The Catfish Museum and All Points of Possibility
Catfish: Points of Possibilities created by AI Art Machine
I am given a tour of an underground water museum. The tour guide takes me to the catfish exhibit. I see a catfish swimming toward me and I see it’s skeleton and how it forms and grows.
I can see sound waves and the potential of energy before it is “activated” in the water. The potentials appear as dots or points. I see the catfish navigate all the possibilities at once.
A propeller appears in the exhibit and it is churning my subconscious, like the deep waters.
At the end of the tour the guide gives me a jack-in-box toy made out of paper, but instead of a jester it is a catfish that pops out. I ask a lot of questions and the guide pawns me off to the exhibit programmer who is disinterested in telling me more. He mumbles something and turns his back toward his computer.
I take my folder of informational pamphlets and my paper catfish-in-the-box and I say I am ready to leave. This dream is an invitation to see the potentials of my life and desires.
There were poems inside this
Old hand-bound journals I made using repurposed fabric, found paper and ribbon.
Oh my darling demons!
Oh, my darling demons
I love you
I love you for all the drinks
and the flings
and the hearts you break —
including my own
But mostly, I love you
for the words you write
words wearing masks
and carrying machetes
and these words
are always so charming
even when they undress
to show the ugliest bodies
On sacred loneliness
This is not a how-to. There are no steps for shifting loneliness into solitude. Loneliness is an intrusion that makes my bones cold. Loneliness feels like a void and Solitude is a sanctuary. Some days I just feel separate from the universe.
I think of the Rupi Kaur quote “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself,” but what I am missing is not myself, but my connection with the Divine. And Yes, I know the Divine is also me, but knowing this doesn’t make the loneliness go away.
The gaping hole in my heart grows wider and I ache for a sign, or a signal of love, or for someone to seek me out. When I was in my twenties this is when I would go out to bars, get drunk, sleep around — anything to escape myself. What I do now is different.
I seek out nothing. I acknowledge that I am in pain and I sit with it. I imagine other humans feeling this same profound sadness with no source point and I breathe into that feeling. This is how I create an equilibrium. I remind myself this is a condition of being human. I find connection in the separateness and that is what brings me comfort.
This mystifying grief called loneliness belongs to you and it belongs to me and everyone else, and that is what makes it sacred.
All roads lead back to yourself
In dreaming life I pulled a tarot card. I saw myself in a sacred circle surrounded by other versions of myself pointing what felt like staves/wands/arrows. At first I felt cornered — was this something to ward off?
No, my subconscious interpreter said.
This card means that you are never worried about a missed chance. These are all versions of you existing after each road taken. Opportunity after opportunity will continue to arise. All roads lead back to yourself. You are never lost.
10 of Arrows
All roads lead back to yourself
The Labyrinth Theory
What I love about walking labyrinths is that the closer you get to the center the farther you are in distance. Life has often felt that way too.
A brief summary of the past 37 years: I am born to two teenage immigrants who speak no English. As they grow, I grow too. Their mistakes are my mistakes. I am uprooted and left behind. In my earliest memories, I am always alone. I write love letters to God and search for portals in trees. I will be the new girl in school 15 times. Being called “weird” or “poor” will never faze me. By age 10, I am irrevocably damaged and weighed down with worry. Poetry saves me. I write it all down — the dark parts and the dreams. I never stop searching for meaning. At age 17, I move across the country to survive on my own. Besides books and my own intuition — and the occasional Divine interference — there is no guidance. A decade is spent destroying when all I want is to create. After one near-death experience and three suicide attempts — at age 30 — I decide to get off Zoloft and heal through nature and talk therapy. I give up poetry for a brief time. I ground myself in the Earth. I meet my husband — my anchor. I grow beautiful friendships. I find my center. It feels a lot like the wonder and magic of my short childhood. All those years spent in the outer circles, I never knew how close I was to myself.
As human as possible
I scatter your moons like dice on a table. Pick one. You expel spirit animals from your body. The tiger that claws your heart out. The whale who always digs up your dreams. And that damn peacock you refuse to accept is you. We’re not here to be animals, I say. We’re here to be as human as possible. Find out what that means to you.
What happens to hearts while dreaming:
He said he would call me later that night while we were both sleeping, because in dreams our hearts disrobe themselves of muscles and tissues and details of life and they become entangled in light. Light, he said, that twists and forms shadows of every thing, and the shadows of things are not really things, but fragments of things that care for nothing but love.
Every beautiful thing
Before you become miserable in love, remember: not every beautiful thing is meant for you. sometimes the grown-up thing to do is ooh & ahh & walk away. 
