Colony

My sister was there when I was born. She helped me remove the shell that encased me when I felt complete in my beingness. I flexed my legs and scratched at the walls from the inside until the sheath trembled and shook with my efforts. Then my sister took notice and came to my assistance. When enough surface had been torn away, her antenna touched mine and I was soothed knowing that I was cherished. We shared knowing. Together we removed the white husk that had held me since a time before I was me.
I had been other than I was now. That time was lost to me, except the vague memory of my sister’s touch. We had shared knowing even before my transformation. She had always cared for me, and I was glad now that I was as she. We were now fully sisters.
When I had completely emerged, my sister and I touched feelers again. There was much that needed to be shared with me. Even while we communed this away another of my sisters came and carried away the birthing husk. My sister showed me the nursery where there were others who were as I once had been. They were so different than I was now. My long slender legs were now so quick and agile. Once I had none. Once I had lain blind and wriggling.
My sister showed me how she cared for these others. The understanding had already been transmitted to me in the knowing when we touched, but now I watched as she helped the blind ones, grabbing them with her mandibles and dragging them to the center of the chamber where they could roll and wriggle together. There were other sisters here, all assisting the blind ones who were as I had been and as my sisters themselves once were. I joined them in herding the blind ones together and saw to it that they were cherished and helped to nurture them so they could grow fat in preparation for their long confinement in transformation.
Some of the blind ones were ready. They were now busy cocooning themselves in fresh birthing sheaths. They would sleep the sleep that I had slept and would awaken anew when their own transformation was complete.
I was shown the eggs from which the blind ones had emerged. My sister touched feelers with me and asked me to help her move the eggs up to another chamber where there was warmth. We worked, letting the rhythm of work fill us with delight, carrying eggs from one chamber to the next through the tunnels. We were filled with pleasure assisting our unborn sisters, helping them to grow into blind ones so that they would one day undergo the great transformation and be as we were.
When our mandibles were empty we occasionally paused to touch feelers sharing the knowing. Our communion warmed us. We were also warmed by our work. Later when the upper chambers cooled, we moved the eggs back to the protected depths of the nursery.
We took a moment from our work and feasted on what our warrior sisters had killed. It was a fantastic beast that they had slain, huge and alien. Its mammoth size was a testament to our sisters’ courage and strength. We touched and sang their praise in the knowing.
When I was satiated I watched as one of my sisters carried away the body of another sister who had ceased to know us. This was all right. We still knew her. Down in the nursery, eggs were hatching and the blind ones were being fed and were spinning cocoons and soon they would join us in the knowing.
The knowing was shared before we were born and it would continue to be shared after we died. Our constant work ensured this. We rejoiced in the never ending flow of activity that was our communal beingness; carrying eggs, tending the blind ones, removing the dead, tunneling new passages, maintaining the old, exploring the world beyond, and hunting and killing, and scavenging and always, always sharing in the knowing.
My sister was there when I was born, and I was there when she was born, helping her to emerge from her cocoon, showing her all that she must know so that she could be there when her sister was born again.

Baby

Remember those early days when sitting in a porcelain tub of warm water with the rubber stopper on the silver chain keeping it all from going down the drain, the world seemed so wigglly squiggly, so barely there and ghostly. Mother and father seemed to change and the others did too, and sometimes you had a sister or two and sometimes you had none and sometimes your aunt was called Robin and sometimes she was called Betty. All these people all these sounds and shapes seemed to shift around in a way that was neither significant nor lacking significance, just a bit of nature dancing for my developing powers of observation like leaves caught in a little whirlwind on the side walk, turning round and round so that the configuration is different in every moment. This is the reason that carousels hold so much appeal for young children, because they turn and turn in a circular fashion and there is no way of telling whether your lion is in the lead or taking up the rear or somewhere in the middle and meanwhile you bob up and down and with the mirrors there is no way of telling if you are the real child on the real sculpted lion or if that other child and lion are the originals. Bath time, so warm and pleasant and wet, with the water jiggling around your body, so like the womb and so like the sea from which all life arose, back when it was still hot and red, the perfect melting pot for this and that to come together in amoebic ecstasy. The wash cloth is soft and squishy and you can put it in your mouth and bite and all the water squeezes out and dribbles out of the corners of your mouth and down your chin in the most delightful way. The water moves when you move, jiggling slightly. All of life is like that when you are a baby. Every time you move you are somewhere different, with a different crowd, strangely familiar, familiarly strange, forever and ever. Then slowly, the waters of life start to cool and freeze. Things seems steadier, thanks perhaps to the magick words you have been learning. Mother and Father are almost always the same, you generally have the same set of siblings, an aunt whose name remains the same. Perhaps it’s because of the magick words, because when you say “Mamma” this is the one that you mean, the one that you invoke. It’s a tricky thing, because Mamma taught you the magick word, so really she taught you how to invoke her, and the other Mammas, the ones who didn’t teach the words for things, they don’t get called, so they never come again. Only this one, the one that tricked you with the word of power, and now you are here with her, stuck in the frozen world and your legs have grown long and stiff and you no longer bathe, but instead stand in the shower. You no longer ride the carousel, but instead read the books and do the homework and watch the world materialize around you like steel bars. A steady, stable place. Gone is the shifty watery world of infancy. Gone is bath time with all its jiggly wet wonder, and gone too is baby, and all that is left of it is a word for what it was.

