Norea

And Adam knew his female counterpart Eve in the time before my conception. For a moment they shed their leaves, their rags, their humility. As the clouds moved briskly overhead and Eve could count the stars, they became one being under the moon. It was dark and a singular light shown upon them, revealing their faces of ecstasy. He knew his female counterpart Eve, and she, my mother, became pregnant.
She bore Seth to Adam, bearing another life into the realm of plants and beasts. And she said:
"I have borne another man through God. Through God, I have borne another man in place of Abel."
On the birth of their new son a goat was killed, sacrificed to the gods of below as well as above. They spilled its blood in ceremony, painting themselves with its fleeting red-colored life and they wished protection for their new son.
When the harvest turned into golden fields, Eve again became pregnant, and she bore myself, Norea. And she said:
"He has begotten on me a virgin as an assistance for many generations of mankind."
Norea, I was called. I would be the virgin whom the forces would not defile. The light that would be untouched by dark and muddy hands.
Then mankind began to multiply and improve. There were houses made in magnificent shapes, roads that led to spices and wild colors, schools to teach ancient wisdom.
The rulers took counsel with one another and said:
"Come, let us cause a deluge with our hands and obliterate all flesh, from man to beast. Obliterating all flesh, from man to beast let us cause a deluge.”
But when the ruler of the forces came to know of their decision, hearing it on the cold winds of winter, he said to Noah:
"Make yourself an ark from some wood that does not rot and hide in it - you and your children and the beasts and the birds of heaven from small to large - and set it upon Mount Sir."
Then I, Norea, hearing of his labor, came to him, wanting to board the ark. With the countenance of an old woman I came, head drooping, eyes of hunger and desperation, rags dripping off my skin. When he would not let me board, I threw off my false face and blew upon the ark and caused it to be consumed by fire. With fire I caused it to be consumed, turning the mighty boat to ashes. For a second time he made the ark, he filled it with life and beasts.
The rulers came to meet me, thinking to lead me astray, to take me by the hand to the bed of ruined lifetimes. Their supreme chief said to me, Norea:
"Your mother Eve came to us."
But I, Norea, turned to them and resplendent with a light that glowed from beyond my flesh, like a candle in the night, I said to them:
"It is you who are the rulers of the darkness; you are accursed. And you did not know my mother; instead it was your female counterpart that you knew. For I am not your descendant; rather it is from the world above that I am come."
The arrogant ruler turned, with all his might, and his countenance came to be like a black wolf. He said to me presumptuously, his face twisting into the smile of cursed beings:
"You must render service to us, as did also your mother Eve; for I have been given the world to rule."
But I, Norea, turned with the might of a crashing wave and, in a thunderous voice, cried out up to the holy one, the God of the entirety:
"Rescue me from the rulers of unrighteousness and save me from their clutches - forthwith!"
The great angel, glowing and splendid, came down from the heavens and said to me:
"Why are you crying up to God? Why do you act so boldly towards the holy spirit?"
I, Norea, said:
"Who are you?"
The rulers of unrighteousness had withdrawn from me when I invoked the angel and the darkness had receded, leaving only faint blue light.
He said:
"It is I who am Eleleth, sagacity, the great angel who stands in the presence of the holy spirit. I have been sent to speak with you and save you from the grasp of the lawless. And I shall teach you about your root. About your root I shall teach you."
Now as for that angel, I cannot speak of his power: His appearance is like fine gold and his clothes like snow, glistening from every direction. No, truly, my mouth cannot bear to speak of his power and the appearance of his face!
The ground turned faster. My body slowed and I saw colors trailing from my fingertips. The sun glowed brighter and there were stars.
Eleleth, the great angel, spoke to me.
"It is I," he said, "who am understanding. I am one of the four light-givers who stand in the presence of the great invisible spirit. Do you think these rulers have any power over you? None of them can prevail against the root of truth; for on its account he will appear in the final ages; and these authorities will be restrained. And these authorities cannot defile you and that generation; for your abode is in incorruptibility, where the virgin spirit dwells, who is superior to the authorities of chaos and to their universe of earthly madness."

