"Like a princess with diphtheria, our earth is in peril. As a Modern Thinker, I vow to diagnose and cure her ills." With this Bodhisattvic oath, I began a journal of my visions and intuitions – which follows.
10/2
Today is my birthday. I am 53 years old. I was born in ’53. Just before I awoke, I had this dream:
I was in a shopping mall, and I passed a store – it looked like a newsstand, but a Frenchman, I knew, made organic candy there.
"May I have a coconut bar?" I asked him. (These candies could be mixed with water, or other liquids, to create a meal.)
The moment I asked, the Frenchman – who was middle-aged, and mustachioed – gave me a sympathetic look. Suddenly, I knew what would happen next.
He would hand me a free candy bar!
"Pay me back, as they say, when you are flush." The confectioner spoke perfect English, but had a marked French accent. He knew I was a poet of some renown, but poor.
"Thank you," I replied. (Then I saw he hadn't handed me a coconut bar, but a bar of milk chocolate, long and narrow, like a KitKat bar, plus a little packet of deep green strands that looked like seaweed. Perhaps, because the candy was free, he could substitute a cheaper one.)
"I will try to pay you, if I do accumulate some monies," I extemporized.
Suddenly I noticed that through this whole conversation, I was looking not at the Frenchman, but at a skull sitting on a shelf beside him. The skull was dark brown. I gazed into its eye sockets.
The meaning of this dream? My life will be filled with gifts, from my work as a poet, but I will never forget Death …
