Last night's Blue Moon – the rare second full moon in a solar month – lulled me early into dreaming, and woke me in the wee hours with its light and power. I don't think I was alone in responding to the 'whispers tucked into the turning of Earth's curve' as she flew across the sky. The title line of this blog post is from a recent poem I wrote, and felt apropos for this time, this moon, this subtle seasonal shift.

Morning flights of geese, calling to each other; a certain crispness to the air, changes of light at sunset, and the first few yellow leaves signal that the planet is at that place in her cycle where our hemisphere is tilting away from the Sun. My favorite season approaches, and with it the strong magical pull through space and time I always feel. It's as if time kaleidoscopes and the matrix of past, present, and future aligns and opens. I'm aware of all three at once, and of threads coming through the opening. The veil between the worlds thins.

One of the medicine tools I use to work with time is this Selenite Wand. Selenite is very good for journeying into the past and future, and seeing the threads that connect who we are, were, will be. This information can be very helpful for a number of reasons and in a plethora of circumstances. Dreams, body symptoms, subconscious emotions, premonitions are, like the whispers, telling us something we need to know, relocate, release, re-member.

This wand has a story. I had the selenite, and it told me it wanted to become a proper wand. So I asked one of my dearest friends, a master artisan of wood, stone, ash splint basketry, and darn near anything, if he would make the handle. He asked what I wanted on it, and I think I said a dragon or something. He took the stone away, and when he returned with the finished wand, he'd carved the triskele instead. 

A triskele is an ancient Celtic symbol, sometimes seen in this pattern, sometimes in other whirling patterns of three. It symbolizes the unending interconnectedness of past, present, and future, through life, death, and rebirth. In the triskele, the three are also one, with no beginning and no end.

My friend said, "It just seemed to be the right thing." I don't think he knew the stone's properties and main purpose, but on another level he realized it perfectly. Selenite sees the past, present, and future, and can illuminate information on the soul's path and progress, aiding understanding in the present, and showing connections that assist the onward journey. Bingo!

The carving is not an overlay. Yew wood has an outer wood layer that is lighter. Mark Kelz, the carver extraordinaire, created the triskele by carving away the wood around it. The entire handle, from its delicate petal-like top to its perfectly turned round end, he carved by hand, and gave me as a gift. The Selenite Wand resides in its own basket with preserved Flicker wings as its attending spirit. It seldom calls out to be used for the work, but when it does, I know we're going to be flying through time.

Yesterday was one of those days. The work fit the whispers, the V's of geese, the magnetic pull to the stones and green valleys of my once and future lives. I think I've been doing this a long time.

Cloud watching is almost a full-time job for me, and yesterday did not disappoint. Her Majesty, Mt. Hood, was working her magic with changing conditions from the east, and by late afternoon had created thunder, lightning, rain, and a vibrant rainbow, plus the wonderful changes in the fragrance of the air, the negative ions and ozone, all of which produced a shift in my inner state of mind. Posts from entranced friends in Oregon and Washington attested to the magical power of a summer storm on our psyches and spirits.

Living near Her Majesty for three years, I've felt her power and how she exerts it to change conditions around her. Sometimes she whips up electricity, sometimes sends alpine winds down her sides, cloaks herself in dramatic clouds, froths the river in green glacial melt on a hot day... she has a stunning repertoire. And then, I remember that when she was an active volcano, she helped create the epic Columbia Gorge over millions of years. The forests, waterfalls and sylvan glades we enjoy on weekend hikes were created through fiery explosions and lava flows which wiped out everything in their paths, over and over again, for millennia.

Major life force energies like volcanoes and floods, beautiful phenomena like snowflakes and rainbows, and every day weather like this morning's quiet cloud cover, result from conditions. Create the conditions for rain, and rain falls. You may have seen reports about Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde, who creates clouds inside galleries as an art installation. Viewers gasp in wonder when the cloud appears, and it is quite magical. But, like creating an oil painting by applying oil paint onto a canvas with a brush until an image is completed, the artist creates the artistic expression of a cloud in a room by creating the conditions that makes clouds form, having to do with proportions of humidity and temperature. You can watch YouTubes of the artist creating a cloud in a room.

