Part One
The Wound and the Wounded
One
The Field
You were running through long grass, away from the road when it happened. I was watching you that day, making your way back through that quiet hillside on the outskirts of town. You stepped on a tea colored bottle. The sun damaged part of it shattered, but the rest of it held firm, and sent jagged teeth clean through the foam of your Nike Airs. I saw you suddenly running on one leg, out of balance, as red wine poured from your foot, soaking the dry blonde grass in a glistening red. You fell into the long grass and it cushioned your fall. You turned on your back, and covered your green grey eyes with your elbow. And lay spread-eagled below me and the sky, with the sun and the crackling grass full on you. It was then that I began to comprehend the wound in you and the wound in me.
I wish you knew the times I watched over you when you were a child. I know I probably watched over you more than a mother should have. In death, the world is clear, it’s all revealed, and our cares and controls are just illusions to help us feel safe. Watching you there in the long grass, as a cold sweat took hold of you; I felt something like the tug on the limb that has been amputated. I felt my silver thread tighten and draw me down even closer to the Earth. And I stood there, your mother, your ghost, haunting the sunrays.
It was not easy. The shock of the pain, the exhaustion of the run, and the sight of eyes of meat watching you from inside your shoe that turned you cold and faint. I leaned over and my see-through silver shadow fell over your face. I saw the small knot knitting your forehead into a frown. I heard your small baby breaths. I realized how much you’d changed since I’d last touched you. Your head shaved and smooth. I waited with you, helpless, as a stranger might do having found an abandoned baby.
I stood there thinking all these things against the flood of Heaven, against the drowning pressure all ghosts feel when they walk the guilty Earth again. I abandoned you because I was abandoned. You know how sorry I am, and that the fugue took over. But seeing you there I realized how that same abandonment had rippled through your life and though different, and modulated by exercise and the many good things happening in your life, was bearing down on you despite your resistance to it, in spite of your battle against it. I don’t know if it is in our blood, to feel unreal or unwanted burdens. But I know the day my blood left my body; I could see that no one in this world can move through it without going insane first. Watching you here, I wish I had tried to live my way back to sanity. I suppose I did try, for many years. I suppose what I mean is I wish, even though I may have known I would probably not have succeeded in finding a lasting sanity for myself, I could have tried, kept trying, as you do. I could have accepted those nightmarish travails, the hours, and just swum each day patiently against the entropy, against the tide, just as I do now, to leave the bed of Heaven for the belly dancing dreams on Earth. Is there sanity in that? The gush of light here whispers to me, no.
I can hear your heart fisting in your chest.
I can see the rush below your temples.
The universe and its truth swim me away from you. Truth is eternal. And brutal to those not awake. I look at your eyes but only the living can recognize consciousness in the living. Your eyes cannot see me until your journey is done, and even then, if you have not found a way to the here and now, if you have not awakened, you will continue that journey until you do.
If you really want to know, it was the bang of the gun, and my last seconds with my cheek on the floor, unable to blink, that brought me to my Awakening. And then, with all that joy and beauty and love beckoning, my life slipped from me.
And so here you are.
You will have to find a way home. I can see that. You will have to get up and get to a road or a path before it gets too dark.
But you just lie there, not even grimacing. Just frowning, some fantasy spinning through your mind. Now is not the time. You need to move now.
Oh!
I whirlwind away reluctantly, my silver thread drawn into a spiritual hurricane, borne by the powerful wind of a Great Spirit. You are a dwindling speck below, your red spray still visible from these dizzy heights and then I’m gone but I will find a way to return I promise.