but I at least can surmise that it served as a lookout point where women ground acorns, warning the village below of potential threats.
As I peer down into the reservoir from the pounding stone, I hear only the lapping of water and the wind moaning occasionally around the canyon. The sense of disconnection is palpable. A trail must have led down to the village site that is now under water and up to other encampments because vanishing trails still link Native American sites in one huge net across the entire range, the boundaries rewoven with barbed wire. This pounding stone on the denuded slope represents social and environmental and historical disconnection on a large scale, but what my soul revealed in the vision at the bottom of Pine Flat Reservoir is that everything is connected, even beyond space and time, transcending the disconnections caused by race and culture. The soul, or higher self, a state of lucid meta-conscious awareness, knows the divinity and kinship of all things; the collective shadow reveals in stark contrast the need to strive for the courage to live from the perspective of eternity, to re-establish the sense of kinship, harmony and order for self, family, and community.
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Native American Village Site at Confluence of Sycamore Creek and the Kings River
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For years I have explored the watershed of the Kings River, finding again and again places that feel familiar, the paths next to streams leading to ancient Native American village sites--places so familiar, in fact, that I have often believed without a doubt that I once haunted that watershed in another life. At the same time, I feel in some ways that over the past thirty-five years, I was intended to know the terrible shadow of disconnection, so that I would experience a spiritual transformation moving me from a transient sense of identity to a sense of eternal and expansive Being. If there is fate, then I have to believe that some part of myself, my higher self perhaps, did not let me veer from the path even though my incarnated personality expected so many other things (such as the continuation of my marriage).
Because I have experienced disconnection on many levels in the past four decades, I continue to explore a spiritual path that honors ancient wisdom and allows me to experience the mysteries without fear of purgation or hell, a path that enables me, in shamanic relationship with the land, to call forth the elemental energies of nature and the powers of local deities and great Shining Ones, a path that celebrates the interweaving of visible and invisible energies, Other worlds and Under worlds, and the spiraling cycles of transformation, birth, death, and regeneration.
Fishing Hole
HOLES
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
Near a series of smooth holes
in the rock, we sat quietly
for hours, not catching
anything. In one hole, a butterfly edged
on the slick surface toward stagnant water.
In another, two butterflies hung frozen,
wings open, the web
barely visible against gray stone.
You died a week later. Twenty years,
and the butterflies are here again.
The stone is cool and smooth,
almost comfortable enough
to sleep on. In another twenty years
I will wake, the same
age as you,
the water still flowing
into the deep pool as we gaze
at the buckeyes, the butterflies
rising and falling, our bodies
still shadows in the flowing water.
Suite No. 5, Tenth Movement:
HOLES
I know that a person you love never entirely leaves you. There is always a shadow of memory that remains.
“Holes” is one of my favorite songs even though my wife was completely indifferent to it. She listened to it once and didn’t offer any compliments or criticisms. She never sang it with me. I suspect that she forgot it immediately after I sang it to her.
My wife and I had a huge argument not long after I wrote this song. I complained that she never practiced enough with me, and she complained that she practiced too much. I relied on her to make the songs sound beautiful, but she gave me the impression that she thought my song-writing was a waste of time. We were getting into a hole financially, and focusing on music wasn’t helping. I got so mad that I told her that I never wanted to sing my songs with her again. She had a simple response: “Fine.” Soon afterwards she went into a teaching program and obtained a credential. We never sang together again after that argument.
In my mid-thirties, twenty years after my father died of a heart attack, I unexpectedly returned to the hole where my father and I had fished together for the last time. I realized then that in twenty years I would be fifty-five, the same age as my father when he died. Coincidentally, I started experiencing A fib when I was fifty-five, and the song seemed almost like the fulfillment of a prophecy.
Even though I don't remember much about our last fishing trip, I clearly remember my father gazing at the buckeyes while he fished, as if trying to understand why the leaves had already turned cinnamon-colored. The leaves of the buckeye are the first to turn toward the end of summer, as if the tree is on some schedule different from the other trees in this part of the world. When all the leaves fall, its silver bark stands out from the rest of its surroundings. It is so different from one season to the next that you might not realize in different seasons that you are looking at the same tree.
