INSANE IS TH E NEW NORMAL: POST SEVENTEEN

Fishing Hole

THE HOLE

     (This is fiction inspired by the previous nonfiction post. Although the events in the story, with one exception, have all happened to me, they did not all happen in one period of time.)

     As we scrambled down the steep hill to the river, I slipped once on wet moss and almost lost my footing on unstable stones but somehow retained my balance. I shadowed Dad and Tom, my older brother, until we reached a small stone promontory jutting into a deep pool. Finally Dad set down the tackle box and baited our hooks with writhing worms. I soon lost track of time, lounging on the smooth stone and gazing at my line where it disappeared into the dark water.

River above Fishing Hole

     Suddenly a gray spider with long legs and a large, bulbous abdomen crawled out of a crack in the rock next to the promontory and lumbered towards me. I leapt to my feet and reeled in my line, keeping an eye on the spider, which continued to approach as if totally unafraid or unaware of me. Then to my surprise other gray spiders, four, five, six of them, crawled out from the crack in the rock and marched directly towards me.
     At the same time, Tom, who had been fishing from a rock about ten feet away, dashed up river without any warning. Terrified, I jumped over the spiders, hoping they wouldn’t attack me. Surprised that I had escaped unscathed, I sprinted after my brother, soon discovering that most of the stones in the river bed were not fixed. My brother scurried across them without losing his balance, so I did my best to keep up, not wanting to be out done.
     Eventually, far from the hole where my father was fishing, I encountered a large rock in my path, which proved a great challenge to climb over, mainly because it was smooth in some places and sharp in others. I slipped several times, realizing as I got higher that if I fell and injured myself, there was a good chance that no one would find me. At that point, some latent power in me surfaced; before I knew it, I reached the top of the rock. I had a strange feeling that I had lost time, almost as if I had blacked out, when that other part of me took over. 
     As soon as I climbed down to the river on the other side, I looked around and could not see my brother anywhere. I turned and examined the rock I had just climbed over and realized that I would be risking my life to go back the same way. At that point in the river, the hill back up to the road seemed even more treacherous than the way down to the fishing hole.     

Flowers near River

     A wave of panic swept over me. I crouched down next to the rock and tried to figure out what to do next. Then the strangest thing happened.
     As I gazed at the river, listening to my breath and the rushing water, my fears melted away completely. A wave of peace washed over me. I recognized the same peace in the trees and the grass and the rocks, in the river and the sky. I wanted to sing, my soul in tune with the earth and its creatures, and I did sing, a song called “Rocky Mountain High,” for a long time. I didn’t know it then, but the core of me had surfaced from deep in my subconscious mind, and I felt timeless. I knew in that forest I would feel free of time whether I was twelve or fifty-five because of the peace of the Earth, a fervent exaltation opening up a connection with all things. I finally remembered that I needed to find a way back to my family. They would be devastated if I did not return. Since the hillside next to the river was an unknown to me, I examined the rock again carefully and determined the safest way possible to climb back over. 
     On the way back, I hiked along the top of a small rise next to the river into an area that seemed to have been cleared by someone, and immediately I felt an eerie sensation, as if there were a presence of some kind nearby, animal or human, I couldn’t tell. I thought at first that my brother was hiding nearby behind an outcrop of rock. Fearing an ambush, I plopped down on a smooth stone and waited to see if he would leap out at me, and my mind shifted to a state alert to any subtle signs of movement. I heard a lizard scuttling through dry leaves and saw a snake slithering through the grass about twenty feet away. I watched a blue bird flitting from the ground to the low branches of an oak. 

Pounding Stone under Oak Trees

    
     Under the oak rested a long, flat stone blanketed by moss, with tufts of grass sprouting from it. Curious as to why grass was growing out of the rock in so many places, I pulled up one of the tufts and found a smooth cup underneath. I pulled up a few other tufts and found other cups of varying depths. Perplexed, I surveyed the area and noticed five large oval indentations in a stretch of earth that was darker than the ground nearby.
     “What is this?” I asked myself.
     “Native Americans lived here,” an adult male voice replied. 
     “Native Americans? You mean Indians?” I wondered. No answer. “What is this cup in the stone?” I asked.
     “You will find out what it is,” the voice in my head answered.
     “When will I find out?” No answer.  

