After Life

It all started with this little heart shaped locket tied loosely around her neck.

Her Mother had given it to her when she’d left, that was three years ago already, and a lot had changed since. Before that day, Sophie had been a teenager, a carefree girl, more or less, with friends and neighbours all around her. The attacks had started just 2 years before she was about to enter highschool- the men, the clouds, the rains, the thunder and storms and now the gas masks.

Her Mother had died trying to save her, trying to protect her from the men who “wanted her.” They wanted her mind, her body and her brain, worst of all they wanted her thoughts. Before then the minds of men, and women had largely been controlled by what were called ‘societal men’. The revolution started as an attempt, first to fight this ruling class, and then as an attempt to put an end to all men. In an attempt to curb the revolut, a group of ‘mansculinist activists’ had started to remove the presence of women.

It had started out as a strange, little known underground movement at first, that was looked down on by the people, but slowly as things got worse, and people became more frightened, this brain-removing, man destroying power made its way as prime facilitator of war across all stratas of society North and South sides of the border. This group of wealthy proletarians, now ruled over the entire continent and landmass and would continue to keep hold for as long as it took to see all women destroyed.

In the last 5 years things had spiralled from frightening to ghastly. The world had started to become a strange place a couple of hundred years ago, as her Mother liked to remind her. Since the time of Christ, or before, men had ruled the world. In the year 3,000, the women had begun to revolt- though it seemed to Sophie women already ruled the world. Like all fathers, her dad had left when she was still in her mothers womb. It had always been the women who had raised the children at home. Men left, as was ritual, when their children we’re just young to go to the ‘places of wealth’ to work and make the paper currency.

Men moved from place to place, impregnating and doing something called ‘loving’ the women so that they could become Mothers. Then these mothers birthed their young, took care of society, the cattle, land and community trade. The men’s sole function became to earn reward in form of paper money- working in cities, banks and educational institutes that often substituted as asylum centres and places of religious reform. Her father, her mom had told her once, was ‘high up in the priestly class’, he was one of these men of high standing order, re-educating the young and poor that were sent there. Sophie had never met her father and had no idea what it would mean to have one, a father that is. She had never thought about him nor wondered how their relationship would be. Most of her friends, living in the suburbs, didn’t have a father either and the only men they saw were their brothers and the men that visited to help their mothers ‘make’ more babies.

This was Sophie’s life too before that last day that she saw her Mother, the day her Mother left with the men, so she could be ‘saved’. It didn't much make sense to her what had happened, but instinct told her she should keep alive and stay away, till she had the courage to cross and leave this place forever.

She had spent these last few years moving from place to place; doing what, she wasn't entirely sure, maybe just surviving, or searching, for something- security, food, money, she didn't really know, but something to exchange for bed and board, temporarily, till she found her way out and was strong enough to never come back.

She knew once she made the crossing she would never return. Never see her family, mother (if she still lived- there was always the chance as long as Sophie stayed here) and people again. No matter how destroyed this land was now, it was still her land and where she’d felt gallingly at home, till now.

The women’s revolution in the cities had come to an end. Most recently she had heard that they had sprayed the cities with deviant chemicals that would reduce, if not eradicate the fertility of all women who breathed in it’s toxic fumes. They would first near die of cold, heart attack, blood clotting, lung infection and then their fertility was attacked if not destroyed forever.

This time Sophie had settled on a farm, where the people had lived in a matriarchal society for the past 20 years. The air, the land, the trees, life was flourishing here. The men in this community had acceded to the feminie rule of law slowly over the past half century and found peace in doing so. In exchange for their worship, reverence and obedience, the men and children, people here, lead a somewhat protected life of peace and kinship, from the ‘Other, outside world’ that was currently seeing it’s end.

In the cities and suburbs, where she’d come from, there we’re still men fighting and battling, trading for power and money, esteem of themselves and each other- her Mother had called this the ‘Ego State’. These men had spent the last two millennium trading paper- a thing Sophie could never get her head around, seeing as her Mother had never owned such with no inherent value of it’s own. She carried with her just the few flower and plant seeds her mother had given her to trade along with a water bottle and spare change of clothes. She talked to the plants, trees and birds as she travelled, if no human was around. Her Mother had taught her this from a young age, how to talk and commune with the land and it’s many beings, inhabitants- many of whom spoke only in the silent language of feeling to her.

