I called her to make an appointment. That was easy enough. However, I forgot to ask her where her office was. When I called back, quite embarrassed, to ask for her address, before she told me, she said, “this is a very promising way to start. You don’t know where to go.” Hilde Kirsch was always coming up with these odd angles of reply, quite different than the norm.

I’m recalling a time in 1950, as I recall, during the off-season in football, when Bob Waterfield of the Los Angeles Rams played with us kids on our street in LA. He was one of the best quarterbacks in the National Football League, and it was a lot of fun to have him play with us. I can’t remember why he was in our neighborhood, but it was a joy, for sure. I was not yet 12. I recall him being very funny and full of humor. As teens, or almost teens, we were impressed that he was married to Jane Russell.

Dreams are stories, fragments of stories, or invitations to story. Analysis, interpretation, and efforts at understanding are types of stories, but they are different from the story potential of dreams.

Saturday Memory
July 18, 2026

It was 1992. Santa Monica. A large event with several hundred in the audience. I had called the conference “Writing Inside Out.” The presenters were Annie Dillard, Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Goldberg and me. What I am remembering is at one point Allen and I were talking about my visit to Sorley MacLean, the great Gaelic poet. Allen said: “Hold on, Russ. I want to give something to your son.” He picked a small book from his leather bag, jotted a few liners and a doodle in it and handed it to me. “He will like this.” It was a copy ofHowl, the book he had been prosecuted form. Indeed, my youngest son, who is the poet among my children, was happy to have it. Quite a memento!

It was early 1977. I and others in my cohort of new analysts, had our applications for the psychology license denied. The reason given was that our clinical experience at the Jung clinic in Los Angeles was not broad enough or clinical enough. We appealed, and this decision was overturned. We were admitted to the written examination and all of us having passed, we were admitted to the interview.
At the exam, I s asked why I felt my training was adequate for the psychology license. I answered that the requirements for the license were unrelated to the work I did as an analyst. Why then, they asked, apply for the license. I answered that I wanted recognition that the real work of the logos of the psyche was recognized professionally. I did not want to be licensed only on the basis of meeting relatively surface requirements, but for the deeper work of the psyche.
There were no more questions and I left feeling like I had done myself in. However, to my great surprise, on 7.7.77, I received my license as a psychologist. I remembered this experience a few days ago on the 49th anniversary of getting my license, I notice as well that 49 us 7×7,

Saturday Memory
June 20, 2026

Sometimes, things hang together with the thinnest of threads. I was at my annual physical and everything was checking out just fine. I had an intuition that I should have a cardiac stress test for a baseline. The doctor did not think it was necessary, but because of my intuition I pushed for it and it was scheduled. After I did the stress tests, I was called and told there were some anomalies that needed further investigation. I was scheduled for a nuclear stress test. The results of that indicated I needed a catheter study of my heart vessels (a coronary angiogram). That procedure revealed that all five of my heart vessels were almost completely blocked and I was immediately scheduled for a heart bypass operation. After I was out of recovery, the surgeon told me that without the bypass, I had no more than a month to live. That intuition was the thin thread that saved my life.

I can’t stop thinking about what I experienced in today’s acupuncture vision.

The scene began as usual. No lights in the tower. The door was closed. For a long period “nothing” happened. Then I became aware (not a voice, just an infusion of awareness from “somewhere” not of my doing) that I was to “see into” the scene and to listen to the silence. I was aware that I had spoken of this in the seminar today. Then as I settled into seeing and listening, everything began to “ripple.” I was made aware that this rippling was the process of becoming and as long as I was aware of the rippling, the becoming was not yet “complete.” If the rippling was in process, the becoming will be still in the future. Then I became aware that when dreams are being assembled, they will be rippling. However, as the dream becomes coded in the brain as memory, then the rippling stops and the dream becomes “real.” But it is not the dream that becomes real, it is the “memory” of the dream that becomes real. Once it becomes real in this sense, it cannot be changed. It becomes as real as a table. It is no longer subject to the “possibilities” that existed in the rippling assembly stage. Like the visions. Once the session is finished, the vision becomes real as a memory. When I am in the vision, the rippling is happening and many things are possible. I understood I needed to stay aware of this. 

