Robert F

The Advocate

This is the first in an occasional series of my strong medicine dreams. An introduction to the series can be found here. The dream was recorded on the morning of March 4th, 1984. It has five scenes. Each of them — in a nod to internet readability — has been given a title and an illustration. Following the dream are some of the personal and cultural associations which the dream evoked.

My Father

I’m in a courtroom, sitting at a long rectangular table. To my right, at the head of the table, is the judge. To my left is an advocate. Although he seems unfamiliar to me, I somehow know that he’s my father.

Other people are seated around the table also. There’s an air of expectancy in the room. Everyone seems to be waiting for something to happen.

Strong Medicine Dreams

I turn seventy-five next week. That means that I have spent close to twenty-five years (one third of my life) asleep. For many if not most of those twenty-five years I’ve been fully immersed in the swirling world of dreams. Having grown up in a dream-demeaning culture, however, it wasn’t until I was twenty-four years old and living with a woman for the first time that I became aware of that world.

The opening happened in Arden, a small experimental village founded by my great-grandfather at the turn of the twentieth century. Joyce and I had known each other as children there. But my family had moved away when I was in grade school and we hadn’t seen each other again until we both returned to Arden as young adults.

School of the Spirit Application: 2

This is the second of two posts containing my application to the School of the Spirit for its program On Being a Spiritual Nurturer. The first post, and a fuller introduction, can be found here.

Wax Statues

A well-chosen question can have quite an impact. Several years after moving to the Blue Ridge Mountains, I was gifted with such a question. It was posed by Douglas, the same friend whose birthday would later coincide with the Testing the Water retreat in Roanoke.

It was a sunny afternoon at Light Morning. We were sitting on a grassy knoll called Temple Hill, close to where Douglas now lies buried. High above us, a raven traced a lazy circle in the sky.

“So why did your Virginia Beach guidance,” Doug asked, “say that the Essenes were to serve as a model for your community?”

School of the Spirit Application: 1

In March of 2018, I learned about an 18-month program called On Being a Spiritual Nurturer. It was offered by The School of the Spirit, a ministry “rooted in the Quaker contemplative tradition of the living silence.” Feeling ready to explore my Quaker heritage, I requested an application.

“Write a summary of your experience with spiritual nurture ministry,” the application said. “Reflect on how you have been drawn toward or clearly discerned a call to spiritual nurture and its study. We seek to understand how this call has risen out of your personal faith, faith community, life experience, education, and training. We encourage you to offer stories that describe your explorations, wrestling, insights, and lessons learned. Please include your experience of desiring, seeking or receiving support concerning this call.”

What follows is my response to this request.

Prologue

Spiritual nurture ministry is an unfamiliar phrase, but it stirs deep associations. Good friends nurture each other. They’re responsive to one another’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. Quakers, moreover, self-identify as a Religious Society of Friends.

I have a knack for making and keeping friends. I’m a good listener and often ask good questions. People tend to trust and confide in me. I have been with friends who are giving birth and others who are dying. I have helped some friends get married and others get divorced. I’ve been there for friends who have become suddenly and seriously unhinged, just as they, in turn, have been there for me.

A Transformational Journey

[When Light Morning was an active community, those wanting to visit or intern here sometimes asked about our core values. In response, we posted three articles to an earlier version of this website: Living Close to the Earth; A New Kind of Family; and A Transformational Journey.]

Choosing to live close to the Earth, in a new kind of family, is to risk intimacy. What drew us to Light Morning in the first place, however, and what keeps us here, is riskier still: a whispered call to cast off our moorings and embark upon a transformational journey.

This journey grows out of an audacious assumption that humans are mutable creatures. As a species, we routinely engage in nearly inconceivable atrocities and generosities. Who could even hazard a guess, then, about what any individual’s capacity for goodness or godliness might be?

This post will approach the complex nature of the human heart from several directions. First we’ll consider a disturbing tension between the soul and the human. Then we’ll turn to an emerging Light Morning paradigm called The Four Cairns and a threefold path of meditation, dreams, and prayer.

