The Turning-Way

All I know, then, is this:

In the land of shadows and mirrors, on the far side of the moon, twilight is forever and the whispers of what we call magic never end.

And I am glad.

For she has come once more to the Turning at the Edge of Time, and once more she will come to me.

She is alone, my Little One; although I am watching, I watch from somewhere else, somewhere not far from her, a treebole perhaps, or a mouse’s nest deep in the pale leaves of the shadowed wood. She cannot see me, not now; in the twilight of the Turning I am for the moment invisible. I see her, though, clearly — small, and bright, and sweet . . . and unbruised. Around her throat she wears a necklet of jewels — amethysts and opals, colors of twilight and moonlight — and on her tiny hands a pair of gloves. And she is young, so very, very young. Holding the pearl now dark and dim passed into my hand only an instant ago by the hand of the Dark Goddess, I sigh and touch my face. Unbruised. For me it is not so. This time I am the one who is dark and wise, blemished and bruised; on this walking of the Way it is she, my Little One, who is beautiful and bright and pure.

It is ever so, on the Way in, and on the Way out, never.

***

“Little One,” I whisper, and the breath catches in my throat, mothlike. She stops, turns, sees me — or my shadow — and says, “Do I know you?”

“You have seen me many times before,” I tell her, “but you never remember me beyond the Turning at the Edge.”

She quirks her shining head, a little bird, and laughs. “How is this so?”

“It is so,” I reply, and echo her laugh, lightly. “Just as I will have forgotten you, beyond the Turning at the Center.”

Like snowdrops the words fall around her, settling in the silence, and she sighs, and shivers as if with chill. She reaches out, and places her hand in mine.

“Let us begin, then,” she says, and I say, “Let us continue.”

And so the journey goes. So it is now, has ever been and will be, evermore, in the land of shadows and mirrors we call the Turning-Way.

We walk.

Twilight turns to night, and night to day, and still the Way unfolds before us, ripple after ripple, revealing each mystery twice, thrice, time after time. It is cold, fiery cold, and our feet and fingers blister even as the Way rises up to embrace us. And even as we walk, our own shades and shadows walk beside us, glimmering, wavering, like reflections on glossy water, and above us and belo glimmer the shades of those who walk other Ways.

“Where does our journey lead us?” my Little One wants to know, her hand resting softly in mine as we walk, the whisper of our footfall like drifting leaves.

“On this path,” I tell her, “toward the Center.”

“And at the Center we will find . . .?”

“The one we seek,” I say, “she who is called the Crystal Virgin.”

“Is this so?” my Little One asks with a frown, and I say, “Yes, for this Turning, it is so.” And now I tell her, “On this Turning, we walk toward the Center, and we walk on the side of light, while the other side is in shadow. But beyond the next Turning we will walk the other side, and it will be in light, while this side we walk now will be in shadow.”

“How is this so?” my Little One asks.

“How is this not so?” I counter. “It is the nature of the Way. The Way folds and unfolds with each walking, so that what is now on our right will appear again on our left, and that which yesterday was behind us lies before us on tomorrow’s journey.”

But she is very young, my Little One, and does not understand, and only begs: “Tell me about her, the one we seek at the Center.” And so, walking hand in hand through day and night, light and shade, and all the unfoldings of the Way, I tell her what I know.

The Crystal Virgin sits in her crystal cave at the center of everything, I tell my Little One, the edge of nothing, where there is no edge — only center; and from her cave, she sees in all directions. Yet she has no eyes with which to see. You, beloved, she will say to us when we find her, you are my eyes in the world.

Is she beautiful? you ask. We cannot say. We do not know. It does not matter. She is crystal, she is light, faceted like a jewel, the eyes of an insect; she reflects back What Is, in every shape, shade and color. There is nothing of her to be seen; there is in the billion facets of her being only the reflection of What Is.

And why is she called Virgin, you ask? (although in reality my Little One has asked nothing, but only listens). I will tell you. She is called Virgin because she is untouched. And she is untouched because there is nothing of her but that which is Not Her. She is Nothing. And because she is Nothing, she is Everything. Because all that is, reflects in her purely, echoes purely; and there is nothing else, can be nothing other than all that is, and that which reflects it.

