This Is Not a Ghost Dance

FOREWORD

My cousin's papers arrived in a green trunk with candle wax on the top and nicely corroded brass fittings. I knew what it was and what was in it because there was an obsolete return address on it; and, anyway, she had sent me a letter of explanation that was in my hand as I opened the door for the delivery.

I was intrigued but busy, and the trunk sat for a week, gathering dust, slowly perfuming the hallway with sandalwood and rose.

But the letter was short enough. I read it again several times, looked at the trunk, put the letter down, read it again while I ate breakfast, took it to bed and read it there, and after a week I was ready.

She had enclosed a small brass key in the letter. You'll be receiving a trunk, she wrote, with some of my notebooks and papers. This key will open it. I have put things together. The journals are chronological and dated, the entries are dated, there are some loose notes but they may not be important and, anyway, I just don't have the time or the interest anymore. But you will find a manuscript in there somewhere. Please find a way to get it published. The world is changing, Elin, or has it changed already? I guess: has it changed enough? Anyway, it's not my place to decide about that. I've done my part. Here it is. This is the best I can do.

She was going away, the letter said. A trip to Thailand, sit a while in the forest, get away from it all. From what all, I thought. We had not been in touch for a while. Most of the aunts and uncles were gone now, and the family was dispersed. And anyway, she was older; I was one of the little cousins, forever in memory relegated to crawling around on the floor with the toys while grownups carved the turkey.

And what did I know of her, really? Reading a book in the corner. Telling some truly odd joke that, once we recovered from the double take, left us shaking our heads and quivering with laughter. The queen of weird shit, that was her family title. I liked her. We had interests in common. I envied her trip to Thailand.

These papers, though. What a pile.

But the letter I read again at breakfast. The world is changing. Here I sit: letter to the left of me, news to the right. Or is it? Is this magic or history? What if it's both, Elin, how will we handle that? Just look around, that's all I'm asking of you, and get this into print.

So I don't know either. And I don't know, really, why I write of her in the past tense. For all I know she is still around, sitting on a zafu somewhere, and I will get a postcard any day. Greetings, it will say, from the New World. Glad you are here.

Elin Grier

Somewhere

20 June, 2012

APOLOGIA

Ephemeral and fleeting flashing

Probabilities collapsing

Help me.

I am crying: Help me.

Why am I here? Why am I here?

On the table by the wafers

is a crystal chalice.

Palace crystal goblet, with it

Let us toast the life of Christ.

Last night in the early dawn I dreamed.

I was in a cavern under the earth, exploring, and my team waited for my report. I had gone into a farther chamber. There was water flowing. There were rocks, formations, colors, enough light from some source so that I could see these things and others. Because all along the walls were books. Rows and rows of them, on shelves built within or of the rock of the cavern, beautiful hardbound gilt-edged books of all kinds, a library in this hidden underground place, a secret hidden treasure. I stood on the rock floor with the echoes of the water moving past my feet and I gazed at these books.

My team waited, knowing now what I had found, waiting for me to do the next thing. I stood there, looking. Every volume was priceless, and essential. Every one of them we needed to bring forth from the cave. We needed them all. We knew, I knew, nothing of the contents. Without looking into each one of them there was no way to decide which must come out first. And in the cave there was something else. Looking up I could see something slowly moving back and forth, brilliant soft blue and red, a round pendulum like the pendulum in a grandfather clock. And I knew, and the team knew, that there was no time to look at all the books, no time to decide which one to take first, no time to get them all out. A strong white light was coming now from behind, from above, shining into the cavern with the books and the pendulum and the water flowing through where I stood unmoving and I knew that, whatever the light was, there was no more time to decide.

No time to make a sure and certain choice.

No time to start with the right first volume and bring all the rest out as well.

But there was time to do something. There was enough time to choose something, anything, as many as possible, and do it.

CLIFF NOTES

What if the second coming of Christ is true, but we have misunderstood it?

What if the apocalypse is a metaphor? What would it be a metaphor for?

What if both of these events have already happened, are happening now, will continue to happen continuously, world without end?

What if the person asking these questions were both a Christian and not a Christian at the same time? Is that possible? What would it mean if it were possible? Why would a Christian choose to appear as something else?

Why would Christ choose to appear as something else?

What is metaphor? What is its structure? What purposes does it serve in literature? In life?