The people here at this farm all knew this language, it was the first community and society she had met that could all speak this same language as her and her Mother. Everyone else till now, only knew the spoken languages of the ‘human people’s mouth’. She had met that one boy last year, who spoke this same language as her. She thought she’d fallen in love with him because they could speak the same language; without words, without movement. By now she’d met so many more who spoke this same language, that she doubted she’d ever actually been in love with him- perhaps it was just the excitement of meeting someone, human who could speak this language with her for the first time.

Most men she knew, had long ago dissociated from who they were for paper self-esteem and had never learnt to make their way back- no matter how many women from the country (or cities) they had slept with. Even the women of the cities had lost their way, more like men than the women now. No one could blame them, they did this to survive. The men were sad complex, terrifying puzzle pieces, a pained mystery even to themselves- they had forgotten their meaning, their purpose and ‘lost onto themselves’.

The forest’s south of the continent had all been destroyed, in some places there was such a shortage of oxygen that people wore masks, even at home when they slept. Here because the people had planted trees, because ‘they hadn't destroyed and murdered all their Mother’s, the wombmen’, they had re-membered the way, ‘a way’. The womben had led them, re-minded them of their importance of planting the earth, gatekeeping for the world, and caretaking of the land. The air here was fresh for this, no lack of breath or oxygen and the trees fed them plentifully. Air was clean and life was free.

Here she didn't have to live secretly behind the beliefs and ideals her mom had taught her, keeping them from the world- apart from her life. She could embody and live her ideals here, her mother’s wishes and dreams, her’s. Though she knew that she would soon have to leave this place and make the crossing to the ‘Moon World’, she couldn't help but be happy to have found a temporary home, where she fit in. Sophie knew only the chosen would be asked to make the crossing, that her Mom had prepared her for this her whole life, yet she found that she was not yet ready. She couldn’t help but feel a deep gut wrenching pang of attachment for the people, places and land she’d been raised on and part of. For reasons she could not comprehend, she couldn't quite bear to leave it yet.

Underneath the destruction of the world, Sophie could feel the sadness, the pain, the men were in. The children and the Mother’s struggling for another way and the men locked inside their own striving for security and power- in the paper made world. The locket was a symbol of this, a reminder to feel in that lifetime- a reminder of the undercurrent that ruled and led all life, “Dharana”, towards one pointed singularity through diversity. It was hers, her Ancestors gift to her, a remember to connect and to feel, and not to be led astray by the wants of man.

The boy, she thought, maybe he too, is to make this crossing. However she’d never had the time to ask, she’d never thought to ask till now, and could only hope that he would have to cross too. She had not yet mastered the skill or language of telepathy through the air or sky, so couldn’t ask now. But that same feeling she’d felt as a kid, holding the locket alone under the night sky, twinkling life light years, she’d felt that feeling in embrace with him. Soft & steady, sturdy, yet electric with light, filling her with gentle wonder and ease of being from inside- out, an ethereal, being-ness source entering her body, holding her from inside out. This feeling she had no words or name, real place in the world except in the stars, the locket and him. She could only feel this feeling when she was alone and now it seemed this human, he knew it too, perhaps.

Something even more subtle, more gentle, more substance-less than the kaleidoscopes she’d been obsessed with as a kid. The multitudinous turning of the colours of the kaleidoscope was more akin to the land- what she felt when she was walking the land alone, with the birds, bees, grass and plants. The many fluorescent light colours divided into prisms of colour when she squinted her eyes or looked closely enough, arose in her the same feeling as the kaleidoscope turning. It was only then that she felt fully alive, when the land was talking to her and she was responding back. She could hear and touch each and every being-with sunlight. That was the kaleidoscope feeling, the feeling the kaleidoscope arose in her, as a child.

The locket, the boy, the night sky, these were things even more numinous- nameless, colourless, scentless, almost discarnate- than the prismatic colours of life on Earth and her experiences on it. She wanted to live in that feeling, the womb like embrace, subtle holding, the expansive night sky and soft embrace of the his arms- the boy. Like holding the locket from inside out, the feeling arose in her that they would travel the same path to the land of the Moon, together or apart they would go there. The locket heart her guide, forever more, in more than human form- the world around her yearning, flowing and moving her towards ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ afar.