Unraveling the Scarcity Mindset & The Soul of Money
Unraveling the “scarcity mindset” installed in me as a child was something I decided to tackle a couple months ago when I was mistakenly billed for a medical procedure. For a moment I thought I had to pay a thousand dollars, and even though I have the money, and more importantly, the ability to earn that money, I had a small anxiety attack that teleported me back to life before my 30s, when I had no money. I knew that if I didn’t deal with my “insufficiency” wiring that no matter how secure or stable I am in life I would never be as free and happy as I deserve to be. As we all deserve to be.
Below is a short poem I wrote — a glimpse into my childhood. After that are excerpts from a book that helped me complete this “soul work” of unraveling the scarcity mindset. Before this book has been a lot of other work: talk therapy, journaling, cutting cords, prayer and stillness. I learned to create a world of abundance and sufficiency. I am more mindful of the flow of money. I am grateful every day for food, a home and a warm bed. If you ever need someone to talk about this, you can email me at claudia@claudiadawson.blog.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”
At one point, a womb was enough. Then came birth and all my parents’ fears and failings and flails became mine. I was drowning too. Underneath poorness and not enough. Money came and went like a river in drought. Roofs came and went. Shelter lines came and went. A free loaf of bread and a peanut butter jar could last us all week. Saltines for dinner sometimes. A cup of noodles in tap water warming on a window sill. This had to be enough sometimes. At one point, a womb was enough. Another new school, another first day, I’m 10 and wearing an XL men’s t-shirt down to my knees. I try to make friends, try to be bigger than my circumstances. I carve out a safe space inside of me, follow my intuition. Keep my head above water. At one point, a womb was enough. Then I’m born and scarcity began to build a grave for me.
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
Once we define our world as deficient, the total of our life energy, everything we think, everything we say, and everything we do—particularly with money—becomes an expression of an effort to overcome this sense of lack and the fear of losing to others or being left out.
The toxic myth is that “more is better”. More of anything is better than what we have. It’s the logical response if you fear there’s not enough, but more is better drives a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition, and greed that only heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race.
More is better misguides us in a deeper way. It leads us to define ourselves by financial success and external achievements. We judge others based on what they have and how much they have, and miss the immeasurable inner gifts they bring to life. All the great spiritual teachings tell us to look inside to find the wholeness we crave, but the scarcity chase allows no time or psychic space for that kind of introspection.
When we believe that more is better, and equate having more with being more—more smart or more able—then people on the short end of that resource stick are assumed to be less smart, less able, even less valuable, as human beings. We feel we have permission to discount them.
This mind-set of scarcity is not something we intentionally created or have any conscious intention to bring into our life. It was here before us and it will likely persist beyond us, perpetuated in the myths and language of our money culture. We do, however, have a choice about whether or not to buy into it and whether or not to let it rule our lives.
By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.
Sufficiency resides inside of each of us, and we can call it forward. It is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances. Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough.
So often we think of “abundance” as the point at which we’ll know we’ve really arrived, but abundance continues to be elusive if we think we’ll find it in some excessive amount of something. True abundance does exist; it flows from sufficiency, in an experience of the beauty and wholeness of what is. Abundance is a fact of nature. It is a fundamental law of nature, that there is enough and it is finite. Its finiteness is no threat; it creates a more accurate relationship that commands respect, reverence, and managing those resources with the knowledge that they are precious and in ways that do the most good for the most people.
Money is a current, a carrier, a conduit for our intentions. Money carries the imprimatur of our soul.
If your attention is on the problems and breakdowns with money, or scarcity thinking that says there isn’t enough, more is better or that’s just the way it is, then that is where your consciousness resides. Those thoughts and fears grow from the attention you give them and can take over your life. No matter how much money you have, it won’t be enough. No amount of money will buy you genuine peace of mind. You expand the presence and the power of scarcity and tighten its grip on your world.
When we let go of trying to get more of what we don’t really need, we free up an enormous amount of energy that has been tied up in the chase. We can refocus and reallocate that energy and attention toward appreciating what we already have, what’s already there, and making a difference with that. Not just noticing it, but making a difference with what we already have. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands.
We think we live in the world. We think we live in a set of circumstances, but we don’t. We live in our conversation about the world and our conversation about the circumstances. When we’re in a conversation about fear and terror, about revenge and anger and retribution, jealousy and envy and comparison, then that is the world we inhabit. If we’re in a conversation about possibility, a conversation about gratitude and appreciation for the things in front of us, then that’s the world we inhabit.
