An Ancient Cave

The Gnostics believe that the world was created not by God but by the Devil. They could have a point. The way I see it, God is that divine moment of now. The devil is everything else. Memories, opinions, analysis, plans and hopes - everything that seeks to descend upon that one sacred moment you hold in your consciousness, in order to shred it to pieces. It is eternally trying to break and enter, to snatch bits of now in order to replace it with little parasites called 'then' or 'soon' or 'one day'. It wants to halt the river, to obstruct it, to sully it with yesterday's dirty laundry, which by all accounts, should not exist anymore and tomorrow's storms, which might never strike. The devil's world is all things that do not belong to now.

I open my eyes. I am sitting in a stone seat in an ancient cave. The air is cool and filled with primordial music. A voice says, "Look around you. Right now, you are in a place so high above your enemies and adversaries, that it will take them many, many lifetimes to even reach you. The only way to continue any kind of struggle with them, would be to go back down to their level. Do you really want to do that?"

I close my eyes. I am listening to the lies told about me by an old lover. The words with which she is trying to bind me, tighter and tighter into her world. But it is her words that cut the canyon forming between my reality and hers. Deeper and deeper, the divide between what she says and what I remember.

I open my eyes. What I see is butterflies, but in reality, they are some of the people I've known in my life. There is the sweet funky butterfly that fluttered backwards. The butterfly that thought itself so hungry it sucked the color right out of every flower it landed on. The butterfly that starved to death because it failed to tell the difference between plastic flowers and real ones. The butterfly that was afraid to commit to any kind of landing. The butterfly that got stuck in the nectar. And then there was the butterfly who landed on my eye - like it wanted to be close to me, but did not want me to see it. That was the last one and that was the one that stuck in my mind.

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

How the angel crossed the road...

I'm on a pedestrian bridge high above the freeway. Just ahead of me, there's a bird, pecking at something in the tarmac. I said, "Hey bird, you lazy. You're supposed to fly over the freeway, not walk over it." He stopped pecking and replied, "Hey angel, where have you lost your wings?"

I open my eyes. I am walking through a graveyard. There are rows and rows of tombstones and they all have the same name on them - my own. The dates are different. The styles are different. I listen to my breathing. I touch my face. My heartbeat continues. But the physical sensations seem surreal. They spread out and trip my mind. The more I try to convince myself that I am alive, the more it feels like I'm really something else.

I close my eyes. No one must know I am here. For some time now, Reenie has been hiding me from a world that believes I'm dead. Somewhere along the way, she transcended to a higher aspect of her self - Storywoman. I tell her story and she tells mine. So who writes the story? And who becomes it? My problems are like those of someone has forgotten what he is? And yet, it is not that I have amnesia. Someone with amnesia remembers nothing. My problem is more complicated, as I remember several versions of the past that has brought me here. They could all be true. They could all be false. In one, I meet Reenie/Storywoman in a Kurdish coffee shop with tribal musical instruments and tapestries on the walls. I follow her home. In another, I close my eyes in a hospital emergency room and wake up behind Reenie's eyes. I experience flashbacks of her life. She is surprised to find those memories back. Reenie and I are the pill dissolved into water. Difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. There is a Reenie who stumbles across my obituary and recognizes me, although we never met. She calls me to her and I take the greatest leap of faith. There is a world where I am alive, in my own body, writing this, furtively, fearing discovery....

I open my eyes. Storywoman and I are having a tea party with the Sane Hatter. There's a funny story about how we met him, but I haven't remembered it yet. We started a game of draughts. The game pieces are cookies. If you win an opponents game piece, you get to eat it. Loser goes hungry. Those are the rules.

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