Is metaphor real? In what way is it real? If so, what are the implications?

What do the great prophets and teachers, all of them, every one of them, know about God that we have not understood yet?

What would happen if we understood it?

Rain After Completion

It's been raining today, softly and with the sky like a changing opal, good luck or bad luck, take your pick, or just a pretty view. Here in the yard are the small green tufty things growing among the flatter, slower grass. Star of Bethlehem, Meg calls them; or is it Star of David? Or Jerusalem? In a few days they will have small white flowers and they will be beautiful, spangling the lawn with light and then they will be gone and the grass will come bright green and high. We hear it will be cool tomorrow, too. A cool rainy day in spring, not too fast, taking its time.

And it's a night to imagine the old days. Still here as they are sometimes for some of us, but the old days nonetheless and we know they are gone. Really gone, just another kind of dream now; and we feel their traces. Those of us who make it our practice to remember such things feel them in our thoughts like the certainty of a stone or like a piece of glass from a broken window. We can make of them a collection. We can talk about them and compare. But they are pieces now, and the thing they were a part of is changed. What word might say it? Broken? Dissolved? Unraveled? Whatever. It is the crumbling ruin now of a great edifice once noble in proportion and still charming in a quaint and antiquarian way. Still standing in pieces and we find relics of it, fine collectibles; but whatever glue once held it all together in its complex and certain lines has vanished like a season gone to time.

From my high vantage point in this ruined tower I have a good view of the rolling mead and villages. In the distance is a larger city, thriving in its park. It looks like Oz. And the forest, the great forest and the prairie, the deserts restored, the ocean too far away to see but I can hear it rolling. I can smell it when the wind is fine. And the roads.

Once upon a time only people of great power lived in towers such as this. Now no one does. They are like museums, but untended and crumbling, without curators, and we enter at our own risk. And we enter. I myself have set up shop in this high circular room that used to be a prison cell. I used to live here. I used to pay rent. I remember the day long years ago when I stepped out upon the window ledge and finally learned to fly. Today I fly no longer. Now I take the stairs. But the view is worth it.

I can see the roads. When the wind is right I can see all of them, footpaths and towpaths, Roman stone and dirt and wood and rail and asphalt, and contrails almost close enough to touch. They rise in layers and every one of them is going somewhere. They are going forward. In each of them I can see the plans and blueprints, and every one is labeled Progress. They are beautiful, especially now. Arrayed like palimpsest ghosts, their little signs declaiming about Horizon 14, culture thereof, they show like snowflakes, like flowers, wrapping the invisible in gauzy ornament.

People come to these places. They visit. They view. They do research and leave signs and treatises. Sometimes they are nervous; there is no liability insurance here because there are no owners. The upkeep is beyond us all. And to charge admittance is absurd, for these places are everywhere. There is no shortage of old things.

So the old things live their lives now as they will, without our interference, slaves no longer. And in their ruin they communicate with each other. The roads especially talk to each other now, no one is left out, and they have much in common.

In the old days they had only local names. Now with other living things they are classified by pattern and relationship and we can read their family. And we can watch their rites: they are not shy. Freed now of the old human cult they have returned to their own true ways and consult with their ancestors. Perhaps they are wiser than we, for they have their own name by which they call themselves—they have gone back, way back, to a time before the mutation happened. They deny that separation. It is only a species thing, they say, and only a local one, in time, conditioned by environment. See us next to each other without your fences and observe. And truly, when I take the long view, the wide view and the largest view I can, they all converge upon their origin. Only on the flat-earth do they have no return. They chuckle about this, actually, and I have heard them. Especially on full-moon nights, or on the eve of solstice. Those are good times to take a walk, and then come back up these long steps and think about what I have heard.

The roads chant to their ancestress. They claim that she created them by hiding herself in human history, hiding herself so well in maps of trade and conquest and discovery that only the advent of digital imagination allowed a pattern to emerge. Only on the flat-earth do roads go somewhere else; only on the flat earth are there corners to be used or neglected at will. Truly there do be dragons, and they swallow their own tails. Whatever were we thinking.

So the roads chant hymns and love songs. They seduce each other in the moonlight and chuckle about how none are left behind, about how all this going somewhere making something served only and finally to describe a world so completely that the unseen lineaments of its source emerged like the contours of a face, smiling and in motion ‘neath the wrapping linen gauze.

