In my own Quest for self-mastery, and to fulfill my Vows of service to the Mother of Life, I have learned I must tell this Vision to more beings, and thus discharge the duty given me when I was shown it. So I send it out here, like a toy boat upon the tide, to go where it will, and perhaps do the work for which it was formed.
One day, as I was standing in my workshop sanding a piece of wood, I felt a presence in the room there with me. A quick glance told me no corporeal being had entered, so I opened wide the eyes of my spirit, and saw the form of a Hawk, fierce but friendly, hovering and calling "come!, come!", so urgently I left my own body doing its mundane work, and stood free in the form of Man-Spirit, and replied; "Who are you who call me to go with you, and where would we go?" And together we rose up out of my dusty workshop, (where the wild Hawk- spirit was most uncomfortable) and I found myself hovering far above my little cabin, nestled in its little valley in the Coast Range.
"I am Watcher-in-the-Sky, and you are called to the Great Council!",she screamed, but it was a friendly scream, for such shrill callings are the way the soaring ones speak across the miles which fill their world. I looked upon her, and saw a tiny Hawk in a vast sky who was a vast Hawk in a tiny sky, and knowing her to be my cousin, and a friend, said;
"We go!" and the wrinkly hills blurred below us as we shot upwards and eastwards at the speed of thought.
The Great Valley swiftly sped below us, then the Sierras unto snow-capped peaks, which tumbled into the Great Basin with its high desert, and the wild and isolated ranges thrusting up out of it. Still Watcher-in-the-Sky led on eastward, with only an occasional scream of delight or encouragement.
This flight was far beyond my small Magicks, and I knew I had become Allman, the spirit of all humankind, and my own face, and name, and place in space and time seemed far away and tiny, amid the myriads of faces and names and places which flew there with me.
The great snowfields of the Rocky Mountains sped below us, until we passed the sudden drop onto the High Plains, and sped eastward between huge thunderstorms over land flat and treeless to the horizon. I saw a great thunderstorm before us, lit bright white by sun, with lightning flashes and booming coming from within, and I knew as we flew towards it, and I felt the broadening and deepening of space and time, that it was our destination.
We flew into its shining white wall, and after traversing a brief maelstrom of wind and rain and noise came out into a great Lodge, and everyone was there. Thunder-on-the-Plains sat before the fire beating out the summoning upon the Earth-Drum, and tier after tier of Spirits sat circled about the fire. Bear and Wolf, Rabbit and Vole, Goat and Sheep, Antelope and Elk, Lion and Coyote, all sat at council with the innumerable little ones sitting upon their knees and shoulders. The cloudy rafters held every kind of bird, and the cloudy floor rolled and parted as a great back rose up, blowing and wet, and circled by leaping fish and dolphins.
Thunder-on-the-Plains continued to beat the calling, and he shifted in body and face, sometimes a great American Bison, sometimes a fearsome Cape-buffalo, sometimes an Auroch, and I watched him, curious, until he looked up from his drumming straight into my eyes, and stopped.
"You", he roared, "are the reason for this council!"
And I looked to see every face turned to look upon me, and their expressions were not kind. All save Watcher-in The-Sky who always looks fierce but whose gaze now bore a certain sympathy and whose courage seemed to reach to mine, and Dog, who with back bristling and eyes rolling came to stand beside me with teeth shining between raised lips, all the rest looked at me with anger, and contempt. And Thunder-On-The-Plains bellowed, his hoarse great voice echoing in the cloudy hall of Spirits, and told of the wrongs I had done.
"Poison in the Air!" He roared, and a vision rose of sickness being breathed, of foul vapors desecrating the clear sky, sickness which touched nearly all of the spirits there, and the vapors arose from my hand.
"Poison in the Fire!" And the vision told of the very Light of Life changed, so the source of all Power sometimes smote harm onto the ones it was sent to illuminate. And the shadow of harm which dimmed the clear Light fell where the cloud arose from my hand.
"Poison in the Water!" And the great back which seemed to be just below the cloudy floor of the Lodge rolled aside, and a huge sad eye stared wet and accusing at me for a moment, and a great breath blew a wet and foggy stink of wrong smells, of wrong tastes, of waters sometimes so ill-flavored that those who were embraced by them fled them, to die upon the lonely, crushing land. And the stink seemed to come from me, and I looked to see a foulness falling from my hand into the waters.
"Poison in the Earth!" And Mole dove into the floor of the Lodge, and swam there through its earthy spirit, and popped his head up by my foot, and a wave of those who live there within the breast of dirt, all the little diggers and burrowers, wriggled up out of the soil bearing small bodies, and lay them about my feet, and returned back into the dirt, but the bodies stank, not of clean Death, but wrong and evil, of smells which drew the Power and Joy of Life away.
“Poison in the Spirit!" And the Great Dance of the Spirits wove through us and about us, but a discord spoiled the dance here and there, where each had its place to be born to strive to eat and to be eaten, where the dance fell into confusion, and the dancers found their places gone, or stumbled where their food was not, or turned into each other, or away from each other, when they should have supported each the other. And all of this stumbling and falling followed where I whirled through the dance, knocking the other dancers about, seeing only my own wants and needs, never how they should fit into the dance, to move in harmony with the wants and needs of all of the other Dancers.
