The acrid smoke from the sour wood of the campfire billowed through the silver hair of Eden’s 72 years, but she didn't break eye contact with the newly 18 year old Eve. Whose mother had told her she must hold Eden’s stare and let her in to forge the link.
Eden’s Lament
Before the universe began there was everything and nothing. A grey pool, edgeless and asleep. Then a faceless question arose, disturbed the waters and asked who am I? It’s ripples birthed difference and the All began to forget it’s wholeness in the pulsing shadows cast by its query’s doubt. The search for the answer stirred the pool from grey to white, forming a black stone in its centre from which to define itself.
Once the ultimate definition was formed, much to the All’s surprise, the answer still illuded it. If the question could not be answered from one finite perspective, perhaps it best be sought everywhere, in the infinite multiplicity of the myriad. In an inspired instant the white pool and black stone inverted, becoming a black pool and a white orb, which promptly exploded, creating the many Suns. Gods whose distant starlight still adorn the long night of the All’s cosmic search for self.
Each Sun, a raging fragment of celestial consciousness, cast apart and ablaze in space’s dark waters, searching for the ultimate answer to unify the All. Individual opportunities to approach, experience and answer something of the original question from a different personified perspective.
In time our Sun externalised aspects of itself, populating the drama of its soul by building mirrors in its image from the debris of its chaotic birth in which to reflect upon the question. Great and vast lessons were learned and archetypal agencies formed within the cosmic violence of deep time. These mirrors, the Planets, Deities born of our Sun’s exploration of itself, would later stir the seas to prompt life’s cameo, who dressed them accordingly with faces that coloured their cultures, as their spiral dance played out the mythic theatre of the solar giants' boundless existential inner opera.
Once the theatre was built, stage set and cast assembled, the Solar System became a cosmic clock capable of calibrating consciousness into the myriad. Lithe tendrils of energy called Souls hurtled screaming from the Sun and plunged into matter. Weaving themselves like needles in and out of the fabric of the material world, accruing experiences through the tapestry of their incarnations, adding fibrous fidelity to the choral search for remembrance of the wholeness once known.
In the earliest ages to acclimatise to the dense torsion and violent stroboscopic metamorphosis of their newly storied selves the souls slept first in the rocks, for millennia. Made strong, forged in magma through the infernal crucible of fractious nightmares, awakening freed, unified and imperishable as crystal dreams. From there they moved into the primordial seas until one fateful cellular dawn, biology kissed itself into being. Divided, moved, fed and bred.
From worms, to fish, reptiles, mammals, monkeys and humans, billions of lessons were learned and indelibly integrated back into the All with each life lived. Growth was etched into the souls with a legacy that would outlive the iterant pulse of life's births, selves and deaths. Stories written in words that transform the essence beyond our atoms, that cannot be forgotten nor need a self to remember.
The planets and the stars continued to ghost write the dramatic symphony of each soul’s becoming from the side lines behind the blue curtain of our world. Consciousness explored itself through a billion eyes, mouths, hands, minds and hearts, through chorus and quarrel alike.
For a great aeon magic was the morning and life a holy teaching, a dappled dance towards a communal remembrance of the All. In our attempts to understand we called our mirror matter and once named, it fascinated us. Alchemy was established, for in it lay the exponential tools of our transformation. We began to understand that as the material world had the capacity to both remember the metamorphosis we could enact in it, so too in concert it mirrored and morphed our own inner realms.
Life blossomed as we acted the cosmic aria of our inner lives into being, woven from the fabric of our material plane, forever inspired by the larger dimensions of consciousness in which our novel dance was nested. Or so it seemed.
Our mercurial minds in their majesty began to crown themselves and in so doing fractured the spectrum, fragmenting the prism of our other agencies. Until In time under the fealty of mind the magic dance of energy and love began to stray and explore their shadows, ceaseless war and endless desire. Confused and in denial, mind took the mirrored stage to be the All and ordered it to be mined for energy to feed the incessant hunger for knowledge in the absence of knowing.
The echo of the initial doubt, resonating from the question's origin, blindly haunted our hearts, stoked our rage and hurried our minds in search of the answer. Alchemy's rapid capacity to transform was tragically usurped by the duality of our fears, the suffering of our preference and the insatiability of our empty desires. In desperation Ego was elected to predict the future, as it was most afraid of change, and through it's ill choices, science and spirit finally divorced each other.
knowledge chased matter to the atom in denial of the spirits knowing, neglecting to see the shadow of its rejection follow it into the nuclear hearth of the sacred solar furnace. Blinded by the majesty of mind, war released the raging energy of the All, that had been held in the atom by the density of our world. We dropped the bomb in our hearts, whose autoimmune trauma burned through generations and fed the fears stoking our death-denial. Ordaining the total horror of our separation on the world stage. Meanwhile Spirit began to doubt the ambiguous truth of the poetry that protected its scriptures from negation and took it literally, ignoring their shadows by building a scaffold of unquestionable dogma that ornamented absent answers and promised personal reprieve beyond the grave to those who toed its lines.