Earth

I come from the earth and to the earth I will return. It’s no wonder that I should chase after the horned God of the underworld. I remember springing from the dirt. I come from the land and the land comes from me. I never was, I never will be. And still the grass grows and the worms crawl beneath it’s yellow coat and the earwigs creep into the cracks of the houses that men built. The black widow hides in the cedar. Death resting quietly in the shade, spinning her scattered incoherent web.
My father showing me the creatures of the earth, holding the black widow in his vice grips, calling me to come and look. Frightened, I hover at a distance. He assures me that it’s safe, come closer look at death so that you will know her when you meet her. He shows me her belly with its red hour glass. This is how you will recognize her. Stay away from her, don’t touch her, don’t play with her, and be careful in the dark places, she is there.
Another time he calls me and, when I come, he is holding a brilliant green snake in his hands. Again he tells me to come closer. This time he shows me the beautiful snake glittering in the sun like a length of new garden hose and tells me it won’t hurt me. This is a good snake, it helps the trees to grow. It kills the gophers that nibble their roots. It may bite you if you frighten it, but no great harm will come of that. It is a beautiful snake and I feel happy looking at it in my father’s hands and happier still when he sets it gently down. I laugh excitedly, watching it slither away, disappearing in the green of the grass as though it had never been there.
I come from the earth. I’ve carried it under my fingernails and in my hair. I’ve felt it under my bare feet. Its thorns have buried themselves in my flesh, its barrel thorns and fox burs have embedded themselves in my clothing. I’ve crawled around in its strong wooden arms and plucked its fruits and danced naked over its grassy back. I climbed to the tops of the trees and balanced above the deep dusty green canopy and drank in the sight that surrounded me; blue sky, yellow sun, dull golden grass like a head of blonde hair, the old broken fence of a brown so dark it is nearly black, sloping and falling, letting its planks return to the earth in broken rotted bits, the white house with the red tile roof, tall and proud and frightening and sad and hopeful, the mountains dark and round, mysterious and menacing and inviting.
I knew as I looked around me that I must remember the sight, that it was an important moment to be so high and see it all. I knew it was more beautiful than anything I was ever likely to see again. I knew it, but was at loss as to what should be done with such knowledge. I tried to hold it inside of me, but could feel it slipping even as I grasped at it, like sand through my fingertips, thoughts of school and playmates and my parents in the shape of words formed inside of my mind, washing the sight from my eyes even as I beheld it and, eventually, I climbed back down into the dark shade and silver branches below.
I nursed a black goat with a white star on her forehead from a glass bottle and a smelly rubber nipple and called her baby and watched her grow, the little nubs of her horns slowly working their way up just as the teeth in my own mouth would do from time to time. The goat disliked the smell of the awful rubber nipple and refused to take nourishment until my grandmother took her into her soft wrinkled hands and doused the nipple in milk and insisted, her old steely blue eyes shining mischievously. Then the kid drank and wagged its black nub of a tail and flicked its delicate furred ears.
I remember earth. Even here, sitting in my plaster box over the concrete and asphalt that reaches as far as I can see, I remember the untamed earth. The dirt and insects and serpents and death and horns which push to the surface where once there was nothing. One day I will return to it. I will be home. I sprang from the earth and to the earth I shall return.

