A Bright House

“Of all the hard facts of science, I know of none more solid and fundamental than the fact that if you inhibit thought (and persevere) you come at length to a region of consciousness below or behind thought, and different from ordinary thought in its nature and character; a consciousness of quasi-universal quality, and a realization of an altogether vaster self than that to which we are accustomed. And since the ordinary consciousness, life, is before all things founded on the little local self, and is in fact self-consciousness in the little local sense, it follows that to pass out of that is to die to the ordinary self and the ordinary world” ~ Edward Carpenter, “My Days and Dreams” (1916)

Jenny’s brief and not very satisfying snack break in Walkerton Ontario had only partially alleviated her sleepiness. Though there weren’t many miles to traverse before the town of Kincardine appeared on a Bruce county horizon, she quickly fell back to sleep as the bus began to roll again. She experienced one of those instant into-dream catapults. She went right back to Ray Townes but he wasn’t in the seat beside her; it was her alone, walking slowly through a dense low lying fog that had permeated a forest. Her sense was of imminence.

She had stumbled into a preview of what was arriving very soon, it seemed. The light of this forest was indicative of early evening, with steeply slanted tree shadows that leaned toward her in the ultra slow eddy of fog. The first thing she could actually touch and feel was the yellow length of crime scene tape that loomed into visibility as she walked. Sadness. A reminder of what she stood to find at the end of this impromptu road trip. She looked left and right and could see no end to the length of the yellow strand as it was swallowed in mist.

The bus and road beneath were gone. As is so often the case with the deepest of dream states, Jenny had been entirely planted within a setting of hyper real feel. All of the visual details felt like memories from previous dreams that kept returning to remind her of something infinitely important. Now deeply supplanted within the dreaming dimension, Jenny lifted the yellow ribbon to duck beneath and enter the closed off area. Temperatures immediately dipped as she did so. The fog carried an odor that was vaguely sickening and familiar. Distantly so, it seemed. Familiar from long lost memories of her infant life, when biological parents were probably deciding her fate. She wanted to cry herself awake but perhaps the woman on the bus was not ever going to awaken again.

Jenny became aware of the movement within the trees around her, just far enough away as to beggar her identification of their forms. They were fast, fluid, opaque, as white as the fog but with definite shape and solid silhouette, and they were silent. Little ghost beings or perhaps extra-dimensionals. She felt no fear then. As her feet moved through forest flooring, that was the only sound. Eventually the flitting things dissolved away, and the temperature dropped further. Beneath her, and beneath the hundreds of trees, she could distantly hear water running over pebbles. Ray would be here somewhere, if this dream state was indeed crossing lines into clairvoyant awareness. Jenny stopped walking. She placed her right palm flat, at shoulder level, against a sturdy Maple trunk. It seemed to vibrate subtly. What felt like energy of an impossible to comprehend “voltage”... this she could sense buzzing within the tree. Were the forest plants conduits?

A sudden ripple or bump shook the ground below Jenny where she stood. It wasn’t forceful or startling, but took place quickly and passed from the front to back of her. The tip of her tongue wanted to intrude with an articulated thought about almost waking up on a bus that had gone over a pothole. Instantly afterward, a solid human shape manifested from the flowing mist perhaps a hundred feet distant and positioned within her forward line of sight. Jenny “knew” who it was before she heard the voice - “his father wants him”, and even those cryptic words landed in her ears with comprehension. (Am I orchestrating an elaborate fantasy?)

She thought of a painting, “The Dream”, by Mark Chagall... she viewed herself as the woman depicted and as the woman approaching... as every woman given breath in a human body. Jenny resumed movement and walked toward the outline of Melinda Emma Townes. Her heart was remarkably calm. A deep peace shushed her bloodstream into acceptance of all that was about to be shown or kept hidden. She and Ray’s mother moved toward each other and stopped a few feet apart. Melinda wore an elaborate frilly calf-length dress that was just as white as the fog cloaking their surroundings. Her feet were bare. Her eyes were tired, shining with freshly shed tears. “Why does his father want him?” Jenny asked. Her voice seemed so distant, so foreign. The elder woman raised a thinly fingered hand to run an index digit along the rope mark across her throat, reminding with force that Jenny had once dreamt something horrible. Melinda’s voice was burdened by sadness, noticeably a struggle to lift and deliver each word. “His father wants to teach him the ancient way of their bloodline.”

