Where Seas and Fables Meet (11 page)

This is a story of a child on my street who reminded me how to see and feel light around me.

The girl's name is Kathleen, called Kait. She was five years old when this occurred. She'd always been a friendly and funny child, full of good will and mischief. She loved to talk to dogs and cats.

One late warm afternoon in October her mother Karen brought Kait home from pre-school in their SUV. I was working in the front yard garden, raking leaves. I did this in part to clear my mind after a frustrating day trying to communicate with my own children, now teenagers. The autumn light was light blue, almost watery.

I saw the SUV swing up into their driveway. Karen stepped out and ambled around the front of their vehicle to get Kait out of the front seat.

“I don't want to get out.” Her voice rang across the street. “Why not?” Her mother sounded exasperated.

“I want to stay here and watch through the window at the whole world...”

She had a confidence in her voice that made her sound older than her very young years.

“Okay.” Her mother was mild. “Suit yourself. I'll come back in a few minutes.”

“Okay mom.” She drawled out the sounds of “okay” and “Mom”, making the latter seem like it contained the words “awe” and “om.”

I went on raking maple leaves. Then Kait's voice came sailing across the street.

“Heya.” She called my name.

I turned to see her looking out the SUV window.

“Hi Kait.”

A little later I called back to her: “What're you looking at?” “Everything.”

“Everything...?” I replied.

“Everything.” Her voice brimmed with happiness. “Everything's so clear and beautiful...”

Falling leaves threw shadows on the ground while she spoke. The wind had been up for a time. And the shadows kept passing across my path.

I smiled at her wisdom. In that afternoon, towards early evening, the world did seem lucid, every sound audible. Glancing upwards, I saw that the leaves were soaring birds, darting and vanishing.

We greet each other across airwaves, strangers who know the other could be a friend. We're here and there, and so we're doubled: this makes it hard to know sometimes if we're addressing a being which has no substance, a ghost. Yet this recognition is imperative: the images of one another, the voices and impressions, the appearances and masks, the traces and glimmering outlines, are how we've come to know one another. They're the beginning of the greeting. The instruments of communication are pushing us on.

There are now only two degrees of separation between us at any given time. The billions in the global theatre who are involved in communication, whether electronic or written or oral or pictorial, experience a form of telepathy. The gap between people is closing. During periods of extreme emotional engagements – say, September 11
^th
2001 – we face one another with more new intensities, our minds transmitting and reaping the Morse code of intuition and feeling.

These communications may be cryptic – stenographic – coming in acronyms, bits, emoticons, blips, abbreviations, breaks, and they may come in forms we don't grasp yet. But the greeting comes. The call to the soul may come at

any time. We're being called; if left unacknowledged, we'll feel thrown, spun loose, AWOL and agog, as if our souls have run amok, gone missing: if acknowledged, we rise to meet the other, finding ourselves in the communicating process.

We greet each other with... what?

The message that we're still alive; we're inspired. It's this which drew us here.

This is what drew me to you.

They walked on, talking. Surprise kept them moving forward.

They felt a glancing touch.

She sensed pressure on her cheek.

She said: “Look. Listen.”

“Where...?” He asked. “To what...?”

“You heard the sound. Like a pulse,” she said. She turned around. It eluded them. Yet they felt the touch, both at once.

It was like light hazing your skin on a warm summer night.

There's a story to come. We sense it. The old story – the great story that asks, who are you? – is about to change. We have a portion of it: an inkling. Something looms, coming, close to arriving, unfolding, waiting to breathe over us. Or: we're waiting for the time when we'll let ourselves breathe in the story we already know. Then that will be the new.

Drive your heart over the bones of the deadened.

She was always taking deliveries from the abyss.

He tried to make sure that they shared an undestroyed heartscape.

He remembers the way she kissed him in sunlight and in the dark.

Her text messages said: “Feel my kisses. I love you so.”

She was happy: she'd found her way home. Once there, she knew it was home.

When he found his way to her, he knew this was home, too, because this is what she knew.

