Clouds are the beginning....

Have you ever looked up to a summer sky and watched the clouds changing from moment to moment? Clouds are the beginning. The trick is to take all the things around you, all the things in your life and to imagine them as mutable as clouds. To take the solidity of nothing for granted. Clouds are merely the beginning. Everything else follows clouds.

I open my eyes. I am the machine that breathes for me. My only voice is a blip on a screen. I am surrounded by all the strangers that know me. Far away from the friends that do not know me. The cables of artificial existence are strangling the life out of me. When everyone in the room sleeps, I wake up and Storywoman stands at my bed. She touches my skin and the cables and machines grow insubstantial. "Let me take you home," she says.

I close my eyes. I am flying across the ocean. Two wings. Two worlds. In one, I am sitting in a plane. My mouth feels dry and I am drinking too much. It is crowded. Somewhere a child cries. Somewhere a man rants. In the other world, I ride the air streams between dimensions on newborn wings. I fly through birds and planes and things I don't have names for. Sometimes they tingle for a moment after I passed through them. Sometimes they smell of the spice and incense of faraway islands. Either way, I'm homeward bound.

I open my eyes. I am standing right in front of one of my best friends, but he has to pretend not to see me. Between us lies a staff picked from the forest of the Great Silence. Which he says does not exist.

I close my eyes.... To continue, click here