I never would have guessed, when we first got together, that my wife and I would grow to love buckeye trees so much, or that we would grow apart to the point that she would no longer recognize me.
Now that my wife lives in Florida, I might never see her again. She is now only a memory, like my father.
Recently I returned to "the couple" by the creek, and I got the sense, just for a moment, that she was there with me. I feel haunted by the loss of my father whenever I return to our old holes, and now I will always feel a little haunted whenever I return to places that my wife and I once explored together.
Pounding Stone after a Rain
THE ROCKS
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
After the rain, newts plodded
over moss and leaves, recoiling
as we stepped near them. They blended
so well with the wet leaves
that we had to watch each step.
We would stop at an outcrop of rock,
sliding our fingers over soft, wet moss,
and we would swear that the rocks--
harboring other creatures, sprouting
star moss--are as significant
and mysterious as ourselves.
In the sycamores, a phoebe chirped,
the steward of the confluence of the creeks.
People who once ground acorns
by the creeks have vanished,
their descendants building casinos
on nearby reservations. Sometimes
we would honor friends, who, fighting
for wildness, had been threatened, blackballed
or ruined. I once believed we would fight
for wildness the rest of our lives together,
but now you're gone, and I slowly
build a fortress with mossy rocks,
for a moment no longer a trespasser,
my chants protecting the solitude
of the heron, the granaries of the woodpecker,
the ranges of the newt and bobcat and all
the tribes of trees and flowers,
my magic gathered from wetness,
mossy rocks, fallen leaves.
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Suite No. 5, Eleventh Movement:
THE ROCKS
I lost my job as the director of an environmental organization when the Fresno office was shuttered due to personnel problems and lack of funds. In retrospect, I don't think that it was a coincidence that as soon as the group became effective, it suffered a deluge of problems: a woman submitted a bogus sexual harassment lawsuit against one of the field managers; another field manager started a mutiny by forming a bogus organization with a similar name but no board of directors; numerous break-ins; eviction from the office because of overdue late charges, and the list goes on and on. Administrators in the central office back east provided no support at all. I ended up seeing the worst in people—lying, backstabbing, betrayal, all of which undermined the great work we had been doing in the community.
After my experience in the political arena, I know now that we live in a faux democracy where elected officials go through the process of pretending to represent the public during interminable meetings, working instead behind closed doors for the contributors who got them elected. Other creatures have little or no chance of surviving this system. Stop one bad project and zoning changes are made for others. Not even a well-funded organization can keep up, especially if that organization is paralyzed by personnel problems. Even if a grassroots organization manages to whip up enough public opposition to stop egregious projects, other bad projects soon appear in the pipeline. I might sound paranoid, but a successful effort to undermine an effective citizens' organization is good for the bottom line: Without fresh air and sunshine, business as usual remains highly profitable for the top few percent. The San Joaquin Valley has been compared to a toilet bowl. I have little hope for the foothills and mountains as long as our political system remains the same.
POPPIES
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
Together we have waded through fire,
the heatless flame altering color
slightly at each step and each hour
of the season, the hues of goldfields,
lupine, fivespot, baby blue eyes, and owl's clover
mingling with these poppies
that burn time away
so that an instant or an age
is of no importance, and moving
or standing still, we
are like them,
burning quietly.
Suite No. 5, Twelfth Movement:
POPPIES
The sense of timelessness that I feel in nature has always helped me to transcend personal problems and gives me a greater perspective on human life in general. There is something about poppies blanketing a hillside that makes you feel significant as a spirit connected to the glory of the cosmos but insignificant as a human. Stepping carefully through the fire of poppies, you become more alert to all of the other flowers within the conflagration: the lupine and baby blue eyes and owl’s clover and popcorn. All creatures burning in this fire are as magnificent and mysterious as any other, and it doesn’t matter if you have known them for a few minutes or thirty years. Even an age is no longer important because the spirit within all of them is timeless, and you are grateful that you could spend even a few moments in the heatless flame.