The lovers: they see open ground outside their window, over the top of the fences –

They didn't know one another intellectually or verbally. Their bodies knew one another – and would always know.

They made their way towards one another through touch. It was cellular knowledge of the deepest intimacy. Beyond soul-mates.

The lovers learned: at any given point there is more open space then closed space, more blue sky than gray.

A rose petal rouses them from their sleep.

Wave-gypsies of the media sea.

The vibration-beings sensed it coming.

The storm was sudden, a great wave. But its form – the tidal wave – was ancient, therefore recurrent. It had happened before, but always in a different appearance. It was returning but not quite in the same shape.

There were people who lived on the edge of new perception. They were attuned to the moods of the electronic sphere, changeable like the weather, mercurial in that the sphere also encompassed the weather: a storm could be reported on, analyzed, photographed, replayed, highlighted, scanned, filed and retrieved. The vibration- beings processed media rapidly. They'd extended their senses. They had experienced and studied the sensational ripples of extended electromagnetic fields, the mainlined source. We had transferred over into a new way of living when we hooked up to energy. The vibration-beings were on the vanguard of this sizzling, seething stream.

There had been Tsunamis of nature: December 26th 2004, for one: the Malaysian tidal wave that drowned hundreds of thousands.

There would be Tsunamis of the global soul when the world membrane of the externalized mind (the noosphere) trembled and recoiled from the high stimuli of controversial pressure. The noosphere Tsunamis were called the death of Lady Diana, 9-11 and the falling towers in New York City, the Occupy Wall Street Protests, and the Euro-econo- crashes of 2011 and 2012.

(On a factual, historical level, Lady Diana was a slightly narcissistic, likely vacuous
fashionista
, who had little going on within her – except for a growing heart, a sense that she must help others. On a mythic level, in the speeding media now, she became a dazzlingly androgynous, magnetic symbolic being: the hunted Diana, who on an intuitive emotional level communicated the experience of beauty pursued and beauty denigrated. She became a transcendent creature of the air whose lonely anguish others shared.)

The vibration-beings exist in masses. They sense emotional quakes because they strike chords of feeling. They feel we exist in the seas (and clouds) of big data – excited, irradiated, flooded and tided over – and nothing can arrest the rapid passage into the new.

They also know that in the unleashing of energy there's a threat to sensibility. The vibration-beings could experience sensory

closure, emotional numbing – seduction and addiction to the flux, the emanations that pour out from the big data we've constructed to instantly channel the energy into us. Media waves, like mental waters, create Tsunamis.

How do the vibration-beings sense what is happening? They do so through tuning.

The news people call out alerts. The web begins to tremble with viral scenes. Rumour and hearsay ignite text messages. TV and PC images appear with mesmerizing regularity. Radio voices speak and squall. Noise teems. And there's no silence to be found, except in meditation times, when people try to disconnect from the discharge.

The vibration-beings recalled ancient stories. They went back to Ovid.

It was Ovid – more than Homer or Virgil – who offered a key: the secret of Nature is unbridled metamorphosis (mutability). When people meet with
theos
, we call the event an encounter with the sacred.
Theos
“designates
something that happens
” (Roberto Calasso). When humans meet with sacred energies we sense this is a meeting with the gods, or with God. No one encounters these energies and emerges unchanged, or unscathed.

The old stories told us that storms would come. Upsets and quakes: rapid assaults and onslaughts – they would

always appear.

“The electronic waves that consume our senses...”

This was a saying, refashioned from the ancient wisdom.

The vibration-beings sensed the storm of the new process called, by some people,
globalization
(the economic-based reading), and by others, the
noosphere
(the mind-soul- based reading). In their sensing they knew that at times they would have to withdraw into private spaces of temporary media relief. They would journey to find silent places. They'd rediscover moments in forests, by rivers. They'd have to go deeply in themselves, to receive through the conduits of their cells, funnelling and translating the waves. They'd have to learn how to shape their impatient rages. They would have to train themselves to sleep and rest.