Saturday Memory
June 13, 2026

It was my senior year in high school. I was Boy’s League President. Part of my responsibility was to arrange a car show and a talk by someone. I was able to get Bob Yeakel’s specially designed Oldsmobile for the show and Ronald Reagan agreed to give his General Electric talk. Yeakle was a paraplegic and the car was modified so that everything operated by hand. On the day of the event, I picked up the car and Ronald Reagan at the airport. It was difficult to get used to driving with all controls by hand instead of by feet. At one point, as we proceeded through an intersection, a car went through as well from the right. I was able to stop in time to avoid a collision. The car and Reagan arrived safely at the school. I remember this event as my one chance to really alter history. One could say I muffed it.

ral

Since acupuncture this morning, I cannot stop thinking about the vision I had.

Acupuncture. The scene began with the tower lights on and the door open. Nothing came out, so I went in. The lift took me to the third floor, where a sliding panel revealed a room that I had not been in before. On the wall were three large TV or computer screens, one on top and two below side-by-side. For quite some time as I watched, nothing happened. Then, the top screen came on, but I could not see anything. It was intensely black but somehow “alive.” After a while, the bottom right screen lit up with blue light filaments that were moving very actively. As I watched, the filaments began to form an “image,” not so much a full image but the “shape” of an image. The lights were forming themselves into many images of what looked like the outline of tables. At one point the sequence of table images stopped, and one image became pronounced in some way. When that occurred, the left bottom screen lit up with an image of a “real” table, like one that we would call “a table.” I could not tell whether the top dark screen was somehow making the right lower screen outlines, or whether they naturally occurred that way and the dark screen “chose” the final image to become real. This all seemed possible in the experience. There followed a sequence of images: a dream that went through the same process and finally became a “real” dream in the lower left scree. Then there was a soccer match that became a real match (Peru was somehow involved). This whole process occurred several times, with the colors of the light filaments becoming the series of objects, inner and outer events becoming real. Then for a while, the lower right screen went dark but was still manifesting. In this case, I understood this was from the light spectrum I could not see, but nonetheless produced reality. The top screen never showed anything I could see but it was very “alive.” The final sense of what it “meant” for things to become “real” (in our experience) was that the manifestation from the lower right dimension was not longer required. The real objects, inner events, and outer happenings became “fixed” in the dimension we call “reality” and operated by the laws of that dimension. I was dizzy when the session ended.

Thought for the Day
Wednesday, June 3,2026

One of the first things to understand about the word olmelleon is that it is not to be judged by it’s absence from any known language or dictionary. It is not there at all. This is because the other is speaking a new language. This illustrates that the psyche (the “other” as I call it) is originating a new language, as it also originates new myths, new stories. I take this to be a word that applies in some way to the conflagration my dream referred to. When I experience a new word like this, the first thing I do is to close my eyes and repeat the word out loud until “something” happens. As I noted last week, “seeing with the eyes closed” is the literal meaning of the word “mystery.” Doing this (closing the eyes) is one way into the mystery the word presents. Repeating the word becomes a chant, a kind of mantra. Speaking this way with the eyes closed has all the qualities of a ritual and begins to excite the deeper psyche. One of my experience in doing this brought an image of smoke on a distant horizon, billowing clouds of dark smoke, a major blaze to be sure. This image presented itself autonomously and without any conscious effort on my part. Another experience produced an image of smoke as well as flames—closer this time. A third time, the image was looking out over a fire ravaged area completely engulfed in flame and smoke over a vast area. When I was saying the word out loud I would say it in “threes.” This reflects my habitual use of the “Rue of Three” Whenever I can when faced with the unknown, uncertainty, or doubt. It is one way into holding Keats’ negative capability. So, doing the experience with the eyes closed and saying the word olmelleon led to three images. My sense is that images were providing the “meaning” of the new and created word. It might be synonymous with the word “conflagration” that the dream referred to. But the important thing I feel is that this word means more than just the destruction of a conflagration. It’s pointing to something far more destructive and I believe it is pointing to what is transpiring now on our way to the future. I take it now as the name of what is happening culturally, politically, economically and socially: utter destruction. Olmelleon is what it is. It is, I believe, one aspect of the sixth extinction manifesting on many levels.