The Eternal Shore

Love is a powerful thing to behold, Mira.  The only true land in an ever-shifting sea.  It can change everything.  You don't need an old sorcerer to tell you that. Meaning and joy is precious amid life's roiling chaos.  Love lifts the wings of angels and bends the arc of dreaming towards deep and genuine gratitude.  We've both felt it.  With lovers, family and friends.  We hear about its power all the time, don't we?   Sometimes, in our darker moments, we view it as little more than a cliché.  An empty sentiment.  But it really is powerful.  Its beauty is extraordinary.  Not only can love change the way we live, but also the way we die.  Dear one, I want you to know that as eternal spirits of divine provenance each of us is a constellation of stories and living legends.  Dreams, poems and songs.  We are bright with treasure and depth.  All of us.  It’s cold and dark without those stories, Mira. Without love or a legacy. Believe me.  I know the difference now between what it means to plead or prosper.  In life and in magic.  However, I didn't always think like this.  As a boy I didn't yet understand these things.  You see, I carried a great psychic burden within me when I was young.  Many of us do, but mine was a terrible and very particular kind of knowledge.  I knew exactly how I was going to die.  I had foreseen it in several visions, over many years, and it disturbed me in ways I can’t convey here.  It was a terrible thing to behold.  I knew that I was going to drown one day.  Accidentally, of course. But still a relatively young man with little in the way of art, romance or legacy left in his wake.  I knew it would be a tragic way to go.  Drowning just off a foreign coast with so much life left to live, unknown and unloved.  But even as a boy I forced myself to see a kind of vicious poetry in it.  I was a wounded soul even at that age, and I did love the water with all my heart.  So, I tried to tell myself that perhaps it would be fitting if those visions came to pass.  Hear me, Apprentice.  As a mortal I've always felt deeply connected to the water.  I feel at peace near rivers and the sea. In the rain.  As a fledgling sorcerer I tried to tell myself that maybe it wouldn't be so bad – to perish in that way, at the mercy of the thing I loved.  But that was a lonely child’s awful madness.  I fought against it, Mira.  With all the strength I had.  I didn’t want my sadness to be the author of that future accident.  And so I rejected that awful fatalism.  Clairsentience is such a strange, multifaceted thing.  A blessing and a curse.  Knowing certain things before they happen can greatly disturb the psyche if you’re not careful.  On the one hand it can create a sense of bewildered powerlessness at watching events unfold just as you saw them, but on the other it can burden you with a sense of crushing responsibility for every unpleasant thing foreseen.  Luckily, I was able to alter that trajectory.  Through acts of love and service I have outlived what could have been a tragic end.  I was willing to take a long, hard look at myself.  I survived my late twenties, and that foreign coast.  I did this by attempting to really know myself.  To understand my fears and motivations.  I gave myself to my art and my relationships.  I made sure that my intentions were genuine, Mira.  Despite my flaws.  I tried to care as deeply as possible about the finer points of living, and dreaming.  Avoiding that potential destruction wasn't really a matter of luck though.  I think it was a combination of courage and grace.  I had to meet my Father half way, across an ocean of doubt.  It’s how both sons and daughters prosper in the end.  I had to believe in a future, and myself.  I had to give my very best to the world and the people I loved.  And then, finally, I had to have faith that a higher intelligence would carry me the rest of the way.  Through storms and over raging seas.  And it did.  He did.  Through the grace of God I was able to change what would have been, and my soul is all the better for it.  I have a life worth living now.  I’m deeply and truly grateful for that.  I still love the water, of course.  I always will.  But it’s no longer my tomb.  Rather, it's my meditation.  An ever-shifting sea.  I'm no longer lost.  Now I know what it means to leave a legacy.  To truly invest in friendships and family.  Even at a distance.  Now I can always find you, and the others, and the shore.  Mira, I want to thank you for everything you and the girls have done for me.  Inspiration and hope of which you know little.  Yet you gifted me with treasure.  Depths, and light.  I want you to know that you are so much more than a sorcerer’s first incantation.  You were never just named for mere progeny in some playwright’s final folio.  No, your real name means something far grander in the shining tongue.  In those days before the Fall.  Anda, Mira - "Behold, a Miracle."  A miracle beheld.

A Sacred Heart

It used to be everything, the heart.  Brighter than stars.  Older than time.  Larger than life itself.  What happened?  Did we fall of our own volition?  Or were we coerced?  Were we tempted with power in exchange for darkening our own dreaming?  Did wraiths come crawling from broken mirrors, offering up boundlessness for blood?  I know what I believe, because I was there.  And let me tell you, it was a devil's bargain.  A lie.  A demon's notion of freedom and nothing more.  I should know.  I myself was once a demon, and an angel.  I was even once a king.  In stories and legend.  I have many epithets but my true name isn't known here.  However, you can call me Kasi.  It means many things.  Shining One, chief among them.  But I'm not a fallen star.  At least, not entirely.  I like to think of myself as a mediator.  A teacher and a poet. That probably sounds like utter hubris to modern ears; declaring one's depths and antiquity with such boldness.  But we live in a ravaged world where spiteful wraiths attempt daily to tear all agency from the human soul.  From the heart itself.  I for one resist.  As do my brethren.  It isn't hubris to speak the truth.  Even with a poet's tongue.  It isn't a lack of humility.  Anyone who has been hung, raped or burned knows far too much about humility.  And survival.  Oh, we know.  We know the value of things too.  A kiss.  A kind word.  A sense of purpose.  You see, the soul speaks in the language of art.  Symbols and signs, poems and songs.  And art is the oldest magic.  You want to know about true spell-craft?  A sorcerer's greatest weapon?  You need look no further than the innermost.  The holy of holies.  The temple of divine fire.  It exists within each one of us, and dark forces have attempted for aeons to snuff it out.  But an aeon is little more than a single breath to an artist, and still we kindle that fire.  It is our most vital of tasks.  We might tend to other things when needed, of course.  Like exorcism, healing, or slaying monsters – but safeguarding the Innermost Light is paramount.  This is why my name is shining, I suppose.  This is why Varanasi still sings at the shore, in the fictions of that very same light.  They have been singing for a thousand years.  Of Laksmi, mothers old and young.  And of girls without name, lost to both history and legend.  But those singers still moor the boats and weave the baskets like the heart was never lost, or threatened. They tell wondrous tales as if we never fell at all.  They kindle, and warm themselves by the fire upon the waters.  An eternity, a breath, a mirror of unbroken silver.  Because it truly is everything, the heart.  Brighter than stars.  Older than time.  Larger than life itself.