Marooners' Rock

 

It’s a strange thing, being stranded. The terror, the loneliness. The vivid contemplation of mortality. It’s even stranger being saved. Realising that grace is something after all. Bestowed not because one earns it, but simply because sometimes the world is kind. If not the world, then the wind. The aspect of spirit that angles feathers and lifts wings. In stories heroes are often saved by birds. Eagles, doves, even crows on occasion. This was true enough for me also—but in a deeper sense I was saved by something far greater. Sweetness, and mortal care.

As I’ve said elsewhere in these pages, I once traded with pixies, tinkers, and maidens of the sea. Bantered, beguiled, using all my knowledge of how stars blaze in firmaments and conversations. But it was never enough to charm anyone who really knew me. I speak now of three who really knew. Not the boys, lost, looking to their leader for courage and constancy. Running feral through the wildest woods of tale-telling. But instead three girls. The princess, the pixie, and the lantern.

See, I can clothe myself in tunics and leaves green as summer’s height. I can wear my hair red as flame. But it’s never enough to truly forget a mortal life lost. My father’s rage, my mother’s grief. Those solar lineages of David, and those lunar tears of Diana. I pretended to forget, of course. Lost in adventure and play. I could sometimes fool the other boys who hid their own wounds just as I did, because they too wanted the adventurer’s mantle to be free of inner anguish. But I could never fool the girls.

The chief’s daughter; a princess bright, kind, and curious. The heartfelt softness of Lilium. The intellectual ferocity of Panthera Tigris. But also the pixie; a tinker, trickster, and wildcard. Bright as dawn herself. A morning-star who pledged to remain at my side through it all. One of my oldest, dearest friends. And then, of course, the lantern. My wending lantern of All Saints. Do you grasp the depth of my love? I hope so. Because, you see, I never forget my friends. I never forget anything really. Though sometimes I pretend. I could never forget you, my love.

The princess gave me cogency, words, and wisdom. The pixie gave me purpose, light, and life again. But you, my wending lantern—you gave me something I grow tearful just thinking about. A place in the waking world once more. In the bright, glorious maelstrom of Londinium. A world I thought lost to me forever. The thimble around my neck, etched with the legend of St Christopher, is even more than the majesty of your eternal kiss. You also handed me a key in that same exchange. Please hear me, my darling. Our lips met and I knew I had to unlock my heart again, whilst I still had time.

I don’t want to live on dreaming alone. On mere fantasy. Not after what you’ve shown me. Your lips still linger on mine, and that is proof enough of immortality. Because of your lantern I was able to cross the raging river. And on the other side I met a girl. I love her with all my heart. Just as I love you. As I love all my friends. Tinkers, tailors, and tempest-dwellers. But I’m not afraid of drowning in those depths of the heart. Not anymore. I think now of a Romanian myth. The legend of the crocus flower. Twin sisters of Autumn and Spring, blessed by the light. They came to symbolise resilience, hope, and renewal. Separate, yet forever entwined. In her arms and in your voice, I find that mythic renewal.

Without you, my darling, I surely would have drowned alone upon that rock. Marooned, forever. But instead I fell in love again. If you are my flower of the river, then she is my flower of the meadow. You know, she battled dragons on my behalf. To keep me safe, just as you did. I can’t help but brighten whenever I think of her. She is beautiful, witty, kind, and courageous. Just as you are. She has entire worlds within her, just as you do. So, I honour you both. Thank you for leading me to her, my angel of hours and fate. Thank you for leading me to a life worth living.

Please don’t give up. Keep your heart open to the promise of a true, profound love. And if at last you recognise him, kiss him. Just as you once kissed me. Nothing would make me happier. I’ll be by your side through it all. For as long as you need me there. All these words, these earnest images, and songs —they are just small tokens of my eternal gratitude. I hope they give you a sense of all you mean to me. My love, I keep your kindness and your kiss. We have reshaped each other’s lives, I think. For the better. As for the rest? It is still unwritten.

