Explorer: Dreams Do Come True

What I Was Dreaming, Up on the Top Bunk

I remember coming home from kindergarten or first grade when we lived in the trailer park in Lowell, Indiana. I’d climb the ladder to the top bunk in the room I shared with my little brother, flop down on my stomach and open up one of my books on the “Great Explorers.”

I’m sure I’d cringe if I read those books now – they were probably written from a perspective of white privilege, glorifying the notion of Manifest Destiny and the white man’s bravery in wresting the land from the grip of the ‘savages’ who were here before him. “Those were different times,” to quote fellow Pisces Lou Reed.

But I was five or six years old and when I opened those books all of the fear and uncertainty in my life disappeared. I flew on the wings of imagination into a world where there were no roads or cars or flat Midwestern grids of cornfields and stinky pig farms. Nature ruled the continent. My heroes were the explorers like Francis Marion and Kit Carson. Men who ventured alone into the heart of Nature, driven by a passion to discover what lay beyond the borders of the map. Risking life and limb to go where none of their kind had gone before.

I knew then what I wanted to be when I grew up – an explorer! I still remember the sickening shock I felt in the pit of my stomach when I was informed blithely that there weren’t really any jobs left for explorers. All the wildernesses had been mapped, they said. But I was a stubborn kid; I hid my dream inside my heart, hoping against hope that one day I’d be able to prove them wrong.

A couple years later, I read Huckleberry Finn and my dream took on a new shape. If I couldn’t cross unexplored continents, I could at least build a raft and float down the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans!

I got to have some amazing Nature experiences as a young man, camping and canoeing in Northern Michigan and tramping through the bush and up and down the mountains in Fiordland National Park in New Zealand. I learned to sail and spent hours alone on the water in various places.

Once I reached adulthood, though, that youthful sense of possibility began to fade. I found other dreams. I lived out my family heritage of addiction. I got sober. I became a father.

But I didn’t completely forget. And there’s something about islands that has always tickled my fancy. In fact, I think I’ve felt a little jolt of longing every time I crossed a bridge and saw an uninhabited island off in the distance, no matter how small or scrubby-looking it was. We lived in Waterford, Michigan – surrounded by lakes, some of which contained small islands – for a couple of years. I felt certain when we moved there that I would soon own a kayak and go exploring.

But my second child was born a month after we moved in. Money was always tight; energy was usually scarce. A couple of years passed and we moved away from the water.

This morning, one of my adventure dreams came true. I took my first kayak trip and paddled out to an uninhabited island in (almost) the middle of nowhere. Just me and the water and the wind and the birds.

As my dad likes to say, “You’re never too old to have a happy childhood.”

P.S. – Let me help you find the inner space where your dreams come true. I’m offering personal evolution astrology readings at special prices in October (while supplies last).

Solar Flares: Clearing Old Grief?

Strange Symptoms

Fallen leaf. Photo by DK Brainard

Fallen leaf. Photo by DK.

My wife had the jimmy-leg, the night I got my second post-eclipse wake-up call from Spirit.

She had kicked me awake twice between 11 pm and midnight; both times I was able to fall back asleep easily. At 2 a.m. I woke up because I was having a hard time breathing. Wide awake now, I stumbled out of the bedroom and walked down the hall to the dark living room, where I sat on the couch musing about grief.

Continue reading

The Relationship Between Money and Energy

What I Did With the Total Solar Eclipse, Part 2

Read Part 1 here

Cactus flowering in a ditch.

Cactus flowering in a ditch. Photo by DK.

You might have guessed that She isn’t my wife. But She isn’t really my mom, either. Although both of them have played that role for me, She is really a phantasm.

Dictionary definitions of phantasm include:

  • a creation of the imagination or fancy; fantasy;
  • a mental image or representation of a real object;
  • an illusory likeness of something. (Dictionary.com)

She is a an illusory likeness, a mental image created – by my inner child, one could say  – of the wound in my soul that compels me to treat others’ emotions and needs as primary, and my own as secondary.

Now, it appears to be true that I learned this behavior from my mother first in this lifetime. But I know that my mom and I have a soul contract about abandonment and self-abandonment dating back at least several hundred years to a lifetime in Tibet. Continue reading

Energize Your Intentions With These Brainwave & Hypnosis MP3s

New Moon, New Energy

You’ve probably read a million astrology forecasts stating that “the New Moon is the perfect time to set your intentions for what you want to attract into your life.” I used to believe that, too. But as I’ve become more tuned in to the rhythms of the lunar cycle, I’ve found it’s not usually true for me.

Now I try to use the low energy days leading up to the exact moment of the New Moon to go within and discover which patterns or people or activities have run their course: What do I want or need to let go from my life?

I’ve found that the week directly after the New Moon is actually more propitious for intention-setting and visualization of what I want to create or attract into my life.

I spent so many years with headphones on, either listening to or creating hypnosis and brainwave entrainment MP3s, I think I needed to take a break! But people have been asking me to make these available again. So I’ve added two more brainwave entrainment MP3s and a dual-hypnosis MP3 to my audio meditation store page.

Manifesting & Intention-Setting Audio Downloads

I’ve continued to listen to Dolphins of Sirius B down through the years. The music and sounds for this track were given to me by my Star Tribe; I can still remember the feeling of sitting in front of the keyboard and trying to recreate the sounds I was hearing. And it seems especially appropriate to re-release now, in light of my recent Venus experience.

But I hadn’t listened to Theta Fishing Trip. I kept thinking I should do, because so many people told me it was their favorite track out of all the brainwave entrainment audios I created. But you know how it is listening to your own voice.

Well, last week I  went back and listened to it. And it kind of blew me away. I forgot that I had learned how to hypnotize people into feeling that relaxed.

If you don’t already own these and you’re ready to feel amazingly relaxed while programming your subconscious to bring you more of the life you want, check ’em out.

 

Message from the Muse

What I Did On My Total Solar Eclipse

‘Don’t ask yourself what the world needs;
ask yourself what makes you come alive.
And then go and do that. Because what the
world needs is people who have come alive.’ 
—Harold Whitman

Wake-Up Call from Venus

Thursday morning, 9/13

Mandala, from a magnolia leaf I found on the lawn.

I woke up uncommonly early last Thursday. With the happy thought in my mind: “I’m rich!”

Just to be clear: This has not been my usual first thought upon waking. And, the thought came with a bonus mantra:

I’m rich!
I’m rich!
I just came into a large sum of money

I’m rich!
I’m rich!
I just came into a large sum of money

I had been reading in The Oracle Report and elsewhere that we should be receiving messages on Tuesday or Wednesday that would bring clarity to what we’d been experiencing in the aftermath of the August 21 total solar eclipse.

I was eager to get this message. Because for all of the promise of the Leo eclipse, the next three weeks felt more like a protracted ending than a new beginning. Continue reading