I
As a child she sat beneath a cypress tree, where she ingeniously culled the melancholy from the surrounding air and filth from the grass blades. All she had to do was run her elegant hands through the topsoil and, as though startled by her compassionate touch, the land jolted in tremors of bliss. Her hair was a spectral flow of supremacy. Her eyes like indestructible gemstones placed in the enigmatic wall of a prophet’s sanctuary. Yes, you could say she had complete dominion over the alchemy of space and time, as they sought guidance through her illuminated wonderments.
Unlike other children her age, she spent a majority of her time aloof. Outside, beneath the nobility of the cypress tree, she silently asked incisive questions to the lingering stirrings of the night. Her inquisitiveness humbled the expanse of distant stars blanketing the elucidated lens of the earth. On the odd occasion, the stars would whisper inquisitions back by falling into the outer edges of the celestial gulf. She thought, “This is the universal lullaby. Everything is trying to comfort and dream boundlessly with everything else.”
One unassuming night, as she sat cross-legged under the phantasmic emanations of the moon, a rather baroque thought pranced in her head. She wondered if humanity would ever be able to successfully terraform the moon. At first the thought appeared to be nonsensical and unattainable in scope. Then, as she became more contemplative with the notion, a kaleidoscopic reverie started rising from the luminous recesses of her mind. She was dreaming of a way for humanity to make the next evolutionary step.
For months following the revelation, she sat star struck in the nocturnal silhouette of the cypress tree with cookies, paper, and pencil crayons. Juggling a pencil crayon in one hand and a delicious cookie in the other, she started to diagrammatically scribble out childish blueprints for her idealistic home away from home. In her “terraformed moon,” she had plantations germinated from seeds of iridescence, astronauts building monuments of angels, levitating abodes rotating around zero energy devices, spaceship launching pads paved from golden mirrors, people raising their hands in heart shapes, and crumbs from the cookie she was always patiently chewing.
When she worried about her, her mother would scurry outside and bring her a woolen sweater if it was chilly or some refreshing milk for her venerated cookie. Her mother loved her like dusk loves the scent of eternity. On special occasions she would even sit for a prolonged length of time in quietude behind her daughter, hypnotized by her beatific brilliance.
As the months progressed, the gentle rustlings of autumn eventually turned into the arctic chill of winter. Still attending to her terraforming the moon project, she grabbed all the lavish pages filled with alluring interstellar trinkets, new age gizmos, paradisiacal communities, and headed into the confines of her bedroom. Frustrated that the ethos of the season was impeding against the importance of her work, she decided she wanted a telescope for Christmas (just so she could watch the moon for inspiration for the remainder of the winter).
While sitting with her parents for dinner one night, she enthusiastically asked if they could buy her a well-crafted telescope for Christmas. Her father, a man with a laconic temper and a penchant to be a tad authoritarian in his parenting approach, asked his marvelously scientific daughter:
“How much will it cost?”
“To be honest, I don’t know.”
“Well, I hear astronomy gear can be quite pricey. Your mother and I will think about it.”
“But Dad, I could even save up my allowances. I could contribute to the price tag.”
“That is alright. You spend that money on things like pony dolls, candies, and the sort.”
“But Dad, that stuff doesn’t interest me as much as science and civilization does.”
“Don’t be in a hurry to grow up, dear. Science will always be waiting around the corner. You should focus your attention on being a kid.”
“But Dad, I want to be a scientist. Shouldn’t I be getting a head start if I plan to be a success at it?”
“No! You should be enjoying the free time you have as a kid to roam amongst kids your own age. The world of science is too complex for a girl with an overactive imagination.”
And with that slandering comment, her heart was crushed like a consternated soldier under the turning wheels of an enemy tank. Devastated and dismayed, she marched off to her bedroom and let her tearful floodgates saturate her fluffy pillow. Her envisagement for a terraformed moon plummeted into a sonorous darkness. For the first time in memory, the ability to change the world seemed utterly useless.
II
She keeps the memory tautly tethered to the waxing and waning of her mindscape. Now, alone, listless, in an apartment she occupies in a relatively outstanding neighborhood, she cascades back into the din images of her memoirs, looking for resolution to her mounting lament. Alas, her attachment to her father’s echoing words still obliterates the sublime peace she so rightfully deserves.
In a spontaneous fervor she jumps up off the soft support of her couch. Turning around spastically, she catches the indented outline of her body before it recedes into the stillness of the fabric. A concise decision has washed over her. She decides to paint a picture.
Grabbing a perfectly constructed section of canvas, and wielding a wizardly paintbrush, she empties all her morose feelings into her creative undertaking. With a slathering of broad crimson strokes, a smidgen of nautically tinged dots, and a hint of amethyst spirals, an undeniable tapestry of multiplying moods begins to saturate the canvas. Partially loathing the application or treatment of the next stroke, partially enthralled by it, she excruciatingly expels her multifaceted imagination into the aura of the painting. Something tremendous has come over her. Something outside the control of her rationalizing mind. She begins to think about a catalyzing, creative trinity existing in the heart of humanity. A trinity of forces coalescing, coagulating, and co-mingling inside our acts and deeds.
Impulsively, she applies another smattering of aqueous dots to the painting. An upward rush of euphoria comes over her, like she is ascending to a palace made of an archangel’s ever-flowing empathy. The rush crashes. The oracle-like eye of the paintbrush detaches from the canvas. Again she impulsively dabs her brush in the amethyst fluid and lets go into the creative process. This time her skin feels like it is communicating to her in a voice of certitude. A shiver slithers from her toes to the top of her vivid head, like a snake methodically moving through the dunes and shadows of the trembling sand.
Finally she dips the paintbrush in the crimson fluid. Forebodingly, a suffocating mood entwines her. She stares into the picturesque lakes of fire eloquently applied to the canvas. It has her. She swerves in pathos. Inevitably, she falls into the diabolical belly of a mental world filled with fiery demons, which seem like they could slaughter her at the drop of a hat. Abruptly, she throws her wizardly paintbrush against the palette.