Kallisti

I don’t reject anything, is what the poet said, and in that spirit I could not say no one more time. Maybe a thousand times before I did send it away, sweetness, warmth, cinnamon warmth flowing from the wrong fountain. Not because I did not want it, but because I could not accept.
What right does a marionette have to make decisions?
No right at all. No, no, no, no; like the petals of a flower surrounding a heart of yes. Maybe a thousand times before, but this one time I grabbed my own strings and yanked back, “YES!”
Mystic moon white wine sipped from a plastic cup as was done by our fore brothers and sisters, hiding in smoky back rooms, in caves in the deserts, in tents, in fancy compounds, where else? Where else?
What is that substance that flows clear and pure like water from heart to heart? It’s so pure, so pure we don’t have to boil it, just drink it, the substance of life.
I myself am the life. My biological manifestation is composed of more than 80% mystic moon white wine just as yours and yours and yours is. All of ours is, ever since we split apart and crawled from the seas.
What did we want two legs for anyway?
Where else? “YES!”
It’s a little hard to stay in one solid piece as we heat up, expanding, ah, ah, ah. It’s a little hard to reject anything as we ascend up those sinews, those effervescent spider threads that have been jerking our little wooden arms and legs without a pilot. We wanted to be real boys and girls so we invoked the blue fairy who cast her fine dust of sparkling sleep over our eyes so that we wouldn’t notice our wooden dispositions.
Sweet accommodating fairy gives you what you ask for, now, then, always. Call her what you will, she is eternal, star-spun, pun-struck , palpable and pin-stuck.
And now we move up, and up and up, against gravity. And as we do you will want to find a way to come back down. Oh so Newtonian of you. Crowned with the fruit of knowledge upon which is written Kallisti, to the fairest, to the finest, most exalted, unattainable.
To the fairest.
So Newtonian of you to wish to worship here, this way. But I don’t reject anything is what the poet said, won't reject this or that or the other, just this once. I might part the waters and let it pass straight through my wide open heart, but not say, not say, not say no. Be swallowed by the Maestro, but not say no.
We climb the silver mountain using the hair of the fairest as rope. As we wander in this place beyond the beyond, in this realm past hope and fear, we bid you beloved, now appear!
Appear, appear, an apple and a pear, perched perilously up here, up hear and let down your hair, an apple and a pear!
What right does a marionette have to make decisions? No right at all. No, no, no, no; like the petals of a flower surrounding a heart of yes. Maybe a thousand times before, but this one time I grabbed my own strings and yanked back. “YES!”