The Story of Hours

 

It’s funny, comparing who I used to be with who I am now. A boy afraid to commit, to grow, to choose any path beyond those delights and adventures of the moment. Wise beyond his years, some said. Yet not wise enough. It’s easy to be brave most of the time. A simple trick of perspective. Just don’t fear death. But not fearing death doesn’t necessarily mean a soul is enamoured with life. It can seem that way to an untrained eye. An adventurer; bold and brilliant. Like a second star in the firmament. Righteous, and straight on till morning. Skating along each glittering surface, leaping from world to world. Never investing beyond the briefest encounters. Hoping charm and imagination would be enough. Often, it was. Often, it still is. Especially among pixies, tinkers, and maidens of the sea. Eye to eye with pirates and wraiths, tomorrow is only a distant, hoped-for dream. Sometimes the morning ended in terror, spilled claret, and the evening came like a devastating shadow.

Is it still an adventure when you must bury your brothers on the shore? It wasn’t for a lack of care, you see. Never for a lack of love. But it’s easier to brace yourself against the terrors of an infinite dreaming by turning your back on boredom. Choosing to engage not at all with the banalities of the waking world. Growing up, paying taxes, the cruelties of realpolitik. Or even worse—the simple joys of ordinary consequence. No, I wasn’t enamoured enough with life for any of that. Better to be a flighted dreamer among dreams. Rebel, trickster. Architect. But things change, my friends. Never is such a long time. I thought I could halt such time. Suspend causality itself. If I was imaginative enough. But love often cracks the firmament and upends everything we thought we knew. Wolves, and the wending lanterns that steal their hearts. There’s a reason we howl at the moon. The silver sun of the night sky. We’re calling to the Keeper of Dreams. Moira, I call her. Angel of Hours and Fate. My angel, and my darling.

It makes me laugh when I think of how little we grasp of storytelling. How true our fictions have always been. Hear me, beloved ones. You share worlds with beings of paint and pages, celluloid and screen. A different order of reality, but no less true than our own. I once dismissed the waking world just as many of you dismiss the world of dreaming. Briefly entertaining, but worthy of no real regard. The joke’s on me, I suppose. I fell in love more than once, and the world of consequence came knocking. I could do nothing but commit to it. The wending lantern of All Saints still has this lost boy’s heart. Do I regret my time amidst the trees and chlorophyll, as a feathered native of the First Dreaming? Not at all. Time, even when suspended, defines us. It helps us measure ourselves. Our growth. The nuance and evolving depth of our love. And it’s the measure of our love that allows us to tell the most beautiful stories.

The Moth Tapes

 

I am a night-angel. A Nocturne. There was a time when I wove among my former brethren of the light. But long ago there was a War of Imagination. For all souls. A third of my brothers rebelled, and the sun itself went dark. In horror at my catastrophic failure to help halt this rebellion, I chose to leave the realms of Eth’iri. Despite the pleas of my brothers. A self-imposed exile from the Fullness. The only home I’d ever known. And so I became a wanderer in a thousand-year darkness. The world between worlds. My wings remained, but my divine fire was dimmed to the faintest ember.

For what seemed an eternity I staggered delirious and blind through ruptures in dreamtime. The ruins of psyche. A realm of perpetual shadow. Until one blackened eve, I heard a dying herald sing. A figment, I thought, conjured by the endlessness of my isolation. Or the haunting memory of my former abode. But this distant voice was no figment. Indeed, it was the herald of the Morn. I found Dawn herself, bleeding fatally, singing with her last breath of wounds and wisdom. Curious, she gazed into the eyes of this little boy lost. But I was a girl once too. Bright, with skin pale as alabaster. Eyes brown and blue. Sensing this hidden aspect she took pity on me, I suppose. Or remembered the place beyond the mirror, where I once remembered and took pity on her. The boy she once was, bruised and black. A disgraced angel of the Choral just like me. Either way, she chose to gift me with a secret, feminine magic. The very last of her light and her life. A burst of brilliance tore the black—and both my sight and sanctity were restored to me.