Scarcity speaks in terms of never enough, emptiness, fear, mistrust, envy, greed, hoarding, competition, fragmentation, separateness, judgment, striving, entitlement, control, busy, survival, outer riches. In the conversation for scarcity we judge, compare, and criticize; we label winners and losers. We celebrate increasing quantity and excess. We center ourselves in yearning, expectation, and dissatisfaction. We define ourselves as better-than or worse-than. We let money define us, rather than defining ourselves in a deeper way and expressing that quality through our money.
Sufficiency speaks in terms of gratitude, fulfillment, love, trust, respect, contributing, faith, compassion, integration, wholeness, commitment, acceptance, partnership, responsibility, resilience, and inner riches. In the conversation for sufficiency we acknowledge what is, appreciate its value, and envision how to make a difference with it. We recognize, affirm, and embrace. We celebrate quality over quantity. We center ourselves in integrity, possibility, and resourcefulness. We define our money with our energy and intention.
If you look back on the experience of freedom in your life chances are that it wasn’t when you were measuring the options against one another, or making sure you weren’t getting stuck with a decision. It was when you were fully expressed, playing full out. It was when you chose fully and completely, when you knew you were in the place you were meant to be in, when perhaps you even felt a sense of destiny. That’s when we’re free and self-expressed, and joyful or at peace with circumstances—when we choose them. We bring that freedom to our relationship with money when we center ourselves in sufficiency, choose to appreciate the resources that are there, feel their flow through our life, and use them to make a difference.
Additional Reading:
How to feel like you have enough by Christine Garvey
How am I not myself? T-shirt
I designed a t-shirt dreamed out of a favorite movie of mine, I Heart Huckabees, and put it up on Society6.
I drew the chalkboard art depicting how everything is the same even if it’s different. See: The Blanket Truth — “We’re all connected.”
“How am I not myself?” is from the scene where Jude Law is confronted about the “mayo” story. A reminder that the repetitive stories you tell about yourself are propaganda.
The Black Tapestry
I found myself in a dark void, surrounded by a primordial and formless space. At first, I thought I had lost all my senses. Everything was deep black and soundless and there was no gravity. I was a floating consciousness with no home. This is limbo, I thought — or maybe I just knew and didn’t think any thoughts. I seemed to understand things without processing them. This is intuition. This is clairvoyance. This is my third eye. Out of the void, a bolt of fabric came into view. It was also black and began to slowly unroll itself before me. A velvety, onyx-colored cloth expanding to the edges of my perception, until it became what I knew as my sole existence. All at once, an invisible hand started embroidering symbols and archetypes and allegories. I read the fabric from left to right — stitch by stitch — I was witnessing my life from birth to now. An orphrey of multi-dimensional imagery. Each symbolic stitching embodying a multitude of history and emotion and language. And the colors — such vivid hues of violet, orange, crimson and pink. It looked like something my long-lost ancestral aunts in Mexico might have sewn. But even though the colors were bright and festive, I was quickly overtaken by grief and discouragement. By now, the invisible hand had finished its work midway through the fabric, leaving almost exactly half of it blank. What lay before me was an unfinished tapestry so deeply embedded with neglect and loss and scarcity — all of which were at this moment so foreign to me. I wanted out of this vision, and hurtful reminder of where I had come from. My shapeless consciousness grew hot with shame, and pulsated with anxiety that spread outward into nothing. This must be how stars die, I thought. No, This is how stars die. I knew. Then came a gentle cooling. I was reminded — telepathically — that what I was seeing was my past. The other half of the tapestry still remained to be embroidered. They said it would be stitched by my own hand and with only the values and experiences that I wanted for this life. Symbols of love and animals and friendship and nature and art and freedom and magic, and these simple words do no justice to the rich power that lies behind them, because just like the embroidery they are a prism. Multi-faceted and pure light. An energy of such high vibration that it could only belong to the Gods. And as I began to accept this as truth — in the core of my being — my sadness gracefully morphed into rapture and gratitude and passion. This was an invitation to stand at the helm of my life. And I took it. And my own black velvet tapestry is just one of infinite tapestries eternally unfolding across the universe — a divine display of all the soul journeys that embark onto unknown space and create something beautiful.
“For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE”
Dream Journal, August 2, 2011
Disclaimer: I was 27 when I had this dream. I feel like anything written or experienced in your twenties should have a disclaimer.
I was walking the streets of San Francisco, sometimes it was Oakland. Irrelevant though, because it was acting more like an old lover. Acting as if it had forgotten me, never loved me, moved on to better things. Still, I stepped onto every curb and turned every corner trying to remember what drew me to fall in love in the first place. There was a boy, like there always is, and at every crosswalk we met. I tried walking in front of him, tried leaving him behind like so many had done to me before, but somehow we kept crossing paths. My destination/destiny became a broken-down bookstore where Spacewaves was performing. Suddenly, I knew his name was Camus and that he was their new drummer. I said, “Fine. You can have me.” Then, I dragged him into the bathroom and made out with him, like I was drunk, but I wasn’t. Not even on love, I don’t think. I left him there and as I walking out, a stranger with an Indian accent, stopped me and said, “Don't be afraid of Camus. Rule him the perversion in your life. For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE.”
