Diamonds in the deep and snakes on the beach.
Nelson Mandela was running for president, South Africa was having it's first democratic election. I had undertaken to work with "archetypal protective forces of the land" - in my temple not made with hands. I was in contact with an African Goddess of the Land (She Who Shall Not Be Named), she would eventually push me into the ocean both literally and figuratively. The working was simple, the immediate results were in my dreams:
I was walking on Camps Bay Beach with Nelson Mandela, a beach that at one time had a fence through it separating white people from black people.. A beach I grew up on. He was chatting enthusiastically to me as I walked, he had a long staff in his hand. In a variation on Saint Patrick he was picking up snakes on the beach - he would pick one up as he was talking, pause to scold it, then put it back down and it would slither away. This went on for some time. He stopped to ask me what I want. I was flummoxed at first, then I replied that I want continued peace and protection of natural resources. He looked at me, nodded his head and said "you seek diamonds in the deep".
I had no idea what this meant, did he mean treasures from the unconscious? Real diamonds? What does it have to do with natural resources and their protection? I had many dreams of treasure in the deep ocean - especially diamonds, it was a recurring theme..
A few years later - I was unemployed after leaving school early, no real prospects and I was watching television with my dad, there was a documentary on commercial diving - dad was enthused, he said I should go do that, that's the perfect job for me - I concurred, enrolled and after a few months of training and I had my Class II Commercial Diving ticket, I would be air diving but I was certified for mixed gas saturation diving. While I was on course I picked up Anne McCaffrey's The Crystal Singer - which led me to have the idea of empowering diamonds with mantra, to make them a focal point for this work.
I soon found myself living in a diver's digs with a legend who is now the oldest ticketed commercial diver alive today and a survivor of the Piper tragedy. Guess what book he was reading when I met him? The Crystal Singer. In-fact - his bookshelves were bursting with esoteric titles and great fiction! We smoked copious amounts of weed and talked, I suggested we use dowsing to help nail down where the diamonds are at. We had a small private concession, diving off the Sea Hawk - a converted fishing trawler with 4 pumps and a large classifier. Alas - I wasn't to make my fortune, my career was cut short by a sinus infection that led to surgery and by the time I was recovered enough to continue diving I had taken an office job (tragic detour!)..
But I was still adamant that I had work left to do with diamonds and conservation somehow. I was browsing ecologically minded pagan bulletin boards and found myself in contact with Janine Roberts - an activist on many fronts and she had an especially long and brutal fight with De Beers. I found myself promoting her work and her fight with De Beers, I had organized for her to be flown to Cape Town and interviewed on a very popular current issues television program called Carte Blanche, everything was set - she was about to fly down and then at the last moment we were both ghosted. The very next episode that aired was a praise piece for De Beers..
That would be the last of diamonds for me, from dreaming of them as an allegory for deep time and spiritual strength found in the depths to this weird set of events that seemed a reification of my dreams by me pumping gravel, jackhammering conglomerate and lifting boulders with lift bags on the sea floor in a very physically challenging job.
In later years the movie Blood Diamond would be released, focusing on mercenaries and conflict diamonds, De Beers would undergo a lot of change, switching focus to lab grown diamonds amidst declining sales.
This work still continues but internally, reification of long arc dream themes into the physical is something that continues to happen, I am still finding stones after dreaming of them but they aren't diamonds.
The sad fate of the Sea Hawk