Changing conditions in the mind also changes conditions in the physical plane. Body symptoms and conditions, living environment, relationships, abundance and manifestation capabilities, happiness and inner peace are some of the areas that change when the conditions we hold in our minds as true are allowed to shift. What seems impossible, like producing a cloud in a room, or healing a longstanding condition, will continue to appear impossible if conditions do not change, because the conditions for the transformation are not in existence at that time. Wishing or worrying are not effective in creating change in conditions, although they do play a part in attracting or repelling the conditions that create change. 

Maybe I love watching clouds so much because I can view nature's transformative powers and their results in real time as an ongoing master class in the ultimate mystery school. The mountain, too, seems to say, are you watching? Are you listening? I'll show you again. We too have the power to change our lives, our bodies, and our world, the whether, if you like, around our personal sphere of influence. Group mind changes conditions in society and can effect global shifts in consciousness. Working with ourself is the starting place for changing conditions: looking at our thoughts, our fears, our held emotions – what we believe to be true, or possible. And who has the power to affect conditions.

Like the mountain, we do not hold all the conditional cards: there are other elemental forces that interact to create conditions at any moment. Rather than a skirmish, it can be a dance, a graceful intermingling of energies, realizing all is an expression of the one. Working – or playing – with the interweaving of forces, in alignment with a necessary degree of internal power conditions, including knowing, intention, fearlessness, trust, detachment, nonresistance, and love, is the work of transformation. Clearing negativity, removing obstacles, repatterning thoughts, letting go of old hurts and resentments, releasing fear changes static conditions so that transformation can occur.

Sometimes it is helpful to ask for information, energetic transmission, clarity, guidance, support and practices to assist in changing mind and heart conditions so that the 'weather' within and without us can change. Each of us can cultivate our inner connect, our stillness, our intent, to transform conditions in our lives. And then, the sweet showering from the sky begins.

Dreams are where I do much of my work. So much so, a friend has nicknamed me Night Shift. But I'm not the only one, as John Lennon famously sung. While I do work for others in dreams, coming into theirs and meeting them in mine,  sometimes it's the other way around. And sometimes I have dreams that show me what will be, and offer stones that help bridge the dream into ordinary reality. This has happened just recently in two instances I'll tell you about.

These are fluorite octahedrons, natural formations of this common stone, which comes in other forms as well. Octahedrons, as you can see, are two pyramids joined at the base, making a form with eight triangular sides. Within the two big octahedrons are worlds and intersecting planes of blue and purple, clouds and inclusions of silvery bits. I stare into them and turn them in the light, hold them as I ground and think. 

When I was a computer consultant, I carried a small fluorite with a pyrite tip in my pocket to help me troubleshoot. I'd take it out, hold it or place it on a computer and ask, 'hardware or software?' Fluorite is very good for figuring things out. Holding one, and asking a question, one gets an idea. Ah! Maybe this. Try that. Great for troubleshooting and problem-solving.

The other night I had a dream, and in the dream a medicine man held out a bracelet of dark purple fluorite octahedrons to me. An illustrious Hollywood woman I worked with in the consultant days walked up, took it and put it on. This person's sudden appearance and her action made me go lucid, or enter into a heightened state of dreaming. As the medicine man watched the scene, he looked at me intensely and offered me a bowl of fluorites, which I recognized as similar to the dish of these I have in my workroom.

I woke up knowing it was time to work with my fluorites on creating the future, a project I am actively engaged in as one chapter of my life has just completed and a new one is rapidly forming. I needed the guidance and energetic signal: fluorite octahedrons – now! Of course! The perfect stone for organizing, imagining and constructing through intention, getting ideas, and finding solutions. Good thing the teacher showed up to remind me that what I need I have and know how to use. Although they sit in plain sight on the workroom table I see every day, I had not been tuning into them or paying them any attention. I went right downstairs and got them, and held the big two in each hand, gazing into them as I turned their different worlds to the light. 