She died in my arms, but a revelation was granted. I couldn’t change what had happened a thousand years before. The rebellion. The war. But I could undo the death of the girl in my arms. I could reignite the sun, making radiance more than the dreaming augurs of Ethri-sol. I could resurrect the dawn. But I would have to die. Every night, for another thousand years. Like a moth to a flame. If not, I would be the only thing that remains. Immortal, wandering this ruin of shadow and salt alone. But I fell in love the moment I heard the herald’s voice. She beguiled me with her healing grace. How could I not offer her the same? Love asks more of both a Nocturne and a Star. We play all roles in the end. Do you know what I chose, Fallen? What both of us still choose? We are within you, even now. Each one of you. Hear this. Perhaps alone I cannot halt a war in heaven. Or undo a genocide on earth. But I can bring back the light, even in darkness. I can try to heal the ones I love. Even if it burns. 

Angel of the Myriad

 

Calesvol is written upon the brow of the first angel. Just above her left eye. It was tattooed there by the Myriad itself, in the time before the world was begun. Did you know that, Fallen?  It is written there in all the colours of continuum. A promise and a warning. But Vivian’s music is heard even beneath the surface. Through the pupil, below the iris, in the waters of perennial vision. Niamah. The Radiant One. But there is something most so-called scholars of these tales still don’t understand. The writhing breach and the eye of the deep are connected. Twinned beyond mortal grasp. A teardrop on the fire, a raindrop salted with soul. Most faithful mirror indeed.

I told you who I am, Callous Ones. I didn’t come here dressed as her. She came here dressed as me. And still you ask why? I’ll tell you why. The waters belong to no one and everyone. All sinister gods of the stolen sea shall be slain at the turn of the First Dreaming. When the stars find their correct places in the sky once again, and men are taught all the science and secrets of the moon. Mortlake, really? Like that pretender Dee? There is no death in my waters. Only life and lumen. Oh, Fallen. Your grasp of Lune and Ebura is utterly feeble. As is your knowledge of higher-dimensional physics. You still search the heart of stars for gates and doors, but sense nothing in a seed. Or a budding rose. There is a reason we are at war. Because your greed outmatches your gnosis.

Access to hidden texts and occult knowledge doesn’t make you wise. Just ask Kiskuh. She was a healer once. Until men and madness and unhonoured menses turned a healer into a wicked witch. Turned a Keeper of Awen into the Scourge of the Inverted Eye. There is a price for seeing, but an even greater price for unseeing. Neither price is paid in coin, or even flesh. These tokens are taken in dreaming, mythmaking, and world-bearing. With or without child, ruin of the soul is an ungodly thing to invoke. Trust me. I broke the world once, for love. Don’t make me do it again. Excalibur? The hard cleft? You have no idea. Men make indulgent thrones from their whoring, scattershot ways. In the meanwhile they murder their mothers and daub their own foreheads in the chrism of ancient vampires. That’s your idea of kingship? Fuck that. There is a better way.

M’ithriin addresses you now. Kashi, and Prosper. Vivian’s music is a mighty thing. Of courage, and kindness. Enough to fracture worlds and bend time itself. We have seen our tales told in a thousand ways, and still we guard these gates. Tell me, Fallen. Where does your garden grow? Because you don’t know the first thing about mine. Maidenhead? These endless Wars of the Roses? If only you knew the true price of defiling something so precious. Hear me, you sickening little wraiths. Love is the most powerful thing in creation. Kindness can undo causality itself—and courage can bring empires to their knees. There is something in the water. Men have often called it freedom. I really do hope you grasp this by now. If not, let me spell it out for you. The stories shall never die. Because the sword is a radiant gate of perennial vision. It belongs not to the king, or even the queen. It belongs to the people. All of them. Every single one. And it shall only ever be wielded on their behalf.

