Recently, I had a dream. The details of the dream are not important. What felt important was the fact that I kept waking up from said dream with the image of two pillars in my mind, both embossed with the Roman numeral “II”. Three or four times those two columns kept pulling me up from the depths of dream and onto the shores of wakefulness before I, just as quickly, became submerged anew.

The pillars were not directly linked to the dream I was having, but they kept on insisting on their importance, as if they were saying:

You have forgotten us. You have to remember us.

As soon as I was fully awake, I started wondering about these persistent pillars. I knew that I knew them, but from where?

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This Easter, when the world is in relative isolation, forced to look within, my thoughts go back to last year’s Easter. I was in The Netherlands, readying myself to join about fifty other people of all ages, all dressed in white, in communion.

The sacrament that we were about to imbibe was not the blood of Christ, but Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a Quecha word meaning Spirit Vine and plenty of people have written about what it is and what it does. I won’t go into details about the composition and history of this entheogen, but I will speak about the journey. A journey that I can best describe as diving into the realms of myth. Continue reading →

Recently I had a dream. A couple of weeks before Norway went into corona semi-lockdown. I was in a bedroom, getting ready for the night, looking at my reflection in a full-size mirror with a golden filigree frame.

Suddenly I saw another version of myself, fully clothed and with a greying ponytail, reclining in a dark yellow (nearly golden) velvet armchair, slowly grinning at me. In many ways like my own personal version of Twin Peaks’ Bob. Continue reading →

A few days ago I was struck by a deep sadness. I know that feeling, it is centred around the heart, it feels like a deep grief of being disconnected with life. True life. A disconnection within the self, a rift, a gap, a lack. A lack of wholeness. It’s a terrible feeling and often kickstarts mechanisms in the psyche which makes me want to drink insane amounts of coffee, play computer games, watch meaningless Youtube-videos, scroll my Facebook feed etc. etc. Just to avoid the pain.

This time, though, the underlying sorrow was too intense. Escapistic strategies wouldn’t work. From experience I know that pain can be a teacher if you let it. So I tried to sink into it, to look for the origin of the wound. An image appeared in my mind, a specific tree in a nearby park, a gentle suggestion to go there and see. “Why?” I asked myself. “Just go” was the reply. Continue reading →