I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness
…
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong things; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
Whisper of running streams and winter lightening
T. S. Eliot
In the north, it was summer. A furious time of year with nineteen hours of daylight, as if compensating for the long, very long, dark winters. Furious, because time is limited and everything happens all at once during the well-lit months of summer. How lackadaisical of nature, lingering in the dark and cold, wanly turning up the lights for but a brief and busy rush of budding and growing and blooming. You could watch your plants grow before your very eyes, had you the patience to sit still for a day to see it. Impossible! Summer in the north is made of furious activity, and stillness is put off until the dark returns.
Inside our tiny tent, floating on rainwater, and straining against the wind, we sat tethered and bouncing on a virtual waterbed, while the wind outside cursed and whined. Then suddenly, as suddenly as it had arrived, the whirling rain withdrew. We came-to in an altered sense of the world and reconvened at the circle of embers. Still enough life in those coals to brighten into a blaze. We reviewed the ordeal, each side of it, an angle of fear, the aspect of excitement, and the lucky awareness in full exposure to the whole of it.
Papa of the family gentle had stepped out of their tent during the windy wet assault because a grounding tie had come loosed. While he worked to retie the line, he was fortuitously present to see the wind pick up our canoes and fly them into the river. Without time to tell his family, he ran into the water, grabbed the bow ropes of both canoes, and stood stock still there, the lightening abounding, as he held tight to our only means home. With miles of rock and grazing land on either side of the river, that waterway was our way out. Only if we had those vessels to carry us.
Another one of us also survived the same dark night, just a few kilometres upriver, camped on a small island that began to shrink in rising waters. Uprooted in the middle of that howling dervish, he was forced to higher ground, in hope and fear of the water leaving something of the sand he could cling to. In this territory, rainstorms sometimes press down like a tsunami from the sky and sometimes turn to twisters, like the storm over us was reported to have done.
These many years later, the boy inside that wailing tent, waiting in fear and hoping in love for his fathers return, has survived! Now a young man, engrossed in AI, and close to his beautiful bride-to-be. What does he remember?
He thought he would die. He remembers his fear of death. He remembers there was no knowing, huddled inside the shapeshifting tent, loosed and taking water, what had become of his dad.
Fully exposed to the storm, Papa stood still in the river. Unable to move against the force of it, and unable to let go of our vessels home. His family had no clue and fear choked their thoughts, eclipsing positivity in the strobe of light and dark, and in the sounds of chaos. Forces greater than the known. Water soaked the boys tent and his bedding was sopping. Once returned to civilization, he learned in a news report, it had been a tornado rushing past us.
My memory is washed out. Its the spike proteins some say, taking out our memories and leaving spikey receptors for Bigs Acceptable Narrative (BAN). The only recollection I have of after the storm is a curiosity. My beloved knife had not moved from where it had been left on the flat rock by the fire. I was mystified by the physics of it. Impossible it seemed that anything could have held still in that wind. But the knife did, and Papa Gentle did, fully given to stillness and to waiting, holding tight to the bow lines.
What was he thinking?
I wasnt, he said.
How is that possible?!
Then a poet I remembered, speaking to his soul, still and waiting in the darkness. Methinks poetry will prevail as C19 spikes eclipse our pasts and our personalities.
In the darkness of our fears, the women and child looked toward a swift approaching end. We were utterly beyond having any sense of control. In a racing wrangle, accepting or not, our lives looked to be finished.
My husband declared he felt only an excitement in the power moving around us. It stirs my imagination to wonder, will his departure be similar? Will the end of his life be glorious, full of thunder and flashes of light as he enters the deep velvety otherworld?
Greatest of all, in the darkness of the storm, I visualize the exposure and the imperative of Papa Gentle, waiting without thought.
In that mighty image, in the image of a still and waiting hero, I now have an answer to how husbands have survived the motorheads calling. The calling of an incubus who entraps married women and secretly mocks their devoted husbands.
Similarly, also secretly, another strata of motorheads are engineering world weather, mocking nature and our closeness to it. Mischievous humans playing god, playing with weather, another shadow dancing in the darkness moving over our world.
I must admit we believed the motorhead was something of a god. Mock me in that! And then allow me to report: any witness to his kingdom is bound to see, gods do not appreciate heroes.
To slave for him is acceptable. To remain infantile, reliving your father wound, is allowed. But! Dare no heroics because if you do, you are liable to become a sitting duck for one of his most startling and harrowing teachings. Look back into his narcissistic kingdom, how obvious it is to see! His own dark shadow is hidden in those teachings, delivered with gusto and glee. His own projections direct from the unseen, never admitted and never integrated, a darkness made to endarken others. With an almost imperceptible sneer in his voice, he makes mincemeat out of men who come to him with clear and heroic insights. Censored. Cancelled. Zeroed out and denied protection. His unseen shadow twisted into creepy concepts of creatureliness and evil leash holders. We were at the mercy of his frightful imagery, having way with us if ever we were hijacked by anger or doubt about his godliness. We were at the mercy of his dark shadow. The motorhead levelled our heroes and raised up the obedient caretakers of his ungodly kingdom.
This is common in cults. Today, it is common in the world. Heroes are destroyed as the powers that shouldnt be level their controls across the world. We have been subdued with manipulations that make our lives about something they are not. Under this shadow creeping, we must fast reclaim what is ours, call it back from what was given to fake gurus. Admit it, we succumbed to false prophets. Yet there are ways out of their evil embrace! We reclaim our lives as they are meant to be lived. We nullify any misinformed beliefs in motorheads with their apocalyptic visions. We choose for life and living.
The scene change is upon us. Our lives are at stake under the darkness creeping across our laudable lands, like a big black cloud sure to whip things into a maelstrom as it rushes by.
You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by, and so become yourself because the past is just a goodbye
It is our very lives we must take back from the machine, along with the fealty to self proclaimed gods. We met god. We lived in his darkness and what remains in the aftermath is the light we were promised. Never delivered by any god, it has been revealed in the cast of his shadow. What has been sucked out of us into black holes of narcissism is irretrievable, yet what is divine, and has always been divine, shines on.
Like Papa gentle in the river. Her husband. A man alone there, and holding the lines, waiting for the rushing vortex to pass over. Waiting in the running streams. Holding on to our way home.
'Papa Gentle', what a wonderful name! Loved this story of the storm and his heroic deeds. I've been following your substack for many months now; through the outrage and heartbreak, the stark and unmasked baring of your soul, at once a poetic and avenging clarion bell for all.
Todays reading reminded me of my own indoctrination into the Catholic church at five or six years old. It was a conscious decision on my part to trust the adults around me to know better than my own experience. Simply because they were the power structure and supposedly wiser, I gave them the benefit of my doubt.
Ten years later, I took back my trust and power by stepping out of that cult, (and have been sidestepping it ever since.) But I wonder if that experience afforded me the insight and strength to trust myself when in doubtful environs; point being that these 'indoctrinating' experiences so many of us fall into, face up to, and struggle to extricate ourselves from are perhaps necessary lessons toward Self awareness, confidence, and determination.
''Remember, the point is not to survive linearly, in the temporal sense , but perpendicularly to that, in the eternal. " EJ Gold