Why did we think it was dead?

I suppose that is the real central question at the heart of all this research. Amateurs all, now; people dabble here and there, leaving notes and traces and hand-lettered signs pointing to vantage points that offer some kind of enlightening view. Treat it like a thing and it is a thing, like a commodity and it becomes one. But the logic by which we did so was the logic of short science, of the old piecemeal roads to truth. And so the syntax in which we chanted spoke against our very words. When the context sprang into emergence, the separations became as embarrassing as old report cards. Now all they are good for is benches at scenic overlooks and window frames at the bazaar. We thought we could choose exclusivity, but choice is still choice and separation only implies that you recognize an Other.

And then—when we finally actually got it that the earth is round—we debated the shape of the universe. Children still argue for a delay of bedtime. I think there was a secret cabal, actually, among the early Quantumists, who planned (in discrediting Einstein) to cast doubt on his view that space and time are one. That would have been a neat trick. But they were in the pay of another secret cabal and highly motivated. They failed, of course, and by then it was too late. But still there remained a concerted effort to keep the split between subject and object. So much depended on it, was based on it, relied on it, sprang from it. Entire fields of academic study were hedged with it; economies were constructed of it; it was the boundary of governments. One line of thought held that such separations were real and maintainable because events at the perceived level of gross material reality obey different laws than those at the subtle micro, and that therefore all of our new science had no implications. A noble debate.

But the evidence was against them.

The center held, after all. It was the periphery that vanished.

Does anyone remember?

Tonight we went to the movies. Katy picked me up and we went to town to see the people drinking coffee, to walk past them on the fine damp sidewalk and past the charming shops and the quaint cafes and the funky diners that are the real history of this sleek upscaling place. Which of them will remain, I wonder, in another few years? Can they coexist? What happens to the personality when the cleansed soul returns to its home? Once these questions were eccentric madness, now they are high chic. (How many times have I edited this paragraph? How many editors are at work? Which is the original version?

(Which one is true?)

I was sitting at the window watching the sky and reminiscing about prayer and holiness, when Katy phoned and said, It’s Time Warp Weekend in Our Village! Let’s go to the movies!

OK, great, said I. What’s showing?

History! Comedy! Drama! Romance!

You pick, I said, like an idiot.

So we had a really nice walk downtown and saw a seriously funny historical romance called Shakespeare in Love. Four stars.

Wow, said Katy. Great outfits.

Wow indeed, said I. Could it be true? Could it not? Where is the essence of things, and where is the ornament? Where does reality begin, anyway, and where does the art begin and end and the reality comes in like the art. How they dance, how they dip, how they catch they eye. And how different are they; how strong is each in each. Rocking, jiving, jitterbugging, doing the DNA twist, they dance and spin and frighten the horses with their wild erotic play. And in the morning, yet again, a new life rests small in the womb.

And so we must decide, those of us who make it our practice to remember such things…. Is the past a blessing or a danger? A teaching or a curse? It is not just about history anymore, it is about salvation and we have heard that to stand and turn and look back now is sure and swift destruction: pillars of salt, roads to ruin, trapped in realms of Fairie. I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Yet we look. And if we look (not back so much as around, for are not the ravels of it everywhere?) might it not embrace us with its grace and mighty limbs? Might not the tiny glittering fragments of it seduce us in our dreams, singing of love and certainty? Might we not wake to find it grown large and straddling our chests, bearing down upon us with a terrible weight of stone and steel and mortar and glory, luring us back into those charming magnificent ruins and reconstituting itself like apple juice from the blood of our near escape?

For it sings. Nor can we ever stop it. The wind whistles through lapsed cathedrals, derelict mansions, and the stock exchange. It conjures. It whispers. If we listen we hear letters of fallen alphabets drifting random as leaves, gathering in corners, echoing, waiting, waiting… to take possession again.

What chanted spell can save us? What prophylactic amulet?

But we are already saved.

If we look upon the ruins… what will we see?

How many times has the only necessary truth arrived? And where is it lodging tonight?

And so, then: Now.

At my solitary window I gaze upon the moonlit lawn. Tufts of dropseed sleep curled like cats. Sedges spring forth in the hollows. A nightjar calls, and the cottonwood answers. The overwhelming change has happened, will happen, does happen, is happening now forever, is forever present and it cannot be recalled, except in recollection. Options array like neon-lined windows, like stones on the hill, narrowing like twigs in the fractal distance, pointing our own hands and hearts and minds as we are held and hugged and mourned and blessed and squirted breathless into the future.