Note: When the Indian stranger said “perversion” he also said “purpose,” like at the same time.
A mantra for clearing shame
Sometimes — seemingly out of nowhere — I’ll find myself stuck in a spiderweb of negativity. What I feel is resentment or fear or anxiety. I avoid giving it a story. I simply say:
This feeling does not belong to me. I return it back to the Universe.
And then I’ll often make a sweeping away gesture with my arms that looks really silly and weird, but is so damn helpful at releasing shame and shooing it away.
Update: The hologram as visual took for grief
Grief Deck is a free visual resource for grief support. All the cards were made by artists or caregivers or someone who has lost someone. Anyone can contribute if you have something to say about processing loss. You scroll seemingly endlessly for an image card that resonates with you, when you click on it, it flips to deliver a prompt or meditation to focus on and let your feelings arise. Grief has never been something I expect to go away, but it is something I learned to coexist with. The best advice I ever received regarding grief was to schedule it — daily if you need to. For a month, I would hold in my tears until I was alone and then I would cry until I was exhausted. After a month, it became less and less, but I never stop making space for it. Here is the card I contributed to Grief Deck, inspired by my father-in-law who we lost last year.
We’re taught at a young age in school that form is in flux. Water can change its physical state from solid to liquid to gas a million times and never lose any part of itself. We forget this fact in grief. The ones we love die and we forget to sense their new state. We only miss the form which we lost. We cry and grieve, but somewhere in this realm there is a hologram, and it is made of love, and it has no physical form — only feeling — but that feeling is one that heals and integrates and transcends all sadness. Try to spend some time feeling this new form.
Ideas for bringing more pleasure into your daily life
I took a Clearer Thinking program test that helps you bring more joy into your life by enlightening you to what your greatest sources of pleasure are. (I recommended it in Recomendo.)
I discovered my greatest pleasures are mostly Sensorial. With the highest being humor, nature, animals and sound/music. Which is not surprising because this is what I try to fill my days with. But my favorite part of the program is at the end when you’re given ideas as to how to consciously bring even more pleasure into your life. Here they are below.
Spaceship Earth & Synchronicities
A collection of Earth from Space media that has been floating through the internet and my subconscious. Use them as tools to shift your perspective and expand your consciousness.
The Overview Effect
“The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space. It is the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.”
Spaceship Earth
Spaceship Earth is a worldview encouraging everyone on Earth to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.
"As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space—it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family."
— Hubert H. Humphrey, Vice President of the United States
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
— Adlai Stevenson to the UN, 1965
Astronaut Bruce McCandless free floating above earth
The Earth Rising Over the Moon
Earth Restored — Toby Ord
If somebody’d said before the flight, “Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?” I would have say, “No, no way.” But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried.
— Alan Shepard, Apollo 14
Channeled Message, Goddess Light
Look at the earth. This time, truly look at the higher frequency and vibration. As you do so if you have had any concerns about what is happening you see how much light and energy is present. So too look around the all that is look around at the many ships at the many, many benevolent ones that come both from other planets and the universe all are here working with you. And the planet of earth is becoming brighter and brighter illuminating all that is within and around.
When you look through expanded consciousness it helps you to clear the lower frequency.
You can see it or sense it or feel it. If there is something that comes across your awareness in your daily life and it begins to pull you down again remember this; there is so much light frequency available to the planet, available to all.
You may also have that perception of how easily the energy flows between the earth and these higher frequencies. The all that is has multiple dimensions within it and you have the ability to flow, moving through those many, many dimensions. It is your way of experiencing the ascension process.
Resources:
Be a weird adult
“That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult — if you don’t lose it.” — Kevin Kelly
Tiger heart — a visual poem
Sometimes I dream of a tiger clawing at my chest. In the most recent dream, I discovered him locked in a cage in an abandoned apartment. He was so malnourished he was almost dead. I was also destitute and squatting in what shape-shifted into my old apartment in Oakland. I wanted to feed him, but I was afraid he would get bigger and bigger. I debated setting him free, but I knew he would die. Before I could decide, he broke out of the cage and came after me.
I realize now the tiger is my heart and I have to feed it every day. So every morning I ask my tiger heart what he wants and he says he wants my whole damn life to chomp and chew.