The Voice of Darkness


On the other side of the mountain, I discover that they've made a park or some sort of protected wilderness area, and so the only people I might see here are hikers. I'll always feel more in common with hikers, for they too are lovers of solitude. But the best times are when I'm by myself and night comes- because then, I can imagine that it might be any age or century that has ever been. Under the curtain of stars, with a whole forested world of unseen eyes watching, I could be any person who has ever traveled this sacred land, sitting in front of his fire, resting deep in the woods. The air is so full of night-birds and the calls of night-beasts, but at the same time, it seems calm. It seems vast and peaceful.

In that depth, I sometimes feel like I lose the distinction between myself and the world. A great space opens up, encompassing me and all things, and I feel like this must be a glimpse of the afterlife itself. "When we die", the great and dark presence with a woman's voice says to me, "we lose the sense of separation between ourselves and the world- that feeling was thrust upon us in the womb, and it has grown stronger and more real seeming since the day of our birth. Along with it, we also lose our illusory sense of self-will, which is born in that same dream of division. Identity arises with those things, and wisdom with their ending."

I close my eyes and imagine what that must be like: I no longer feel like I must direct myself here or there; I no longer will myself to be one thing or another; the world itself picks me up and I move now in a great channel of power. No longer do I wonder where my loved ones are, anywhere in the world; I am with them. I don't miss the forests I've loved or the mountains where I played as a child; I am in them all, and they in me. It’s far better than going on a hike; it’s like being on a hike while simultaneously being the woods themselves.

It's a beauty and a pleasure beyond imagining, but I’m limited in my ability to simulate such a state with my weary and distraction-prone head. A barking dog in the distance brings me back. But, odd to tell, even when I'm here in front of my fire, in this many-columned temple of trees and verdure, I sense that I'm always a part of the great, dark and open space that is the mother of all things.


I don't even remember falling asleep, but my eyes open when my fire is low and my face has grown quite cold. The stars that I saw earlier in the night have all but flown, and the moon is nearly gone. I walk to the edge of the trees to look at the bright curved moon in the sky, and I see something in it- a great mystery staring back at me. I see a pale faced woman, somehow old and young at the same time, and I hear those barks and yips again- foxes maybe? Or is there a home nearby with dogs? Surely not wolves; we've not had wolves in ages- they fell victim to the modern age around the same time the last bears did.

The pale woman's face is going fast, but her eyes remain- you always see the eyes- and the barking continues, distantly. A mournful short howl cuts through the air from a ways further out. I sit down, and for a moment, I'm very certain that I felt the earth below me tremble. I know the classics quite well, and I know what I've stumbled into: Hecate, the queen of witchery and the Underworld, is walking nearby.

The brave Aeneas clutching his golden bough had the same experience with the prophetess standing next to him, at the door of the Underworld. She called upon the same powers I have felt this very evening: the immense and soundless spaces of chaos and night, and Hecate, queen of phantoms. The same dogs bark in this wilderness that barked for the ancient Sybil, and the same oaks shake above my head. The earth below shakes- silence! She comes!

The moon dips down now behind a distant mass of stone, making that dark peak seem horned. The woods go quiet, and only the slightest wind trembles a few leaves. Nature has gone silent in honor of the presence of the Queen of the World. I lower my head. My heart tells me that I won't be leaving this wilderness unless I give a sacrifice for my safe passage. I reach into my pocket and take out a woven leather bracelet that my love made for me, with a silver clasp.

I hate to part with it, but it will purchase my freedom, and show the Ancient One something of my need and my deep respect for her. I walk back to my fire-coals and drop a few dry branches in. The fire jumps up again, and into the heart of flame, I set my gift, my bracelet made by loving hands, my tiny modern-day holocaust. It is taken by the flames and given to the Great Presence that I can feel brooding and lurking and watching me just out of sight. After a time, the moon is fully gone and an owl gives a startling cry from a branch very near. The wind picks up. The atmosphere lightens.


I sit back down and fall asleep, but there's no oblivion behind closed eyes; dreams come, dreams from the grave-cloaked Queen. There's a woman sitting at my fire with me now, stirring the coals with a stick and talking to me in a language that I don't understand. Yet, for all the fact that her voice rasps and clucks in a now forgotten tongue, my heart tells me what she's saying.

"Things aren't changing; we're changing. When we change, we think the whole world has, but the world is just watching us shift and grow and melt. The whole of the world, it is a great entity, a great and powerful thing whose mystery defies all thinking."

I ask her what I should do to find happiness. She tells me to stop thinking of myself as so lost, so out of place. Nothing, she says, separates me from her, or what I call "my time" from hers. It's the same world, the same great dark openness, the same dark entity. We're a breath apart from one another, she says. She tells me not to mistake my own blindness for loss, my own short-sightedness for abandonment. She tells me to be whole and stop thinking in broken-up ways. Fate, she says, has bound us all together and whole.

Now I know what madness is. It's a sense of feeling lost and apart from everything and everyone. It's the feeling of standing in a museum and looking at the crumbled remains of a brooch or a sword or an old coin, and thinking of all the thousands of years that separate you from those things- when nothing but your thinking separates you. I look at my hands; hands just like these made those ancient treasures. I look at myself in the mirror; eyes just like these feasted themselves on those golden treasures, and here I am, still looking. The same loam and dirt under my feet was under theirs. This is the same world.

I ask the old woman about Puck. She knows Puck. She's always known him, though under many other names. Puck, she says, is as ageless as the hills. Puck's very wise, and he always tells people what they need to know, even if they don't realize it at the time. That's bothersome to me, considering he always ignores my requests to talk.

"Silence is the message then", the old woman says. "Wise are they who know how to hear the silence."

She asks me what else Puck does, and I tell her "he moves; he runs or vanishes into some rocks." "Another message" she says. "Do what he does."

I wake up, just then, with the sun warming the ground around me. My fire is just a pile of cold ashes, and the world's rising back into a new sort of life. It feels like this might be the first morning of the world. In a way, it really is.


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