Gate: The Heart Chakra
I entered the vision gate and was sitting on a bench gazing out on the ocean when a strong wind came from over the water and blew my hair back. My hair started to grow, stringing out behind me like a pennant. I turned my face to where the wind blew and saw Badger and a woman with golden eyes holding hands and walking away from me.
Badger looked over his shoulder and winked at me indicating I should follow so I walked away from the sea. They led me to a spring filled with milky, white water. The woman with the golden eyes walked into it unhesitatingly, dropping like a stone beneath its surface. Badger waited for me where the earth met the spring.
“Go on,” he said encouragingly, when I reached his side.
“What’s in there?” I asked, trying to peer through the water but it was too cloudy to see anything.
“Self knowledge,” Badger said, giving me a playful push towards the spring. “You’ve never let a little self knowledge stop you. Go on, go on. Don’t you trust me?”
“But I want you to come with me,” I said, reaching for his hand.
“That is not a place I can go. She’ll take care of you,” Badger said. “I’ll be right here.” Hesitating a moment more, I walked into the spring. Like the woman with the golden eyes, I too sank like a stone into the clouded waters.
As I sank, ivy came from the depths and wrapped itself around my feet, pulling me downwards more quickly than I was prepared for. At first I struggled, but then gave up fighting the pulling plants and threw my arms open wide welcoming the ivy. It grew and filled my sight until I was seeing grasping vines instead of cloudy water.
Then out of the growth, a bright light emerged. Wherever the light touched, the ivy changed to blood vessels and fractal shapes like I was looking at the outside of a womb. “Let me in, Heidi,” the light said and I understood this was the voice of the woman with the golden eyes. The ivy melted away and I was surrounded by pink and red light that pulsed with the beat of my heart.
The light began to take on substance and shrank around me like the caul of a newborn. As I had with the ivy, I struggled at first, fearing the feeling of my existence contracting. “Let me in,” she said again and out of the surrounding brilliance I saw the spirit for a moment in her true form- a being made of light, blood, and feminine power. A spectral hand caressed my cheek. “You can trust me,” she said.
“I don’t know you,” I said. “But I wish I did. What shall I call you?”
“Sylvie,” the lady said. “You may call me, Sylvie.” Then, she threw open her arms, changed back into light and began surrounding me once again in the enclosing pressure of a living womb. Sylvie pushed in and in until she sat upon me like a second skin but was stopped from going further by my free will. Deciding to trust the process, I gave her permission to enter my spirit and the caul contracted further still, traveling in through the substance of my being until it came to my heart.
“This is curious, Heidi,” Sylvie said. “You must come see.”
I blinked and was standing in an open space. In the center, there was a swirling darkness, a portal to the shadow realm. Sylvie stood very close to it, moving her face until it nearly touched the portal’s surface.
“Careful,” I said. “It burns when it touches you. I know from experience.” At that moment, a tendril reached out and brushed the lady’s cheek and she gasped, pulling back out of the shadow’s reach.
“It is as you say,” she said, taking another small step back. She gazed at the swirling darkness for a time, its movements as hypnotic as the enclosing womb was earlier. That thought had barely entered my mind when Sylvie lifted her hands and surrounded the darkness with the same enclosing light she had used to free me from the ivy.
“I think this is a power source that desires a more balanced expression,” she said. “Perhaps something like a closed circuit would do the trick.” The lady began to move her fingers on the blood-colored surface surrounding the portal of shadows.
As she worked, Sylvie tried to explain what she was doing but I was mesmerized by the patterns appearing on the “womb” around the gate. Lines of light surrounded the open portal like a spider’s web. She tapped and pushed a few more times at the light lines and the whole system began to tremble. I felt an answering pressure building in my chest and my legs began to shake.
“There,” the lady said as I fell, crying out and reaching for her. “Let’s see what effect that has on the overall system.”
“It’s the shadow. It’s coming out,” I said. “Where is Badger? I need him.” Sylvie gestured upwards and I gazed up and out of the melding light and shadow to the pool’s surface where Badger waited still.
“I want Badger, please bring him to me,” I said, shaking even more as Sylvie’s new grid around the portal filled with light, then shadow, then light again. The whole world trembled and I felt a chasm splitting open in my chest.
“Your male guide may not enter this place of unbalanced feminine power until it is polarized,” she said. “But I will be your friend and helpmate in the transition.” Sylvie changed her form into that of my Badger but she retained her golden eyes. I pushed my face into her furred neck, taking comfort from her closeness as the universe fell apart. I stayed that way until the trembling within and without stopped and all was still once more.
“Have no fear, brave one, for it is done,” Sylvie said, giving me a reassuring hug and reassuming her human aspect. As I stood from the ground, Badger appeared and wrapped me in his arms. Then, he held my right hand and Sylvie my left as I gazed out onto a new space.
The swirling shadow gate remained but its power was partially channeled through interconnected grids and living tendrils to a mirrored portal made of light. When the darkness reached out, it was answered by the light, the power moving seamlessly from one to the other and neutralizing itself at a nexus in the middle.
My spirit guides changed from people back into a wolf and a badger as I watched the interaction of the light and shadow moving and melding. My attention was drawn to the balanced center of the energy fields.
“What is that in the middle?” I asked. “I have never seen anything like that before in all my travels.” Even as I spoke, the view was hugely magnified and what was once unbroken beams of light and shadow became particles of the same. The particles crashed into each other and began to spin, creating tiny taos, the living balance of the two opposing natures.
“It is in the middle of the light and darkness that the eternal dance takes place,” Sylvie said.
Badger bumped into my hip. “This was my idea,” he said. “What do you think of the result, Heidi?”
“I think I want to get a closer look,” I said, mesmerized by the complexity and play of existence unfolding before my eyes. “I think it is almost unbelievable. Thank you, Badger. You always have the best ideas.”
