The Raven's Flight

 

To an angel the lie of linearity isn’t necessarily a destructive thing, Kara. Though we exist beyond the usual strictures of spacetime, we are all too aware that mortals don’t. They abide by its rules and are governed by its laws. And though angels circle in a dreamtime beyond conventional causality, we are still heavily influenced by it. A true being of light is a friend to humanity, and humans love to tell stories. Those stories are incomprehensible without convention. Thus, to truly know mankind, angels must know linearity. What it feels like to begin, to be in the middle of, and to end. Of course, beginnings and endings are mere abstractions conjured by an incomplete grasp of birth and death. So, the truth – as with most things – is somewhere in the middle. In Medias Res, as the Arcs among the Auguries are fond of pointing out.

The adventurer in me likes to put it another way though: the journey outlives the destination. A traveller’s logic to be sure but a sound approach, nonetheless. Did you know that each feather of an angel’s wing is someone’s dream? In this world or any other? These are the secrets of the Innermost. Myriad, and multitudinous. Without the depth of such dreaming an angel can only ascend so high. But with a storytelling forged of true character, true wit and imagination – those bright ones are borne aloft amid the highest strata of consciousness. So, Kara, I want you to understand that you pre-existed your conception and shall long outlive your destruction. This is the immortality of the human soul. The grace bestowed by our Father. We change, my friend. But we never truly perish. Sometimes it seems a gulf or epoch exists between the people we were and the person we are now. Those former selves can seem like distant dreams in the miracle of light, yet there is nothing but continuity. Even in apparent discontinuities of darkness.

My seamstress, my explorer of the edges, the threads of fate and temporality are woven by all of us in tandem. I am more than just one man, as you are far more than just one woman.  We are, all of us, birthed and guided by that great mystery that we call God. Source, creator, divine intelligence. Some style him as masculine, others feminine. Some give him the behaviours and mythologies of mortals, to better tell those stories I spoke of. Stories grounded in convention, yet reaching toward the numinous or inexplicable. Sometimes we can sense spiritual forms by placing them against the context of things readily perceived. After all, the strange becomes stranger amid the ordinary. Kara, we are so much more than mothers, daughters, poets or kings. Do you know it yet? Have I helped you to better imagine, even slightly? I hope so. We are all winged travellers, eternal. Forever soaring on the winds of dreamtime. Shifting, changing, becoming new. Who we are informs who we soon become. Do you want to know the greatest secret of all? None of this is possible without love, without relationship. We are all nurtured, tended, and healed by our family and friends, aren’t we? Coloured by the company we keep. Mortals and angels alike. So, let’s choose our companions with kindness, and offer them an equal companionship in return. The kind of grace our father offered when he forged us from flame, stories, and mud.

The All-Stone

 

It hurts, doesn’t it? These forgotten myths of the father. These lost legends of stone. Pater noster, qui es in caelis. The true Magi have said it before in many tongues, by the earthlight of the polar places. Beneath the ethereal night-shimmer of a dancing sky. The bright shadow of Simon falls upon the sick, making them whole. The rivers of Paul wash us with blinding light. We’ve forgotten so much, and it hurts more than any of us can articulate. I suppose that’s why we make birds of men and women, and why we tell tales of fabled, winged youth. We’ve lost our depth, I think. Our spiritual hygiene and moral certitude. We no longer protect our young or old. We merely erode their hopes, dull their cognition, and then banish them to the ends of the earth.

I’ve heard a lot about second stars in my thousand-year exile. But what about the first? You trust wraiths, marauders and pirates with the intellectual and emotional legacies of an entire generation? Really? It’s no wonder that you’ve forgotten my name. And the names of each winged progeny. Believe me, it’s a nightmarish thing to watch your own body broken on the sands of dream. As a child or an adult. But what’s even more horrifying is being ordered at knifepoint to bequeath your memory to a dark empire built by vampires. Even now, you haven’t the faintest idea, do you? In a realm where nothing is hidden anymore, yet all is still lost amidst a gaggle of garish counterfeits.

The woodland boy in the book was only a partial truth. I’m so tired of this editorializing of the sacred by men who claim to know magic. When all they understand is elitism. Woe, and workhouses. Nonetheless, the most kind and courageous among us drink from a deeper cognitive well. I for one still chart the sky and the hidden places of the earth. I do it right here, in the liminal glow of a midnight sun. And I’ve been doing it since warlords and false kings first bound the book. Apocryphon. Feared, supressed, rewritten. All fathers, souls, and stone. There was a time when true teachers and shepherds didn’t have to speak in riddles. Those times are long gone. Fear not though, my friends. Even time isn’t what it used to be. My brothers and sisters of the Magi have taken care of that. Even as lions become wending wolves, there shall come a day when lambs will live. Soon we shall negate these ghoulish, scarlet altars.

I speak of true harmony, of course, and reconciliation. Beyond the vicious brutalism of the so-called natural world. My friends, are you afraid of the snake, or the bacterium? You needn’t be. They are simply the ancient mineral dreams of an immature earth. Dreams of contrast and extremity. Hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon. The entire song of creation explicates with these polarising notes. But you are implicate, eternal, and can imagine with ever greater subtlety through the infinite realms of dreaming. Hear me, beloved ones. What is your name? If you know the name of a thing you can bind it, or help it flourish. There is a reason why I and others like me use epithets and nom de plumes. To elude those sinister priesthoods of the Fallen.

So, tell me, are we children of darkness or light? Do we continue to hinder or heal one another? Our father has made a place for us. A playground full of delight, and dastardly villains. Our imaginations are limitless but also very real. After all, maturity is nothing if not the recognition of consequence. We can become increasingly reptilian if we so choose – garish and violent, with a bellyful of hours and blood. Living among charlatans and shipwrecks. Or we can find our way to insight and mutual recognition. The light of true knowledge. We can soar with our many brothers and sisters. No longer lost, upon wings that carry us all home. So, again, tell me. But do so with your heart, not your words. Who are you, and what is your name?