This morning I awoke at 5 am and having had eight hours sleep I got started with my morning practice. I have been doing this practice upstairs for a few months but I felt the pull to go outside again, get warmly dressed and set up on my deck. I rummaged and found some warmer clothes to wear, pulled out my winter wool hooded striped wrap, and got started. At some point I lit incense and the bee’s wax candle. There was no breeze outside to speak of.

I faced the big walnut trees, as that is the place behind which the sun comes up. There was a huge planet in the eastern sky. It was mostly hidden with branches. I leaned over on my side to get a good view through one of the holes in the branches. I lost my balance but had a good view.

As I lie there stretching this and that, I can totally ignore my leg pain. I suspect I have some kind of vested interest in keeping it there. It occupies my life quiet a bit.

The morning was beautiful, pretty quiet to begin with but I could hear the insects chirruping lowly all around me. The sun came up at 6.35am and I was ready to be sitting quietly, singing a love song. As the beautiful colors of the dawn arose all around me I had the impression of the music of the spheres singing over me. My face was full of smiles. 

The invitation to listen and hear the birds and insects join together in praise in the morning surrounded me. Just as I finished my chants, a wren flew on to the deck, on the corner, a little above where I was siting. Like myself, the bird was a bit tattered. I was fairly still at that time and I hooded my eyes and just kept them one-quarter open. 

I have this impression that if a bird can see my eyes, it will take off and I so wanted it to stay this close to me. I formed the thought that maybe it would sing. It stared directly at me a time of two but then seemed satisfied that I was no more that a log on the deck and just started to sing at the top of its voice. And as if that was not enough, it moved a quarter of a turn and repeated the song four times covering all four directions. 

The waves of the morning song broke over me, uniting all parts of me, lifting me into the morning sky and held me in this music of nature. This song united everything.

I had a dream experience of birds.

In my real life, I was invited out to gets some melon from a full august garden.  When I went there I found myself on a high chair, with a red seat and highly polished legs.  I had a mug of Tutsi tea in my hand and I was talking about dreams and chanting. I was out in the beautiful garden, full of produce, corn and three kinds of melons, tulsi and basil. There were cucumbers on the trellises and tomatoes. There were fruit trees and the tree that the Indian Yogi liked to grow also grows in this garden. That tree was more vine than branch and was supported by a cage.   

The house and garden are on the side of a hill, near the top, overlooking a valley and there was a dip down into farmland and up the other side onto the distance hill. It was a great expanse, a few miles wide. This is a high place from which to see rainbows when the rain sprinkles the valley and this evening to observe great white clouds gracing the sky.  

Here in this garden there was holy water sprinkled from the fountains of water supplying the water to the Golden temple in Western India. I heard of the practice of scattering salt in the foundation of a house and I have some water from the Mary Shrine in Knock in Ireland that I got from my mother by way of my sister Celine. I keep the hold water to bless myself for protection at times. 

It has been a few years since I was at that Holy Shrine of the Golden Tempe in India and I am so thankful to have been there. Most times I say a certain chant, I see the gold of that temple and I see a corresponding fine gold in my body below the naval. 

After an hour, not too fr from sunset, I went home with a whole baby melon under my arm and I ate half of it that evening for supper. Now it could fit in my refrigerator nicely. I woke up to practice a meditation and when it was finished I fell asleep and had a dream experience. 

In this dream experience, I was looking out over the valley described above. A flock of birds, all flying together were above me over the garden. The birds shone silver as they dived and turned in the air. The surprising thing that happened inside of me is that my body of a sudden blazed into a flying energy and as I saw and flew, I came back to by bed and darkness of my room, full of smiles at what just happened. 

The waves of flying broke over me, uniting all parts of me, lifting me into that vast sky space, and gently dropping me back into my body. Like the wren earlier this morning I carry that energy with me, often thinking of the sensation of flying and of the little flyer wren. I am grateful for this heaven on earth that is all about us. Love from Rose. 

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