Lauri is holding a class in this old funky building. Some people have arrived for it but the room isn’t set up yet. There are backjacks in the room, and people sitting around or milling about. Lauri’s somewhere doing something. The class is going to be about creativity and art in a shamanic way. I decide to start setting up my backjack and my initial art materials. I’m thinking about Lauri’s PhD and how that qualifies her to run this class but I’m also wondering if that’s necessary to do this sort of thing. I am happy to get it started soon.

I’m organizing a retreat for natives and a group that I belong to. I’ve found a location which is a little funky but kinda cool. It’s an old lake created by a spring on some property that’s been built on but has been there forever. It’s at the edge of a city and looks a lot like somewhere in Mexico. You can have boats on the lake and there’s lots of place to picnic and just relax. I’ve worked out to reserve the whole place to ourselves. We’re looking at dates and the date I had picked out was at the end of January I believe. It turns out that there’s another ceremony scheduled at that time that a number of people will be at so we’re looking at alternative dates in April or May.

I’m standing with Kirby and my mom is there. He’s talking about not feeling well and having been in the hospital while in California. I’ve asked him why he didn’t call me. He starts talking about someone moving into his house and they didn’t have a job for the longest time. I mentioned other people like Kevin that had been unemployed for really long periods of time and Kirby agreed that he knew people like that as well so they shouldn’t talk. But then the guy got a job at an amusement park. There’s a rollercoaster there that he road while the park was closed and broke a record for most consecutive rides. He went thru the loops like 50 or 60 times. He loves it. He said that once when the ride was running, some woman had to stay off and noticed that the spa nearby did something odd and when the guy drove away his license plate was glowing. Now they call it the Shaman Rollercoaster.

Thoughts: It sounds a lot like my rehashing of shamanism and the difficulties with making it something that seems credible. I’m out of work, I’m wanting to lead classes but worry about scholastic credentials, and it feels a lot like a rollercoaster, going over these things again and again. A license plate is a valid license. A spa is water and a bath, someplace that I used to meditate a lot.