The Mountaintop

She had been on the mountaintop since the early afternoon the previous day. She had watched the birds and the lone hawk that swept over her in circles again and again, as though he had something specific to communicate. She searched his feathers and form for a message, letting the tenuous sparks of insight fall to her like snowflakes.
The afternoon had stretched long and wide, opening its tunnel of curiosities as the sun arched across the sky. She walked the path of the day without fear of a setting sun, and soon, as she knew would happen, the light turned golden and then slowly drifted below the long mountain range in the distance. Her vision blurred and she opened her arms wide and lay back on the firm soil of the earth, letting blue twilight spill over her like the sweet arms of death.
Blue turned to crisp black and without light, her body quickly grew cold. She kept her eyes wide, letting the blackness and flickering stars roll and tumble over her with possibilities, letting it drag her mind into depths that daylight preferred to avoid.
There were demons and they laughed and giggled. There were animals with horns and a lilting flute somewhere in the distance.
The wind moved over her and a nearby howl danced with her fears. Dark time lasted for an eternity, just the slowly arching crescent moon marked the movement of the earth and her body’s place upon it.
Her body held onto the deep worry that came from childhood and her parents and the movies she had seen. Her mind clung to visions of chains and bumpy demons and the sounds of crying. She knew she held on to the light, thinking that it alone would ease her deepest fears.
Just as she clung to the daylight, she held on to the world, to the flowers and plants and dreams that she could see. As she looked, she saw the nightmares of her youth and the cold waiting chains of years within a sphere of words she had never asked for.
The long night opened its tunnel and she walked in, letting herself be filled with its chill and rich sounds of pain and mystery. And then there was a chamber without words. Here, she was truly scared. Here, she had no body, no role, no purpose. Here, she was nothing.
Then the nothing found its way back, it found the body, the fears, the worry. It found all that it ever was. But it brought back the memory of the chamber. Her eyes were wide once again, and she knew that to live in the light, she would have to learn to voyage in the dark.
She lay on the mountaintop as morning light spilled into the world of a newborn day, and she drank in the pale pink light, letting it come into her like the semen of the sun. She opened her arms wide, letting the day bathe her in its clarity.

Nothing Ever Has Happened

Like wind that has no power, like a wave without sound, void of temperature or sensation, rolling past a body without shape or skin…the thought came over me. More than the thought, the moment of clear understanding, like the bell I ring every few minutes, sending its deep resonating power through my ears, penetrating the still air and layers of consciousness. I felt the moment come through me, roll through me, like an understanding that has traveled with a comet, past stars, though many outer levels, into this labyrinth. “I cannot be born” Oh. A tear stings. “Die.” Oh. “Exist.” Ouch. “Or change.”
The candle flickers in front of me. I take a deep breath. The body does. The body is born, the body dies, it changes…but the thing that moves through it, that thing inside this breathing flesh, it does not. There is no beginning, no end. It is. The thing with no shape, no characteristics, no form. I see.
Thank you. Thank you for the cosmic look into the blackness. Nothing ever has happened. The question I asked so long ago finally means something, the question is itself the answer. Depending on who does the asking.
Nothing happens to the unnamable. Nothing happens to the void, the void in which I am part of. Things happen to the body, or at least they seem to. The body can grow old and die and still, nothing ever will happen.
Two things happen simultaneously. One of flesh and nature, the other an eternal cosmic stillness that resides inside the movement of the body and light.
I sit in the garage, while the cold summer wind tries to make its way through a fleece blanket. This does not have to be learned in a cave deep in the Himalayas. It can be understood in a basement, with only a flickering flame and the sound of typing and sporadic coughs in the background. It can happen to a girl who talks slower, as deliberately as she can as other thoughts vie for space in her brain. And as thoughts seep in like oil into the bay, as they move like tendrils of smoke from the incense that burns a couple of steps away, a soft wave of knowledge rolls over the shores of consciousness.
Oh, and the tears.
The picture morphs like heat waves, taking on a manly harshness, becoming gentle, becoming a monster of blue and yellow and then a vague Mona Lisa smile. This woman from the corner house, twenty minutes from a place I call home. She is a part of me now, as much as she ever was, as much as I was blind to understand it. As I am one and there is no other. The body I never knew, but we are One. My mouth will move tonight, and while nothing has happened, it will. And I will watch and you will show and I will talk.
You were never born, I will never die.