In Utero

 

It’s a scary thing sometimes, the world. Wars and rumours of wars. But we should never forget our mothers. Especially now. There seems to be so much extremism on all sides these days. Righteous indignation, increasing polarisation, the obliteration of nuance. We seem to be trapped in our own little bubbles in a world that is increasingly online. Increasingly denatured, bloodless and virtual, fed by a self-reinforcing algorithm curated to make us feel a variety of unsubtle emotions. We’re encouraged to feel rage, disgust, or even morbid curiosity. Anything to keep us clicking, keep us scrolling, until the next dopamine rush or synapse-hijack.

It’s terrifying to consider that our thinking is largely not even our own anymore. It’s a hybrid, hyper-mediated construction designed by billion-dollar corporations and social engineering interests. To my mind this seems to be a perverse, toxic version of paternity. A conquering mindset, not a nurturing one. Not to belabour the point, but this algorithmic version of existence seems to have created a flattened, slightly inhuman affect—part AI, part overstimulated nervous-system. It’s an odd, distinctly twenty-first century malaise. It’s not just apathy, or nihilism. It’s a strange blend of cynicism and innocence.

We’re cynical because we can no longer tell what is real. And with advances in AI it’s only getting harder to distinguish truth from lies, fact from fiction. So much so that the language around those topics is becoming increasingly outdated. A new lexicon is needed, and it will emerge even if it’s by accident. This is the way of societies on the cusp of terrifying, monumental change. So, yes, we’re cynical. Tired, burnt out, overstimulated and distrusting of all forms of so-called authority. Lost, distrustful of our fathers, and craving a connection to our mothers that we seem to have traded away. In this regard we’re incredibly innocent, plunging headfirst into a world we can barely comprehend. A world soon to be filled with technologies we still don’t really understand.

Unless you believe in recurrence, lost advanced civilisations, or time travel—then mankind has never been here before. Not at this exact point, in this exact way. A dangerous threshold between self-extinction and an oncoming digital revolution. Quantum computers, data centres, faster-than-light technologies, interstellar travel. All these things once seemed like science-fiction. But we are already designing and building the infrastructure to make these exotic technologies a reality. Perhaps not globally or commercially. Perhaps not even outside of classified private or military-intelligence circles. But soon, and with an alarming lack of foresight.  

Even with intermittent or partial success—these advances have the potential to alter the course of human development on a long enough timescale. It doesn’t take much. For me, this is why the natural world is more pertinent and necessary than ever. Gardens, forests, parks, rivers and lakes. Green spaces of all kinds. Especially in the cities, but in all places were human and animal life resides. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that we’ve become uncoupled from nature in profound and disturbing ways. Our lack of accountability and oversight for some of the largest corporations on earth is proof enough of this. We’re no longer stewards of the Earth in all the ways we should be.

This vital lost connection to nature isn’t the whole story, of course. It’s also about our humanity in general. Our increasing lack of insight. Our lack of depth regarding empathy, parity, and tolerance. Do we seem like a particularly tolerant species right now? Inhabiting a world filled with genocide, vitriol, and viciousness of every kind? These words aren’t meant to upset or deflate you, my friends. I know how difficult it is to gaze into the abyss. To peer into the depths of a black hole. You can feel hopeless, and powerless. I’m only writing this to make a general point about humanity, nature, and our overreliance on tools. Humans have fashioned tools since the beginning. Tools for action and tools for contemplation. Scientific tools and artistic tools. Spears, knives, bowls, medicines, papers, and ink. Wood, metals, and plastics. With these tools we were able to expand our societies and our collective knowledge.

We survived the agricultural revolution. It gave us grain, a new relationship with the land, and a new ability to harvest and store food en masse. We also survived the industrial revolution too, but with great casualties. Our tools became far more sophisticated, but so did our weapons. Leading to wars and conflicts on a scale hitherto unimagined. In three hundred years—the blink of an eye in geological time—we leapt forward in greater strides than we had done for millennia previously. If you believe the official accounts of accepted history, that is. But what happens when most if not all our tools are digital? Virtual? What happens when Artificial Intelligence has finally crept into almost every facet of modern living? Make no mistake, a digital revolution is coming. We’re in the early stages of it already, and it will continue to gather pace long after each of us currently living is dead.