Our children are the wave gypsies.

They're on the cusp of epic metamorphoses – in matter, energy, light, spirit, and the global membrane. Their gift: comprehending the whole instantly. Their capability: to be lanterns and spotlights simultaneously. A lantern illuminates a scene from every angle; a spotlight focuses on one detail, highlighting it to the pitch of specialized attention.

They're children of cathode light and big data. Too much and yet too little... They're the children on the streets

protesting. But they can embrace and shutter themselves, and they're already ahead of us, immersed in theos, gypsies of the global media, heads in the ether, making their bodies available to tattoos and public demonstrations, time-space travellers and aeronauts of the flesh, nighthawks and late- sleepers, roaming the future that is already apparent and crystalline to them, already their succour.

The wave gypsies will in turn have children who will be karma-free (according to a freshly minted legend). They won't be carrying good or bad karma (so I've been told by a person wiser than I am). These babies will be free of their parents' and grandparents' psychic debts. They will be starting fresh. I saw an ultra-sound that shows a figure like an angel hovering over a four-month-old foetus. Imagine the possibility: children without karma. The children of the generations after World War Two, after Viet Nam, after the economic crunches, after the terrorism of the end and the beginning of the millennium will be starting clean and clear.

Everything far is becoming near.

The more they know about you, the less you exist. (An aphorism attributed to many sources.)

Yet – they say – if you're not on line – you're said to be nowhere, nothing.

Let's listen to the overtones, read the associations:
now here
(always present); no thing (a process, being and becoming: the mysterious non-name for the energy, the Spirit, that permeates space, matter, time, physicality, you; Celan's unspeakable other; the ineffable for Whitman). Nowhere, no-thing. You're a channel, a locus, a voice, a line or radiance of intensity, an antenna, an eye, an attending ear, a touch, a wave, a glance, a detail, one note (pure and easy).

So, then, what's left of you (my friend) in this moment of profiling, facebook, kindle, polling, online petitions, blackberrying, googling, shadow-data, imaging, selfies, IMs, twittering, fidoing, and info-files?

It's a great gift to not always know who you are or where you're going.

Wait. Be receptive. Atmospheres will envelope you. Keep the solitude you can when you're being extended everywhere at once. Wait, above all. It's coming. Wait: it's here. It's always been here. It's we who must move towards, waiting and yet moving, through the pressures and weight, through the appearances of the Structure, through the bruising and brutality, to clarity and lightness. Wait. And be receptive. In emptiness you may come to exposure, come to feel the pressure, the entries and the pinpoints. This is the pressure that comes down when you walk across any street in the global city, when you click on the images, when you walk towards your love, when you turn on the music, and we wait, and the cosmos moves through.

A recovery of strangeness.

Eternal tourists of ourselves.

The dust on flowers, the dust on eyes.

Only when you look ahead do you see that the path you're on is the one of no return.

When you look back you see your path is already a map for someone you don't know.

Sentences and images that need the sacred to complete them.

“Too much like lightning.” – Shakespeare

“... to breathe lightning.” – Charlotte Brontë on her sister Emily

Unsettling harmony...

Secret orchestra of the soul, hidden music of the spirit.

Climb like a tree, fall like the rain.

Be a cross, a key, an arrow, a juncture in the road, a rose, a thorn, a transparent leaf, a withered branch, yesterday today and tomorrow, an enigma in a lifetime where you feel that insistence on explaining and confessing your most intimate desires.

Be a path on which others may walk for a time until they make their own maps, a telephone line to the womb, an antenna for all that you love, the succulent soil and the warming light nurturing it.

Spooning out the sparks of sunlight from the water's edge, in the late afternoon, and again in the morning... You keep trying: the reflection flows away, running through your fingers. Yet the sparks of sunlight in the water continue to glow.

Someday soon the hearing of all hearts.

Wandering in the night locked into visions... your night- mind veering...

A woman made of flowers.

A child in the seed of a tree.

The alphabet of the angels.

You build the bridge, and then find the river.