Restless again. In the Nagalands again. The flowers still adorn the boulder, but they are faded and wilting. A breeze stirs around me, dense with the promise of sweeping the flowers off so I may have a place to sit. I shake my head and scoot a nudged flower back in place. So much in my Waking life is thrown away for the sin of being blemished. The flowers are still fragrant, the garlands still intact. I don’t need to sit there.
There is a bare patch of riverbank nearby, where the river had scoured it clear of plant matter in a flood, but has since retreated. I knelt down there and listened to the water murmuring strange gossips to the patient trees. I pulled the beads out of my pocket. I knew many used them for counting prayers or mantras. But I had no gods to pray to. And my mantras were impotent when not backed by fierce emotion.
I held the string over clasped hands anyway. Maybe focusing on my physical posture would help. Dense wind coiled around me with damp concern. “I’m restless. Again. I apologize I am not good company today.” The wind dissipated at once. I feel like I let the entity down.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus on feeling myself fully there in the Nagalands. Waking concerns kept pushing their way in my awareness time after time. I know this was part of the process of meditation, that with practice I would be able to hold out against these intrusions longer and longer. But right now, it was just infuriating as fuck.
My hands dipped. The motion snapped me back to full awareness and disappointment. I thought about laying my hands in my lap, but then worried about the string slipping from my hands into the river. I held my hands up to my face again, closed my eyes, and restarted the focus on my body.
My hands began to dip, but they were caught. Something touched them, enveloped them, and lifted them back up into position. As they were lifted, I had a flash of something like vision, but no eyesight was involved.
I saw myself in the Nagalands, but there was no color. Everything was black, of such dark intensity I was reminded of the Abyss. But there was also light emanating from everything. The light was far beyond what we humans would call visible light. It was not ultraviolet, nor infrared. It was a spectrum that all things emanate, but humans can not see. In that light, I saw the outline of what was holding my hands. It wasn’t a three dimensional image because I was not sensing this with any kind of stereoscopic vision, but it was flat like a projection on a screen, and glowing darkly like the inverse of a shadow. There was where the entity was, and where the entity wasn’t. There was black, and a different kind of black.
When I realized what I was sensing (because I can not call it sight in any sense of the word), I turned my head away in shock. The beads fell to the ground. I was afraid.
“Right now, you can be anything. You can be any size. You can be anyone. And I am afraid that if I see you after all, you will be confined in the image that I see. You will be restricted until I no longer exist. And I do want to see you. But if the price of seeing you is restriction, then I’d rather not see you, ever.”
I lowered my head, thinking that would keep it safe. But then I realized my eyes were closed when the flash vision happened, and that it occurred without any use of sight at all. To keep it safe from me, I would have to leave.
~chkchk~ I feel a weight on my hands. I open my eyes and see the string of beads have been wrapped around my clasped hands. I feel a pressure surrounding my hands. It is comforting. I smile and the wind caresses me in answer.
“I need to think on this. And ask Snake about the ramifications. Forgive me?” The pressure on my hands cease. The wind nuzzles my face briefly before leaving me in stillness. I bow in farewell to nothing that I can see, and leave the Nagalands and the dream.