If iron, steel, and plastic took us to such unimaginable places… if it laid the groundwork for things like electricity, flight, nuclear fission—then where will AI take us? Where will quantum computing, genetic manipulation, transhumanism, and evolving models of higher-dimensional physics take us? What will it lay the groundwork for? There was a time when mankind never imagined flight, the internal combustion engine, or mass-communication. Those things were fantasies and fiction. Sci-fi. But nothing ever stays the same, and it seems to me that Imagination tends towards manifestation over a long enough course of time. What can be imagined can often be achieved with a combination of creativity and the right tools, but those tools can often make us slaves in the process. Beholden, anxious and denatured. So, this is why I reiterate the importance of maintaining a connection with nature and each other however we can.

This connection will look a little different for each of us, depending on our circumstance and struggles. But friendship, faith, and artistic endeavour is a good place to start. These things ground us in the now. In the physical. They reorient us toward one another, and the numinous. Our connection to the natural, the spiritual, and ourselves needn’t be separate relationships. We came from those green places. And it’s to those green places we all return. Mud, rivers, seeds, and stars. We were born in the shared womb of our mothers and the earth. Made in utero, from carbon and water—fed by the light and electromagnetism of our closest star. And we have femininity to thank for that. Our green spaces and secret gardens. We need masculinity too, of course. We need fathers as well as mothers. Truth be told we need both, now more than ever.

This is not a luddite tract, or even a warning about overreliance on technology. This is just a gentle reminder to seek the soft, the nurturing, and the kind. All those things within and without that tend toward healing and growth. In a virtual, plastic, denatured world obsessed with profit-driven incentives, there isn’t much value placed on true paternity. There isn’t much value placed on green spaces either. So, it’s on us. We must be the ones to think beyond counterfeits and colonies. We need to understand the connection between womb and wisdom, seed and star. Our inner lives depend on it. And soon, quite possibly our daily physical lives as well.      

Writing in the Garden

 

Hello, my friends,

Welcome back to Amid Night Suns. I hope you’re all keeping well. This is just a quick post to share another short story of mine. Or, perhaps more accurately, a short novella. I’m just trying to hone my craft and explore writing from various perspectives. If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you’ll know I adore storytelling and the general art of fiction. You also might know I have a particular fondness for Victorian and Edwardian literature, having studied it at university. This is a lengthier piece, around 20,000 words, inspired by that fondness—and more specifically by the work of Frances Hodgson Burnett. A British-American writer who wrote some of the most beloved pieces of children’s fiction. Including A Little Princess and The Secret Garden; two of my favourites. This piece of mine is inspired by those stories that kept me so delighted as a child, and then fascinated again as an adult. Please forgive any mistakes or typos I didn't catch. I wrote this story for my friends, as a labour of love. For anyone who appreciates or resonates with the work I try to do here. I had you in mind when writing it, make no mistake. For courage, kindness, and adventure. You can read it here at The Night Sun, or download and it read at your leisure as a PDF. I hope you’re enjoying your summer, as best you can. And I hope this tale entertains, inspires or uplifts you.

All my love,

Raj

High Fidelity

 

Hey, guys and girls. Welcome back to Amid Night Suns. This is just a quick post to share my latest video from my YouTube channel, The Oldest Magic. This one discusses adventure, romance, storytelling, and all the connections therein. I hope you get something out of it. I really enjoy doing these pieces directly to camera. I feel like I’m just chatting with friends, and it’s a nice change from the free verse stuff I often post here — or the more elaborate, time-consuming video collages I love to make. So, I’m going to try to post more of these conversational videos moving forward, as and when the muses move me. Anyways, I hope you’re all keeping well. I hope you’re out there chasing adventure, romance, and meaningful stories... whatever that means to you personally. I wish you nothing but love, autonomy, and magic.