Electrical Impulses

The power of movement. A simple thing, taken for granted by those creatures that have long possessed the ability, but ask any cactus or man locked in a tiny cell and they will tell you that the power to move about freely is most precious of all. In the very beginning of your life, it was the first thing to be active in you, your movement center. You wriggled, you cried in hunger, and your body happily relieved itself of the wastes that were left in its system. You learned to crawl, and to walk and to grab and to hit. Viola! You had the most essential skills needed to maintain your existence on this planet. You had the power to translate electrical pulses sent from your brain via your nervous system into motion, activity, into an adequate response to some stimuli, such as music, or the sight of a hungry wolf, or the smell of a roasting pig.
The subtleties that could be added, the endowments of the intellectual and emotional centers, would do you little good in this plane of existence without the foundation of this first essential power, the fully functioning motor center. Now you have the ability to do, and with the addition of the other two powers, you have a heightened capacity for subtlety, a desire to find a purpose to put your fantastic abilities to the test. You’ve got the car, now baby drive it!
What are you going to do? What are you going to make of the multicolored world? How are you going to organize all that sensory impute? How does it make you feel? And what are you going to do with it all?
You can see an electrical pulse. See it in the way your limbs go wiggly when we hook them up to a loudspeaker. See how you groove and shake and twirl. That is the power of movement. It gives a shape to the unseen forces that are ever at work in the universe.
This truth is so obvious, so apparent that it seems to be hidden from us. We are blind to it. The ancient Greeks, however, were appreciative of this secret. They honored the human form, took great pleasure in athletic feats, not only as the triumph of the motor center, but as the culmination of all the aspects of the human being and even as a representation of those mysteries which are seen as originating elsewhere.
As above so below.
As within so without.

Birth

Nine years ago something happened which I was not entirely prepared for. I was a frightened caged animal. I had lived in captivity my whole life. I bonded with a male of my species. He was the first that I bonded effectively with, so he became my mate. Soon I was pregnant. Everyone around me was a frightened caged animal. They could do nothing to sooth my own fears. They were busy drowning in the wealth of their own terrified floundering. Far from being helped by others of my species that had once undergone the same experience, I found that they were obscenely domesticated, agitated by the repellent truth of their own bodies and unhinged by the new and obvious instance of my own. I began to discover things on my own through weird chances, a few random glances through the holes I poked in the box that had been the world since my own birth. I heard tales of women who gave birth in their own homes, and women who opted against vaccination, and women who squatted to birth their young instead of lying on their backs. Inside of the box I was treated as though I were sick, as though I were a sickness myself, something very disturbing to the other creatures in the box. I was too young to be overly brave, too uncertain to insist on too much, so though I longed to run away into the wild and find a quite ditch among some brambles and do what it was in my nature to do in a place away from accusing, and prying, and clinical eyes I submitted to the conventions of the day. I did hold firm on giving birth without the assistance of any pain killers. I arrived in a hospital early one day because something like water was leaking from my vagina. I was tested with a little swatch and treated as if I was very silly and told that my water bag had not broken, and I was not giving birth, and they sent me home. Less than six hours later, I was having real contractions and my father and my mate delivered me once again into the hands of the hospital staff. This time I was admitted. I was permitted to walk the halls and squat and stretch as I pleased. I asked not to be hooked to an IV but they insisted, and soon my resolve against it was weathered away by that insistence. I was young. That asked which drugs I would prefer, and I told them none. They stood in the halls and snickered amongst themselves, certain that I would beg them for their medicine in the end. I never did. There were none of the complications that they had used to frighten me into being hooked to the IV. My baby was healthy. I was changed from then on. I knew with a certainty that they were all cowards and liars. I knew that I would always have to fight to protect the important things, my true nature, and that of my new child. I knew that it would be a struggle to do more than peek through the holes I bored in the box, I knew that my fellow inmates would try to frighten me into remaining within our prison. I had been young once. Now I was something else. With the birth of my first daughter, wisdom was born within me, a knowledge that stemmed from my very core, and a resolve to do justice to that new knowledge of life. I ceased to be the domestic creature that I had once been, and began to seek out the wild that lived within me.