Her father and the abundances of beasts residing in Man sneer at her with an unprecedented virulence from the crimson strokes. Screaming at the top of her lungs, she grabs the canvas and starts slashing at it with the blunt end of the paintbrush. Ballistic and unhinged, she has surrendered to their discouraging and malice intentions by embodying them. “This is my defeat,” she ragingly whispers to herself. “Man’s dominance is over-saturating. I cannot win. I just can’t.”
She collapses to the floor. Weak, remorseful, and spiraling in a discombobulating state, she groans to the loneliness of the pallid walls. In response they just crawl closer to her, as if they want to suffocate her like a sarcophagus could suffocate anyone who happens to be enveloped in its diminutive quarters. She realizes that the almost insoluble trinity exists in her heart as well. A trinity involving the inexplicable ferociousness of a hellish world, the ethereal graciousness of a heavenly world, and the ambivalent strangeness of the world she is living in right now…in the flesh.
Just then, as her head squirms in agony on the floor, a beaming full moon comes upon her optical vantage point. It invites her with its virtuous presence. She remembers. She remembers “the vision” from her childhood. She sluggishly stands to her feet. The moon greets her with everything it can possibly muster. For the smallest of moments, her agony subsides into the charm of the moon. “The antidote,” she modestly pipes out. “My hero.”
III
In a respite outside, in a malleable chair with a freshly sparked cigarette, a meditative like tranquility washes over her enraged ego—dousing her psyche’s flames with an oceanic calmness. She thinks about what is rancorously tearing away at her internal world with an open mind and an open heart. In an exhalation of thick smoke, her openness joins the distinctly woven cigarette cloud as they both dissipate into the nocturnal yonder. Relief invariably dances in everything she blesses with her extruding openness. The moon lets go of an emotive, tearful strand of effervescing light. Gloriously, the lunar light touches the crystal pendant she wears around her voluptuous neck. For a brief moment, the great divide between them only seems like an illusion caused by the burden of perception. Feeling safe, secure, and incorruptible, she falls deep into the quiescence within and without her. To her, at this very moment, the planet is awakening in the silence of its isness.
As the cigarette slowly burns down to the filter, she begins to feel lethargic. Anticipating her return to the sleeping world behind her eyelids, the stars blink less rapidly. Their eyelids are becoming heavier and heavier as well. In fact, the entirety of the neighborhood seems to be fatiguing, as her yawns penetrate geological stratums and unseen animals in and on the land. Slowly peeling herself from her pliant chair, she whisks herself away into the solitude of her apartment.
Brushing past a MC Escher painting, a fireplace, a wall ornament resembling the twelve faces of the zodiac, she lethargically stumbles across a letter she received from the seminal scientific researcher, Carl Sagan. Framed and conveniently placed near the entrance and exit of her apartment, she scans through the lucid response to the letter she sent to him. His words once again touch the yearning of her soul.
Months before he died of pneumonia, she received a well-penned letter from Carl Sagan. After waiting three years for him to write her back, she finally received it on a tempestuous day in late August. She remembers that day was a particularly hectic and sorrowful day. Her lithium medication had vanished from her possession; she found her precious kitty under her bed, in a stage straddling rigor mortis and decomposition; images of her father and the plundering of Man raced frenetically in her mindscape. The letter allowed her to disengage from the tumultuous and horrific events of the day. She was given a gift of scientific sanctity from the ever so admirable, Carl Sagan.
In the letter to him, she asked if he thought humanity would ever make the leap from the terrestrial to the celestial, safely. Carl, in a cursive reminiscent of her very own, powerfully responded:
“For us earthlings, it is imperative that we use skeptical science as a way of discovering the panacea to civilized dread. I have spent a lifetime studying the causes and effects of evolution only to become electrified by the feeling of evolution itself---its imagination, and what possible angles and directions it evokes in my understanding of it. When amalgamating the potential of the imagination and the proponents of skeptical science- a science that dispels pre-modern myths and looks for contemporary truths- there are an overwhelming number of options available to us. If we all look into the sky at the right time of day, at the right time in this continuum, and we dream of the impossible, everything will eventually fall into place.
Science is the ticket to interfacing with one’s supreme goal: the completion of creation. I write this letter, smiling and grateful, because so many people have taken an interest in what I find to be the mind blowing achievements of existence: the anomalies in life and death, the cosmos and the depth of our ecology, the strength of love. I think my scientific allegiance will always encompass a synergy of these things. So, to answer your question, I do believe it is possible. I believe it is more than possible.”
Now, standing, once again mesmerized by Carl’s assuring words, she gives a slight genuflection to the framed letter. Surveying the room, filled with a ripped apart painting, a stack of esoteric magick cards, and her astute sense of interior decorating, she decides it is best to call it a night. The quietness of the apartment whole heartily agrees. Hand in hand, bodily temple in bodily temple, they enter a slumber together.
IV
For months on end now she unexpectedly has a dream where, in a flight of fancy through an otherworldly terrain, in a journey through a centrifuge of thunderous and superlative images, she comes face to face with a timeless oval citadel. She intuits it to be a citadel, but for all she knows it could be an extraterrestrial jewel that was placed in this bizarre hyperspace well before the dawn of Man and his kin. Nonetheless, the oval shaped structure intrigues her to the edges and extremities of astonishment.
