Write From the Heart by Hal Zina Bennett

Author:Hal Zina Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library

CHAPTER EIGHT

Higher Creativity

and the Peak Experience

All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings….But my encounters with the “other” reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison.

— C.G. Jung

Last night I awoke from a dream and for a long time lay in bed luxuriating under the warmth of the soft down comforter, trying to remember it all. In the dream it was a crisp, fall evening. I was standing on a dock made of weathered planks as thick as railroad ties. It stretched out a hundred feet into a deep, blue lake, a half mile across and two miles in length. I looked out over the water to the opposite shore and a dense green wall of cedars. With the sun dropping below the hills behind me, shadows quickly spread through the trees and there was a mystical quality about the landscape, as if it had been drawn not from nature but from an artist’s rendition of a lake. The colors were too intense for a real landscape, and the entire scene appeared as if frozen in time.

I was there alone, and I had the clear sense that I was no more than ten or twelve years old. I walked out onto the dock and knelt down to untie a rope wrapped around a chock fastened to one of the planks. I dropped the rope down into the bottom of a wooden rowboat bobbing alongside the dock a few feet below me. Then I slipped down over the side into the boat. As it took up my weight, the boat tipped slightly. I adjusted my weight, took a step toward the center seat, and sat down. I shoved away from the dock, swinging the bow out toward the middle of the lake, then took up the oars, lifted them, dipped them into the water, pulled, and the boat slipped forward away from the shore.

I rowed toward the center of the lake, dipping the oars, pulling, lifting them, leaning forward, dipping and pulling, over and over again. The boat moved effortlessly over the water. I rowed until I could no longer see the dock. With each pull of the oars, the boat rose, then fell, on gentle waves. The rhythm of my rowing joined with the rhythm of the waves, rocking my body sensuously, sublimely. I could no longer see the shore nor the sky. I only saw the water all around me, and the worn gray gunwales of the boat on either side of me. I saw the bottom of the boat, narrow planks, damp from the water that had dripped from the oars as I rowed.

As I moved across the lake, something very odd began to happen. I was no longer just the boy in the rowboat. I was also the boat and the lake and the sky. I felt in

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