Dive

Silvergirl. Photo by Kyla

 

Today I dive.

At first the water is clear, translucent blue. I watch bubbles float and rise as I make my way deeper into darker water. I am not seduced by the gold glow of the blue above me; I seek the darkest places as the darkest places also seek me.

I can feel the tug downward, gravity magnetizing my heart. If I just let myself float and don't push deeper, I'm convinced I'd go deeper anyway, pulled by whatever that magnet is down there.

I've already forgotten to care whether or not I breathe. The pull is stronger the closer I get to its source, it seems. It feels like a hook is in my flesh, and I am tugged deeper on a line.

[This morning I looked out the window and saw the owl, in the top branches of the tallest oak across the street. It stayed just long enough for me to grab the binoculars and know what I was seeing up there, before flying away out of view. They know when we are watching them, I'm convinced of it.]

 

Now, I am in the deeper zones where I can begin to see more clearly. Here the dark gives way to another kind of vision. I hope to encounter the owl again. It hasn't given voice at all yet this year and I wonder if its mate is around or if owls even care about memory. Soon, the creatures will start to show themselves, whomever I will meet today. It may be a plant or a mystery or something that appears ordinary at first. I never know. I used to try to ask but soon learned that's a foolish waste of time. Even questions mean something different here, here in the deep waters of the heart.

[Surfaceside, in the outer world, the daffodils are blooming now and the first buds opening on the forsythia. Some of the fruit trees are budding. I don't know about them at all. I should; I used to prune apple and pear trees. I got paid to do that even though I had no idea really what I was doing. I thought I knew, but now I know I did not know anything. What is pruning after all? Not something the trees want, that's for sure.]

Down in here, assumptions are rinsed away before you ever get this deep, and sometimes you can find yourself at sea without them. That was a joke, a bad one, and I know it. I am out to sea and I know that too. Sea, the deep heart sea, is the place to see and I am looking, looking. Not looking for anything, just looking to see. Here they come now. I know it because I can feel the different movements in the field as they start to arrive.

You may want to know who "they" are, and all I can tell you is they are those whom I meet, and whom you might meet, down inside here.

Even before I see them, I feel them come closer. I almost think they put on their bodies like clothes so my eyes will have something to find. That would be kind, though, and I am not at all sure they are kind. Some of them, yes, most likely they are, but others? No, you would not think them kind either and I wouldn't want to try to fool you, or make this place seem any more friendly than it really is.

Perhaps it is that they know, kind or unkind, that if they want to touch my mind, they have to give me something more than the vague disturbance in the zone we share, they have to give my eyes something to see, in this sea of black that is lit from inside itself somehow.

The ones I like best are the patterns that are not trying to be plants or animals or creatures we'd think we know in any way. The ones without real bodies have the most to say and say it for the longest time. The others usually only have a sentence or two. Ha. You don't even know what I mean by that, do you, of course you don't, I am trying to speak in human code from a non-human place and doing it badly. Very badly. I am sorry. It is just so hard to make sense and I wonder sometimes why I try. I think I try because you are there, and you might be listening, and also, I think these here want me to make sense of them, to you.

I do know they are lonely for us, for those of us who have forgotten them. Or, some of them are lonely. The pattern beings are above and beyond such needs; they are a part of something so big they could never possibly feel anything so mortal as loneliness. That is why their contact resonates for so very long. As long as I can listen, they sing on. But I forget. I always forget. I get back up into the world and it fades, oh, it fades away, dissolving into absence. Gone.

Now, this deep, the pressure is less, and more of the internal light glows through. Now, they come. The ones who appear are yellow-bellied snakes, snakes with arms. They almost look like frogs in the face but not quite. They are very odd to see. They don't have legs, only arms, which is why I call them snakes. But the arms are almost human looking, with hands, fisted hands at the ends, which they lean on.

Their faces are completely reptilian though, their eyes are red, and they have that perpetual grin of a mouth big enough to swallow its food whole. There are two of them. They seem to be intertwined in a way that looks like a nest of snakes, if you've ever seen one, but also perhaps they are attached, body to body. I can't tell quite. They are definitely aware of me, and they look predatory, though that may only be the nature of the reptilian face. Here's where it gets tricky. Do they want something from me? Or do they have something to give me? And, do I want it? Is there a penalty if I refuse? Or a penalty if I can't figure out which it is?

I never know. I can only take my best shot and go on. Like life, really, like all the rest of life. You take your best shot, and then go on, as long as you're standing, and sometimes even after you can't stand anymore.

The snakes can't stand anymore, they tell me. They want out, into a field, where they can lose those arms they never should have had, and wriggle in the grasses like proper snakes. I think they just want me to know this. I hope that's all they want because I don't see how I can help them. There is no outside or inside here, after all. We are all just here, together.

Put down your arms, they want to say. We can't stand anymore. Put down your arms.

Yellow is the first color of spring, almost before green; the daffodils, the forsythia, the first weed flowers are yellow. The snakes' belly yellow is the yellow of flowers, of the weeds they'll wriggle among if they find their way out. Belly to the ground they need to go, belly down to spring. The black diamond pattern on their backs looks like tree bark, and yes, the trees are starting to arrive. Before they green up, they have more to say. After, they are busy with leaves and fruit. It is the two trees at the Chinese couple's house who have come. Out there in the world, they stand one on each side of the driveway, beautifully paired, tall, well-formed. I admire them daily. They speak to my vision in the outside world; here, they speak to my gut, to my belly, that deep heart there. Unlike the snakes, they are separated by free passage, their limbs touch freely above as their roots must, below.

Armless, legless, rooted, free. Funny, that they are here with the snakes. I wonder, maybe I'm a messenger between these two different beings, a passage from snake to tree and back. Within me both are speaking. I can hear them but can they hear each other? Can I hold them both long enough, lightly enough, that the message gets through both ways?

Ah but what would the trees need from the snakes? Do you wonder about that? I do. What could the trees possibly want? Perhaps, perhaps it is something like the way the pattern beings cannot feel loneliness, how the trees do not understand the tortured and unwholesome and ill. Their health, their balance, maybe it's a kind of imprisonment. The snakes give them a message: here is how it is to be part one thing and part another, to be poisonous and despised, to be tied to your evil twin, to be lost in deformity.

Do the trees need to know of this? Can health perceive unhealth? And would it matter at all? And, to whom?

I may never know. The snakes are with the trees now, and I am rising, rising, going up through the dark water. I guess they're finished with me, I must have done what was needed because the magnet is gone and the pull and tug is now reversed, toward the surface, toward air, and that other light.