I felt their calming, centering, organizing energy immediately activate. While I could enjoy their expansive universe-in-a-double-pyramid form, helping me connect with the monadic center (galactic center, Source, whatever you like to call it) that creates everything all the time, no sweat, I could feel their organizational powers easily tending to unknowns, confusions, questions, mental chatter, and problem solving. Meditation is like that, and fluorite octahedrons are wonderful meditation tools.

That's one way dreaming and stones have helped me 'do the thing' as I am known to say. Everyone knows what is meant by the abstract directive 'do the thing' at any given moment in their life. It's, you know, the thing. The thing you're doing, gotta do, want to do, don't know how to do, all of the above. The Nike slogan just do it is so powerful, I think, because it cuts through our trying and hoping and wanting and if only-ing. The word just is telling, however: if it were that simple in our minds all the time, there would be no need to say just. And no need for the slogan to begin with. Sometimes – often, in fact – we need some assistance, some information, guidance, energetic component, to help us do the thing. But I digress.

A few weeks before that dream, a friend had a dream in which she had to follow a guide through a watery, rocky landscape a long ways to find me. I was not in my usual spot, she said. She asked the guide if she could shortcut the exertion of the hike and simply fly, but the answer was no, so on she walked, past rivers, up rocky steps, along steep paths, on and on.

Finally, she found me near a waterfall, sitting and knitting, with strands from the mountain, the water, the elements. I was frustrated because my knitting was turning to mud. She reached in her pocket and brought out a stone, which she handed to me in the dream. She now knew why she'd had to make the effort to find me: to give me the stone, which was to help end the muddying of what I was creating through my work, knitting with the elements.

When she wrote me the dream, she described the stone, and I thought, 'hang on – I think I have that stone!' I went upstairs to my closet and brought out a necklace I'd made a decade earlier, with a dragonlfy and owl on either side of a stone another practitioner and friend, known as The Stone Giver, had given me. He knows his work well, finding and giving stones to whomever the stone is meant to help. I took a photo and asked my dreaming friend if this was the stone. OMG she said. Yes! That's it. I immediately put the necklace on and wore it day and night for a week or so. It had been hanging up in the closet, unnoticed and unworn, for years.

I'd forgotten what the stone was, although I knew the pink inclusions were ruby. The Stone Giver reminded me it was Fuchsite, very powerful, he said. Pretty much! I looked it up in the reference and noted that, among other properties, it helped to end old patterns of servitude. Bingo!

Removal of obstacles and the core issues that create them are what's for dinner at present, so this was news I could use. Often, core issues have deep roots in the past: this lifetime, past lives, ancestral patterns, and historical events. Resonances of the past stay active, influence our perceptions of self and what is possible. Core fears arise from these perceptions, kept alive by our power and our belief, however consciously, unconsciously, or subconsciously. I needed help to detect these threads in my knitting, and why they were muddling the work. As soon as I put on the necklace, a grounding, calming clarity and peacefulness entered my heart chakra where the stone hung. 

In the few weeks since this dream, many thoughts and feelings have been clarified, with release of the old and opening to the new. It's the thing to do! I'm so grateful to the stones, the medicine man in the dream, the far-off friend for her dreaming efforts and narration, and the Stone Giver for his gifts and stone medicine.

Dreaming is powerful, and in dreaming we reach out to each other with love and wonders. Being a dreamer has been maligned throughout history and is still actively suppressed. 'You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one...' The visionary who wrote and sang that line changed the world with his words and dreaming. 

Writing this, the necklace said, yo – put me back on, you need me still. I didn't argue. It's on me, and the fluorites are doing their thing as well. May you dream into what you have around you that assists you today to do the thing.