FAIRY FOLK AND SEA MONSTERS

 

 

At the edge of the universe love found a song and light moved slower than its speed so it could stop to see the beauty of the space between stars. Too many questions tug at the heart that might not even be hers (of course, nothing is hers, not even her), and the character is torn between giving them a beautiful answer that is a lie or an answer empty of hope that is no less a lie.

In the morning I will walk into the lake to meet the sea monster, disappearing forever beneath the surface, but no, that was a nighttime dream, vivid as it seemed. I disappeared long ago. And in my cabin the girl sits pale in the chair across from me and asks, after I closed my eyes remembering the dream of the sea monster, "Where were you just now?” A question impossible to answer, so I say something like, “I was just spacing out,” and where that odd expression came from is unknown.

I used to have a world, but it was like the glass globe that fell off the desk of Miss Winters in second or third grade (which was it?) and broke, shattering into a million pieces. Some of the kids laughed, Miss Winters cried, her world was broken and it would never be put back together; her students would never see what she saw, never feel what she felt, never understand what she tried to say to them, never love her the way she loved them, and she could have no children of her own but did not know, (though maybe she did?) that she could never have children of her own even if she gave birth a million times.

The girl in the chair understands, she says, that there is no doer and nothing matters. But for many, Nonduality becomes an idea, another belief system with its catechism like the long ago church I went to as a child. Seekers sit in the pews at Our Lady of Perpetual Nothing, and rarely do the words resonate with what I think I feel. But if my feelings are only thoughts, maybe I am as unfeeling as some of them have said. Whoever they are, the ones waiting on the other side of the mountain, in their cities, on their screens, in their imaginary lives, doing, always doing, and suffering, so they say, and trying so hard to make everything better without knowing what that would mean.

They send emails with questions:

Don’t you want to make the world a better place?
What happened to you?
Are you happy?
Are you ever coming back?
What kind of a life is that?
Do you care about me at all?

And seekers send questions:

Why can’t I find what you found?
How can I be one with life?
Is love real?
Why do you post things if you say it doesn’t matter?
Do you care about me at all?

No answers arise for anyone. Just the sound of rain on the cabin roof.

In the forest there are eyes that look back at you, birds, squirrels, the elusive wildcat, who knows, really, maybe just my own reflection glistening in the echoes of my candy apple brain. At the edge of the forest there are fairy circles, and the girl who was on the chair, who knows she is not the doer, tells stories about the different fairies, the fairy folk of local lore. The fairies are not cute or sweet at all. I am not cute or sweet at all. Life has dreamt me, and even that is a fairy tale. As if there is someone here, and a story about her, when there is only the sea monster in the unfathomable depths, weeping beautiful tears that fill the edgeless lake with love and nothing at all ♥