Jenny knew, once again without the words or why of it, that her placement in the lifetime of Ray Townes was of far greater significance than the timing of chance. She opened her mouth to ask another question but Melinda interrupted in a louder, surer tone - “So you are the chosen.” Jenny felt a stifled perceptible flash of something like anger. “Am I not also choosing? Am I a pawn in a game for cruel gods?” (this sounded nothing like her usual manner of speaking) She went on - “Do you know how my childhood memories begin...?” Melinda stepped closer, nodding as if to herself. She was partially translucent, a holographic imprinted being. “Dear child” she almost whispered with an eyes-scanning glance of the fogged forest, “not cruel gods... have you ever cried happy tears?” Jenny nodded mutely, fascinated by the coming and going molecular structure of what her vision could perceive as Melinda Emma Townes. “When you cry happy tears, child, you come closest to the truth that lies in waiting for the latent part of your mind to be freed after bodily death.”

A ripple in the space time continuum crossed between them, almost a wind, and Jenny feared for the dream as it threatened to dissolve away. Dimly she felt a seat, a road, a humming wheel well, and ignored it. She wanted to stay longer. “We are all from one, and when you cry that way you are remembering something true and beautiful. A key is passed to unlock the entire memory when we die, but many of us return or cannot overcome the fear that has shaped us during our lives here.” Melinda’s voice seemed to fade slightly, as did her appearance. Jenny reached forward impulsively with a head bursting from questions. Her hand slipped into and through the holographic elder. “Please” Jenny implored suddenly, feeling brutally exposed and alone, “please don’t leave.” The Melinda shape turned its back and continued to disintegrate back into the raw material of strange mist that had birthed it. With gliding steps away, the woman’s bare feet vanished slowly from the ground up but her voice continued softly. Jenny stood rooted like a tree, listening intently with a suddenly racing heart.

“If you truly are the chosen, and you love my son, only you may bring him back. His father wants him. He is to continue the story of his people but not as a mortal man, and he is to have a child with a woman of earth, but as with everything under creation, there is a choice...”

the voice trailed off as Melinda’s outline became entirely swallowed up in fog. As she had left her son and husband, so too did she leave Jenny’s visitation. Against the will of the dreamer. Jenny felt herself a whole universe removed from her crooked house, missing husband, job in a diner, nights of burning eyes from weeping. She stood astride the paradoxical and maddening freedom of energy itself, and was aware. Explosively aware. Stoned on its power, suddenly a fierce and fearless force of her own written script, finally being read dispassionately and with no self-editing. She could revert to the routine of years before.

She could return to the city twice crushed. Each evening’s footfalls in the spaces of her old home could tilt the rooms out of control, sending them spinning with her trapped within. The creaking skeleton of old age was waiting there for her to step into its marrow, alone. This was the closest available foreseeable truth, and was too easy a thing to accept. But if there are locks in the universes, they must exist solely for the unlocking. Why else would they exist? Why would sentient life reach so desperately for what vast unknowns remain, forever? She stood in the dream place, inside the sectioned off area where people had been vanishing, and a flood of vague memories teased at her ability to view them.

Did her biological parents play an unwitting role in this prewritten tale? Was her life as Jenny thus far a mere prologue to what awaited, with Ray? The thought of his name brought such an aching recall. It reached clear through her into places she could not have known, and yet she felt she must. Ray’s mother had made a wrong choice. That much was shown in the restless wanderings of her spirit. In her reluctance or inability to ascend from this woefully limited proving ground. Now Jenny and the cusp of choice had become reunited. Through Ray whose eyes calmed and recognized Jenny.

Through her own courage and weariness, in the want of change. Change that rises up suddenly from every nowhere to announce it has been there all along and cannot take another moment of imprisonment due to circumstances beyond anyone’s grasp or control. Again it was the obvious answer about loving thyself, forgiveness, about patience, letting go of the strange comfort of pain as a companion. She looked up and all around the forest and its misted drapery. Silence was pervasive. Only her breathing, deep and steady. There was no scrap of fear anywhere in this place. It had become the womb. She felt that wherever Ray was in this moment, it had to be mirrored. They were connected and what events existed ahead, all of them at once, were enabled by choice. Or by choice not made, which is still a choice.

