Sunday, February 12, 2017

February 12, 2017 - On Being a Seed, Part II


[This is Part II of “On Being a Seed.”  Click Part I for the prior episode.]

Things change in the darkness.  In the beginning, there was sound.  It was not light that was first, but sound.  I was wrong when I thought that light was the beginning.  It was all I knew at the time.  To believe that light was first is to not understand how the unmanifest becomes manifest.  It is not light that heralds life, but sound.  For who called the light the first time?  And how did the calling sound?  Only afterward did the light appear, after it heard its name.  This is the First Blasphemy of the seed.  This is what the seed knows as it sits in its tiny prison, hidden in the darkness of the Earth . . .

It was a tapping I heard, a tap-tap-tapping.  I was roused from my silent slumber by a tapping that would not stop.  At first it was quiet, barely audible.  It was sporadic.  A tapping and then silence; a tapping and then silence.  But it grew quickly, coming louder and faster, until all I could think about was the constant, gnawing tapping.  In the tiny chamber of my prison, the tapping echoed back and forth against the walls, each tap questioning and answering the tap before it.

It was a kind of music, a rushing song, tapping and tapping out its haunting melody.  I listened, entranced.  On my knees, I wanted nothing more than for the music to continue forever, because it pleased my new-found ears.  Because in the beginning there was sound, and it was sound that called forth the thought of the Great Alchemist, which had been imprisoned.  It was sound that broke the barrier and named all that was previously unnamable.

And so I was completely unprepared when the wall of my prison cell was rent in two.  The sound was astronomical, a crushing, ripping, tearing sound filled with wonder and terrible majesty!  It was horrible in its kindness.  The veil that hid me for so long was finally torn asunder.  The prison was breached.

Then in rushed a dancer so quickly, I didn’t have time to get off my knees.  There were thousands of tiny bells on her skirt, tapping out a siren’s song.  She ripped me from the doomed ship I had been on, the ship that had crashed into the rocks.  She saved me.  And then she drowned me.

[Click here for Part III.]