...The Crux of the Mermaid...

(This could very well be a stand alone article, or you may fuse it to the last hub entry for "Daybreak Illusions/Death on the Shore")

Sliding peacefully down into the sea, the sunlight on the surface quickly fades. I am surely being taken to the end of my life as the pressure of the water pushes my heart to explosive beats and seizures. So quickly, then, has it ended. Passage from life to death, as quickly as being born was, is just a painful portal that is never remembered in its entirety. The mermaid's firm grip on my ankle becomes less tight and I heavy and am following her effortlessly down past horseshoe crabs and blue fish.

Memories are also squeezed out of my body from the pressure of the abyss. Terrible thoughts trapped in bubbles drift out of me, out of my nose. Horrible things I have heard float out of my ears. Nasty things I have said, from my mouth. They meld into the ocean of consciousness where everything began, and everything ends...for a moment.

All of the good things, the happy things, the joyful things remain. I pulse with the light of them and the mermaid observes. If I did not pulse, I would keep sinking. If all the joy and light and love had faded, she would take me to her lair. She looked disappointed, if a mermaid could so look that way. She watched me suspended in the water. In a moment I would rise back to the surface and gasp for air through lungs that had been completely depleted of air. She would watch me go and wait for my return.

I didn't want to rise from the abyss. I was so tired of chasing Death and walking into the spiderwebs of truth and reality that wrapped themselves around my face. I wanted to be void of the painful feelings of life beyond the shore. How I began to crave the freedom of the mermaid, the freedom of the sea.

The morning was another illusion. The promise of a painfree existance receded with the tide. The shape of a scythe lay outlined in the bay. I traced it with my toes, felt the cold sand and water between them. Where was Death? I guess I would have to wait until the darkness fell, as I always did. He came just before I was nauseated with fatigue. He stood both at the head and foot of my bed in long dark shadows. His cold smooth skull shone like the moon, the hollows of his cheeks showed corridors of the Hereafter. I could look down them forever.

Forever I had walked around the Labyrinth of the Forest and the Sea. I hadn't gotten things right yet. I had to return and redo and rework everything just so I could stop returning. Would I want to stop when I was done? What would I do, in the Hereafter? Hang out in the clouds, a spectator...a guide...a protector? Would the work be worth the effort? The pain of humanity and the fear of death plagues the planet. It would be liberating to be on the Other Side, influencing the living...but there are rules. There is the limitation of the illusion we call Time. There are beliefs and walls of anger and anguish blocking the Rays of Illumination, and for good reason.

The mermaid watched as I left her there in the cold dark ocean. Her head bobbed above the crests of the waves and she was full of the same envy that I felt for a life under the sea. This emotion was unnamable to her, it was all she ever felt. She knew nothing else, she felt completely void of human angst and wasn't aware that she was comprised of pure emotion. Every cell that she embodied was a compilation of my parallel life - all of the things I had ever felt lived inside her. She was like a skin that I had shed and tossed into the ocean, filled with tears and regret and sadness. Her song was always forlorn, always enchanting in its forbidden way. The salt of the ocean tides blended perfectly with her hair and the tasted of human tears.

She watched with lidless eyes and closed lips. She sang no song as her anger grew and welded itself to her soul, black as night. She couldn't know it was so dangerous, she lived in the ocean after all. There were far more treacherous things there. She was so cold, so subliminally numb as the tide went out. She retreated to the vast stretch of sea, past the lighthouse, past the jellyfish and the jetty and dove down deep into the dark green and blue limits until her own light began to flicker. It was here that she somewhat understood that the darkness could be comforting...that sometimes being completely submersed in it was the only way to regain the spark of hope that led back to a life worthy of illuminating once more.

Her perspective shifted as the light in her belly grew. It attracted fish and larger sea creatures to its ominous glow. She drifted aimlesslessy, her hair and arms spanned out, her face towards the sun so far away. Lost soul, drifting among the dark creatures of her own world...she accepted her place and never tried to leave or change it. She forgot me already. She felt the pain of the expanding light in her body as it stretched and fought for an exit. She wrapped her strong arms around it and squeezed it until it exploded like an abcess of white and yellow light into the currents.

...

From my place on the shore, I saw the bubbles of light on the quieted surface of the sea. I knew she was down there, somewhere...waiting for me.

When I decided to truly quit smoking cigarettes and start walking instead, I did so, up and down the winter shores of New England. I believed in the power of the ocean, the negative ions of water and the many pieces of reference that toted the fact that great inspiring people such as Stephen Spielberg and others had been greatly inspired while either in the shower, or bathing in the chambers of Greece, and several other incidences where sources and bodies of water have made way for phenomenal transformation and information to flow as smoothly as silk.

Understanding this, and having tried everything else, I simply walked by the ocean starting in November of 2004 and did so all winter and into the spring. After that I turned to the Forest...and between the sea and the woods...you see where my stories and poetry were/are born. With that cloud of smoke between me and my dreams and imagination I could see nothing. Now all I see is the Truth of myself, who I am and that I chose to share with you.

Thank you for reading!

Until next time

Namaste