While in this idiosyncratic land, she is always wearing a Gnostic cloak of fine velvet satin. In one hand, effluxing outward from the center of the palm to the tips of her fingers there spews an infinite amount of mathematical formulations. Creating algorithmic juxtapositions, conglomerating in Pythagorean nexus’, fractalizing into ratios of myriad variations and sequences, the mathematical formulations migrate to her fingertips like they are trying to communicate to her something substantial. In the other hand, floating in the concentric area of her palm, is a rotating platonic crystal. As she investigates the sharp and jagged texture of the crystal, as she gazes wondrously into its whirling temperament, she notices the crystal projects holographic representations from her memory. But the crystal just doesn’t project childhood memories of watching birds or swimming in lakes, or young adult memories of idolizing the words of Carl Sagan. The crystal projects fantasies and affirmations from her cosmological memory. Barbaric mammals, helical strands of DNA, unicellular organisms, ineffectual dinosaurs, clusters of hydrogen and carbon gases inconspicuously drifting in outer space. It is all there in the fluid rotation of the crystal.
Voyaging in her velvet cloak, her two hands emit and wispily hold compelling anomalies made of shamanic ideas, scientific theories, and things that are just downright unspeakable. In the flora and fauna of the dream, she is always drawn to the alien like antiquity of the oval cathedral. Giddy and on the verge of exploding from sheer enchantment, she approaches the oval citadel with the taste of danger always wrestling with her tongue.
She speaks to the oval citadel in an inflection and dialect unknown to her very self. When she speaks, the oval citadel modulates with the beautiful resonance of her voice---rippling in matrices and vortices of timelessness. Its aether-like membrane contorts itself when she changes her dialectical tongue. Eventually, she becomes frustrated with the confounding oval citadel levitating in the confounding land, in the confounding dream. She awakens with her nails already scratching her forehead.
Surprisingly, this time she doesn’t awaken befuddled from the puzzling dream. She just keeps on going into an unknowable void beyond personal comprehension. Into the blackness of deep sleep she unconsciously drifts.
V
At the stroke of dawn, the solar wellspring releases its prismic light in order to fraternize with dust particles residing just above her head. The solar-somatic aroma tantalizes the disparate dust particles; the aroma causes them to madly careen and accelerate towards her barely opened lips. Like gypsy sprinkles, they reach her mouth and amorously snuggle up against them. Groggy and dazed, her bones creak to welcome the unconditional love of nature’s brand new day. She outstretches her arms. She wipes the immanent miasma caused from hours of deep sleep from her eyes. Finally, she indolently steps out of bed.
Every morning she walks like a lobotomized android to a pillbox atop her fridge. Popping two kinds of anti-depressive medications, relief overcomes her. Paradoxically, she partly relishes and partly despises the necessity of such a ritual. Turning on the radio, she hears an announcer blurt out that a cataclysm has taken place in the Middle East. Car bombs mangled and incinerated a whole city block in the Gaza strip; leaving some without limbs, some without hope, and some with reprisal insanely pacing in their skulls. A sadness creeps out of her heart. She benevolently sends her unwavering devotion to those who perished in the attack, and to those who live lost in their own chaos.
Sitting down to read the newspaper with some freshly squeezed fruit juice, she turns to the community section. She is scandalized to find an article about the exploitation of two innocent children on the same street as her residence. A harrowing chill instills itself in her inner tree of life---her heart. Cringing but decisively attuned to the story, she learns that the children were victims of some insidious form of entertainment. Kidnapped, the children were brought back to an apartment in her conservative suburbia and stripped naked. For hours the kidnapper videotaped the children pleading in naïve anguish. Vehemently, he shouted at them to fondle or massage one another’s private parts or else they would suffer the consequences: they would never see their parents again. The explicit footage on the videotape revealed that the children somberly abided to the deplorable wishes of the kidnapper. Eventually the children were released back to the perturbed and shaking parents. The kidnapper—not wanting to serve a lifetime in prison due to his transgressions—killed himself with a sawed off shotgun before law enforcement officials could apprehend him.
“THIS IS PURE NEUROSIS,” she shrieks in an appalled tone. “THIS IS THE PATERNALISTIC HEMISHPERE OF THE PLANET AT ITS BEST. ALWAYS LOOKING TO DOMINATE IN THE MOST REVOLTING OF WAYS. I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. IT IS MAN’S BRAZEN NEGLECT OF HIS GRACEFUL SIDE THAT MAKES THIS WORLD A LOT MORE DISGUSTING. I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE.”
Slamming the newspaper onto the dense body of her coffee table, she inadvertently knocks over the box she keeps her tarot cards in. Spilling and sprawling out on her carpet, three cards sit face up for her intensified eyes to see. She leans over to inspect the combined meaning of the cards. Rather shockingly, her Kabbalistic divinatory tool has unveiled a message of great magnitude.
VI
Lying perfectly symmetrical to one another, the three cards draw her intensified eyes further into their splendid magick. In anticipation, a humungous gulp of saliva goes down her supple throat. From left to right, the cards read: Oppression, Equilibrium, and Courage. Depicted on the oppression card is the Zen sign for wholeness succumbing to strangulation by a prickly stem on a dying rose. Rendered on the equilibrium card are the key ingredients of Gaia- water, earth, fire, and air- spiraling into a discernible eye made up of infinitesimal serpents. Adorned on the courage card is a bodhisattva holding a double edged sword composed of dharmic justice; with one side of the blade cutting deep into a profane abyss, and one side of the sword cutting deep into a sacred abyss. Curiosity, with all its vast and intriguing qualities, causes the primal inferno of her anger to extinguish itself. Jumping off the couch, she sits sublimely with the three cards so she can wait for their combined meaning to relay a phenomenological profundity to her.
Patience. Prescience. Patience. Prescience. A multifarious mood of relaxation and prophecy drains into her logical faculties. Iridescently, a message comes to her in the form of a synchronicity.
She has been here before, at this exact moment in the space|time continuum; looking at the different nuances of the cards, looking at her primal inferno extinguish itself, looking at her mind process the numinous information from a tarot deck. She has apprehended this moment before.
Patience. Prescience. Patience. Prescience. Her multifarious mood blossoms in sensitivity.
Electrical and sensuous impulses circumnavigate her body. She has become more sublime. She has become incredibly still with the sheer weirdness of the predicament. “This moment must be of tremendous importance,” she subliminally gestures to her analytical mind.
