WATER TELLS

One drum sounding out her parting footsteps faded behind Tedgery as she approached and stopped when she stood at the edge of the vast featureless desert the tribe called, the Beherarnonz Avoid. She felt she was standing in the line of a wall separating everything and nothing. She was aware of the breeze carrying the constant buzz of insects and the aroma of the flowers in the field she had just crossed behind her, but before her lay a sameness of airless dead silence that sent a chill through her groin both terrifying and challenging her to go forward.

Her imagination and curiosity had been her closest allies and the causes of all her troubles with clan elders until she encountered her spirit guide, who knew a good deal more than the dog and stick fetch routine of her more playful friends. With the trilogy of her creative imagination, unquenchable curiosity and the natural wisdom of genetic memory represented by her spirit guide gurgling advise in the grottos of her inner ear she felt ready to die or any other experience. She had to find those warrior farmers before they found her people.

As she stepped off of the last blade of the grass meadow onto the trackless surface of the desert she felt what others had described as a form of vertigo which made them throw themselves back onto the land they came from and the home they knew. The sensation she experienced was a rising of the horizon to the south, which her spirit guide showed her with its constant level to Gaia, that she was perceiving her mental attitude change about the changelessness that she found herself at the center of the moment her second foot hit the ground.

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Trekking south she realized that the voice of her spirit guide needed no concentration on its gurgling to understand its meaning. She knew her thoughts were from the water because they were wiser than her experience had led her to be as it clearly told her:

“CHANGE. Without it there would be no evidence of our existence. Like drops of water on hollow wood a tune is played to each ear with the meaning of each note set up by the one before, flavoring curious anticipation of the next. The life of the universe, the signs of its consciousness, manifests enough natural examples of change for even the slowest, dullest collection of sensory perceptions among the infinite variety of such entities to notice it is alive — at least as alive as what it recognizes as life around it.

The present is the nothing before the big bang of everything — there is no change within the present — there is no within to the present — all change is a function of remembering the approach to or anticipating the leaving of the present with the poignancy of reality appearing to be more intensely solid in blurred smears of acceleration as its irresistible gravity swallows the past and spews out the future as time’s black hole evades direct experience, there being no change within. The present is the undetectable twist in the mobius strip of time.

In the present one is simply what one has become through whatever experience brought one here with the potential probability that enables for the future. This is the state of is-ness at the heart of the deepest meditation where no change can occur because there is no time, no action, no thought, no growth or decay, nothing to be conscious of but the falling away of the phenomenological world and the sensory needs of individuality from the void of pure pre-existent being.

Observing events closest to the present on both sides by casting the past in the role of the establishment; the human need for security, and the future as heretical anarchy; the human need for growth, we can see time is bound to uproot the inflexibility of our world view and the quantity of the universe we admit to view. The only destruction wrought by entropy is to human ideas of permanence. Being alive, there is no permanence in the established eternity of the universe.

The past is mere memory leading to now
The future is potential probabilities leading away
Both only realized in the changelessness
Of the infinite present
Squeezed to a non existent nothing
By emphasis on the bookends
Not the reality of the book

When the thoughts quietened, Tedgery had the impression she could walk for forever, whatever that meant in this timeless place. She wasn’t going anywhere anywhen. How long had she been walking? The uphill mental impression of going south began to take on aspects of going toward the light and expansion of newly realized situational information.

Only when her second foot stood on the man hole cover next to her first step away from her homeland did she get the fleeting glimpse of the seed of time the present is; drawing in composted nutrients of past experience and blossoming constant potential in life’s ongoing experiment. It passed her consciousness as quickly as the readjustment of her mental level to her environment. The odor of the steam coming from under the metal plate she was standing on was making her want to puke, so she ran over to a low ledge along the wall of a screamingly loud canyon to try to get her bearings in this strange place, while stuffing her experience in the desert back into the to-do pigeon hole so she could.