I focused on one of the taos, allowing it to get bigger until we stood like tiny figures beneath its swirling perfection. Underneath our feet, the nothingness of the new space changed into sand made of diamonds. I knelt and allowed a handful of it to sift between my fingers.
“It is also in the middle of the eternal dance where one finds the sands of intuition,” Sylvie said, kneeling beside me. I picked up another fistful, marveling at the light gleaming from each particle. “Usually first-time visitors sink into its vastness.”
Badger snuffled in the diamond sand. “Heidi knows the dance of now,” he said. “All is well.”
“Is it?” I asked, as the sand began to crawl along my skin instead of falling back onto the ground. It crept up my arms and into my neck, lodging like tiny splinters in my throat. “It hurts,” I whispered, diamonds spilling from my lips.
“Speak the prophecy,” Sylvie urged, rubbing my back in encouragement. “Speak and the pain dissipates. At least, it always has before.”
Badger pawed at my neck in concern, his claws gouging where the sand continued to burrow into my flesh. “I would speak it if I could draw breath,” I tried to say, when the diamonds changed into a chain and I was dragged down into the sands into another place.
I found myself hanging from an iron chain around my neck like a fish on a hook. As I tried to get my hands between the relentless pressure on my throat and the chain, I saw other women hanging to my right and left in an unbroken line. Some struggled to free themselves from bondage, others were obviously already long gone from this realm of existence and hung dead on their chains.
A gigantic, obese cyclops ran his finger down the line of hanging women like a child with a windchime. As he struck the living women, they wailed but the dead ones made a hollow sound like dried bamboo. “Speak, prophetess, speak,” he mocked, rolling his one eye obscenely. “Your songs make me want to dance.”
“Mother have mercy,” I whispered, pulling at the chain, feeling my strength leaving me. “Divine mother, hear my plea. Have mercy upon us, your servants.”
The cyclops bent down to examine my struggles, poking me with one filthy finger. “There is no mother here,” he said. “There is no mother anywhere.” I saw the reflection of my predicament and all of the other women hanging with me mirrored in the giant’s bloodshot eye.
“That is not true,” I gasped, inhaling a miasma from the cyclops’ breath. “I have seen her face. I have walked in her garden. She has supported me in all my times of trial.” The giant laughed at my words.
“See how she cares for her own,” the monster said, again running his finger along the line of dead and dying women. “There is no mother here,” he repeated, with the cries of the women both living and dead punctuating his pronouncement.
As I was about to give up the struggle and accept the giant’s abysmal reality, I heard Sylvie’s words echoing in my mind. “It is in the middle of the light and darkness that the eternal dance takes place, takes place, takes place…”
The unyielding chain choking my throat changed once more into separate particles of diamond sand. They shifted and changed shape, becoming a trident with three points. The weapon placed itself in my hands and I felt myself growing, becoming a giant like the demonic cyclops.
“May the Divine Mother have mercy upon you because I do not,” I said. I raised the goddess’ weapon and aimed for the center of the giant’s eye. As I drew back my arm, strength flowed into me from a power far greater than my own and I trembled in the presence of this new energy. The trident launched itself from my hand in an explosion of diamond light.
The cyclops screamed in rage as the pointed tines of the weapon pierced his eye. He drew the weapon out of his own flesh and attempted to send it back at me, but the trident melted into sand once more and the power slid from his grasp.
I turned my back on the creature and extended an index finger across the chains of the hanging women in the monster’s lair. At my touch, the binding ties disappeared and those who were still drawing breath began to grow, becoming as large as their captor.
A stunning lady with shoulder length black hair ran to my side. “Whom do you serve,” she said, a sword of shining light materializing in her right hand. “For I would walk and fight beside the one who has freed my sisters and I this day.”
The diamond sand ran up my legs and placed itself in my hands, becoming a weapon once more. “I am a servant of the Creator of All,” I said. “The Divine Mother has given us her blessing this day. We must thank her for her mercy, though I can’t imagine an offering of comparable worth to honor her succor.”
“I can,” said the lady, producing a helmet from the air beside her. “My sisters and I will travel throughout the worlds with the news of this great victory over the shadow. What shall we call you?”
“My friends and I are The Light Congress,” I said, then my attention was drawn from the conversation by the cyclops’ rage. He was at the center of a ring of vengeful female warriors. They tormented him with their words and weapons, causing small injuries all over the creature’s body.
“Stop, please,” I said, compassion for his plight filling me at the sight. “He did not know what he was doing.”
The helmeted warrior turned towards me. “You cannot truly believe that,” she said. “This one has caused the death of many. I was here. I saw his depravity.” The blinded monster spun his face in our direction.
“I will gladly give up this struggle if the one who took my eye is the one who delivers the killing blow,” he said. “Otherwise, I will fight this “Divine Mother” and her minions with all of my strength until time itself comes to an end.”
“I wish my guardian Michael was here,” I said in reply. “For his is the arm that I lean upon to dispatch matters of this nature.”
“My lady,” came a voice. “You need only have whispered my name for I will always come to your call.” From out of the farthest shadows of that forsaken place, my angel came running with his flaming sword raised in defiance of the dark.
“No fair, no fair,” screeched the cyclops. “It must be her hand to cause my demise or my words will still come to pass.”
“You poor creature,” I said. “Can you not see that he is my own hand in matters of divine justice? He and I have stood together on the scales of the heart and it is only together that we were able to find balance. May wherever you find yourself next be a place where you too can discover the dignity and grace of the eternal dance of light and shadow.”
I turned my eyes away from Michael as his sword fell upon the nightmare, removing its presence from my inner worlds.
There, the vision ended.
The Light Congress 