Suddenly, giving the words oppression, equilibrium, and courage one last glance, a revolution of energy comes radiating out of her eyes into everything she sees. “Ah hah.” “The message must be telling me something about the way I see.” “How fascinating.”
Not wanting to break the profound momentum of the synchronicity, she just lays there sublimely with the company of her cards. Patiently. With prescience. Patiently. With prescience.
VII
Her sublime disposition grows outward. Into the furthest reaches of the horizon it sings. Into the extremities of silence and burgeoning wonder it exultantly soars. Clearing its way through the wilderness of her psyche, her sentience starts to vibrantly project itself in every nook and cranny of the apartment. She breathes in the fluidity of the air. Like a mystical fire utilized in a Hopi Indian trance, the influx of air causes her body to turn into a scorching sea of vision. A comforting, energetic magma pumps triumphantly through the superhighways of veins and capillaries moving methodically along.
Exhaling, the flow of her body moves towards the apex of her skull. Like a volcano ecstatically rupturing cornucopias of magma and steam, her body writhes in release. Through patience her body and mind have become intimately synchronous. Her ingrained mental motor has nullified its own perpetuation. In the clarity of it all, she hears a seraphic voice ricochet a softly moving sentence in her head:
“Look at all the cards with an empty mindset.”
Starting off with the oppression card, she studies the miniscule thorns asphyxiating the delicate stroke of the Zen circle. Images of famine and economic sanctions, nuclear weapons and misogynistic conversations smother her in their stark undercurrents. Rapidly and rabidly, the images move backwards and forwards, adjacently and perpendicularly across the patient framework of her mindscape. Nausea submerges itself in the unsettling pit of her viscera. Taking a deep breath, her hypersensitivity prepares for the worst. Just then, the seraphic voice chimes in:
“Look at all three cards with an empty mindset. Don’t attach to what is provoked out of your understanding. Differentiation and dynamism are fine tools to analyze with, but emptiness is your key!!!”
Exhaling, she turns her head to the center of the eye on the equilibrium card. The concentration of feral snakes and the coalescing of the elements foster images of composure and consonance in her mindscape. Hastily inhaling the fluidity of the appetizing air, she hesitates. She decides to reexamine the cards by looking at them in terms of “emptiness as form”. Scrupulously scanning the visualizations on the cards- from oppression to courage- she finally reaches the peering slits on the face on the bodhisattva. His courageous stance invokes images of the patriarch of pacifism (Gandhi) peacefully standing up against the mongering of the British Empire. She gloriously smiles.
Meticulously examining the cards in a reversed fashion- from courage to oppression- she reaches the withering body of the rose chained to the Zen circle. Forlornly, images of childhood hazing, carnivorous and decadent men slobbering over bountiful cleavage, and the repugnant flesh of a decimated prisoner of war eclipses her mind. She flinches. An aghast sigh exits her mouth. “Serenity. Calmness. These things will help me align with my fullness,” she delicately hums to herself.
Patiently fighting the escalating sense of dread, her mind begins to expand. Magically, she is able to enshrine herself with her own feminine aura. “This is extraordinary. “This is marvelous,” she gently whispers. “By opening my mindset it has the opportunity to become full.”
Looking out into the blue horizon, she joyously emancipates an enormous swelling of contracting emotions. “Now this feels like me. This moment feels like me.” Elated and brimming in confidence, she jumps to her feet. “Time to go to work,” she eagerly pipes out.
Grabbing her keys and blowing a kiss to her framed letter from Carl Sagan, she jubilantly steps out the door.
VIII
Underneath an obnoxious incandescent light, in a spacious library organized by her impeccable sense of categorization, she gleefully waits for her first class of students. In her vocational den, she has carefully laid out all the latest book club additions to the library’s already voluminous corpus. From fantasy to folklore, the new additions silently wait for the grubby yet precious fingers of her voracious students. As the jarring bell rings to signal a changing of classes, she can hear an onslaught of munchkins marching towards her. “Here they come,” she blatantly says. “Here they stupendously come.”
They file into the library very chaotically. With untied shoelaces, with juice stains on their pants, with their limbs flailing, with scintillating daydreams glossing over their eyes…all the wee ones stampede in. Immediately honing in on their favorite section of the library—naively bypassing the carefully laid out book club selections—the munchkins grab books as though they are plastic toys they can frivolously contort. “Now that all the boys have made it, all I have to do is wait for the girls and then I can start,” she says.
The girls elegantly enter the library with scintillating daydreams glossing over their eyes as well. Unlike the boys, clusters of them immediately take an interest in the latest additions to the library’s inventory. “What is this all about?” they all inquisitively ask their librarian. “I will gladly tell you, but first it is time for the lesson plan,” she smilingly responds.
Everyday she starts off her class with a short procession before the children are let loose like hungry lions into the tall grass of the literary Serengeti. In the procession, she concisely tries to teach the students about the importance of edification and their imaginations. Today’s topic has taken the form of healing your friends. “Gather around my students.” “It is time for today’s lesson,” she beckons the males from the Guinness Book of World Records collections, and the females from the Harry Potter novels.
“Okay today we’re going to talk about curing your buddies. Does everyone know what the word curing means?” The male students look at her dumbfounded; but not wanting to appear too dumbfounded, they nod in acquiescence. Evidently, shyness has come over their kindred sit on the mosaic design of the carpet. Breaking the awkward silence, a female student speaks out: “My Mommy gives me a cure when she gives me medicine for a sore throat.” “Why yes, that is an example of something that cures you. Does anyone else have another example?” she curiously says. A boy, with filthy glasses and a fresh booger hanging off his finger, responds: “My Daddy is a doctor. He is always playing with cures.” “Yes a doctor is a great example of someone who cures,” she responds. “Now, let me tell you a story of someone who cures people in the jungle.” Bracing herself for the anecdote, she takes a stimulating gulp of the library’s well-filtered air.
