Gate: A Sprouting Seed
I stepped through the vision gate and tumbled down a waterfall but I was very small, the size of a drop of water. I crashed into and through other drops of water until we hit the surface of a dark pond where all of the drops merged into one and I sank down into the waiting shadows.
I reached my hands towards the light I could see shining down from above, but a whirlpool came from the bottom of the pond and sucked me down into nothingness.
Then, I was in another space made of a metallic substance, gleaming silver in the dark. The walls formed a box and I could see no way out. “Hello?” I called tentatively but the metal magnified my voice and it echoed back to me as a scream making the walls ripple with its power.
I covered my ears and resolved to not speak again until I was free of my metal prison. Even the slight sounds created by my footsteps on the floor created seismic vibrations so I stood as still as I was able.
A whisper composed of many voices entered my mind. “Hello, Heidi,” they said. I opened my mouth to reply but the Whisperers admonished me, “We can hear your thoughts. Sound is too powerful a tool in this place.”
“Who are you?” I thought.
“You will see,” said the Whisperers. “Come and find us.” The metal walls shifted and elongated so I now stood in a long hallway instead of a four-sided box.
Beneath the surface of the metal, something pushed up from the other side and created a distortion in the floor like a fish emerging from the bottom of a pond. This disturbance created a clear path down the hallway which I followed on tiptoes, unwilling to break the silence. I wished for my badger to walk this strange place with me and he appeared in the next moment, gliding next to me without a sound.
The trail led to the end of a hallway and disappeared into a gap within the metal from which issued the sound of breathing. In and out the air whistled as if from the lungs of a giant within the walls.
“This way,” instructed the Whisperers. I hesitated to enter the space between and the voices spoke in my mind again. “Is Heidi afraid of breathing?” they asked and I could hear the laughter behind their words.
I smiled and thought in reply: “I have seen so many strange and wondrous things in my journey. I think I shall never be afraid again.” With that thought, Badger and I fell into the gap in the world where we were smashed closer and closer together until I could not breathe without pushing against my friend. Together, we struggled against the shadow that pressed in against us on all sides.
“We are dying,” exclaimed Badger and drew his claws through the unseen arrayed against us but nothing prevented the relentless pressure of existence in the new world.
Ahead, a light appeared at the end of a long tunnel. Badger and I fought to reach it but the harder we struggled the more the walls prevented our forward motion. “My dear friend,” I said. “I do not think we die- I think we are being born. If that is so, then we need do nothing and the shadow itself will take us into the light.”
“Are you certain?” asked Badger, slashing once more into the nothingness.
“Trust me and relax,” I said, embracing my friend and pressing my face into his fur. He wrapped his claws around me and the moment we gave up the struggle, the walls began moving us. In primordial pulses and pushes, we were birthed from the tunnel of darkness and fell into an enormous flower blossom.
The Whisperers spoke again but they were outside of my head now and I could not hear them as clearly as before. “SSSSssssssss,” they said and were silent.
“Badger, there are beings of great power in this place… somewhere,” I said, looking to the sky and around at a field filled with giant multi-colored flowers like the one in which we sat.
We peered about us in confusion, seeking the divine in the everyday, when a bee, proportional to the size of the field of flowers and therefore a King Kong-sized creature to us, appeared above our flower. It gathered the pollen of our bloom and, with a sound like helicopter blades whirring, Badger and I were swept up along with the plant particles.
As we were carried above the field of flowers, the Whisperers spoke again from the pollen. “Seek the source,” they sighed. “Seek the source.”
Our bee took a precarious dip and Badger and I fell from his legs down through the stalks of flowers to the Earth. The moment my feet hit the soil, they changed into roots, my body became a stem, and I changed into yet another flower in the field.
My face naturally turned towards the sun and I felt my petals spread towards its life-giving light. I felt Badger in the flower with me and we laughed at the sudden change in our condition. “Seek the source,” spoke the Whisperers again.
“I will find you,” I said. “If it takes until the end of time, I will find you.”
I took a moment to assess my new mode of living as a flower. Practicing self awareness, I moved my attention from my blossom to my stem to my roots, following a line of existence as simply as tracing my finger down a raindrop’s path on a windowpane.
Moving deeply into my roots, I was surprised to find myself interconnected with the roots of the other flowers in the field. We were wound together so completely that the field was more like one living organism than separately blooming plants.
I sped along this highway of connections until I came to a space that felt like the beginning as well as the end of the road. This area was exactly like the metal box from earlier and my presence rippled through the walls as if I were a force of nature, moving through the fabric of reality.
Having left my flower self behind, I didn’t have a voice to speak and existed only as consciousness. Even so, I found myself spontaneously moving in the Dance of the Now. I twirled and spun, mimicking the movements of the stars in the sky and the waves in the ocean.