A New Kind of Family

[When Light Morning was an active community, those wanting to visit or intern here sometimes asked about our core values. In response, we posted three articles to an earlier version of this website: Living Close to the Earth, A New Kind of Family, and A Transformational Journey.]

In the spring of 1974, two couples arrived at an old Appalachian farm in southwest Virginia and started homesteading. Ron and Marlene and Joyce and I were passionate and vision-driven. We had just come out of a catalytic encounter with inner guidance. But we also came from significantly different backgrounds.

Joyce and I grew up in a small intentional village on the east coast. As young adults, we adopted the early hippie lifestyle of long hair, psychedelics, rock and roll, and Vietnam War protests. Ron and Marlene were raised on Wisconsin dairy farms. They came of age as straight-laced Midwesterners, never doing any drugs, ignoring the war, and becoming members of the John Birch Society.

How did two couples who would hardly have been acquaintances, let alone friends, end up spending their entire adult lives together? We later joked that it had been an arranged marriage, and we were still looking for who had arranged it. But whoever that mysterious matchmaker may have been, we were tightly bonded with a curiously durable glue.

Living Close to the Earth

[When Light Morning was an active community, those wanting to visit or intern here sometimes asked about our core values. In response, we posted three articles to an earlier version of this website: Living Close to the Earth; A New Kind of Family; and A Transformational Journey.]

How do we learn to live close to the Earth? Paying attention to the needs of our body and stretching toward higher octaves of health is a good place to start. Living close to nature and working close to home is another approach. This necessitates making a slow transition from a cash-intensive to a more labor-intensive economy.

While improving our physical health and meeting our outward needs more directly are helpful, being close to someone also implies emotional intimacy. According to the dictionary, an intimate relationship is “a warm friendship developing through long association.” Might it be possible to nurture such a friendship with the planet we call home?

A Midwinter Pilgrimage

Shortly before the turn of the millennium, Light Morning experienced an unprecedented population explosion. For twenty-five years we had been a relatively small intentional community. Then, seemingly overnight, our family of six adults and a teenager morphed into a bustling warren of sixteen adults and six children. The transition was chaotic and overwhelming, exhilarating and exhausting.

Almost as soon as it had formed, however, the bubble started to deflate. A few of the recent arrivals packed up and moved on. Others wondered what their next steps were going to be. Still others were trying to discern how their personal values aligned with those of Light Morning.

All of us were deep into the stretch zone. The newcomers were adapting to a place where every meal, most of the work, and much of the money was shared. The old-timers found themselves suddenly outnumbered by those who didn’t understand – and sometimes didn’t want to understand – how or why Light Morning had become what it was. The crucible of community gifted everyone with psychic bruises and blown fuses.

The intensity tested our resilience. It also forced us to wrestle with several essential questions: Why are people drawn to Light Morning? How much do they know, beforehand, about its founding vision and core values? How do visitors become committed members of the community? What systems and values are we willing to change? What remains non-negotiable?

The questions kept gnawing at us. So when four of us left for a 10-day Vipassana meditation course in January of 2000, we took the questions with us. Jonathan, Joyce, and I were fully committed to Light Morning. Kent was a former member of the community and a fellow Vipassana meditator. Little did we realize how insightful and harrowing this midwinter pilgrimage from southwest Virginia to western Massachusetts would turn out to be.

Hopscotching Through Time

In the small village where I grew up, we often played hopscotch. One of us would draw the familiar pattern on the street with chalk, then we would each choose a marker – usually a penny, a small stick, or a flat stone – and the game would begin.

The first player tossed their marker into the first square, then hopped to the end of the court, skipping the square holding their marker. Turning around, they hopped back to the square just before the one holding their penny or small stone, picked it up, and hopped back to the beginning. Then they took aim at the second square. Their turn continued as long as their marker landed completely inside the square they were aiming for, and they didn’t touch any of the lines while hopping.

We would play hopscotch for hours on end.

Memories of this childhood game reawakened as I was pondering how to choreograph the weekly posts that will appear here. Some will be drawn from the earlier incarnation of lightmorning.org. Others will be stories not yet told. All the posts will relate to resilience, the core theme of this website, but they won’t be posted in any chronological order. Instead, we’ll be hopscotching back and forth through time.