Resonant Reading (Wednesday)-Time-Travelling Adventure-Jones

An exploration of ideas, feelings, and our life experiences, using a different short reading as our springboard each time. The sessions are on Saturdays, 4-5, and on Wednesdays, 12-1. All are wide open and you are welcome to come twice a week or once in a while.

The participants over the years have found that the approach we take, and the respectful, affectionate community of inquirers in which we read and converse, are as important as the reading itself. While many small groups begin with a check-in, with a session only an hour long, Resonant Reading jumps right in to the conversation. Those who are frequently in the group get to know each other very well this way, and those who are new will soon find they are among friends.

Facilitators use a light hand, posting the reading in the chat and calling on whoever’s Zoom hand is up. Suggestions for readings* come from group members, who also take turns facilitating, if they want to try that role.

The reading for this session: Wednesday, June 10th

“…you open the door [of your cabin] and you see a woodpecker on the doorstep, and it jumps back a step or two as you open open the door and it drops something from its beak; a small shiny Tiny Stone. With slight jerky head movements, it looks up at you and it looks at the stone as if to encourage you to pick that stone up. And so you carefully reach down [while the] woodpecker [keeps] its eyes on you following your movement as you reach all the way down take hold of the stone. It’s so incredibly smooth and almost shimmering with that kind of shininess where you don’t know if it’s just incredibly reflective, or if some of that shininess is coming from within the stone itself. And, as you stand back up holding the stone watching the bird and the bird watching you, your brow furrows a little wondering why this bird bought you this Stone. The bird gives a couple of little nods and then flies off. It seemed like the bird did that on purpose…

“Looking around you notice something unusual you start to hear the faint sound of tambourine playing, and your ears begin to focus more on that faint tambourine sound. You start to wonder where it’s coming from it’s faint and you can’t work out the location…

That tambourine sound gets a little louder, and, while it gets louder, it reaches that point where you become more alert, more focused, more curious, and you start looking around you trying to figure out what’s going on, and you see that that Shiny Stone beside you is glowing even brighter now, and you reach over, and you touch that stone, and you notice that it’s giving off some warmth, and you watch that stone with curiosity seeing how it’s getting warmer and warmer, and you notice a slight glow coming from the stone, and it’s an indistinct orangey glow [like the] the glows of a fading fire in a fireplace, and you watch as that glow becomes stronger and stronger, just a dim light glowing from that stone spreading out f further and further until the glow is beginning to caress the walls of the cabin. And, as that light expands around the inside of this room, the sound of the tambourine increases slightly in volume, and you realize it seems to be coming from somewhere in front of you.

“You can’t see anything in front of you for it to be coming from, and you look and pay close attention and. in the dim light. You notice that light seems to be almost becoming a cone emanating from that [stone]; almost like the light of a projector that projects a cone of light onto a wall containing an image; only the image that you see form in before you isn’t forming on the wall in front of you; it’s forming on the space between you and the wall almost like a hologram. The stone seems to be charging more with the warmth of the fire so that dim light seems to be turning more into that holographic image, becoming more opaque with every passing moment.

“And what’s forming before you looks like an African savannah with a vast vista stretching out [over] coarse grasses. The most beautiful orange-sunset areas of ready orange dirt, and you can see some people underneath a tree enjoying some shelter from the sun playing different musical instruments. As the tambourine gets louder, you begin to hear other instruments: Someone dancing around playing a piccolo,  someone playing a viola, and you stand up and walk towards this holographic image. As you walk towards it, you start to feel the warmth as if there’s a warmth from within this hologram. The more you walk towards it, the warmer you feel, and the more you realize this isn’t the warmth of the fire. There seems to be warmth coming from this projection, and those people playing the musical instruments are carrying on completely oblivious to your presence as you walk into that hologram. And [you] find that, when you walk forward so the Hologram, [the projection] seems to become more solid, more real. The room seems to fade around you until you find yourself only surrounded by whatever direction you look by this Savannah. When you turn back and look back the way you came. You can see this unusual beam of light like a cone of light focusing down onto a stone, but you can’t see the stone. Just the cone of light passing into a vanishing point, and you know that the other side of that vanishing point is that stone. You walk around to the side of the cone, and you look at the side of the cone. You look at the side of the point, and you reach down with your hand trying to pick up the invisible, and it turns out you manage to pick up that stone. The cone rises up at the back but then begins to fade, and you’re left with that shiny stone in your hand while you are here in this Savannah, and you hope that that stone can be triggered by warmth again to open a portal home later. But, for now, you’re curious [about] where you are and why you’re here.”

–Dan Jones, from The Time-Travelling Adventure

Questions? Drop an e-mail to resonant-reading+owner@uucpa.org.