“Deep in the exotic jungles there lives a Man. Not an ordinary Man, however. This Man has supernatural powers. This Man has the ability to heal people with the sound of his voice. This Man has the ability to communicate to the animals. Why when he uses his supernatural voice, all the animals gather around him waiting for special instructions. This Man is called a Shaman.”
Transfixed by their librarian’s words, all the children’s glossed over eyes dilate in awe. Their daydreams circle around the unfolding of the story in an ignorant and innocence embrace. Vivified from their daydreams mingling with her anecdote, their librarian joyously continues:
“One day a young boy was traveling outside a village looking for food. Picking away at the berries on the trees, plucking plants from the soil, the wandering boy was gathering ingredients for his tribe’s annual mask festival. Suddenly, out of the blue, the boy found himself facing a giant snake hanging from a vine. For no reason, the snake angrily bit him in a fit of rage. The boy, hurt and woozy from the poisonous bite, tumbled to the ground in shock. The poison caused his entire body to squirm helplessly on the ground.
Hearing his cries from the dense jungle, the Shaman runs to the rescue. Immediately, the Shaman puts his hands around the wound of the boy and massages the wound with his supernatural voice. By rubbing the wound with his hands and singing an ancestral tune passed down from his forefathers, the Shaman was able to bring the poison to the surface of the wound. The boy was cured within a matter of minutes. Cool eh?”
The children, with their eyes dancing in the folkloric gracefulness of their librarian’s words, sit compelled and attentive. “How can a voice bring poison to the surface of a wound?” a flabbergasted girl shouts out. Attending to the moral of her mythic anecdote, their librarian responds:
“The Shaman knows how use his voice to help people. That is why it is important not to make fun of your friends or even strangers. The voice carries powers rarely understood, but regardless, powers that are always acting. If you put someone down for looking differently or for thinking uniquely, the words themselves turn into poison. But if you congratulate someone for looking differently or for thinking uniquely, the words turn into remedies. Children, you must understand, the human voice is that powerful.”
Undeniably entranced by their librarian’s curative words, the children sit in silence; trying to absorb the moral of the story. Some of them tackle the moral by twitching their noses. Some of them scratch their heads with one hand and their restless butts with the other. And some of them even look around the spacious library, as though the mythical story has superimposed itself over every nuance of the library’s visible and invisible reality.
“Okay that’s it. Enjoy the rest of your library time. The storytelling session is over. Your butts are now allowed to free themselves from the carpet.”
Homogeneously they run like wild turkeys to their favorite spots in the library. Sitting back down under her incandescent nuisance of a light, she ruminates over the moral of the folkloric story; thinking about what inside has been affected by the goodness of her hearty words. She stares off into the scattered daydreams of the children, pleased, and poignantly touched.
IX
There was a time in her life when occupying a creaking chair in an elementary school library was as farfetched as the obliteration of gravity. Ever since her carefree days as a child under the sheltering cypress tree, she always favored a scientific worldview. Even in her teenage years, when she was first going through menstrual moodiness and when she would receive affectionate stares from pimple-faced romeos, she would think of everything as a grand discovery. Quite palpably, you could say she was quite taken by her own morphology from a very early age.
One time in a biology class, her teacher expected the students to supply a written assignment on the benefits of heredity while using punnet squares as the formulaic point of reference. Feeling constrained with the guidelines given to her, she decided to be a renegade and turn in a paper that showcased the downside of heredity. In the paper, she used urban sprawl as the quintessential benchmark to oppose the beneficial side of biology. Claiming that suburban environments are bequeathed with negative dominant and recessive genes from urbanized malcontent, she tried to convince her teacher that our biological functioning shouldn’t only be seen as beneficial. Her teacher, admiring her ambition, intelligence and originality, gave her an A+ only under the stipulation that she tutored some of the more undetermined students struggling with the course.
Taking home her exceptional achievement to her father, she was met with a bitter sense of detachment. Due to losing his job at the city’s most prestigious hospital, her father was like an incendiary substance just waiting for a threatening spark. For long nights and days, he would just sit on the couch, drinking whiskey bottle after whiskey bottle, not feeling anything but the sorcerous affliction of the intoxicant. Even when she proudly presented her tour de force in academic bravery to him, her father just nodded while staring blankly at the shadows in the chasms of the room.
Their rapport around this time became more and more desolate. With her father slowly being consumed by an encrypting malaise, and with her mother feeling the brunt of her father’s frustration, she slowly drifted further into a universe submerged in fantastical conjectures and feelings of being under appreciated. Not wanting to give up on her scientific dreams, she valiantly continued to work on her theories in the lonely ambiance of her room.
Awakening one spring morning with an awful feeling pervading her delicate synapses, she found her father motionless on the carpet. Allegedly during the course of the night, her father passed out from drinking too much of his sorcerous elixir. While sleeping, he vomited up an inordinate amount of liquor and partially digested fodder. Not fully exiting his mouth, the vomit lodged itself in his throat, causing convulsions and inevitably, death. She tried to revivify her father’s stiff carcass, but as the story goes, her father had bit the dust.
While combing over his body, she noticed that her biology paper was sticking out of his back pocket. Removing the paper ever so gently, she was disturbed to find a series of scribbles written in a drunken cursive. In the barely legible writing, she could make out words that indicated to her a sense of deep penitence on behalf of her father. Along with the incomprehensible scrawl, she noticed dried, salty tears covering the surface of every pen stroke. Decimated from the experience, she broke down into tears herself; smearing them over all the alluded regret in her father’s desperate and drunken scribbling.
After this traumatic experience, she became less interested in furthering her scientific keenness. She slowly started to detach from the regular flow of her optimism and striking dreams. Plummeting into an unfamiliar self-projected universe of harrowing shapes and inexorable pain, her life became lifeless, dreary, and intolerable. Even the most basic of tasks seemed like an excruciating exercise in futility. Around mid-summer, when she was seventeen years old, she diagnosed herself as having bi-polar disorder.
