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Rescued _ When Two Worlds Meet: Part 14

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December 28, 2013

This morning I wake up in a panic. As fast as I can muster, I scramble out of bed and, despite all logic, turn on some lights. Whether or not this will do any good, it makes me feel better. Isn’t it strange that a blind person still feels better with the lights on?

I’ve awoken from a dream which seems terrifyingly too real. In my dream, I am in bed slowly waking up to a new day. Suddenly a huge black dog jumps on top of me, pinning me down. It is bigger than Allegro, who is 75 lbs, but not substantially so. It is perhaps 100, 110 lbs. I admit to not wanting to look at it much though, so can’t say more about it. Instead, I turn my head toward the right side of the bed and start screaming for Allegro to help me get the dog off me. Allegro is wagging his tail and wanting pets, but seems unphased by the fact that there is a nasty canine growling and bearing its teeth preventing me from getting out of bed. Then I wake up.

By the middle of the day, I’ve put this incident safely out of my mind. I make dinner and then get comfortable to listen to a good book. I have no obligations for work or school not just because this is December and still winter break but also because I’m on medical leave, so I’ve been happily doing as the spirit moves.

My dad has given me a fascinating book for Christmas. It is Cathie McGowen’s novel, The Expected One, about a modern-day descendent of Mary Magdalene. Now, even though Mary Magdalene is from the Christian tradition, she is a feisty, strong, compassionate, fascinating woman particularly from McGowen’s perspective. Incidentally, McGowen portrays Jesus himself, who in the novel is Mary’s husband, as being a human being I might actually want to meet. Besides, it is obvious that a lot of historical research went into the making of this book, along with excellent descriptions of remote villages in France, and modern Jerusalem, and I adore historical fiction. So it is after midnight, and I am contentedly listening to yet another chapter on CD.

Suddenly, a dog appears at my front door, growling menacingly and glaring at me. It looks identical to the dream dog. However, I am *not* dreaming now! I’m even more terrified than I was this morning. I try not to look directly at it. I can almost hear its low-throated snarls, and am too petrified to move.

How on earth did it get in here, I wonder. And then it hits me: I have closed my portals to the otherworld, but unfortunately not before this beast got into my apartment to terrorize me. What kind of dog is it? Who sent it here? What am I going to do?

As my mind races, a picture flashes before my eyes of a scene in the novel The Last Miracle At Little No Horse. In the scene, a black dog personifying the devil leaps onto the main character while she is sleeping and won’t let her move. This devil stuff is one reason I left Christianity. I couldn’t believe in a religion that seemed to glorify suffering with its image of a crucified god while creating a nonhuman entity upon whom to lay the blame of all the evils of human nature. I seriously hope this dog is not the devil. Probably not.

I wonder if this might be Cú Chulainn’s dog totem animal instead? He is, according to my otherworld friends, quite the narcissist as well as their personal rival and they’ve made sure I haven’t run into him. Even so, I doubt even Cú Chulainn or his totem animal would be this vicious for no apparent reason.

I admit defeat at the “who?” question and quickly return to the more pressing need for action. All this speculation isn’t helping the situation whatsoever. The dog is looking more and more malevolent, and if I am honest with myself, banishing this dog is far beyond my capabilities. I start wondering whether I ought to slip out the back sliding glass door and … what exactly… spend the night outside? It’s cold and it’s now around one in the morning.

At this moment I sense some sort of activity occurring to the right of where I’m sitting. I haven’t been paying attention to that part of the living room, as all my focus has been on the snarling dog at my front door. With the exhaustion of having to suddenly remain seriously vigilant, I reluctantly turn my eyes briefly from the dog, hoping it won’t take this opportunity to rush at me. I feel paralyzed with fear, but fortunately my head actually obeys my command to move.

My head turns, and suddenly I am looking up, straight into Oisín’s greenish-blue eyes. I am profoundly relieved to see him here. He’s in fact standing right next to me, his facial expression impossible to read. There are two other féinnidi standing behind him, but it’s too difficult from my vantage point to see them clearly enough to possibly identify who they are. Identifying them is not immediately important, anyway. I’m thinking, by the gods this situation is much, much worse than I thought. Again I wonder how this could have happened.

Now that they are here, however, my fear has significantly, though not completely, subsided. Oisín is sending me a picture indicating that I need to help them by keeping an eye on the dog while they go about banishing it. (I now think the reason has to do with the fact that they could then make certain that any energetic links formed between me and the dog could vanish along with the creature. At the time however, I just do what I am asked, regardless of how much I’d rather look anywhere else.)

The dog is still there, fierce and terrible, a defiant look in its eyes, as if it were challenging us to go ahead with the impossible. Oisín is no longer in my line of sight, and I’m in panic mode for a second until he puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I am so grateful we have more than one way to stay connected, and now, I feel safe.

