**Audio Version**
As I sit to write, it is raining outside, sounding gently on the tin roof. A cloud has enveloped the mountain and the world has closed in. The horizon is gone, lost in a misty grey punctuated by the shapes of trees, drained of colour but deepened in form. A fire crackles gently, and a dog sleeps, curled on a mat by my feet. Outside, small honeyeaters visit the gaudy orange baubles that festoon the bare-branched persimmon tree, in hope that one might yield nectar this cold day.
I’m trying to find my way into writing about the nature of the cosmos. The mist is helpful. I started with the mist. Not this gentle, transient cloud of moisture, but something altogether deeper. It has many dimensions, and I don’t have words for most of them, but when something is infinite, then measures such as length, breadth, depth and duration are next-to meaningless. Other things start to matter.
Imagine it with me…
A silver-grey fabric that seems at first to be uniform, but watch and we will notice thickened swirls, faint changes in tone that wash past us. Look at your fingers and toes. They are – not disappearing – but merging, becoming misty. Dissolving. This is a little disturbing, but also right. It feels right. As we stand, (if standing makes sense when there is no ground as we know it)…as we stand, dissolving, watching, we become aware of energies. Electro-magnetic pulses. Fast-moving particles. Look at it this way, and its matter. Look at it another way, and its energy. Look at it another way again, and it’s ripples…
… ripples we almost recognise. Like a dream half-remembered. Like music that we feel with our bodies. Like a song in a language we can’t understand, giving up to us only a part of its meaning. Meaning. Yes, meaning. Consciousness.
In this mist there is no direction, and yet we can orient ourselves, up, down. Left, right. In front, behind. Look down at your body – at first it seemed that we were dissolving, but no, we are emerging, constituting from this mist, little whirls of energy and meaning thickening out of the mist. See those honeyeaters, those persimmons, that snoring dog: they too are whirls of energy and mist. Can you see the threads? The threads that weave us, winding sinuously about us, composing our very form. Trace one – around and around your torso and legs and out into the etheric mists where it curls and dances, before it bends and winds into honeyeater and out again, through me, and out again, and finally disappears into the silver-grey distance. You and I and honeyeater, beings of swirling mist. We rise and thicken, we incarnate as fleshy bodies and bone, bodies with a self, and we live for a time, individuating but never separating, until, one day, the energy dissipates and the threads begin to withdraw, slipping back into the mist. Some whirls dissolve completely, most others remain as more-or-less durable structures in the ether: attractors, crystalising in time fresh formations of energy, new whirls. New whirls, but perhaps carrying some old ideas. Some old self.
In this mist you can find old whirls that have been injured or ensnared, unable to remain incarnate, but also unable to return to source. Ghostly traces, we might not be able to see them, but we feel them acutely[1]. There are other formations of energy to be found here, kinds that rarely if ever take on physical form. Creative energies, destructive energies. Angels and fiends. Devas and Asuras. Tricksters.
There are dreams, and there are Dreams. My dog dreams. Perhaps she is chasing a rabbit. This imaginal space is of the sub-conscious. Both creative and receptive. It is those very threads that we can trace into the mist. I have ‘had’ dreams that shook the foundations of my world. So have you. Dreams from another place, dreams from the mist. Thoughts and ideas that do not belong to you. Not till you dreamed them. Now they mark you. Dreams come to us. Sometimes because we need them. Sometimes because they need us. Sometimes they just come, barging into our comfortable certainty, raving about something that happened ten thousand years ago, and which is happening again. This time around it’s your story.
Riding in on dreams are the Archetypes: whirls formed and fed by millennia of human experience, laying like rhizomes beneath the ground, and casting threads into the structures of human lives, for better or worse. Archetypes threaded like beads onto stories. Stories that sometimes become strong enough to hold their own intentions, their own sentience, and which manifest the great dramas of human existence. Stories of Empire that extirpate indigenous people. Stories of Progress that extirpate the living world. Stories of ferocious and jealous Sky-Gods. Stories of oppression that twist into justifications for the slaughter of innocents. Stories that bind killer to killed indelibly and for all time. You’d be careful, if you knew that.
Do you remember the Words of Wovoka?
“There are lines in the creation which connect each thing with every other thing. Power flows along these lines. These lines fill the world. Some are given by your culture, your own nation. Others are given in your visions and dreams which bind you to Creation.
And you can cut some of these ties, injuring yourselves: Bear is no longer your relation, this Stone no longer heals. If you kill something or someone for purposes that are not in line with the Creation, without praying and without respect, it’s as if a high-tension wire were cut. You are connected to these lines with your head, your heart, your hands. The more numerous and solid these lines are, the more solidly you are attached to the universe and the better life flows in you. This is why the vision quest and living in a sacred way require a true and real consistency in life, because you must live in such a way as to not break these lines which help us to stay in the path where the power flows.[2]” In The Life of the White Mare, Etain Addey P285.
The rain has stopped and the mist has lifted. The dog has moved on. A flock of galahs is trying to destroy the crop of lentils I planted yesterday. No-one is hurt when I call the dogs and send them barreling down the hill, scattering the pink and grey marauders back to the high limbs of a dead tree, where they squawk indignantly. Three kangaroos, wet fur dark graze out my other window, indifferent to it all.
It is time to walk. Before the winter darkness closes in.
[1] I once walked through a field of bones where hundreds of horses and camels has been yarded and shot in an aerial cull. Destructive feral animals, but some horror of that place I felt in my body as manifest pain, and years later, I shudder at the memory.
[2] Wovoka, Northern Paiute, Born circa 1856. Founder of the Ghost Dance, which so scared the US authorities that they felt compelled to suppress it, leading to the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee.
mis
mist
miste
missed
the missed