My dance created music throughout the space and, once they began to vibrate in resonance with me, the walls replicated my motions, forming themselves into spirals and hexagonal shapes.
I began to see lights behind my eyelids- the ancient shapes early humans carved into the cave walls as they spoke to the gods. Then, the space between the shapes filled with blinding light. I danced until all of the moving shapes were gone and there was nothing but me and pure light, and then I stopped, and all was still.
The light spoke to me with the voice of the Whisperers. “Heidi, welcome to your Source,” they murmured. The breath of sound stirred the light so that the shapes rose up again and surrounded us in a cocoon of swirling motion.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“We are those who connect you to the Divine,” they said, their light reaching out to contain me in their brilliance.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“You spoke our name to call us,” they said.
“That was not a name, but a dance,” I replied.
“So it is,” the Whisperers said. “You speak our name with every movement, every breath, every moment in time. You cannot help but speak our name as we are life itself.”
“I am honored to stand in your presence,” I said. “But, how do I call upon you when I need you? When humanity needs you?”
“Breathe, just breathe,” said the Whisperers and, for a time, I did. “We have come to this place at this time to remind you of who you are.”
“Who am I?” I asked.
“We are the living spark in every molecule as well as the spaces in between,” they said. “We are the stars, we are the Earth, we are the Moon and Sun. We are ecstatic motion.” The light exploded and I saw the simple shapes shift, change, and spin until they formed the Milky Way and it hung suspended in space before my eyes. “And this is who you are- the universe,” said the Whisperers.
My vision expanded along with my consciousness and I found myself existing as every flower in the field, turning my myriad of faces towards the sun, which I was also. I was the bee gathering pollen from myself and I was within the air holding up the wings of the bee. I was also the Earth beneath it all, spinning in a dance that had existed since the beginning of time.
I held this realization in my mind for a timeless moment.
Then, I perceived I was also in the shadows that dwelt beneath the flowers, the petals blocking the sun from touching the ground. As I realized I was the light as well as the shadow, I heard a ripping sound as if an enormous piece of fabric had been torn and the sky split in two.
Something made of shadow and reaching tentacles fell from the sky and tore through the field of flowers, consuming everything that it touched. I felt the sun itself trembling in the presence of this new thing and I gathered my consciousness from all directions to confront it.
“Before you banish the Shadow, look very carefully into it,” advised the Whisperers as I prepared for war. “What do you see?”
“I haven’t time to examine the monster,” I replied. “If we hesitate to act, all the flowers will be gone.”
“You have nothing but time,” they said and I calmed myself to do as they instructed. I looked at the shadow and found only darkness so I parted that, observed again, and discovered even more darkness. I dug through the mist and shade, down and down, until at the very center of the marauding thing, I saw a familiar woman sitting upon her meditation mat and I drew back in surprise.
“It is me,” I said, watching the shadow continue to ruin the flowers of the field. “I do not understand- how I can be both the beauty of this place and that which defiles it.”
“Dance the dance of Now,” said the Whisperers. “Your shadow will remember itself.” As the sun, the flowers, the field, and the sky, I moved my molecules in the dance of existence and haunting cosmic music again filled the world and everything within it.
The darkness of the monster began to change into the moving shapes of the fabric of reality and it shrank into itself until there was only a small speck of shadow lying on the ground.
I found myself standing in my own body again and I bent down to pick up the darkness and discovered it was only a seed that had split itself open. “Beware harvesting that which has not had time to ripen,” spoke the Whisperers. “For disappointment is a ravaging beast.”
“I confess I have felt great disappointment in my life at times,” I said, carefully planting the sprouting seed in the ground. “How do I manage my desires and fears but also allow reality to unfold as the Creator promised in the beginning? For it was promised, I remember it was, and I have trouble seeing the greater pattern in this existence.”
“Remember, in addition to the Creator’s promise, that all is well,” said the Whisperers. I looked up from the ground and saw, spilling from the blossoms of the field of flowers, my Light Congress. They gathered around me, bringing me into the center of their press of bodies and I realized they were murmuring to me with the voice of the Whisperers. “We have been talking to you your entire life,” they said. “You are never alone, Heidi. We love you.”
The world began to spin and everything, the Light Congress, the sun, the field, the air, everything that I was or perceived to be myself was sucked into the ground into the planted seed. For a moment, all was darkness.
Then, a flower grew from the seed, the sun returned to the sky and everything restored itself. I saw the new flower cast a shadow of its own, there came the sound of the tearing of the sky, and the Whisperers said, “We begin again.”
There my vision ended.
The Light Congress 