Now we must breathe.

Breathe, now.

It is time.

The Roads: Grainger’s Story

I went out last night at midnight, discovering myself, to find the other. The moon was out. It is early spring and the air was cool on my body. Even through this raiment I can feel it still, and again. It makes me tremble.

They have mailed the ancient rites to us. Mine came by post. Lysandra’s came by email and Derek’s by Jollywood. Each of us now receives our coded messages in the dark, alone. There is a secret here that we don’t understand.

We sleep, thinking that we will arise to do the bidding of our masters. But when we awake it is on a windy hillside at dawn, and we are naked again. Furtively we sneak home in the spreading light, in cabs, on early trains, and no one sees us.

Sometimes in the day I remember. It was never like this. Deep in the bones of me I remember the earth, the limestone base of me, and the muscular soil. I can feel these things. They erupt invisibly, a bodily hallucination; I close my eyes against it and go on. It passes. Normal life ensues.

I work in the transportation industry. I suppose we all do, in a way. Getting and sending. My job is to provide food to the great city. All day I carry orders, every day faster and farther, for tomatoes, grapefruit, salt, mangoes. The work is very stimulating and I am well paid. There is a great deal of prestige associated with exotic foodstuffs.

Yesterday I had a very bad moment. I was working on the New Zealand order and—midway through a conversation with their representative—I felt cobblestones under my clothing. Of course I knew this was nonsense and focused my thoughts on the apples in question, but it was too late. We completed our negotiation as the mail boy came past with his cart. On top of the stack he placed before me was a letter from Greenleaf Farms, with their logo that I had seen a thousand times and never given the briefest thought. I stared at it in horror for a small eternity and then I knew that it was an ash leaf, Fraxinus pennsylvanica, and that its delicate veining presaged another of the coded messages come tonight come tonight come tonight you will know where to find me.

Everything about the moment was ordinary, except that as I picked up the letter I could feel raindrops impacting my left forearm, though I was inside of course and my shirt was completely dry. Twice in one day, I thought, futilely attempting to ignore the sensual slickness that had become my skin. No one noticed.

I got home early and went to bed early. Never one to shirk my responsibilities, I knew what I would find and what the result would be, and I didn’t want to be tired in the morning. I brushed my teeth and made sure the windows were closed. And of course, I awakened in the black light to find the window wide open and single ash leaf resting upon the coverlet. I gazed upon it—really what else is there to do?—and read in its color and slight weight and in the turn of its stem another invitation, as we call them, to exit my familiar house and walk out again upon the habits I have long forgotten.

I will not tell of where I went or what I did there.

1

Spring and Fall

Spring

And now several days have gone. (Where does the time go? Where do the parentheses go?) Is this a novel or a diary of some sort? Who can tell? We think it's our life, we think so; but then someone whispers, It’s only God writing fiction.

In our news today: Kosovo and Denver. If this is fiction it's a very bad story. Gratuitous violence, as they (or would that be we) say in the entertainment field. And what is your reason? Shock? Horror? Are you looking for some kind of reaction? Are you trying to send us into a dark safe hole for protection? Are you trying to send us into each other's arms in grief and compensation? For what nasty prurient purpose? Or are you without reason of any kind, in any sense? Are the atheists right … not necessarily in the sense of correctness but in terms of with whom is it wise to do business? Are they so determined—and not without good cause!—to avoid that nasty man on the street corner that they will, in denying his very existence, successfully cause him to disappear?

Or are you in fact one of the victims? Bleeding and dying, all for greed or hatred or some worthy political reason or no comprehensible reason at all? Your land stolen, your body ruined, your freedom a mockery and your future a bleak riddle? And that's just Europe. What is this current American penchant for taking out huge numbers of people and oneself at the same time? Is it such a grand passion for darkness that it simply must be shared? Such a desert of loneliness that the only certain way to love is to drown in an emotional cataclysm? We used to kill each other here in ones and twos and manys and then survive to attend church afterward. What happened?

Oh, right. That was when there was an Other. That was when we had an Out Group. The cataclysm was reserved for them.