Ego, overworked and underpaid, began to desperately build structures, concepts and ideologies that would dismantle faith, explain away soul, the knowing and the unknown by fixing the flux of life in place. In the bright name of progress as the focus remained on the replicating bud of the new and the incandescence of innovation, little attention was paid to the dry barbed brambles of Mind's path that grew stiff in the stunted wake of ceaseless progress. The knotted maze corralled history down habitual paths that obscured Mother Earth’s heart and in time few remembered her ineffable illumination.
Mind's runaway mechanisms systematically automated an organic matricide, meted out by the monolithic materialist monologue whose rhetoric echoed in mentations barred chambers. Territories, agricultures and academies incessantly divided, proliferated, pillaged and produced. The heart's great sorrow was placated, fed fleeting feelings peeled from the surface of myth’s deep waters, once potent images now hyperventilated into irrelevance. Unable to satiate the heart's ineffable needs for genuine connections, material desire yawned into a void, swallowing meaning like dark stars.
The artists awoke lucid and raving and became oracles for the end. First through the fictitious cries of the paranoiac saints of counterculture, who span their minds through imaginations momentum into the dystopian punchlines of our blind makings. Fictions so essential their swallowing spelled annihilation. But the clarity of the horrors they penned in verse and painted on the silver screen were so total, so alien, that we felt unable to face them and our personal parts in the enormity of the play.
In time those warnings were perverted and sold to us for entertainment as the collective nightmare of the media numbed us to tomorrow's terrifying truths. Our courage was absent in war at the borders of our egoic increments of self, fighting those we deemed other enough to kill in the shadow of our battered hearts. So we sat back scarred and sedated by the mutilated history of our self harm and fed it to our ego’s fear of change, coddled by what fragile comforts we had left. So indoctrinated into the architecture of our fractious egos and broken spirits we put our feet up with cups of tea and watched the world burn after work in the high definition cabaret of a million LEDs.
Meanwhile as we watched, seduced by the gravity well of our endless desire quest, somewhere beyond the horizons of our cities, under a blanket of denial, the architecture of our industries ground the forests and fields to dust. The earth, for too long plowed, became the deserts in the blink of 50 years. For one week the food we ordered failed to arrive. In panic we turned to our televisions through which the end was briefly denied in flailing polemic, before its looming reality cut the power. What agriculture remained grew in the ground far from the cities and was desperately devoured without thought of seeds within a season.
The Rich who had prepared bunkers, receded from the world. Without the gratification of an audience to enact their richness at them or access to the world they treated as a theme park, most became bored and swallowed by their neurosis either committed suicide in luxury behind closed doors or bred a short lived generation of children ill equipped to do anything bar briefly exist in decadent perplexity.
The angry Lost Mob killed and ate everyone and everything that crossed their path, on two legs and on four. Warring lives forgetting their cosmic lovers fight to become whole, fought to the last breath over a glass of water, rather than constellating through kinship and conversation, the coordinates of its source.
Which left those of us living who kept the story alive, guided by our ancestors who pull the ribbons of our intuition to guide us down unknown paths towards the miracle of clean water. Who remembered the question and sought answers in our hearts beyond the tyranny of mind to bear the torch of our undoing into the long night of our reflection and rebirth in Hope’s Garden. So now we walk the seasons taking what the trees give and no more. Our place is to sing this song through these dark years to warn our children's children who will live on when earth has grieved and been born anew.
So you must beware of Bunker’s Treasure, that sings you to stasis. You must protect yourself from those rageful ghosts of the Lost Mob that are forever searching for hosts. Anger catches like a tinderbox in a bitter heart, so furnish yourself with courage’s embers and the seeds of compassion. Breathe life into them, water them and give them to the earth to be transformed.
Each element is important in its place, Spring’s air inspires, Summer’s fire acts, Autumn’s water reflects and Winter’s earth accepts. But divided, pitted and broken, air breathes ill ideas, fire ignites ill actions, water nourishes illusions, and earth enthrones ignorance. We must always pace the season's sacred dance, lest we forget ourselves and blindly butcher all into another hell on earth.
Mercury's webs and wit will guide you. Mars stokes your will to live against these odds. Venus loves above you, tracing a five pointed star in its wake and the Moon illuminates your intuitions, keeping you astride and safe, Jupiter teaches you through joy to grow, Saturn holds you to this promise, Neptune waters your imagination through dreams, Uranus shouts change or be changed, Pluto urges us to die and be reborn and Chiron is the key to set us free from our wounds by moving through them.
Take this, it was your mother’s. She too sang this sacred song, whose lovers’ dance carves a pentagram in the heart of heaven.
Look inside, it’s empty.
We keep this story alive by wrapping it in poetry, never fixed to paper with pen. So it may flow between our mouths like moonlight and slip like quicksilver through the fingers of those who would seek to change, destroy or force it to sing their selfish songs, that always blindly mean to end us all. Now you are the question walking Eve, towards Hope's garden.
Eve cradled the locket in her palms and wordlessly vowed to sing the story on.