Becoming manic and sedated due to mixing lithium with different pills she found in the medicine cabinet, she completely slipped away from her scientific outlook on life. She gloomily finished the rest on her high school tenure wasted on possibly lethal admixtures of medication. After graduating with a less than remarkable performance record, she took a couple months off from academia. Eventually she enlisted in a special course offered at a local community college entitled, “Organizational Learning Environments.”
Falling further down the proverbial spiral into despair, her disheartening situation escalated. One night while studying for a mid-term examination in her course, she ingested a full bottle of her anti-depressive medication. Realizing that she had just made a serious blunder, she yelled down the hall for her mother; who by now was extremely worried about her daughter’s mental status. Not wanting her to die disoriented and petrified alone in her room, her mother covered her in blankets and rushed her off to the emergency room to have her stomach pumped. Thankfully they made it to the hospital just in the nick of time.
Recuperating in the solace of her bedroom, her mother showered her with a love so tremendous, it was a curative potion of eternal lore. “You are the reason I was put here my daughter,” she would passionately say. “You’re the reason I smile and have faith in this universe we call God.” “You’re the brightest twinkle in the whole wide world.” “Without you, this universe just wouldn’t be the same.” “In fact, this universe would just wither away, because it wouldn’t have you to water its mysterious soil.” “I love you with all my heart.”
Rejuvenated from her mother’s penetrating words, she got back on her feet. When she was twenty years old, she applied to be an assistant librarian at the centennial library just down the street from her home. From that moment on, she has remained in a field dedicated to sorting out knowledge, and more importantly, the magic of the human word.
X
The fluorescent lights tirelessly project their artificial luminance onto her head. Some days the lights sting her unmercifully, like every radiant fractal is an irritating wasp making a small incision into her eyes. Today the collective fantasy of the frenzying children keeps her surveillance focused on the horizon, and not on the banal, droning glow of the lights. Their daydream weaving pleases her sanity a magnificent deal.
As her eyes flicker and flutter with the mercurial dreams of the children, she catches sight of a young girl being reclusive behind a bookshelf. Sitting nervously, with a sullen look on her face, the young girl is pretending to read a book; but her ploy doesn’t work on the razor sharp attentiveness of her librarian. Methodically she gets up to see what is perturbing the child.
As she rounds the corner of the bookshelf to see what is wrong with the child, she is horrified to see seven fresh welts on the child’s arms and legs. Sobbing to herself, with her whole body shaking like it has been left in the cold too long, she gloomily looks up at her librarian. Devoid of contentment, the young child’s eyes burrow deep into her disconcerted soul. A circumambient sadness grabs a hold of both of them. The phosphorescent lights seem to dim. The entire world seems to be bedazzled with the pervading depressiveness of the young child. Then it comes to her--out of the subtle whirring of her inner voice. For a nanosecond, the extruding sadness caused her to be stricken with amnesia. She remembers. Yes she distinctly remembers that she is looking at the precious face of Elizabeth.
Elizabeth comes from a broken and violent residence not too far from the school. In a deteriorating home, which looks like it has been through its fair share of hardships, Elizabeth bleakly dwells. For years on end now, her father has been addicted to a nearly perilous concoction made up of methamphetamines, hard alcohol, and misanthropy. The family has been trying to intervene in order to take Elizabeth and the other progeny to safety, but right when things seem to be at there worst, their father smartens up. Cyclically their father’s odious then remorseful, remorseful then odious behavior leaves the family in utter shambles. However their father has never laid a finger on his offspring. Seeing as the mother died of a brain aneurysm, neither does she. All of Elizabeth’s bruises and lesions are self-inflicted.
This time around, Elizabeth took the blunt end of an ornamental sword hanging in her brother’s room, and maliciously bashed away at her arms and legs. Bludgeoning blow after bludgeoning blow, Elizabeth worked away at her petite frame, muscle-by-muscle, bone-by-bone. Usually she starts off the self-torturing process with acute but soft hits arbitrarily directed anywhere on the body. When she finds a spot she takes a liking to, Elizabeth then increases the severity of her pounding until she balls her eyes out or she starts bleeding.
Doctors describe Elizabeth’s mental condition as being analogous to that of a paranoid schizophrenic. Unfortunately they can’t give her a strong medicinal dosage because she is too young; and any miniscule dosage she is given just wears off right away. Doctors say she just has to go through her violent fits of delirium until they pass. Usually there is a person around to watch Elizabeth when the onset of her enragement is about to take place. Regrettably this time around, when she needed the care and attention of another person, everyone was preoccupied.
XI
Elizabeth’s sad eyes pull at her, aggressively and tenaciously. As though her emerald eyes are tainted with something unfixable, Elizabeth looks at her librarian like she is ashamed to be alive. She looks back with her disconcerted soul emphatically filtering through Elizabeth’s mental domain. Neither Elizabeth nor she have said one word to one another, and already both their lives have been channeled to one another through the numinosity of an almost claustrophobic sadness. Before she can say one impelling word, Elizabeth morosely blurts out:
“Do you think a Shaman could cure me?”
“Elizabeth, what do you think needs to be cured?”
“My head. It hurts sometimes. My head. It doesn’t know what it is doing.”
“You know when my head hurts, I think about places. Places beyond this world.”
“Places?”
“Places rich in happiness. Places built out of dreams and wonder. I just imagine them and they become.”
As though her librarian has revealed to her a revelation more profound than any passage in any religious text, Elizabeth eyes loosen their grip on the encumbering sadness. “Imagine?” Elizabeth naively says. “Yes, imagine!” “The places of the mind only have to be imagined and then they come into being.” “Let me tell you a secret story I never told the rest of the children.” “Will that make you feel better?”
Looking at her librarian, with a small smile and with emerald eyes as beautiful as the gardens of Eden, Elizabeth gently nods her head. Bracing herself for another fable from her fantastical stream of consciousness, she sits down next to Elizabeth and asks her to hold out her hands. Elizabeth without hesitation holds out her feeble and welted arms. Touching her with sensuous reassurance, her librarian begins with the secret story.