And so I write today. Today it is now. Two nights ago there was such a rain that the yard became a pond. This morning the sun shines and chickadees are in the maple tree. The grass is lush beyond description. We are still hoping that this is the end of an era.

And Fall

I have abandoned the parentheses.

Time has passed again, though this is still the same slow story. But now the sun slants in hard from the west and it is welcome warmth in these crisp but beautiful autumn days. Temperatures in the seventies, and cool without the sunshine.

The room feels alive, peaceful. Paneling glows; the wood turns golden. The white cushions catch the sun and reflect it back, focusing the room all on places where people will sit. It is a very human season. The sun is strong and hot and it comes insistently through the mini-blinds and makes strong shadows on the keyboard, obscuring the letters in tiny valleys half alight, half gray and fading. The quietness of fall. But vivid. The trees are turning: Willow is turning yellow again, going home; shrubs all gently afire, just catching now, it is only beginning. The maples are still green.

But now the summer is passed.

All its horrors were far away from us. More shootings: Lori went to Temple for Yom Kippur and came back with tales of police at the door to keep the people safe, but the deaths were in Los Angeles. And the Baptists in Texas, gunned down by some guy dressed like a cyber-movie hero. And the schools... now they all have cops at the door and even upscale white folks can feel like the embattled mothers of the inner city. It's an education for sure.

As for the speculation, not to say tense concern, about the Coming Earth Changes that were allegedly scheduled for August…. Well, the earthquake in Turkey that killed all those thousands didn't affect us too personally here, and the one in Taiwan we hear something about from friends whose families fled the Communists all those years ago. We discuss it over coffee cake in the mornings and all the folks at home seem fine, just a bit shaken up, no big deal.

Is any of this stuff real? We talk about it as if it is some slightly more legitimate version of the tabloids at the grocery store. Horrible to be sure, and worrisome if true—so many stories and who can tell the portents from the fiction? But really we know those things are written by some pimply guy in need of a bath. His desk is littered with cigarette butts and ashes, stale chop suey, and other unsavory items. His hair is greasy even when he washes it and he bites his nails. Where is his social life? We shudder to think of it. There is brown gravy on his shirt. Who can take him seriously?

So I have abandoned all pretense of fiction, though it still sounds like fiction to me. But I will tell you that this is the truth. That I have embellished nothing, that whatever distortions are in these pages are my own true perceptions, still, and real enough then in their own way.

Three Bubbles of October

October 3

There is no need for anger, or fear. No need for violence or despair. I hesitate to mention them. I speak of them in exorcism, to exorcise them, these products of ignorance, begetting ignorance, endlessly cycling through their sterile and lonely loop of non-generation, of not-life. They are illusion, supporting illusion. Creating it, yes, because even evil may create; but it creates illusion and only misery. It creates separation. Only separation.

There is a time, a circumstance, for separation. This is not the time or circumstance to make of it a goal.

HERE IS YOUR GOAL: the fullest experience of viewpoints. Your mission, should you choose to accept it … (or even if you don’t… but then the happiness of all beings, including each of you, is reduced. I do not threaten: this is merely a statement of fact)…. Your mission is the generation of forms and behaviors and conditions which support the fullest expression of perception and response. This means the expression of what is perceived and also the personal and subjective, if you will, perceived nature of the perceiver. Take a moment or several to call forth in your mind what that might mean in the world.

HERE IS YOUR CIRCUMSTANCE: This is not now happening. Some points of view are not developing. They are being cut short before their stories can be told, or they are growing in a stunted and deformed way, crippled by the obstacles I spoke of before. Obstacles created and allowed, yes, by other points of view who are in turn shaped, some would say disfigured (but that can be healed) by the same obstacles and others—greed, selfishness, fear, separation. All created by ignorance. This is the stuff of drama. It is properly a form of recreation. It is not appropriate to the real business of humanity. It does not belong in real life.

HERE IS YOUR CHALLENGE: Do away with the obstacles without using them or reverting to them in the process. Those of you who like drama take note: You will find here a more compelling story than any other you can imagine.

Some of you look at the world around you and see it as perfect, or nearly so, or tending so strongly toward perfection that no effort is required of you to nudge it forward into the realm of dreams and wishes.

Some of you look at the world and see a land harsh with injustice and deliberate cruelty. You desire that this should change.

