Pilgrimage
09 July 2010
I rose early, and headed out. Whenever a book of mine comes out I walk up a mountain. And so it was with On The Third Day. One of my favourite things is being in places where nobody knows I am, I don’t know why, it’s just something I’ve always liked. And so the mountain is perfect.
Up I went, up the uneven path between the grasping fingers of the many-handed pines, and up further again to the dead tree being kept standing by its parasitic creepers. Here I stopped and looked up. There is life in this tree, actually. Right at the top, an umbrella of green where the creepers can’t quite strangle that final inch of being alive.
It’s a strange thing, your book coming out. It’s probably different for big name authors but there’s little fanfare when it comes to my release. As a rule I don’t like to organise things and so organising my own book launch is simply never going to happen! But that doesn’t diminish the joy of it in any way. I get a very happy feeling buried deep inside. It’s half pride in achievement, half love of the book itself. And it’s all coated in hope.
At the top of the mountain there’s a pool of healing water. If you drink from it you live forever. The only draw back is that your immortality only lasts whilst you’re on the mountain. I sat at the edge of the pool and watched the water at the far end go over a lip and into a sinkhole, back down into the darkness. I thought about how lucky I was to get two books published. There are not many people who manage to end up doing the exact thing they wanted to do since being a kid and I’ll never forget that fact.
To get back down the mountain I usually take a different route. There are narrow roads for logging trucks and one of them sweeps around a bend overlooking a ravine. Car thieves use this ravine to dump stolen cars. As I walked along this sweep of road the sun dipped into the heads of the pines and the light split open. On the track ahead a fox appeared. We stood there for a moment, he and I, looking at one another.
‘Searching for something?’ he said
‘I see the light has split.’
‘It happens.’ He spun around, his bushy tail chasing him. ‘Here we are then, in the middle of the light.’
It didn’t strike me as strange that a fox might be talking to me. This was a pilgrimage, after all.
‘So what do you want to know?’ he said. His voice was soft, wispy.
A little bell was ringing in the back of my head. The notes of its music went into a part of my mind that had not been active for many years. ‘Tell me about the world.’
‘Ah, of course!’ replied the fox. ‘Come, follow me.’
And he led me to his fox hole, a dark space in the centre of a mat of soft green ferns. The light began to fizzle and lengthen. I saw it as traffic trails and sparkler stars until it was so bright I had to shield my eyes and when I opened them again I was inside the mountain.
Two baby foxes lay entwined about one another in the corner, their eyes closed in sleep. The vixen of the family, I could see only her eyes, staring at me from a dark shadow.
‘The world,’ said the fox, ‘is a network of pulses. Watch this.’
He put a vision in my head, of a tall building on fire. There were many people living inside the building, 333 souls. On one of the very highest floors a small child was trapped in its bedroom. It was crying for its mother. The vision then pulsed. I was watching the same thing but my knowledge of that child had suddenly expanded. Its memories became mine, and its past dug in its hooks. I heard the voice of the fox. ‘The pulse takes you deeper into knowing.’ Then I knew that the child’s mother worked very hard and made many sacrifices to keep the child alive. I saw the deep part of a midwinter night and she was awake watching television with the lights out. Synapses sparked, far away quasars bleeped, and my understanding deepened. Another pulse, white. The mother was in the hallway, being restrained by neighbours. Her home was saturated with flame. The neighbours were stopping her from going back in. But she broke free and ran in through the front door, for her child…
The vision stopped, freeze-framed. The fox appeared. ‘Why is she running into that building? She will clearly die.’
‘She wants to save her child.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s human nature. It’s instinct.’
The fox put another pulse in my head and the vision swung around 180 degrees and we were in a cave. The only exit was through a small hole in the rock ceiling, through which shone the moon. On the cave floor were two lumps of raw flesh, one large, one small.
‘I pulse and you understand more deeply. You can track actions backwards through the mind. The mother wants to save her child. But you can go back and wonder why this is. Because she loves it. But why does she love it? You track back and back right to the source. Which is here.’
I looked at the two lumps of flesh, and I saw that they were in fact connected by a thick vein. They shivered in the moonlight, their gelatinous surfaces vibrating soundlessly. ‘The small one is love,’ said the fox. ‘And it feeds off the big one.’
‘The big one is its mother.’
‘Sort of.’
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t you know?’
I glanced around the cave and noticed a dark tunnel leading into deeper black. ‘What’s down there?’ I said.
‘More aspects,’ said the fox. ‘There is light and dark in the soul.’
I looked back at the large lump of flesh.
‘Tell me what it is,’ I said.
The lump of gyrating flesh was emitting something, something like a pheromone. I could sense it and the feeling it gave me was a warm whiteness.
‘It’s the basis from which all our good things come. Can’t you see what it is? It is hope.’
This time there was a huge white flare as the vision of the burning building became wholly real to me. It was as if I had spun this room from my own thoughts, weaved this story with my own hands. I was the room. I could sense every inch of it, from the forgotten photographs in the dusty drawer to the seeds in the apples of the fruit bowl to the lined-up shoes in the hallway. I was that world. The woman was filled with a great depth of feeling and at the bottom of it all I could sense the driving factor of her own hope; vibrating, pulsing.
‘This is rare, but it happens,’ said the fox. I felt the fire stir and curl. I willed it not to harm the mother. I hoped for her, and I sensed my own soul pulse, pulse, pulse with hope. The flesh at my feet throbbed and hummed with effort. The fire looped away from the woman and arched over, like the tube of a sea wave. The fire held its breath, the woman was allowed to pass. She took the child in her arms and there was no pain.
‘You see’ said the fox, as I watched the mother run out into the hallway with the child in her arms, ‘you as a human can only experience the first few pulses. The spectrum goes much further. Hope stretches further than you might know, sometime beyond the walls of your body and out into the world itself.’
I was back on the path now. The fox looked at me. ‘Perception is a funny thing. Not so deep as you might think. Not enough pulses in people. Nobody can see past the curve of the Earth.’ He smiled and said, ‘Slow and the world will reveal itself.’ And he swept around in a circle and disappeared into the ferns.
I descended the mountain to the scent of mint mixed with pine and the song of the Dippin’ bird. From the shadows beneath the pine branches I felt the family of foxes watching me. The split light collected itself about me and returned to its usual photon tracks. The sound of cars came rushing though the trees and I was in the real world. I was back.
1 comment
Written by Brenda Evans on 12 July 2010 at 14:49:00
That is a beautiful peice of writing!