As I watch, a radiant glow streams past my peripheral vision. I blink. I am definitely looking at some kind of object that looks sword-shaped, but which is entirely made of light. I presume that everyone now has a light sword. I now have two thoughts crowding out any fear of the dog from hanging about in my head. I think, this is the first time I’ve ever seen any of the fianna use swords, rather than simply wear them so they can be easily identified. Secondly, I muse, light sabers may in fact have a very real origin within someone’s experience with the world beyond this one. Star Trek could very well be divinely inspired.

Now Oisín is pointing the sword at the dog. A bright band of white light is rapidly streaming from the tip of the sword, soaring in a wide arc over the twenty feet between the living room sofa and the front door. This light, I realize, has very long range. It is one continuous, concentrated, brilliant beam that traverses the room in less than seconds while never breaking apart. It is almost like a Lazer, but within whatever spectrum of light is visible to me.

Oisín is aiming the light far above the dog’s head which perplexes me, but I’ve come to trust his reasons for doing things. (It is only later that I recall that in fact dogs physically have genuine trouble seeing overhead objects. This is why a guide dog can run a blind person into a tree branch which is high enough to smack the person in the head but also too high for the dog to see. Sadly I’ve had personal experience.)

As I watch, the light beam is abruptly changing direction in mid air, shining rapidly down onto the dog’s head. The dog has not expected this, obviously. The light is streaming onto the dog’s head, and the fur on its head starts to pulse with an evanescent glow. Then the light bursts apart, shattering into millions of showering sparks. Wherever the rain of sparks fall, exploding like myriads of tiny prismed multifaceted intangible crystals, nothing remains. With three on one like this the dog doesn’t even have time to growl. It vanishes almost instantly, and not a trace of it remains.

I think my mouth is hanging open slightly. I am infinitely grateful and also full of awe and a great curiosity as to the physics of this particular kind of light. I am, I admit shamelessly, a physics groupie. I taught myself physics in high school when the teachers weren’t sure how to teach someone who is blind, and then read many physics books for lay people for fun, and passed a course at Stanford in special relativity and conceptual quantum mechanics with one of the highest scores. I know this is no manifest light. Upon hitting an object, many colors, that is wavelengths, contained within the wave of a single white light beam will get absorbed by the atoms in that object, and some colors will be reflected. You see an object as green, for instance, because, in this object, green is the only wavelength, color, of light that the atoms in the object haven’t absorbed. Black objects and black dogs are their color because they don’t have a color to reflect. That is, in a black object or entity every wavelength in a light beam gets absorbed and “stays” in the entity. This is why color appears to be absent.

Spiritually, I have come to learn, humans are like most manifest objects in this respect. That is, when you hear someone tell you that your shadow side, that part of you that is suppressed and disowned, must be brought out and integrated for you to grow, there is a deep truth of physics behind the why of it. Perhaps such a task is less frightening if you know that the shadow is dark because it has absorbed all the colors of the light within you that you fail to or refuse to draw out and express.

With most things and all people, including otherworld people, light is always in the darkness, waiting to shine. Not so for whatever creature the dog actually had been. Whatever its composition was, it was made of no ordinary darkness, either. A dark object always has light within it, stored as energy in its molecules. The darkness in the dog, however, seems to be a kind that abhors the light, and shrinks from the opposite of itself. It seems to be such that it has no capacity to absorb color, but is in the purest, most sinister sense of the word, a void. Now it is the nothing at the heart of its essence, and perhaps not now even that.

I shiver slightly at these thoughts, glad for the comfort of Oisín’s hand, still resting on my shoulder, and the presence of the others. I am so very lucky, I think, to have such wonderful friends, who are willing to walk their journey with me and protect me, even though most likely I am the one who let the dog in by keeping that portal open in my living room for so long. Live and learn, I suppose. I sincerely thank all three of them for rescuing me. Before leaving, Oisín wraps me in still, quiet, golden light, so I’ll feel safe enough to actually get some sleep.

The next day, I invite a manifest friend over and together we sage the apartment thoroughly, walking the perimeter counterclockwise three times. Then with my Tibetan singing bowl, I reclaim my space as mine. I hope now I have properly banished everything and everyone unwelcome. I set the intention that this space is for me, my family, and my friends, in this world and the next, and only for us.

 

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The Lesson At Winter Solstice _ When Two Worlds Meet: Part 11

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December 21, 2013

Today is my seed group’s winter solstice gathering. It is our first semi-private ritual since the group formed, and we’ve put quite a bit of effort into making it as meaningful and smoothly running as possible. My friends pick Allegro and I up in a clunky, old, yet functional pickup truck. While Ashley drives, Tara gets into the truck bed with Allegro on her lap and we set off to make the forty-five minute trip from Berkeley to Walnut Creek. Fortunately the truck is equipped with a camper shell. I would otherwise have never let Allegro ride in the back of it on the freeway.

