A Stroll Backwards in Time to A Valley's Moon Swimming Hole

The pre-dawn squints back at me through the windows behind the foot of the bed.  Clouds, always, at the mountaintops, hovering there like UFOs.  Hugging the mysteries that lay in the craters, no doubt. A soft, motherly hug.

A little later it's just me squinting and the beautiful colours are rising and the sweet, soft, ripple-less lake calls me to those windows; and I look down at them, they up at me.  Or is it one big eye, with Atlantis buried deep beneath the pupil?  There are so many places, with so many powers - how grateful I am, to be in this one.  Perfect timing.

The mornings have been calling me to a desk outside, wooden, with a water, herb and flower -filled jar in the centre.  A stick of sweet smelling wood lays like a fallen tree next to three coins, and as I've been doing and will continue to do in the mornings, I throw the coins six times.  Christ - it's like talking to someone, holding a dialogue with some sort of timeles matrix of situational wisdom.  And I'm just starting the conversation!  But everything it says and everything I ask and everything else around me feeds into the process and I breathe deeply at the words and say Yes, yes...go slower.  Patience.  You'll be dropped to your knees at this rate...

The subtleties of it all.  If you dismiss the subtleties, you see only the gross; and if you see only the gross, then your life is raw, your layers unloosened and your perception of the all and everything largely fed to you.  What's easiest.  Like supermarket shopping at the delusion store, acquiring all your pseudo-security needs.  But wait for it...there's a little crack in each layer and the watery stream that is you, which is at the centre, slowly leaks out of the crackers in each layer; and it might take lots of time but eventually there's this fucking pressure that builds and builds and it can happened day to day, or maybe one time when you're in your thirties - who knows - but it will come, and Spring a powerful leak out of whatever outer layer you're wearing at the time; and it'll taste, this water, a little bit like each layer.  Such confusion.  Without that sense of subtlety, one cannot taste the airy, empty nature of the centre that was one's self.  The swirling DNA dance of love and ethereality, that lives forever; that never was born, and never will die.

The morning holds another gift for me.  In response to my sincere questioning, I'm hearing more and more about my roots in this world.  I go back a while, tears streaming from a place that is far from conventional memory.  A fish tugging, jerking the tears from somewhere way down below.  The meaning of my whole life somehow some through from it.

I was born three months before my Yiayia died, so we were existing here on this plane for three months together.  All of this time this woman spent in hospital, sick with leukaemia.  That means, also, that my Mum found out that her mum was going to die when she was seven months pregnant with me.  When I read that, I felt it.  Make of it what you will.

We met properly twice: once in a painful, confused way, when she was not well.  She demanded to be taken to me because there is a Greek custom whereby the grandmother puts money and a Greek Eye symbol in the baby's bed, so as the gods keep watch over the new child; and I imagine that the money is for prosperity.  The other time we met, she was in remission and like I envision a lovely Greek grandmother might do, unravelled my baby-clothes and had a good, long look at her new grandchild. Ten fingers, ten toes.  I would be a great man, she declared.  It's taken me a damn long time, but I think I'm finally getting what she meant by that.

There was another time we met, before she died.  Mum tells me that she and I were asleep in her and Dad's room, on the day of the night she died.  Both of us slept for a long time, Mum said.  An unusually long time, and they had to come and wake us both up.  Something crawls inside of me when I hear about this.  Though I don't know what or why.  It just feels.

I was the only one of the kids of the family who was there the night she died, because I had to be with Mum the whole time because she was breastfeeding me.  Mum said I was a good baby at the time; quiet, didn't cry much.  I wonder if I was awake or asleep when Yiayia died?  I wonder if it makes a difference?

Ok, so the morning comes to an end.  Early afternoon and I'm going to venture out, alone, to the pond at Elephant Rock.  On the way I am powering hard, like the Terminator; except I'm reciting the mantra Soham-Hamso all the way to my in and out -breaths.  The mantra is brilliant.  It's lie life and death, just like a breath.  You say So on the in-breath, and Ham on the out-breath; and then you reverse the emphasis so you're saying Hamso; and then you spontaneously alternate between the two words, which is surely symbolic of beginnings becoming ends and ends becoming beginnings; of life and death; of renewal; of the serpent swallowing its own tail, and living on infinitely...

I arrive.

Mountain water, immediately over my body.  So-ham.  So-ham.  Freezing.  Feel it in my bones.  Loving it.  One dip in, stay a few breaths, back out onto the rock to sit and stare and watch everything going on.  The unintentional power walk here has created a huge contrast to the stillness I sit in now; the cloud of insects buzzing about and the sweet, sweet sound of the flowing stream.  The hot rock beneath me.  Me, right there with me.  The mantra slows down.  Everything does.

Coloured-fuzzy-energy in my third-eye space, stirred as it has been; beautiful energies rising, from the flames of repeated confusion.  The waves and troughs move up and down, relatively.  It makes sense to experience a backlash - but holy moley, the uplash is worth it; it is the integration, the life growth, the entering into the new conditions with new conditions.  Learnign from the old.  Loving the old.  Feeling into the new...

And I get a few stones out and bathe them in the stream - a huge clear quartz, an obsidian and some amber.

A dying bee is beside me and I feel a pinch on the lower left side of my back.  An unprovoked sting.  Now it's there, on the rock, slowly dying.  I watch it.  Unfathomable.  Touched by the sting of a bee.  Why did it sting me?  What is there, to the bee...?

The walk home is very slow.  I am seeing everything with different eyes; and among all the things that I see and inspect and feel and sing, I see a black and red butterfly jumping about the path ahead of me; and I follow it.  Until it veers left, off the trail, so I walk up and stop where it turned and see it over in the greenery there, erratically flying about as butterflies do.  It's flight path reminds me of the Zodiac.  Maybe the butterfly just paints out the stars in 3D space.

It come back toward the path, back towards me.  And before I know it it's coming right to my forehead and I flinch reflexively, closing my eyes as I do so; and when I open them again and I look up, I've lost it - the beautiful black with the red stripe, gone.  Nowhere to be seen.  But in that time span, I think.  It can't have gone so far away that I cannot see it anymore...

It can't have gone so quickly...

And I walk on, slowly taking it all in.  Breathing.  With a butterfly fluttering about in my skull, I walk  back home.  Breathing.

Feeling the wind in my wings...