“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth didn’t come through last Monday evening, New Year’s Eve. Instead, Jane and I gave a party for a change. The next day we were ready to get back to our writing and painting, but first I cleared the house of holiday paraphernalia—including our beautiful Christmas tree. I carefully propped up the tree, a balsam fir, in the woods at the back of the hill house. I told myself that next summer the tree’s skeleton would remind me of the days that had passed since 1980 began, in our terms; I knew I’d be grateful for having physically experienced every one of them. [And as an artist, I’d be as much intrigued by the tree’s naked structure as I had been when it bore its dense greenery.]

1. My dream represented a reaffirmation of a stand I’d taken early in this life—one that perhaps I’d felt since birth. Very simply: I dreamed that I was a youth, and that even though there was snow on the ground I’d been given the task of taking care of a beautiful young tree growing in a large field next to the Butts family home in Sayre, Pennsylvania. (Sayre is only 18 miles from Elmira, New York, where Jane and I live now.) Even though it was wintertime, the tree carried a sparse cover of leaves. Nearby in the dream were old industrial buildings, in which I became lost—but I found my way out of them and returned to the tree. My interpretation is that I saw the tree as the tree of life even then, and that I’d chosen to remain close to the world of nature and art instead of immersing myself in the safer industrial one. Jane was inspired by the dream to write a series of excellent short poems about it today.