Minus some minor hang-ups, the ritual is a big success. In itself it only amounts to half an hour of the gathering. The rest of the time is spent chatting, eating great food, drinking mulled wine, and catching up with friends and family.

Now a bit tipsy on both red and mulled wine, I find myself in the kitchen of the clubhouse we’ve rented for the event which is owned by the apartment complex of one of our members, Holly. Holly has had more whine than I have though this is hardly the main reason that, when I find her, she is more in the otherworld than this one.

“Can I talk to you a minute?” I ask Holly, who puts a warm cup of mulled wine into my empty hands. This is the first year I’ve been introduced to the stuff, and boy have I been missing out!

“I’m not all here,” she says, “I’m trying to make more whine and am running around a bit. But I have a minute.”

So, I lay out the problem for her as quickly as possible. It has now been a solid month since the fianna started coming through my apartment on the way to making other commitments elsewhere. I am more than exhausted. I lean against the wall heavily, visibly spent, explaining to her that despite the fact that none of them have individually given me any trouble, I’m an introvert who recharges energy by having alone time, and have had next to little of it lately. I think there are definitely over a hundred of them, and that’s an insane number of people to share a small 720 square foot apartment with.

This would be difficult to deal with in and of itself, but things have gotten worse. I am, as it turns out, amateur at best and dangerously ignorant at worst when it comes to creating portals to the otherworld in my living room. Recently, I’ve come home to find two modern teenagers lackadaisically lounging on my island kitchen counter swinging their feet and rolling their eyes at me when I ask them to get down. I suggest to the couple that perhaps they have died. Do they know where they are? With surprised quizzical looks, they disappear. This leaves me sad and worried. If teenage newly-deads can appear in my apartment, perhaps anything and anyone can. What would prevent a nasty otherworlder, human or creature, even elemental, from entering my space?

“So,” I say to Holly, “It seems that now, despite my intentions, anyone can get through. I’ve been trying not to conclude I ought to change my mind on offering my hospitality, but now I might not have a choice. The thing is, I haven’t known my otherworld friends that long and something like this hasn’t happened before. What if Oisín and Caoilte don’t understand? I don’t want to make them angry or let them down. What should I do? I really did mean it when I said they could call my place their own. I wanted to give that to them. But it is now costing me too much of myself and is becoming potentially dangerous. It’s never wise to indiscriminately let any otherworld being into your home, even if this wasn’t my intention.”

Holly thinks this over for a while. Finally she advises me that it sounds like, for my safety, I need to get rid of the entrances I’ve made into the otherworld. She assures me that the four people, including Caoilte and Oisín who helped me heal, are already connected to me and closing the portals won’t shut them out of my space. I’m relieved to know that. She says that to her mind they ought to understand why this situation is no longer working for me. Uneasily, I agree with her that tonight when I get home, I need to get the word out that I can’t be offering my place for everyone anymore.

I get home at 1:30 in the morning, but I am undeterred from my mission to do what I say I would. I am now extremely exhausted, and even more tipsy. I open Microsoft Word, and write a letter to Oisín and Caoilte, explaining the situation and how I need to do what is best for me, and that I apologize but I simply misjudged my capacity to host so many people, as well as failed to accurately assess my ability to selectively create portals into the otherworld. I end by entreating them to understand, still not sure whether they will, and not sure I want to know what mood they will get into if they do not.

I then close the portals immediately without waiting for approval. It would frankly be foolish to wait for a response from my otherworld friends. After all, the longer I wait, the longer I leave open the possibility that something unpleasant can come through to bother me. For all I know, some nasty thing has already done this. More than that, however, I don’t do approval. I’m the kind of person who begins eating a cookie and then asks if it’s all right to eat it—if I already know the person whose cookie I am surreptitiously taking, of course. I have walked across a road I know is closed just to tell a bewildered police officer that I do not follow the rules: well I actually had a line prepared about not seeing the “closed” sign, but I’m an embarrassingly terrible liar. Of course I am considerate of others and a happy follower of social norms, usually, but I’d rather make my own decisions and own their consequences than constantly look outside of myself for direction.

Once the portal is closed, I remember the letter on my screen. In a moment of pure inebriated clarity, I hit the save and send button in Word, then puzzle for a minute or so over why I can’t remember Caoilte’s or Oisín’s email address. I decide afterward that perhaps I should only write my otherworld friends while sober. But I do smile at the fact that I’ve completely forgotten their disembodied status for a moment and simply thought of them as people, period. And most people I know have email. I decide that I will simply leave the letter on screen and delete it in the morning. This, I think to myself, is like writing something on a piece of paper and then burning it, without the complications of writing on paper or the use of fire, both of which I gladly forgo most of the time.

After this, I can barely move and am falling asleep sitting up, which I am excellently good at. So I get myself to bed. When I wake up in the morning, I delete the letter on my screen, and hope for the best.