Sketches from the Borderzone

Concealed within English is a deeper and nearly inaudible language of astonishing power and mystery, and that elusive voice is itself an aspect of the spirit that moves through all things. It has to be assimilated one word at a time. There are subtleties of tonal stress, syntactical structures, phrasings, idiom, nuances of timing....

One can find residing within this secret language the bones of consciousness. Tap that skeleton with the right verb at a propitious time and there will be soft exhalations much like the breath of a sleeping lover. It only manifests as poetry, and every noun is a hidden avenue that can be opened and entered if approached with love and disciplined excitement. Once you have learned to hear this magic whispering, English becomes music.

At the edge is where the shadow lives. The border zone is his turf by divine decree and natural order. He is its steward. He tends and nurtures it. So when you come to the edge you must honor the shadow with sincere and authentic respect if you are to traverse this domain and go beyond. And traverse it you must, for all the detours and alternate routes that purport to lead around it take you only into illusion.

Here, the shadow resides in a cold spot at the edge of Robinson Creek. My fires won’t burn there.

This morning the man is considering the possibility of having lived his life upside down. Or backwards. Such an unsettling yet strangely alluring perspective appeared in his consciousness unbidden and with no sequence of associations that he could trace in hopes of making more sense of it. It had simply appeared last night, manifested, when he stepped out of the house and into the darkness to take a final survey of the late spring sky and smell the sweet exhalations of the earth.

The residual warmth of the day met him in a delicate vapor already condensing on the foliage of the garden and on the leaves of the ancient maple. Upside down, it said, or backwards, or maybe both. Or inside out. And when it saw his perplexity it knew that it also had his attention. So, as he turned to go inside, it scurried around him and positioned itself in his path. Upside down, it again insisted, and maybe also backwards and inside out.

When he moved to step around it and re-enter the house, it dropped to its knees and clutched his pant leg. It wheedled and pleaded with a self-mockery intended, in the consummately skilled manner of a begging huerfano, to enhance rather than veil sincerity. It let him see the glint of familiarity in its eye as it played at being doleful. It was that special esoteric shine in the face of an old and dear but unrecognized friend who is having a little fun in the minute it takes for memory and sentiment to coalesce.

Upside down. Or backwards. Or inside out.

Of course he heard the words as they had been spoken, but their tone suggested something to be remembered, hints: A big storm in Durango one summer night. Or the time he camped in that little meadow of columbines up on the North St. Vrain and the wind shifted and he heard the voices in the water and for a short time everything was different. He had indeed felt disoriented at those times, upside down, backwards, even inside out. But it had felt ... right.

And it was beginning to feel so now, because now he recognized the speaker. It was no huerfano, no motherless child who would forget him the moment it was given currency. It was one of the creatures whose home is deep within the Self of nature and who had come out of the dark tangled place by the creek, out of the creek itself which was, is, a dim and distorted reflection of the true creek flowing through that richer world. It was both emissary and guardian, serving now in the former capacity and bringing him a message it apparently believed him ready to receive.

Upside down.
Backwards.
Inside out.

And it had slipped through to his heart with a subterfuge common to its kind, masked as his own thoughts in order to circumvent his incredulity.

Thus recognized, it smiled its delight, then vanished, and he stood alone again. For a few moments he remained on the stoop feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting, seeing the delicate difference that always briefly remained after these rare visitations. Yes, it felt right, and when that feeling of rightness subsided and the night was again the familiar one - the upside down one, the backward one, the one that was inside out - he went into the house without closing the door behind him, for in the realm of the emissary/guardian, this is a supreme gesture of gratitude and the sincerest proferrance of friendship. That much he had learned. Doors to and within that place had stood open for him in the past, and he knew that another was standing open now, and that he was obliged to find it on his own. So he went upstairs to ponder the strange communication he’d received.

He sat on the bed in the darkened room and removed his boots while looking through an open window at the space between the house and the creek. It was faintly illumined now by a quarter moon. For a short while it had been the yard’s own light, lifted, primed as it were, by light cast by the moon. Only then did he begin to comprehend that he had gone to the emissary as much as the emissary had come to him, that it had been a meeting more than a visit, and that a truth had been passed to him.

Upside down.
Backwards.
Inside out.

He heard a whippoorwill, and then a distant train sang through a crossing in Fletcher. When he listened for it, he could also hear the true voice of the creek within the sound of its movement.

Shed the day as a snake sheds its skin.

Allow it to dry away.

Leave the day behind. Crawl out of it and let it be the delicate and transparent ghost of form that it really is, a residual thing that marks your passage and should be left to the appetites of the night.

Most people have had the experience of a linking detail that exists in both the dream and the waking state. The growl of a beast in the dream seemed no less real than the rolling peal of thunder that awakened the dreamer. The sound existed simultaneously in two realities, but it was experienced as one thing with an appropriate history of events leading to its occurrence in the dream, and it had an equally appropriate history, an evolution of an entirely different kind and form in the waking world, the one we are accustomed to calling reality.

In sleep you may be listening to the sound of your own boot heels clicking rhythmically as you walk across a peculiar surface in the landscape of a dream, and the same sound continues when you awaken from the dream in the dead of night, only now it’s the bough of a locust stirred by a nocturnal breeze, tapping against a window pane in the same rhythm, making the same sound.

It is perhaps an invitation to engage in a deeper reality and to enter a truer world, to cross a border.

Once I was sitting with my grandfather in the living room of his home in Greenwood, Indiana. On the far side of the field beyond the open glass doors the leaves of a cottonwood moved, and then a few yards closer so did the tall grass. I knew that in a few moments the moving air would stir the curtains that had been pulled back to allow us a view of the field, and that the small stream of gray smoke rising from Papo’s Tampa Nugget would bend and drift away.

We both watched silently as the curtains moved, as the smoke moved. I became aware of Papo’s breath, of my own breath, of the fragrance of the cigar and the almost subliminal hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. There were footsteps in the hall - coming, passing, going - and the drone of a small plane overhead. There was the call of a distant crow.

Not long thereafter the small stream of Papo’s life rose from his body to bend and drift away as it was touched by another kind of motion.

Everything is moving. Not a thing in all the universe is really still.

Motion itself is a being. Everything embraces motion, resists motion, or is oblivious of motion. But everything is moving.

Through the practice of giving one’s attention more to the way something moves than to the thing that is moving, grace becomes palpable. One begins to perceive in a sensory as well as a spiritual way the tenuous nature of form. But more importantly, the current of the Tao, the path of the spirit that moves through all things then becomes evident and transformation is possible.

Imagine this beautiful planet as having been commandeered for purposes of holding prisoners taken in a cosmic, multi- dimensional war between the forces of light and dark. The primary mission of all prisoners of war has always been to escape, so imagine that this primal imperative operating within all of us to seek and assimilate the light is in fact a deeply programmed imperative to escape our prison.

Our captors are neither unkind nor indifferent to our plight, but neither are they stupid. To give us freedom prematurely would see us all return to oppose them; to incorporate us prematurely into their own realms would contaminate and weaken them. We are not enslaved, but rather held in quarantine until we are well enough that interaction between ourselves and our captors is safe for both of us.

Now and then an individual human does manage to break free, but he or she does so only by attaining a level and quality of consciousness characterized by wisdom and love, which of course implies a transformation that precludes the perpetuation of what diminishes and obviates the light. What is integral to the individual prisoner’s enlightenment and subsequent freedom, however, is the understanding that there is no freedom and justice until there is only freedom and justice. And so in most cases such an individual, after the joyous surprise of his captors’ good will and encouragement, might freely remain among the prisoners to help show them that the way to freedom is to outgrow the prison.