"There are empty seats in the Great Council, and tribes and even nations have left them." And indeed I saw places in the Great circling where vaporous ghost-spirits sat, and empty spaces where even their memories had faded. And Dog pressed close to my leg, shivering and snarling, and Hawk circled above me screeching defiance, as the whole Council arose in rage with a growl such as when a tornado rends the Land, and began to close in upon us. Thunder-on-the-plains became a great herd, all looking sideways at me as the great Cape Buffalo do when preparing to charge as a whole herd, and began to turn. I knew I was doomed if they fell upon me, and felt it might be Just to be so doomed, but I cried out the name of She whose Lodge we made council in;
"MOTHER!"
and She was there, filling the whole Lodge, and She said;
"stop"
very quietly, but all ceased to move, for we were all like fingers upon her hands, and could only move as She willed.
She spoke then, very quietly, almost a whisper, but Her voice was the voices of all the Spirits there, all speaking together, and shook the Lodge, and the whole Earth.
"For long millennia have I looked"...(and we saw a vision of the hills flowing and moving as the days and the seasons flickered by, and the plants and animals upon them flowed and changed in color and form)..."upon the stars dancing across the night sky"...(and we saw a vision of the stars moving about, across a space illuminated with wisdom which saw and knew the vast depths and distances between and beyond them)..."and I have felt them there"...(and we could feel the deep wisdom of knowing, the Magick understanding which arises from a taste and feel of the Earth and the Space which holds it, and reaches across that space to taste and feel the presence of other Worlds and other Stars)..."swimming beyond the great, dark, empty ocean between us"...(and piled against the clear, deep understanding of the imponderable distances and cruel forces between here and those other Worlds, we began to feel a yearning)..."and I have wished"...(and the yearning became a deep, shaping need)..."to go there." (and we felt the taste of a future in which we stood on other Earths, in other places and times, and looked out on stars never seen from here.)
"So I began to shape myself long ago into a being which could cross the emptiness between this World and others, and am beginning to succeed." (We saw visions of men walking upon the moon, of space shuttles taking off, and tenuous beyond them vast ships filled with whole worlds of Life, spiraling ponderously away from Earth.) "But such Power is filled with great danger." (The Visions were of the Shuttle explosions, of hydrogen bomb blasts, and of great pollutions staining the whole fabric of life itself) "And we are wounded, and may be destroyed." (And we all were stunned by a vision of a future in which the great web of Life collapsed into decaying ruin, and none survived save green slime and stinking bacteria.) "But still will I risk it, for the longing calls me. Will that Alllman learns the Way, before we are all doomed, and cleanses himself of his greed and foolishness before he destroys us all, for I will not stop him, but increase his Power, and his knowing."
And as She said those words, another Vision filled me, deep and full, and it was of a future, or maybe a dream. In it were people, living in a land full healed, and living within its wildness. Deer and elk, buffalo and bear, lion and wolf, hawk and songbird, the little and the great of Life's beings were all there, moving freely in the ancient dance, and mankind among them. And the mankind I saw were married so with their machines, and with the Life about them, that they took their needs for food and shelter and comfort and purpose without wounding themselves or the land, giving back as much or more for everything they took, and honoring the places and needs of all the others. I marveled at their machineries, which were woven into their Lives and the Life about them with such wisdom as to let them walk the wilderness, or fly over it, in peace with it and as its stewards. And I looked through the eyes of those people, who did not know warfare or hunger, at a night sky where Ships came and went, Ships so huge they could be seen where they orbited before or behind the moon, flying Nations, within each its own living wilderness. And I saw and knew that there could be such wisdom and strength, that Mankind could envision and build such technologies, and bring wilderness to them and nurture it there, and live there in the great Ocean of Space. Through the dreams of those folks I saw *their * vision, and it was a vision of a universe spread like an endless adventure before them, the oceans of Space to be sailed and explored, and Worlds without number to be found and known.
The Vision of Visions began to fade, and as I felt myself falling back from that one future, I saw spread before me a great tapestry of futures, glimpsed vaguely, and some of them were of improbable horror. And as I felt my body begin to be there about me, and my awareness returning to a piece of work held in my hands, a desperation seized me to see a path through the possible horrors to that clean healthy world I had seen. As I cried out "how?...how?", a woman's voice echoed within me and about me, whispering what might have been a prayer, or a command.
"Find the way...know the way...know the way..."
The whisper faded, though sometimes I still hear it these decades later, and I found myself once again standing in my workshop. Hearing a distant scream in the sky outside, I put down the wood in my hands, and stepped out through the door into the bright afternoon, to see a hawk circling far above. I raised my hand in salute to it, and it dipped its wings in response, and sailed away over the mountains to the North.
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Even now, after more than thirty years, I am left with a blessing and a curse which shape and move my life.
The curse is of measuring our technologies against what I saw in that improbable future, and finding the most of them pathetic, crude and ugly, like a child's crayon scribbles compared with the works of one of the great painting-masters. And being forever ashamed and horrified at the way we rend and abuse the great web of Life which birthed us, and even now embraces us and nurtures us.
The blessing is a hope, and a living dream, that maybe what I saw there is not an impossible fantasy, but the real future, and that we will find a way through the hate and fear, the greed and power-lust and stupidity which seem fair to doom us, and return to living in harmony with and within the great web of Life.
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"I searched for wisdom, and found it not in the words of men, but in the laughter of children."
October 11, 2003