ARTIFACTS OF DESCENT

[Bohemian]

I turned in bed constantly, unable to sleep. I climbed out of bed and walked to the living room, fumbled for my cigarettes and smoked, in the dark. The LED on the clock read 3:46 A.M. “Damn.” I sipped from a cup of cold coffee and tried to compass the conversation I had with my mother.
“Your real father was an Indian,” she said it with casualness, as if any consequences were overlooked during the passage of time. I’d sensed my life was five thousand puzzle pieces scattered across the table, even then, she was reluctant to place the pieces, remaining cryptic about my past. It was a pain like pulling teeth, the day she said, I was adopted spoon-feeding bits and pieces about my birth mother through the years. She was being over protective, fearful, that I’d abandon the life her and dad gave me. I felt a comfortable strangeness. Truth, my truth, buoyed by feelings of a surrounding presence and the words mom spoke, became another affirmation.
There was no puff of smoke coming from the grassy knoll that gave me instant gratification. It was in successive steps during the courtship with my wife Alanna. The scent from burning wachango, sweet grass, lingers in the air, the tightly bundled wand left in a ceramic bowl on the coffee table next to my feet as I propped them up and leaned back into the couch. Warmth encompassed the circle, she drew in the air around the table and where I’m sitting, as she smudged the living room in preparation for ceremony. The feel of autumn maples caught in the drift of leftover scent raked my spinal column.
When she explained it to me the first time, we were giving thanks and acknowledgement to the higher beings that give us guidance. The circle representing life, marked by turns toward the four directions: north, east, south, and west.
“The four directions of the earth give balance.”
Alanna had gone through spiritual trainings with two Miquan Apache medicine men. Two men shrouded in mystery, I only knew as Michael and Jim. It was Jim that told her about a tall stranger wandering aimlessly nearby. It was at that time we both lived in Portland, and were attending the Pacific Northwest College of Art. It wasn’t until after I dropped out and was sitting in one of my haunts, the Heathman Bakery & Pub having a coffee, when our paths merged. A predestined path carved for both of us long ago. That was an acceptable truth and another piece to my puzzle.
What I found intriguing, Jim had said to Alanna, “It was quite possible that in a past life I was the son of a Mandan Sioux medicine man, and that I’d be chasing the white buffalo for many years searching for answers.” I have to admit the first year of our marriage, I was getting a crash course on who I am, and how I am connected to the world around me. It was more than a subscribed service through AT&T. Technology is beat hands down, in the techniques to communicate with nature and what shaman call having visions into the spirit world.
Another of those occasions, like an ephemeral twinge, cherubim swinging through the latticework spiking thoughts of déjà vu wringing confessions from sleep. I sipped the last of my coffee and lit another cigarette, and thought about Solena.
Solena said, she is a trance-medium.
No fear, I told myself, as I pictured her on the other end of the phone with tools of her trade spreading the tarot cards across a table, and explain I had always felt different from others growing up. I was always the one attacked by bullies in the schoolyard, and given wedgies behind the maintenance shack. Like my mother, I tried to spoon feed Solena information about my life, and only mentioned the car that hit me during childhood. I realized, during our phone conversation, more than simply tossing away the stones from the Esquiline destroying the empire, she held secrets and they were mine. I had given her a Readers Digest version of my life, and what she had said, left me slack-jawed.
Solena spoke with a pleasant southern accent, “You actually left your body. You’re not the same soul from before.”
The god Somnus must’ve visited that day I laid, tubed, and connected to life support machines in the hospital, giving me the slow drowsy slur in my speech, as I spoke into the receiver, “Oh, really, that’s interesting.”
“You died while in a coma and came back as a walk-in.”
I tried to picture myself after clearly seeing the hood and then the windshield of the Buick Skylark as my head and shoulder and the rest of my body bounced off the car and hit the asphalt. Deep in the realm of ambiguity, and perhaps, left pea-size, and unattainable, I spent the better part of five weeks in that coma. A boy about my age but some how older walked up to me, more like, slid up to my side with a comfortable ease as I watched my mother listen to the doctor, a tall man with jet-black hair with a face framed by clinical wisdom, tell her that I may never wake.
The boy never spoke of IT, not in spoken words, more a subconscious wave of energy forming thoughts I could easily understand. There weren’t any terms to the agreement, the favorite to any used car salesman, who’d tell you it was done legal and binding, something the sleeping Frank would never understand, death.
In that deal, written in the fine print of the contract, left pea-size on purpose, the boy shrouded in light traded places, with me, and introduced a sorted lot of friends. The pause on the phone line meant Solena was giving me a chance to take in the complexity of the blue print drawn by the Alfar, she explained are the fair folk of the earth that mapped my creativeness.
At this point, there was no reason to believe, Solena was reading me for what I was worth on the magnetic strip of my credit card, or an impostor sitting in a cubical reading answers to the questions linked by key words from a script I provided in my profile.
“You have had contact with UFOs.”
X-file fantasies raced through my mind.
“Benjamin Franklin,” she said.
“What about him?” I said, remembering I read some were that he was an extraterrestrial walk-in.
“In a past life you were his apprentice.”
We discuss my past life experiences and the life forces and spiritual energies that remain in a transitory state-visible to some, always moving, and shifting. The light can be bright or dull like a waning incandescent filament leaving our tenancy a temporal matter, something that can’t be contained in one lifetime, moves on. Humans aren’t a separate entity in the universe, merely an appendage.
“I have been and always will be a giver of energy, a healer.” Solena continued, her southern tone never wavers, and foretells, “You invent something-a healing room with crystals.” She could see green and gold spectrums radiate prongs of light from my hands.
I literally saved the Esquiline, preventing war, a slave, but, also a tutor and confidant to a Roman emperor. To think I changed the time line continuum. What would a world without heroes be? During the seventeenth century, I was a minister in England, during the last plague scare of that century. A man giving of himself physically, for the greater good of the masses making sure they had plenty to eat and shoes to wear on their feet. Attributes, I have in this life have mirrored Solena’s view of my lives within the non-linear forum.
Ten thousand angels whispering secrets about Fatima leave the Roman Catholic Church to stutter the truth about the existence of a third dimension, allowing limited belief in the hereafter. Saint Francis, on the heights of Mount Alverna in Umbria became one with Christ-not just in spirit, but truly engulfing his being, when the stigmata appeared as the bodily manifestation of his spiritual transformation.
I flexed my fingers as if fitting a new pair of Isotoner gloves, “Yup, that’ll work,” I slipped into a pair of jeans, shaved, and left the apartment, for the store, sure the white buffalo is around the corner. If anything is around the corner it better be a fresh pack of cigarettes, bread, milk, and eggs.

[iblieve]

Almost poetic in places mystical reality at its best. "C"

[creativesoul]

this is absoutly fabulous i love it
what happens next
more more
did ya find the white buffalo? eggs?
cigs?
come onnnn

[Bohemian]

Thanks ibelieve and creativesoul

I managed to find breakfast that morning...as for the white buffalo-it is still illusive.

Bohemian