Ruler Of The Kingdom

When first they gave me the poison I was told that I must be careful and do certain things so that it would take hold. I call it a poison for I can presently think of no better description, although it is more like semen than poison. But semen is after all a type of poison, a thing which comes in and causes change, causes the death of the young woman and the birth of the new babe and mother. This that they gave me was like semen, filled with new hidden life, a type of life which I, as I then was, could not even fully comprehend. Like a person asked to take a mysterious package to an unknown house, I cannot know whether the package delivered means life or death. Certainly it delivers both, but whether it is for the benefit or detriment of your cause all depends on which side you’re rooting for, mobsters or coppers, guerillas or soldiers. Some, like myself, agree to carry the package not because we are partial to one side or another, but rather because the dangerous opportunity has at last been either ferreted out or stumbled upon, and the chance that it could mean death for the courier is promising. I did not care to be what I had been anymore. I did not care if I lived or died. No, that is not true, I preferred to die if possible. Suicide would be the choice of a more reasonable person, but I have never been reasonable. I had decided that suicide was for the weak and I wanted to be strong, strong or dead, and there is only one way to meet one or the other of these two fates. One must jump into the fray. So that is what I did.
It was described to me in a variety of ways with the usage of a variety of terms. They called it a lineage, they called it a way. There was talk about the transfer and transformation of substances. At times I thought it was like being sprinkled with pixie dust, it was a mystical something which might effect a change upon me. Most other times I simply understood that IT, rather than I, was the most important part of the equation. Yes, there were times that I understood that, in theory, I was a host for something. A host just as the mother is host for the human embryo as it grows within her, for it is a fact that throughout a pregnancy the developing fetus functions as a parasite within the mother’s body and it is by a clever and necessary internal trick that our body is swayed into harboring this guest. I understood this theoretically, philosophically. I was comfortable with this "idea".
And then I changed handlers, went away to another master. At that time, the talking stopped. The idea was forgotten. I was given things to do and I did them. I stopped thinking about the transference of substances. I was kept busy doing things which would seem to an outside observer to be perfectly ordinary things to do. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, I walk. I write silly nonsense stories. I make love to my handler. I cook and clean for my handler. I make love to my handler. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk. Perfectly ordinary things to do. I did them, and I did them as instructed. Time passed. I felt differences in my appetite; in my appetite for company and music and movies and books and yes, even foods. I noticed these changes, and I even imagined that these were signs of success, but silly me, I didn’t think to make any predictions with regards to what such signs might foretell. Perhaps it is not so strange that I did not wonder or guess at what might lie ahead. Very few animals do truly posses the ability to foresee what effect they may be causing in the present moment. For example, many dogs will run into the street to bite a tire without expecting to die or cause an accident, and teenage girls fuck as they please and are shocked to find themselves impregnated.
I did as I was instructed to the best of my ability and shifted little by little into being something other than that which I had been. I did not understand that this difference in me was just the beginning, a preparatory phase.
One day I felt uncommonly sleepy. I lay down to nap and began to dream of mating with the Bistea Neptunis, which looked to me a bit like one imagines Poseidon, bearded and muscular with a beastly fin. It was not how it looked so much as how it felt that seemed monstrous. Its presence was alien. I was suspended in the water above this creature and my heart was wide open and golden love seeped from my heart into its own heart and with its tail, it fanned that same love back to me, it spewed from its genitals into the water which carried it into my tingling vagina. It all felt so good. Then I was abruptly awakened by some heated quarreling taking place in the room adjacent to mine. My head began to hurt very badly. It hurt for three days, and, by the third day, my stomach also hurt immensely.
In the afternoon of that third day, the pain was unbearable and I laid down upon my handlers bed with my hands folded upon my chest. I was alone in the room. I felt myself shifting and moving out of my body, reaching with many waving tentacles from my center. The pain in my body seemed to be a disturbance caused by the discord inherent in having this subtle many tentacled thing within me rubbing and moving about within a body that is the wrong shape. We were both very uncomfortable, myself and my alien occupant. I decided that it was a sort of growing pain shared between us. Something would eventually give, my invisible body would stretch to accommodate it or it might slowly devour that body and take its place. I could not, of course, be certain.
My handler was unconcerned by these developments. His only instruction to me was this: "Stay calm."
That was when I knew that the time had come for me to be careful and do what was necessary to ensure that this delicate bloom of the netherworld would take hold within me. This is what I had agreed to do, whether I had understood that in the beginning or not.
Somewhere along the way I became the whore of Babylon. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a package and now I walk with it, unsure of whether I will survive this little voyage, not knowing what impact its delivery might have. I look to the outside observer as if I am running an ordinary errand. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk some more. Ripe with poison and rocked with shock, I do the little things I have learned to do in order to nurture the life hidden inside of me. They have become habit, so that as this new thing eats away at the old and eventually replaces it, it will already be accustomed to walking upright, to snapping its fingers, and scratching it’s head, to making love and writing silly stories, and no one will even know when it was that I died and it took my place as ruler of the kingdom.

Maze

The Labyrinth which began as a unicursal path developed into the Maze.
In a Maze you face the challenges of a multicursal design: paths divide, there are dead ends, trap doors, and illusions designed to deceive.
Many Mazes can be navigated by keeping the right hand to the right wall, and in this way a voyager may find the center. In some cases this rule is void.
What is the secret to finding ones way through a maze?
It is often true that the path which seems correct and most direct does not in fact lead to the heart, it is a deception. In some, there is no way to go back the way you came in, having entered you must proceed forward.
The Messara Labyrinth of Crete lies beneath the surface of the earth. It took two hours to navigate through its dark design if one knew the way. But what if one did not know the way through? It was of the kind of Maze that does not allow a voyager to retrace their steps. Once inside, retreat is impossible, as irrevocable as birth or death. In darkness, unsure of the way, tormented by the certainty that something both terrible and majestic lies in wait at its heart, what manner of man would be able to proceed?

At Messara the entrance to the Labyrinth is in one world, the exit opens into another. From the heart a second journey is launched. Having confronted what waits in the center, the voyager must find their way and emerge into a new land.