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REMEMBERING ETERNITY

Young Love Under the Moon

Night had now come. Fairy light, from a waxing, gibbous moon that looked like a stone skull leaning back against the sky, a head colored in chamois and yoke yellow, its face blotchy and weathered as if from a thousand battles and a million tribulations, played upon the woods, streams and rocks around their tent. Their environment was delicately lit by gossamer, lambent, muted rays that informed it with the spirit of an elemental world, a realm ruled by soul rather than mind, where dancing imagination replaced plodding intellection.

This light was of a playful, feminine sort, with a soft burnish, all silvery-liquid metal, and seemed to be not earth’s own but a reflection of illuminations from another universe. It was the light ruled by animals, one in which man retreated and the four-leggeds advanced. In this powdery diffusion, when the earth freed herself from the harsh glare, rasping tongue and domineering will of mankind, the nature spirits felt free to frolic. Humanity’s night was their day. Ilona knew directly, and Skylar felt subconsciously, that all around them, romping in innocent amusement, were fairies and elves, sylphs, naiads, and salamanders, nixies, oreads, sprites, and trolls.

Mystical Experience

He felt that he had been dissolved as a discrete entity but had, in an incomparably advantageous exchange, been reconstituted as the vital center of everything. Ego had nothing to do with this conception; on the contrary, the change allowed Skylar to see, in a profound way, that not only were all people and things in the universe interconnected, but that they all depended on one another.  By virtue of being the terminal through which the traffic of the various macro – and microscopic energies got routed, Skylar sensed that the ocean constituted his bodily liquid; the stars, his all-seeing eyes, and the sand, the hairs on his gigantic body. No differentiation separated him and it, he could simply direct his attention to the sea and flow, or to the stars and shine, or to the beach and repose.

And the ground state of everything was love: not silly romantic love in which egos traded caressing strokes; not the mandated love for relatives, that resembled bottles of fine wine labeled to entice but empty once uncorked, not any love involving a lover and a beloved. This love could best be described as disinterested divine affirmation, the blind but all-comprehending approbation of everything, from the smallest quark to the most-immense quasar. This love was that which made everything else possible. This love assured the continuance of the mind-bogglingly complex movements that made up the material world; in the same way, this love had responsibility for the spiritual evolution of all life forms: guaranteeing the constant functioning of the laws of karma and the catholic forward march to realization

The Pacific Ocean

As Skylar sat there, arms entwining knees, thought replaced by wonder; as his eyes sailed what looked to be the endless Pacific, he became more intimate with the world than he had ever been. The plunging, chasmed depths of the ocean, inversions of the soaring, colossal peaks of the mountains, rising up to shelves and shores were, he saw, simply the bottom of a great tea cup whose beverage was the sea. And the land, thirsty for it, constantly tipped this 70-million-square-mile cup to its lips, splashing the liquid out of the vessel and then pulling it back in through the flow and ebb of the tides.

Skylar felt this close to the earth and its enveloping waters: that he saw them as a pretty porcelain teacup, like the ones his grandmother used, the Meissen ones with sinuate sides painted in purple camaieu, brimful of sloshing tea. What a precious feeling, to be so familiar with the great planet that he might have lifted it up by its delicate handle and tipped it precipitously forward, thereby causing the surf to surge far inland.

The surf’s ever-recurring liquid whisper sounded like a hush-a-bye-baby lullaby purred by some invisible but all-loving mother to soothe his soul into gentle release. What deep satisfaction he found in this perpetual advance and recession, which nothing could stop, which would continue evermore; though man might laugh or cry or fight or die, this flow and ebb would play on for a thousand million years. Though wars raged and populations starved; though crafts reached other planets and carried explorers to them; though cities fell in rubbled stacks as Gaia’s muscles shuddered; though discoveries extended the longevity of the human body to centuries; though atmospheres got poisoned by the beta-radiative isotopes released by fissile explosions: still the sea would run up to the land like a curious child and then retreat like that same child in doubting shyness.

Selections from Remembering Eternity by Rick Maddox.
Featured image by Solomon Barroa, USA.

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