Some of you look at the world and see a shifting mirage of confusion where the right way and the wrong way blend and dance and cavort with each other in such a vague and amorphous pattern that the only practical course is to avoid action and opinion altogether.

And some of you look at the world and see a place of wondrous potential, a place to be used and enjoyed, a teeming bright world of opportunity in which the only obstacles are the people who don’t want to do anything with it.

Who among you is right? And what will you do with the others?

Remember what I have told you.

The Goal. The Circumstance. The Challenge.

October 8

The ways are always fading, always becoming lost, always becoming found and created again. And that is as it should and must be. It is again a wonderment of the beauty and tragedy of the created world.

This is its nature. Don’t be fooled. When you are taught to attach and not-attach, this is the meaning. This is the ultimate meaning. Are you happy? I am giving you an ultimate meaning. Do you feel distrust? Fine. Continue to think about it. Continue to think about it.

(I have lost it.

(No.

(This was too important. It must be here.)

Each of the ways is a metaphor. Each points to and leads toward and creates a framework for entering into a new life, a new way of mind and perception in which there is more information. More beauty. More responsibility. Enter the way, enter the metaphor and follow it and pursue it to the place where it leads you and you emerge within it and beyond it in a world that is so easy to describe but no one would have believed or wanted to hear. Enter Christ and you emerge through the doorway marked Love. Enter the Buddha and you emerge through Identity. Enter Islam and you emerge through Communion. Enter the native road and you emerge through Holy Abundance. And if it is too hard and a bit too frightening, hold fast by the doorway, whichever one you choose, hold fast by the route and do not look beyond it. Because on this road, on the real road, the scenery is spectacular, boring, too close, too far away. It is real. It is what you seek and are made whole by finding, by entering. You may expect it to be more complex and intense than what you have been comfortable with.

The ways are metaphors. Like all metaphors they change, they become cliché, trite, a word said by rote, an empty ritual. To cling to the ritual is useless if the goal is not kept in sight. It is worse than useless if taken for the ultimate. Any religion professed is a map only. Any religion lived is the territory. All territories join in one planet. Any territory is lost by fighting to keep it.

There shall be no more fighting.

Look instead for agreements and points of translation.

There shall be no more fighting.

October 10

I really cannot do this.

A Chalice of November

Backing slowly into it….

If this were fiction, there would be no point in writing it. If it were real, it would be too confusing and scary to write.

If it were the deluded ravings of a madwoman, it would be an interesting document from some clinical point of view and already way too long.

If it were true, a refusal to write it now, still, would be cowardice. Pride. The sin of pride. Yet another. To wait until understanding comes or until the suspicion that it must be written finally at last simply goes away…. Well. In all these years neither one has happened and yet still events pile up, nudging with their weight until here we are at last, and I am going to sit down and put this all on paper.

Not to mention criminal negligence. In those moments (and they are many) in which comes this thought:

"Yes, this is all being staged for your benefit, all for you, all to convince you that your viewpoint is so true and important that the world needs, yes, needs to hear it"

holding hands with this other thought (yes, they do: they come holding hands, fighting, flirting, dancing, playing cat-and-mouse and hide-and-seek with each other; coy, provoking, right-and-wronging but we now know—or at least we do suspect—that this is merely another of those blessed and cursed duality things and they are once again both true, neither true…):

"Preoccupation with one’s own thoughts, inflated self-importance, and the sense of communication with invisible but conscious forces in one’s environment are indicative of mental imbalance and spiritual immaturity and render suspect everything such a person thinks and perceives"

(but that is now finally at least at last totally irrelevant to the fact that I am going to sit down here and do this) comes also this other thought, their secret child, an old soul filled with wisdom, shyly, respectfully, but insistently peeping out from behind them:

"This is the way it works. This is reality. Write it down."

Rob has cancer. Gross, disgusting creature, the author, how can she use this as a tool for exploring reality? Is it not better to say nothing? To quietly believe that he will recover like the others at the brunch table who also had it and now years later enjoy a casual Sunday afternoon with the rest of us, critiquing the sermon and calling out for more coffee?

Or to see his situation as random, which in this case means a combination of genetic predisposition and perhaps environmental circumstance, perhaps nothing?

But what if Rob’s environmental circumstances are part of a larger pattern? What if they include mind and behavior, ethics and values and choices, respect and belief?

