Libraries As Portals To The Dreamtime

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One of the up sides of being a bum who hitch-hiked around North America during the warm months was that I treated myself to being a bum in Key West, Florida during the cold months.

The whole island back then was like an inside place to be except for the mosquitoes. I slept at night and mostly in the day time right out in the open unless I got invited to sleep inside someone's house.

A lot of bums from all over competed for the resources for staying alive in the warm southern climes in Florida, Texas, and California mostly. Key West may be the choice of the lot, but the hardest to survive in. Any place has a limit by nature to how many people can sponge off a particular neighborhood.

Key West is now one of the most expensive places to live in America. There is a really good reason. There are thirty odd bridges along U.S. Route 1, and keeping the scum and the great unwashed at bay is easy. Two sheriff's cars parked in a vee on one of the bridges and two deputies with riot guns could hold off an invading army. A bank robber there has a armed gauntlet for an escape route. Aiiiyyyeeeee!

Being a bum meant that I had as much time (then as I do now in "my retirement") to do whatever I please without cumbersome appointments. With no real inside place to get the public's eyeballs off my physical person, sometimes the best I could hope to relax and enter my private dominion was to find an empty seat in some public library.

Any place where I could park my body in a soft upholstered chair with an open book in my lap and drift away into the dreamtime until the bespectacled librarian's assistant would slyly poke me rudely back into the library's universally known musty smell. "You can't sleep here, Sir!", they'd cackle.

"Learning to ask people what they think instead of correcting them and telling them what to think seems more progressive. It's pretty much the point of learning to use oracles in order to be-co-me One."

I wrote the quoted paragraph above an hour or so ago as an e-mail response. I like how-formed the whole paragraph turned out. Especially the second sentence. I didn't know during the ti-me I used and studied the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching that I studied oracles in order to become One. Or, an oracle either.

Even after I was informed in a dream to stop using the I Ching I didn't understand that I had to stop using the book as my oracular source and start using people instead. It was a big move. It frightened me for months. Eventually I discovered that people LOVE to be used as oracles. None of them ever knew they were so smart.

A couple of hours ago I walked out into the woods where I've been cleaning up the ground cover and fallen tree residue. I felt moved to clear the area above where the pipes I buried to move county water from their meter up to my house. It's been a long time since my youngest brother and I buried those pipes to our houses.

His house is a hundred yards deeper into the woods than mine. We buried our individual pipes in the same trench until we got to my house, and he split off from there and buried the rest of the pipe to his house. Once I cleared enough of the ground cover and bushes away I found the trench by how the filler dirt has settled in.

There aren't any leaks. The county water department has billing mistakes they refuse to admit are incorrect. I think that may be because they don't know how to go into the database program and make the necessary corrections. They're dismissing me as a doddering old man who is merely confused. So far, it's working for them. I may arrange a surprise by going over their heads to the county commissioners. Even that may not resolve my problem. A lotta these county government people are kin or at least seem to be.

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