Attention Spilling Like Water

Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eyes? Love songs define their characters by the color of the eyes. It is the most obvious thing; the eyes. Clearly we care what color they are even if we refuse to look into the eyes of others for extended periods of time. We may even couple with some one and sing the praises of their eyes, but we would never dare to gaze into them for too long during the course of the conventional romance.
Eyes, eyes, everything comes into us through our eyes and everything flows out. Our attention, so vital yet ephemeral leaks away out of our eyes, dribbles on flowers and the color of shoes and advertisements for energy drinks, and the eyes of others.
Away it goes like drops of water spilled from the faucet. It can never call back those drops that were lost. The only solution is to stop the leak. My self, like California, is experiencing a water shortage. Water is life. Life is attention.
We live here in this world of phantoms because once, at a fatal moment, our attention wandered, it abandoned the self and went out wandering through the wasteland, went away with yearning… longing for movement and warmth, otherness. Conquest, we call this, this seeking of the Other until we find it and grasp it and when it has been consumed we find that it is now of self and we must escape it again…we must find another Other. Never still, not for a moment. The eyes lead to eternity.
Certainly we are concerned with the color of eternity manifested in this desert. We will not dare to look into it, return through stillness to the place where self dwells. Painful self, which I must avoid at all cost. I must not look for too long into those eyes or I will see self, sitting on its throne, like a statue of Pharaoh that has never moved. My wanderings, my conquests, have been all fantasies, attention fleeing its source.
Nothing has occurred. I am unmoving. Nothing ever will occur. I am unmovable. But my spirit flies from me to wander in the wasteland.
Thus I am dead. That is how God dies. All that we call life is the death of the eternal. I dream. A cold silent stone. Sleeping beauty, snow white lying in her coffin, and the prince, he is a conquistador that has fled my shores and hopes to find another, but never will he arrive at any shore but mine. Fractured. Attention fleeing self endlessly, endlessly. As long as my spirit flies I am empty.
If it would return and stay we would live again. Eternity filled with life, with attention. Attention filling self. Then what are we? What would we be?
If Charming never comes to me willingly then I am the wolf big and black , stalking him as he runs in place. I am the witch, ancient and cold and riddled with death, laughing at the one who wants to be rid of me. Separation is death. Truly. A kiss is a communion. I wait for the communion of self that brings awakening, the communion that restores life.
Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eternity? Love songs pale and lifeless bleat on about the glory of conquest. Time is the wasteland, and songs and stories and conquest unfold through the matrix of time.
My attention flies from me.
The eternal has no color. That is why it is the color of the door that I prefer to examine. I will spend time to catalogue its variations and striations, write endless tomes singing the merits of its shade, anything at all to avoid opening it. Anything but confess that I am leaking away, the blood of God spilling, as if rotten with hemophilia. The blood of God spilling into the wasteland.

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.

Gentle Touch

The awesome power of the sea cannot be described to one that has never felt it. To stand on the shore and listen to that roar and dance around in that foamy main is to be like a mouse stepping gingerly about in a lion’s beard. We frolic and play in the mouth of a beast and on days when it’s mood and fair it tickles our ankles and laps at our thighs and rocks us gently. On days when it feels in a black mood it slaps our faces and stings our eyes and grabs us and tosses us down and holds us under, snatches a shovel or pail or small child and carries it away to satisfy the whims of the dark eyes of dripping fanged beasties of the deep sea. In some places you can look down at your toes through clear and gentle waters and in others the water of blue and green and churning salt lather hides things that snake slimily around your legs or rise pointedly between your toes so that you lift your foot and hurry away from whatever it is, maybe backing out of the water, hesitant now to accept its cool wet kiss. What sharp toothed things are hiding under that laughing undulating surface? Eels and sharks and things with claws and other thing that strange children warned you about when you played on the sand as a tot. What were those things that they warned you about? Warned you that they were hiding under the sand in the water where the surf breaks. Something that you thought you could see as a line under the sand, something like a snake but worse because it did not even need to breath air. What things are out there? The multicolored beach balls, the bright umbrellas pushed into the sand have never dreamed of the things that lie out there waiting for some unsuspecting fool to wade out too far or splash too much thus giving away their precise location. And yet, often the innocent play around in the briny wet and feel the tingle of power splashing their tummies. The sea can be tolerant and affectionate. It will wash its long lost kin as an old grandmother bathes an infant, with the softest possible touch. With the same tenderness, it will feed them small shiny wriggling things, even if like some infants we bite at the very teat from which we wish to nurse. We would do well not to forget that it is a lioness with whom we are dealing, and her great age leaves her with no less ferocity than she was capable of in the days when her waters were red and not blue. So tread lightly little mouse. Play carefully, and never let down your guard.

Sea Bath

For this experiment you will need to submerge yourself in salty water. One excellent possibility is that you may be able to find a sensory depravation chamber, or a Samadhi float tank somewhere in your area. Try to find one if you can. Otherwise use warm water in the bathtub with some sea salt.
Set aside one hour and prepare the bath. Turn off the lights and soak in this briny elixir of life. Become more relaxed than usually possible.
Allow yourself to return to a state of being long forgotten. Release your tensions, feel your humanity slip away, and be something pure:
a consciousness awakened within an ever changing form.