She has no eyes, no voice of her own, but shows back what is shown to her, and sings back the songs that are sung in her presence. She is bright, but cold; she gives, but not of herself; and she cannot receive, she can only reflect. Her very brilliance turns us on our path; she is the mirror on which the Way turns back again.

And the walls of her cave echo our every whisper.

The one thing she cannot reflect is darkness, and the one thing she cannot echo is silence. And that is why her sister the Dark Goddess stands at the Edge, on the far side of the Way, to catch and capture and hold within herself all that is dark and silent in the world, all that does not exist in the Center where the Crystal Virgin dwells.

“The Dark Goddess?” Little One is thoughtful. “I seem to remember something about the Crystal Virgin . . . but the Dark Goddess I do not know.”

“And yet,” I tell her, “it was she who at the start of this journey placed around your throat the amethysts and opals you wear, and kissed you on the lips, and bade you well on the Way.”

“Is this so?” she asks, and again — as if for the first time — I reply, “Yes. On this Turning, it is so.”

Now day becomes dusk, and dusk night, and still the Way unfolds, and after long journeying we find we have come to a chasm.

***

The chasm is not wide, but very deep — two steps wide only, a slit, a slash, a gaping grin in the earth. From it rises the most noxious odor, and from within it we hear the most terrible noises — gabbling, yammering, whining, the chattering of a thousand stinking nightmare creatures, leechlike, monkeylike, stupid. They clamor in the chasm, and their fingers scrabble at its ledges and clutch for a grip, and we know that, if they could, they would snatch at us and drag themselves up and attach themselves to us and ride along with us on our Way, as if our Way were their own.

Horrified, we turn as if to retrace our steps, and as we do a voice calls from the edge of the chasm.

“You could turn back,” the voice says cheerfully, “but I wouldn’t advise it.”

Looking toward the voice we at first see nothing but a gallows, its one long rusted arm stretched far over the chasm’s gaping mouth, and then, hanging from it, a corpse. It is a fetid thing, this corpse, rotted and sere, and it casts a long shadow as it twists and turns in the noxious wind that rises from the chasm.

The corpse is singing. Cheerful, contented, even as it rots and stinks on its gallows pole, this corpse does not know itself for the dead thing it seems to be.

Remembering the words the corpse had called to us, we ask:

“Not turn back? Why? What lies beyond the chasm?”

“Everything. Absolutely everything,” and the corpse laughs, the sound of sweet water rushing. “Are you afraid? Don’t be. Step closer to me.”

We do as the corpse invites us, Little One clinging to my side, as the winds of the chasm rise and the monkey-leeches scream and natter. Tattered black flesh, male or female, we cannot tell; it does not matter; and vacant sockets where eyes were once, staring blankly. It contains nothing, is merely the husk left behind when that which grows within it grows on, and goes.

“Fodder for worms,” the corpse sings pleasantly, “and if I’m lucky, a blossom or two.”

And yet you sing, I feel Little One thinking, as if the soul that gave you life lived in you still.

“Ah, but there is another kind of song,” the corpse says in answer to Little One’s unspoken thoughts — “that which lives on eternally, through the things of the physical world. The trees remember it, and the rivers, and the stars —” And in the empty sockets of its eyes we think for a moment we see sunlit skies, and from the gaping gash that had once been a mouth we think we hear the song of leaves blowing in the breeze, of grasses growing.

“The soul that lived within me is long since gone,” it continues. “And yet, what joy we brought each other! . . . And now, I wait for the moment when I, all empty, return to inhabiting everything that once inhabited me. . . . Have you met my brother? — it is he whose foolish sighing stirs and awakens the winds of the chasm, and makes the monkeys yammer so . . .”

With these words we see for the first time that around the corpse’s neck the hangman’s noose is looped three times, an umbilical cord, tethering the corpse to its gallows. And we see that the tether of the hangman’s noose, the cord of life, is actually the ribbon of the road on which we walk, and it is to the Way that the corpse is tethered, and not the gallows. This — or else the Way tethers us all to something else.

We cannot tell. We do not know. It does not matter.

Suddenly I remember that we cannot, must not stay here by the chasm, and I urge Little One onward. But there is no bridge, and she is afraid.