Jenny received the impulse suddenly and smoothly, as though “God” had dialed her in. She spoke to the trees all around her, and meant what she said. Meant it from the Heart which was also all around her. “I forgive you, mom and dad.” This was not the first time she had uttered those words, but it was the first time they had come from the truest source. She meant them. It wasn’t about her. It wasn’t about weariness and not being able to shoulder another mental pound of anger, abandonment’s vengeance, or unfinishable thinking. It came purely and with sweet tears that felt like the happy kind. The relieved kind. ”I forgive you, Scott" she continued into the womb like silence of what and where she dreamed. “I forgive you for the recklessness and for not listening to me when I worried about some of the things you did.”

“I forgive you, Jenny” and here the words ceased as she went down on knees into the cool soil and foliage. She forgave herself for giving up when Scott was taken from her. Not a believer as others call themselves, she looked up through the fog bathed branches and leaves to forgive God, for it was not an infallible Creator. She could not then know whether the massive internal release of this forgiveness was setting forth energy chain reactions, but it was meant and so deeply felt as truth. When she could speak again, she said ”I forgive you Ray, if you can’t love me and be with me as I wish it so" and with that the whole of what she had dream-entered (or had been entered by) zoomed away from her in three hundred sixty degrees of blurring squealing jolting slowing sideways tilting body on bus seat jarring back into -

back into the one story ever told in infinite ways. Told by a teller you know and believe, for the teller may be you. Indeed, for the infinite story to be told it must be self-authored so that it can become real. Who holds the pen is unimportant. Who publishes and profits from the tale is less important, still. You are the key holder. You are the finder. You are the detail decoder : A woman whose appearance might catch the eye of many, yet whose energy field had barely radiated year after year. A nondescript old house on a plain city street but for its sagging foundation and the weep of its walls.

A man whose clairvoyant mutative curse and gift has devoted his life to helping others through its means. Both adults who have been abandoned in ways that never stop impacting, shaping and defining their surviving souls. This story has been told along with the birth of mountains and the scrape of glaciers. There is nothing new here but for the reaction of a caring resonating heart. How do we not care deeply for those who love? It is our wish that everyone finds a great love, and a Home, and some precious peace during the infant years of mortality’s transitional arc.

This infinitely shaped and retold love story reached its pivotal potential on a two lane highway out in cattle country near a small town named Kincardine. It could have (and in fact, has) written itself into a countless array of outcomes, though one dreads to imply any veracity to the term “ending”... but in a layered constantly flexing series of “realities” that are always influenced by each other and each other’s players, there was only the bus locking up its brakes.

There was only the woman awakening with a full-body start as the vehicle swayed violently to one side and then skidded to a rubber belching halt. Its nose faced lake Huron with the front wheels planted deeply into highway shoulder stones. Fortunately there had been no traffic at the time. Fortunately the man who had staggered directly into the Gray Coach’s path had not been struck. By the time he was reached by a shaken driver, the man had toppled backward to the asphalt and was prone on his back, eyes closed. He moaned softly before going under, with his hand outstretched, palm to sky. This is where and when the meticulously balanced scale of all that resists defining and controlling righted itself.

A series of sounds came from everywhere but mostly above. Voices and shoes scuffling. Hands upon him. It seemed that long ago he had decided something of utmost importance, but now it wouldn’t come back into focus. He couldn’t open his eyelids but wanted to. He wasn’t sure he could remain within his body, but wanted to. Like many of his kind, the children of a cosmos that staggers imagination, he found himself in need. He and his exhausted mind and body could not “know” that all needs are eventually met, though it was a beautiful prayer to send out.

That knowledge was before his station and capability. Hints and nudges were all the mortals could be allowed, if they were paying attention. From within the sensory overlap around and above him, he heard one clearer voice and felt a sudden coolness in the palm of his outstretched hand. Where the braid of hair had cut into his flesh, a sweet small cool spot fell into place and he heard “I love you, Ray”.

Three hours drive to the south, in that very instant, the hands on a clock in a kitchen stopped and then jumped forward just once as a battery died. The constant ticking sounds that had kept time with dust motes in window light, fell silent. Floor joists settled audibly with the changing temperatures outside, and the house seemed alive with a sigh. If anyone had been there to walk from the kitchen into the dining room, and had turned to face a southwest corner where the floor met its walls, they would not have known that a beautiful shiny glass marble had been removed from its resting place against the baseboards.

The clock said 11:11

all is one