This is the kind of situation which generations of atheists have labored valiantly, nobly, to render impossible. It is the kind of situation which generations of theologians of both the warm fuzzy persuasion and the simple method persuasion have labored with equal valiance to render the same.

It is the vulnerable squishy underbelly of religion. It is the soft black midnight side of the alleged New Age.

Because what if this is someone's fault? Rob's fault, my fault, the fault of the guy whose toe he stepped on without apology on the train last January? But more than that, way more than that, if it can be someone's fault, if things can be like that, isn't it God's fault?

Oh yes. I know. Somewhere in the stained glass-prismed halls of how many faiths with well meaning global pretensions, the wise and powerful are shaking their heads again in alleged pity and amusement: They never outgrow it, do they? Always the same dark nursery dreams. Always the old wild heartbeat. They never listen when we explain. They never understand. Children always, always in need of our guidance and care.

Or is that soft whispering rather the quick efficient signal of those watchers who are swiftly and ruthlessly moving—once again—to quarantine this line of thought. And to quarantine it swiftly, lest it corrupt the easy pleasures of those who sin against respect and choice in ways so large and intricate and subtle that to even notice them sends us into either useless frenzy or exhaustion…. The perception of large patterns is delusional: Sleep… sleep. The immediate world of the senses and, if you like, the very highest and best abstraction as God, all knowing, all good, and in control. There is nothing in between. There is nothing else. Sleep.

Or… is that soft whispering… both?

What if these twin denials, both of them lies, triangulate on a hidden truth, though they both seek to suppress it?

What if there is something else?

What if, in spite of our pejorative psychologizing and revisionist religion and high-minded (or otherwise) attempts at social engineering, there really is something else?

What if there is another level to reality? What if there are an infinite number of levels to reality? Of God? In an infinite number of dimensions?

And what if each one of us is a unique doorway opening onto yet another perspective into the living changing complexity of it all?

Can some of those perspectives exist independently of the human mind, just waiting, as it were, for some wandering human experience to connect with them and open them up for view?

Can there be consequences of that connection? And would not such consequences open, in turn, other perspectives from which, once entered, there is perhaps no safe way to turn back? And yet to go forward is also not without risk?

Is, then, such a connection bad?

Is it good?

Is it conscious?

Next day

A cooler day today, more typical of November than the day before. It has been warm and beautiful this year, a long extended fall. The global warming jokes fall thick and fast like leaves on a windy day. Millennium.

We had lunch as usual. Not so tense. Rob was there in his electric blue suit. He had dressed up for his daughter’s school event, and I don’t know why they do it on Sunday. But he was at brunch with a body/mind update and looking pretty good. He has seen the primary care doctor this week, the test results are in, and he has selected from a pool of two his choice for oncologist. His state of mind is delicate, of course, and changeable; and he is doing a good job of managing the conversation about it. He is not grumpy.

Tom asked, What is your staging? Tom is a recoveree. He had exactly the same condition that Rob has. Years ago.

Rob said, You mean what stage am I at? He is asking more for clarification of this new and peculiar terminology than to contest Tom’s sophistication and mastery of it. His voice is filled mainly with courtesy.

Tom nods.

Stage four.

Tom frowns slightly and quickly and then begins to ask questions. Treatment protocols, details, he is curious and knowledgeable, wanting to help. They talk. We all listen. After a short while Rob says, One step at a time. And they go on to talk of something else. Sunlight floats in from the window. We are sitting at a round eight-top with a fabulous view of the sidewalk life. We are near the food and out of the way. This is probably our new favorite table.

Rob has lymphoma. His doctor detected some enlarged lymph nodes during a regular checkup, and, because of Rob’s family history, they did a biopsy immediately. Then they did a CAT scan. The cancer is in his bones. Treatment will involve chemotherapy (but I won’t lose my hair) and some other things to address the problem from both sides of it. We’ll know more later. Rob plans to explore some alternative therapies also. He is already taking an Ojibway herbal mixture. He says it makes him feel a little spacey. Psychotropic therapy, we joke with him.

Truly he looks marvelous, more relaxed than I have ever seen him. I suspect he is concentrating. There is a small swelling visible on the side of his jaw.

I suspect further that there is nothing like being escorted onto the dance floor by You Know Whom to improve one’s concentration. For the first time since infancy, perhaps, you are the legitimate center of attention. You need to watch out for your feet and negotiate the lead.