“The Way is forward,” I remind her, “toward the Center. Toward Home.”

“Even so,” she insists, “here is where our greater safety lies, it seems, and our comfort . . .”

Like fat soft overripe plums her words fall at her feet and roll toward the edge of the chasm. With a shout of glee the corpse stretches out one black stick of an arm and snatches the words up and flings them, one at a time, into the void, calling out their names as he does so, first “Safety!” and then “Comfort!,” as if exhorting twin demons. And for the moment in which the words are falling into its throat, the voice of the chasm is stilled.

“Very well,” I say to Little One. “We may rest here a while. But we may not stay.”

We rest, and dream, and in our dreams we see that the corpse’s face and body wither, and parch, and burn, and crumble to ash and dust. Waking, we know the danger in staying longer, and step forth toward the chasm and the gabbling, grabbing hands stretching above it. We cannot stay, I remind Little One in her wordless fear. The Way is forward. And at the moment our feet reach beyond the chasm’s edge and we believe we must certainly fall, the bridge that was always there rises to meet us, the monkey-leeches vanish in a breath of smoke, and we are crossing.

***

The bridge that bears us over the chasm is transparent, and at first we think it a mirror, because as we step foot onto it, beneath our feet, as if in reflection, two travelers very much like ourselves are at the same moment stepping onto the underside of the bridge, but upside down. We laugh, believing it an illusion, and we wave, and they also wave, and foot to matching footstep we cross the invisible bridge over the great silent chasm, as if we are walking on the upturned soles of their feet, or they are suspended from ours. The bridge across the chasm is an unspooling ribbon, the same ribbon that tethers the corpse to its gallows, the babe to the womb. And for a moment we think perhaps the ribbon has twisted on itself as it unspools and we are now the travelers on the otherside. Then we laugh, and the two reflected travelers laugh also — so very like us, the younger and brighter, the darker and wise — as if they have at the same moment thought the same thought, seen the same illusion.

Night becomes dawn, and dawn day, and still the Way unfolds in its eternal twilight. Moving now east and now west, now north and now south, as dictated by the winding of the Way, knowing always that the Way leads ultimately in one direction only, and that is forward, and toward one destination, and that is the Home which lies at the Center, within the heart of the Crystal Virgin, and the Turning beyond which leads again to the Edge.

And still as we walk I see beside us, passing us, shades and shadows, remnants of our other journeys, and below and above us the shades of those traveling Ways of their own.

Little One does not see them, these others, and thinks we are alone, thinks the Way we walk is the only one, thinks this our first journey.

“Look,” I call to her, “did you not see? There — look, Little One, with your eyes if you would understand. There we are, just to the side, in the shadows — the others, the ones we once were, and will yet be.”

“Where, Sister?” Little One cries out. But she is looking to the left, not the right, and before she can turn her head the Way has folded again, and that which I would have her see has vanished with the turning.

When I tell her so, she weeps.

“Never mind,” I say in comfort. “The Way will bring us here again, and perhaps when it does . . . perhaps then you’ll see.”

But I know it is not so, has never been so, will never be.

***

And now, it is Little One who calls out, “Look! Someone has been this Way before us, and dropped something,” and stooping to the path she picks up what she finds there. “Look,” she repeats, holding out to me a glove, for the left hand. It is a perfect match for the gloves she wears. Seeing no need for it she is about to discard it when I say, “Keep it, Little One, and bring it with you. You may yet have need of what the journey gives you in this moment.” Little One tucks the glove into her pocket, happy again, and we continue on.

We walk, and before long we come to a crossing. It is as if the ribbon of the Way has folded over across itself, and it is not clear which direction we are to take. But in the center of the crossing we see a signpost; it has fallen on its side in the dust. Carefully Little One raises the signpost up and with the left glove she had found and tucked into her pocket she wipes the signpost clean. Together we trace the letters carved on it: THE WAY OUT, they read, and the arrow that follows them points up.

“Well, then,” Little One says, and turns the signpost over, and wipes clean the other side, where we read, THE WAY IN, and see another arrow, also pointing up.

