The Cosmic Womb
TRANSCRIPT:
Here is a dream that I cannot create imagery for and does not want to be flattened down by the written word. It can only be spoken and walked through with voice.
I am in a house, and it is my house, and it exists outside of space and time. I am hosting a gathering of people that I have known this lifetime, but from different places and ages, and some of whom have passed and are no longer living. But here they are, in my cosmic house. And I am preparing the space.
I am acting as a psychedelic guide, and I am pairing them up, men and women. One man, one woman, to embark on this journey. And this has nothing to do with sexuality or gender. This is just the symbol for the Divine Feminine Energies and the Masculine Energies. And those are, Masculine being our more action-oriented, discerning, rational energies, and the Divine Feminine being our more receptive, open, intuitive, psychic energies.
So here they are, paired up in perfect balance, and I am the psychedelic guide, and I feel very competent and capable in this role, but at the same time — outside of my dream body — I have a dual awareness, and this second awareness is my waking life awareness. “Waking Life Claudia” is there and she's there as the witness and the observer of this vision, where I am acting as the guide or the shaman.
That's when I realize that there is no sacred medicine to dispense to the people. That the path to these alternate realities, or to the ultimate truth, requires each woman in the pairing to spread her vulva as wide as possible for each man to enter by his head, as if it's a reverse birth.
This is the “The Cosmic Womb”. This is the Divine Feminine Womb. There's nothing sexual about this. It's just depicted in a very graphic way within my dream. And this is the point in the dream where my husband walks up to me and he says, “Okay, it's your turn.”
I very sternly shake my finger at him and I say, “No, I am not the portal.”
And then I show him a diorama of my own womb or vulva, only it's not anatomically correct. It's not a diorama of that. It is an ancient, petrified forest. And I say, “Don't you see? This is not a portal.”
And that's when I wake up and I have those words ringing in my head: “No, I am not a portal.”
And I sit with this dream for the whole month of October. And I have other dreams that shed more light on it. And then I come to an understanding of how to act as a conduit and a guide without being used energetically as a portal.
But beyond that, if I was going to bring it down to Earth, as close as I can to the 3D-level I would say that we are each our own portal. That this pairing up of the men and the women was not a message that we need someone external, like a priest or a shaman, to experience other truths, other realities.
It was just the message of the balance of both, of being grounded and yet open to these divine cosmic influences, and of experiencing existence that way. Through your own portal.
Cosmic bathtub personality mix
Vision from a psychedelic journey, April 1, 2022
I had a vision of bathtubs floating in space. It was before birth. Before I took this form. My soul tribe and I were disembodied spirits bathing in a row of cosmic bathtubs, waiting to be born. This is where we concocted our personalities — which is different from our consciousness or soul. We each sat in our own bathtub like cauldrons – adjusting the temperature and flow of the starry water — adding a little bit of this and a little bit of that — until we were just perfect for the life that we chose. We know we are not our personalities, we are the bathers in the cosmic bathtubs. Our personality is just a layer — a residue that we bathed ourselves in. It can always be washed off.
Cute vegetable-animal-human creatures grown from spore prints of consciousness
Lately I’ve been dreaming about new energies and creatures that want to be pulled into this world. In my dreams I usher them through portals, create havens, give them voice. Last night I met the cutest creatures made from consciousness spore prints, called soul prints. Here is a distant relative from a hybrid kingdom who wanted to meet you.
The Moon Tarot Card: A Meditation
In The Moon Tarot Card:
In the land of dreams — when your intellect is illumined by intuition — two dogs bark and howl — these are your natures. One of them is tamed and one of them is not. Which is the one that you feed?
In the distance the two towers symbolize Intelligence and Instinct. One is man-made, the other divine. Most people live in one tower and not the other. Very few live in both.
The Moon is eclipsed and the face in the moon is a projection of your face. The droplets raining down are what cause waves in your subconscious. Sometimes they feel like a disturbance, but they are meant to stir you awake.
In the foreground there is a pond, where a crayfish lives. The crayfish is YOU — boxed in by your own five senses. The pond is rigid and stagnant and nothing new is ever born there.
But you can crawl out, and walk the path past your dogs — your submissive self and the one who revolts. And past the towers that paralyze you with paradox. Because you know there is something beyond what you are told. And you know there are more lands than just this one land.
Because you are primordial, made of angels and stars. You are not just a crayfish. This is a shell and you have choice: Retreat into the stagnant pond or leap beyond everything you know.
Inspiration: Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism
Illustration & Animation by Olga Goriacheva
How to draw closer to your mystery
The above audio is a reading from a transcript. It is a thirdhand creation story. They are not my words, but the story was told to me orally by someone I loved, and for almost twenty years has lived on a microcassette unplayed. It is an unearthed treasure and I wanted to share it with you.
TRANSCRIPT:
My dad used to tell this story about the beginning of the world. And initially all is covered in water and there are two animals on a row boat. And one was a Coyote and one was a Duck. And the Coyote was the creator but he didn’t have any raw material with which to create the world because all around was water and the boat. And the duck didn’t have any creative powers of his own but he could dive and the duck did dive down and took up a little piece of mud in his beak and brought it back to the Coyote. And the Coyote took that piece of mud and spread it out, spread it out, spread it out, kept working it and working it until he had a continent - and that’s how the earth came about. And it’s the same with the creative process in that you have all the raw material you need to create but it’s sediment at the very bottom of your mind. The bottom of consciousness and the layers of the subconscious and you can’t get to it, but at some point when you keep trying and trying you discover a diver – you discover a duck that will go down in to your subconscious and bring back pieces of raw material with which to work and you don’t really know where they came from, but you found some part of your mind that is capable of retrieving that information. And then where do your stories come from? I don’t know from the bottom of your mind.
Here’s another way to put it. John Lennon was talking about George Harrison. He said George Harrison is not a very interesting man, but what is interesting is the mystery inside of George, and watching George discover that mystery over the years. And it’s the same thing, we’re all boring people, but in you is a mystery that’s very interesting and the closer you live to that mystery the more interesting your life will be. And that’s what you’re doing when you’re writing - you’re living close to your mystery.
Here’s another one, Annie Dillard said “Some people can go to bed at night and sleep well without having written a single beautiful sentence all day long.” And it’s true - some people can sleep without a single beautiful sentence. But the question you should ask yourself is, “What do I have to do everyday? What do I so deeply need everyday that if I don’t do it, I don’t sleep or I don’t sleep as well?” And that’s your mystery. Whatever it is, whatever your deepest, deepest need is, so deep that you need it each day, that’s your mystery. And just draw closer and closer and closer to that need and you’ll be more and more centered and more and more beautiful and more and more radiant and ever more transcendent.
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
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.
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.
Dream cards
These are words that were said in dreams and typed on to trading cards and watercolored.
Famous break-up letters
After reading the diaries of Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo and Courtney Love, I imagined what their break-up letters might have sounded like.
After reading the diaries of Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo and Courtney Love, I imagined what their break-up letters might have sounded like.