“There was once a girl from a world made of only happiness. Every time the birds chirped, the foundation of the world would cheer. Every time the flowers moved with the rustling wind, the sun would speak in words of gratitude. It was a world of honor and love. Not only because it was honored to have the girl as a resident. It was because the world loved the girl from the deepest regions of its heart. The world claimed that without the girl, it would fall apart. It couldn’t exist without the girl, because it wouldn’t know how to act.”
Her hands hold Elizabeth’s like infinity holds the diaphanous line between semblance and the formless beloved. The atmosphere, once decaying in Elizabeth’s schizophrenic sadness, is brightening and strengthening with her librarian’s soaring words. In appreciation, Elizabeth’s hands tighten their grip on her librarian’s. In solidarity they wander further into the mythological fabric of the story.
“One day the girl woke up sad. Seeing as the world couldn’t tolerate sadness, the world started fading away into blackness. The world soon became only the blackness. Her feet, her sadness, her memories, and all her longings stood in an isolating darkness. She stood for a long time in the darkness; only thinking about what could bring the world back.
Days passed. Months passed. Years passed. Soon enough, the girl was growing really weary of the blackness. But she hadn’t forgotten about the happiness of the world she once knew. All of a sudden, she had it. She realized something. She realized the secret. The happiness of the world flooded back into her view. The birds chirped with the rustling of the wind. The animals roamed with the swaying of the flowers. The happiness was there like it had never left, and Elizabeth, it loved her from the deepest regions of its heart.
Now Elizabeth, what did she remember?”
Elizabeth, with a puzzling confidence surrounding her eyes, looks at her librarian. Her librarian, with a patient confidence surrounding her eyes, looks at Elizabeth. In solidarity they both just look at each other- like they are on the verge of a realization so large, the Milky Way galaxy can only quietly wait in austere anticipation. “That she was always the happiness of the world?” Elizabeth ecstatically squeaks. “That’s right” “You got it!” “You got it Elizabeth,” her librarian buoyantly professes.
Throwing the book she was pretending to read on the ground, Elizabeth throws her arms around her librarian in tears of bliss. Elizabeth’s jubilant catharsis penetrates deep into her concerned soul. Not wanting to say another word, she just gives Elizabeth a big hug, which only a librarian of her caliber could deliver. In the back of her mind she thinks, “I will always protect this girl.” “It is my duty to protect this girl.”
Until the bell rings to change classes, Elizabeth quietly vows to reside inside her librarian’s arms like they are seraphic wings sheathing her from all the torment and madness in the world.
XII
The workday dwindles down to a slow yet ambulant simmer. Just in time too. Her bones ache. Her lithium medication has finished running its course through her neocortex. Her cognitions are already yards ahead of her body, because she already imagines herself sitting on a cushy bus seat on route to her humble abode. Saying goodbye to her fellow co-workers, her computer monitor, a shellaced apple she received from another teacher as a practical joke, and even the volumes of books in her library, she leaves the school--exhausted and ready for a tranquil bath.
As she exits the school, the scathing heat of the sun’s ultraviolet rays greets her without warning. “Looks like it is going to be another scorcher,” she mumbles to herself in the most lighthearted of ways. Looking into the unpaved parking lot, she notices that the amalgamation of dust trails created from all the cars leaving have conceived a specter like figure in the concentric area of the parking lot. Looking into the verdant grass, she notices convoys of ants racing up and down an ant hill almost like it is a ceremonial day for the tiny denizens of God’s perplexing design. Peering into the perimeter of the schoolyard’s property, she notices four children teasing a downtrodden child. Being the competent problem solver she is, she decides to walk over to the children to intrude on their vindictive parade.
“What seems to be the problem here?” she intrusively asks the four upright children. “The mongoloid on the ground here is short of breath. We were just playing around,” responds one of the children. Glancing down at the flogged victim of the children’s hazing, she sees a crying, mentally challenged young boy. With an asthma inhaler opening up his closed off passageways, the child plaintively looks at the soil—all the while breathing heavier than a mountain just to stay alive.
“WHY IS HE CRYING?” she furiously barks out. “We were chasing him and he fell to the ground,” the four stiff children coyly respond. “WHY WERE YOU CHASING HIM?” she retorts. “Because he is retarded,” a cocky kid says. “I WANT YOU CHILDREN TO GO HOME RIGHT NOW. FIRST THING IN THE MORNING YOU GO TO THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE. I WILL WAIT FOR YOU THERE.” Seeing the veins on her forehead and arms pulsate like Armageddon from underneath her skin, the children frenetically run off without giving a second thought to ever looking back.
Peering down at the mentally challenged child, she clearly sees that his eyes are still glued to the soil. His fright and flight disposition causes her fury to loosen its ultra peeved hold on her aura. She sits down next to the child and tilts his head up to her eye level.
“What happened?” The panting child, still trying to absorb the traumatic experience, looks at her with a bewildered yet focused look on his face. “Thheee other boysss wanted to tease meeeee,” he droningly garbles out (while some drool secretes out of his lips). “Well it is okay now. I won’t let anything happen to you.” The mentally challenged child, not knowing what to say, just ethereally looks at her. For many minutes it remains this way. His silence is angelic to her. It is heroic.
“I forgiveee themmmm,” the mentally challenged boy suddenly chimes out. “Well that is fantastic.” “Would you like to walk with me to the bus stop?” “I would like to talk with you.” Without giving the slightest hint of reluctance, the boy takes her extending hand and they both start walking towards the distant bus stop. A virulent sense of mutual admiration starts burgeoning in the atmosphere. “His heroism is germinating,” she thinks to herself.
