It makes perfect shamanic sense that Tom Petty should be one of my guides. I named my non-functioning (it refuses to let me post on it) blog "Learning to fly" after one of his songs. Like most songwriters and musicians Tom is an accomplished dreamwalker and he brings me straight forward and understandable instructions. I woke up with "Runnin` Down a Dream" in my head this morning and in the process of tearing it apart to find the core message within I came across the great ,"tourist vs explorer" debate.
I`ve been making wands like a madman lately. I mean I could supply a small army of vampire slayers with some rather nicely detailed, highly figured and highly polished ammunition for their utility belts or whatever it is they carry their wooden stakes in. I have been transforming scrap wood into different ritual tools with the help of moving meditation and guidance from the Trees for a while now but these wands are beginning to stack up. I have come to the point now where I can probably make these things in my sleep,like the part in Tom`s song where the he sings "I hit cruise control and rubbed my eyes". Like Tom I`m running on auto-pilot and waiting for the trip to wind down and arrive at the destination. You drop the reins and let the horse go wherever it likes as long as it keeps moving and you`re just hoping it`ll head to water.
I had finally moved past the part of the song where "Me and Del were singin` little Runaway, I was flyin`" and like the folks in the chorus I was "Runnin` down a dream that never would come to me, workin` on a mystery, goin` whever it leads". I put a freshly cut piece of nearly frozen Red Oak in the lathe with the idea in mind I was going to turn it roughly round and then seal it so it would dry out slowly and not warp or crack too badly when I got back to it after it sat for several months on a shelf drying and stabilizing. Instead I just kept going and soon had a green wood wand that had spun soaking wet shavings off as I was turning it because it was so green. I friction dried it`s surface and sanded it till it was as polished as it would get, then brought it upstairs into the heated house to see if it would survive and dry without self destructing. Me and Tom were blazing new trails here and it would either end up as labor intensive firewood or a useful piece that took things in a new direction.
A few days later I remembered that I had placed it next to the wood stove and was surprised to see that it had taken on a life of it`s own.The twisted grain had made it bend and spiral into something that looked far more organic, something that looked like it had grown in that shape rather than been cut and formed by human hands entirely. It was the partnership between maker and tree I had been looking for and It had only appeared after I removed as much of myself as I could from the equation. I had to become more like the old Bodgers who lived out in the woods and turned chair spindles out of fresh cut branches using spring pole lathes that they made themselves right there in the groves and ran on leg power alone. I suspect there was move than one of those ancestors guiding my hands and pointing the way with this experiment.
What Tom Petty was telling me this go-round was that there are two kinds of people who travel this type of road. There are those who approach life like tourists,moving quickly from place to place and collecting momentos as they cross another destination off their list. They arrive somewhere, buy a T-shirt, refridgerator magnet or sticker saying they were there and then hop back in the car or re-board the boat and are off to the next stop on their vacation cruise. They were there alright,but they never gave the place a chance to show them all it had to offer. They hit all the landmarks and followed the crowd and have the pictures to prove it when their friends and family get together for the slide show after they get back to their mundane lives.
On the other hand there are those who start out on a trip riding that tour bus yet when the bus finally pulls over they aren`t afraid to split off from the crowd and take a side street or two. They follow their intuition and let things unfold as they will rather than listening to a prepared script. When you follow the road less traveled you are handed the opportunity to experience life more deeply. You realize that there are magickal things outside the itinerary that can only be seen if you get off away from the crowd and stop listening to the guides with the microphones in their hands who keep reciting the same historic facts.
Tom was absolutely correct when he sang, "There`s something good waiting down this road. I`m pickin` up whatever is mine". Glad I took the time to listen to Tom instead of following the script.
