When I searched for Lake Tirza just to see what would come up, the results were all about the very similarly named Lake Tisza, the largest artificial lake in Hungary. Since one of the bloggers I follow is Francis Berger, who lives in Hungary, I wondered if he might have mentioned that lake on his blog at one point, and if a subconscious memory of that might have been the source for Lake Tirza in my dream. All I found was a 2019 post called "Mednyansk - Hungary's Best Landscape Painter," which highlights his 1880 painting Fishing on the Tisza.
This is the Tisza River, though, and the post makes no mention of the lake. The idea of rivers in that part of the world reminded me of something else, though. This past Thursday (September 25, a week after the Tirza dream), I was teaching a group of young children. Their textbook has this photo of a tiny house on a tiny island in the Drina River in Serbia:
One of the boys commented, in Chinese, that living in that house would be very scary because there might be sharks. I said, in English, "No, there can't be any sharks, because that isn't the ocean. It's a river."
"What about octopuses?" said another boy.
"No, octopuses live in the ocean, too. Does anyone know what kinds of animals live in a river?"
Finally the children began proposing more plausible animals -- fish, frogs, turtles, water rats, and so on. The first two animals they had thought of, though, were sharks and octopuses, in that order.
This is a fairly major sync because in "Further notes on the Tirza dream," I had connected the Tirza dream with an earlier dream I had had in 2023. I quoted this paragraph from my account of that earlier dream:
Last night, I had a dream in which I did not appear as a character but simply observed the story as if watching a movie. It was about a man who had decided he wanted to visit a place "where the ocean empties into a river" (sic) because of all the amazing things you could see there -- "Imagine, you could see sharks, octopuses, all kinds of things -- in a river!" So he was walking off to a place like that, with a female friend tagging along rather unenthusiastically. She asked if they were going to Africa, and he said, "No, Michigan. It's a bit north of Africa, but the ocean empties into a river there, too, so it's just as good."
This map of the Danube basin shows both the Tisza and the Drina. The Tisza flows directly into the Danube. The Drina flows into the Sava, which flows in to the Danube. All three of these confluences are located in a fairly small region of Serbia (Novi Sad is an hour's drive from Belgrade).
The Drina, according to Wikipedia, "originates from the confluence of the rivers Tara and Piva." That name Tara has also come up in connection with Tirza. In a September 24 comment on "Blue Green Crystal Ball," I wrote:
Another of Jo Sun's songs is the Green Tara mantra in Sanskrit. Possibly relevant in connection with Tirza/Terra and other mantras that have come up before.
According to this page from the Tourist Organization Republic of Srpska, the similarity between the Serbian river name and the Sanskrit mantra may not be a coincidence:
The word Tara has a double origin. Based on one interpretation, the name is old Indian i.e. Sanskrit and means speed and impetuousness or a fast-flowing river, while the other meaning of the word is the name of an Ilyrian tribe which lived on river banks and whose name was Autariatae.
By the way, I mentioned Green Tara in the comments on "Blue Green Crystal Ball" without knowing that her name can be otherwise translated. According to Wikipedia:
The Green Tara (or "blue-green", Skt. Samayatara or śyāmatārā) remains the most important form of the deity in Tibetan Buddhism.
The Serbian tourism site says Tara means "speed" in Sanskrit. Wikipedia disagrees:
Tārā (Devanagari: तारा) is a feminine noun derived from the root √tṝ, "to cross". It is causative, and as such means "to cause to cross", i.e., "to rescue".
However, the Green Tara mantra -- the one chanted by Jo Sun on her album The Blue Green Crystal Ball, which was my occasion for mentioning Tara in the first place -- does include a reference to swiftness. Wikipedia again:
The main Tārā mantra is the same for Buddhists and Hindus alike: oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā. It is pronounced by Tibetans and Buddhists who follow the Tibetan culture as oṃ tāre tu tāre ture soha. The literal translation would be "Oṃ O Tārā, I pray O Tārā, O Swift One, So Be It!"
Here's Jo Sun's version of the mantra, which follows the Tibetan pronunciation:
Jo Sun's real name is apparently Josephine Genese -- strongly suggesting "Joseph in Genesis," a character Bill has brought up repeatedly.
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