Woman in Vision

     Suddenly the image of a woman rose into my mind’s eye. She wore a green dress covered by flowers and stars and held a golden cup in one hand and what seemed like an emblem of rulership, a scepter perhaps, in the other. On her head she wore a crown suggesting the phases of the moon, her jet-black hair flowing all the way to the ground. A few animals, a bobcat, doves, and farther away, a stag, remained in her sphere, and each seemed less like companions than symbols of different aspects of her self. I blinked, and the woman disappeared, but she unexpectedly surfaced again in my consciousness a few moments later as if stubbornly reasserting her ubiety.

Mortar in Pounding Stone

     Startled, and afraid that I had been gone too long, I dashed wildly back to the hole, only to find that my Dad and brother had disappeared. How could they have abandoned me? I felt like I was falling into some black pool of suffering connecting me, to some degree, with the other people and creatures of the Earth. The black pool seemed bottomless, and immersing myself in it for even a moment, I began to understand the pain and loss of others even though I knew that I had not experienced anything close to what many had experienced.

Hole

     “Why is there so much suffering?” I whined, tears welling in my eyes. To my surprise, I received an answer, not verbal, but visual. Life forms that had once lived in the area quickly passed before my eyes, including dinosaurs and extinct animals and the first people, and I knew that they had all suffered to a greater or a lesser degree, but then I felt the deep peace of the Earth again, as if the Earth itself were communicating with me, showing me that all life is part of the peace at the deep core of existence, no matter what suffering has occurred throughout the ages.
     Still stinging from a sense of abandonment, I climbed the steep incline back to the car, stopping now and then to orient myself and catch my breath. When I reached the road, I discovered that the car was gone. I could see a silver car parked down the road a ways, but the blue Dodge had vanished, leaving me stranded in the wilderness, with only a thin gray thread of humanness connecting me to the life I once knew.
     “What happened? Why did they leave me?” I wondered. No answer. I stared down at the river, which I realized would just keep flowing no matter what happened to me or what I did with my life. Suddenly my face itched, and I suspected that I had brushed against some poison oak.  When I scratched my cheek, I felt hair on my jawbone. I looked at my hand and saw a ring on my finger. I suddenly remembered my wife and children, but the rest of my life had vanished. What did I do for a living? How much money did I make? Who were my friends? Did people respect me? None of that seemed to matter in the tranquillity enveloping the mountains.

Flowers in Oak Grove near River

     That car down the road....Was that my car? Had I fallen and hit my head on a rock? Was I in shock? I did have a slight headache, but I could not find any signs of blood anywhere. My father, I suddenly remembered, had died a couple of years after we had found the hole down below. My brother had moved to a different state. I began remembering times of loving and caring in my family, and moments of vision and exaltation and attainment, but so much of my life in the past forty years lacked the spark of divinity, the harmony and peace that earlier in the day seemed to hold everything in the world, in the cosmos, together. That sense should unite us, not just the sense of weariness and suffering that bound us all together, I thought. For a moment, I wanted to create a religion honoring the divinity of the energies of the Earth that link us with the unseen energies of Heaven.

River Downstream near the Foundation

     Then I remembered those who had consciously tried to destroy me for their own ends, one even who had tried to kill me, so many people scrambling around me, trying to get a leg up or to stay on top, cutting each other’s throats, literally or figuratively. I had just kept returning to the forest, no matter what, journeying just far enough into a state that corresponds with the subconscious core of my being, a visionary state whose symbols and voices transcend space and time. In the forest, all I had to do was let go of fear and let the peace wash over me.
     I got in the car, and a moment when I had slipped on the rock flashed through my mind. 
     “Did I go so deep into that forest that I forgot forty years of my life, or did I fall and hit my head when I was climbing the rock?”
     I shifted the car into gear. No answer.