“I haveeee drawings in my pocketssss.” “Woulddd you likeee to see themmm?” the mentally challenged boy proudly blurts out. “Would I?” “Of course I would,” she enthusiastically responds. After scavenging his pockets for the picture for ten seconds or so, the boy finally pulls out a crumbled piece of paper. Unfolding the wrinkled and limp piece of paper, the downs syndrome child unveils a rendering of two amethyst spirals kissing in the middle of a crystalline lake. “Now what does this picture mean to you?” The boy intently looks at the picture for ten seconds or so. “The circlessss are happpinesss,” he droningly responds. “Why are they happy?” Once again, the boy gazes at the rendering for another ten seconds or so. “Theyyy are happpyyy because they are in loveeee,” he unwaveringly responds.
A tear of jubilee falls from her eye socket into a crack in the concrete. Swelling up in her hypersensitive temperament is his greatness. His heroism, forgiveness, and artistry all start to luminously caress the viola strings of her consecrated heart.
“Why are they in love?” she joyously rings out. For the final time, the boy looks at the drawing for another ten seconds. “They’re in love becauseeee they rememberrrr,” the downs syndrome child says. “What do they remember?” she responds. Stopping dead in his tracks, the boy closes his eyes and pulls his hand away from hers. Outstretching his index finger, the mentally challenged boy points in the direction of the beatific sky, and then draws his finger back in and points at his chest cavity. “Thheeeyyy rememmberrr,” the boy responds with a convincing inflection in his voice.
Her optical orbs close. She genuflects to the child in wholehearted agreement. Even though the other children are blind, she sees him as lucidly as Gaia sees her ecological lore. A hero. A savant. Quite distinctly, he is a boy who can see past the fallacious and superficial layers of our mundane plane.
Her eyes open. His smile, his amethyst rendered spirals, and his being welcome her with a powerful stance. “Thankkkk you for helllpinggg meee,” he droningly says. “No.” “Thank you,” she responds. “You have given me an enormous amount of faith.” The boy ethereally looks at her for ten seconds or so, and then says, “youuu are welcommmeee.”
After their cordial exchange of gratitude, the mentally challenged young boy reaches down to clutch a cluster of dandelions. Pulling up the weeds serenely, ensuring not to sever the stems of the weeds from the nourishing roots, the boy hands the bouquet over to her sophisticated hands. “Theseeee areeee prettyyyyy likeeee youuuuu,” he sluggishly says. “Why thank you.” “I will put them in a glass of water when I get home.” “Then they will grow just like your kingly way.” Blushing with his Herculean cheeks, the young boy gives her one last ethereal look before running off into the periphery. Standing in eternal grace, with her sophisticated hands holding her bouquet of weeds, she watches the child until he is out of sight. To her, watching the mentally challenged boy run into the yonder is like mediating on the miraculous gift of creation. It pleases her to no end.
XIII
Her lush body feels revivified by the soothing water of her bubble bath. Dipping her head in and out of the water in a hedonistic like hypnosis, she feels the scaly stress of the day dissipate into the soap scrub and pantheonic ripples roaming below the bubbling froth. By running the bar of soap from her nipples to her labia minora in a titillating stroke, from her labia majora to the webs between her toes in a sensuous sprawl, more and more stress falls from her body and mind co-dependence. Her body and mind, after a long day of hearing lurid children argue about the pettiest of issues, after hearing adults cacophonously bicker on about the most superficial of complaints, finally finds sanctuary in the confines of her milky tub.
Her skin submerges itself under the bubbling clouds. Allowing every orifice on her face to assimilate with the deluging storm, allowing every pore to swim in the whirling dervish of the Wiccan sea, she waits for ascension to overcome her. Just when she can hold her breath no longer, a pair of white raven’s wings bursts out of her marrow and pigment to glide her back to the air above the clouds. When she breaks through the frothy placenta, she is reborn. Cosmogenesis revisited, a bathtub baptism, the lofty spaces an audacious raven sees above the obscuring clouds, or however you like to put it---she is reborn. This time her mortal scripture has changed because now her aspirations are wings, and she can take the sutras of the clouds with her as she exits the planet. There is no danger in the ominous vacuum of the celestial collapsing her lungs, because the elemental forces and the pantheistic deities of the earth protect her in her gravity-less stride. Together their propulsive consciousness jets past Venus and Mercury to reach the savory center of our spiraling galaxy. When their combined consciousness disintegrates into the Sun, a distant being on a planet light years away sees a star twinkle. At this moment, a distant being dreams of one day leaving home. And maybe like her, the being wants nothing more than to apprehend to the secrets of the divine imagination.
XIV
While face-to-face with the timeless oval citadel, in a protean landscape of undulating hills and visual secrets, deep in the heart of the crepuscular expanse, she looks at her hands. Mathematical formulations coalesce with the holographic representations of her cosmic memory. Her being starts to waver back and forth, like a tree caught in a blissful hurricane. She speaks the inscrutable tongue, which is really the mysterious backbone that holds up the skeletal frames of all languages. The membrane writhes like before. She speaks louder, more melodically, more confidently. She is determined to get inside the jewel of mystery. Suddenly, the membrane begins to peal back like a flower that wants to unveil its innermost thoughts. Light pours out of the oval citadel. Thousands of supra-dexterous hands of light touch her being all at once (perhaps more than thousands). The hands are beckoning for her to come inside. She gives into their beatific implorations, and then she is only light, as opalescent as a million suns singing the hymn of the One.
Inside the oval citadel she sees her father planting seeds of iridescent on a glowing surface. She sees her mother building a monument of profound iconographic beauty. She sees Elizabeth and the downs syndrome boy levitating, smiling, and laughing. Her being explodes out of love, and the I AMNESS that surges through every warp and woof of her marvelous self spreads throughout the plenary of space. And then she is nothing but the Truth, the enduring story that is embedded in every place imaginable.
She is forever the light and the truth, the moon, her father, the bathwater, the Wiccan sea, and all the things she hasn’t imagined. She is blessed by the grandeur of the Great Dream. Forever the light!
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