Clearly one side of the signpost directs travelers on the path we are traveling, and the other on the neighboring path that has risen up from nowhere at the crossing. But which is which, we cannot tell. Nor, for the moment, can we recall which path brought us to the crossing, or even if our path is that of the Way In or the Way Out, to the Edge or to the Center.

“Where do we go now?” Little One asks, and before I can answer a voice calls to us, as if from a great height and very far away:

“Bring us the stone!”

***

For the first time we notice that the crossing lies at the foot of a great hill, and at the bottom of the hill rests a great grey boulder, half as tall as I and round as a breadloaf. And at the top of the hill, peering down, two figures — travelers like us — the taller of whom calls out, again:

“Bring us the stone!”

“Why?” we call back. “‘Why should we pause on our journey to do this thing at your bidding?”

“Because,” the taller traveler replies, “it is what you have come to do.”

So we do it.

For hours we labor, my Little One and I, to push the large stone up the hill while the two travelers watch silently from the crest. The hill is steep, and the work is hard, but at last we are finished, and the great grey stone now safely at the top we are settling ourselves to rest when the taller traveler reaches out one leg and with a single swift kick sends the boulder tumbling and bouncing once again to the bottom of the hill.

“Why do you roll the stone down the hill again,” we ask, “after all our labors to bring it up to you?”

“So it will be ready for us the next time we come this Way,” the taller traveler answers.

“Then why,” Little One wants to know, “did you have us move it in the first place?”

And again, the reply: “Because it was what you had come to do.”

It is always the same, the Way. The Way is always the same. And so it is.

“Greetings,” the taller traveler says to us now, and holds out a hand. “Have you come far?”

I take the offered hand in mine and hold it for a moment. “Not so far,” I say. “Not this time.”

It is almost as if we look into a mirror to see these two, they are so like us, my Little One and me, but fresh and full of vigor, while we are already ragged and weary from the journey. Little One is surprised to see that her counterpart wears a headpiece of daffodils and hyacinths — a gift, she is told, for the Dark Goddess who dwells at the Edge. Little One shows off her own necklet of amethyst and opal that is the gift she bears for the Crystal Virgin.

“But see,” Little One says, “you have lost a glove — the right one. I have an extra, I found it on the Way, and would gladly share it with you — but it is for the left hand, not the right.”

The small traveler smiles in gratitude, and touches Little One’s cheek, saying, “You are so like us. It is as if I know you, and full well . . . was it you we saw walking beneath us on the bridge over the chasm, crossing on the underside as we crossed above?”

“No,” Little One replies. “It was we who crossed above, and only our shadows that walked below us.”

But suddenly we are no longer certain which side of the bridge we walked, nor yet of our destination or even the path to choose from the crossing. To the Edge? — or to the Center? — the Way In? or the Way Out? — As we ponder this dilemma, the four of us, I remember the black pearl given by the Dark Goddess to guide our way, and they, too — the other travelers — remember that the Crystal Virgin had given them a white pearl, and we realize that with these two gifts we will be able to determine the way to go. We find our pearls and lay them side by side at the top of the hill, and discover to our amazement that they cannot be distinguished one from the other.

“Look,” they say. “Our pearl was purest white when the Crystal Virgin gave it us, at our journey’s birth. But see now how dim it has become with our travels.”

“And ours — ours was deepest black when our journey began,” we say. “But see the light with which it shines now, after all this way!”

***

Which path to choose? Still we do not know. So Little One takes up the pearl of the others, and the small traveler so like her takes up the pearl that had been ours, and each casts her pearl down the slope of the long hill. One rolls to the east and one to the west, and with a whisper and a wish we follow — two travelers toward morning, and two toward night. No more sure than before of our destination, but certain now of our path, we follow the pearl, Little One and I, as it rolls before us over green glade and desert, river and sea, and all the long hours and ages of the Way unfold beneath us like a great drowsing beast stirring fitfully and grumbling in its sleep.

Walking the Way awakens dreams, and in her dream Little One sees before us, just ahead, the Center, she thinks. She cries out with pleasure and reaches a hand as if to catch it, this long-sought place of light and song. But at the very moment of her reaching, our path turns sharply away, snatching the treasure from her grasp. Awake now, her outstretched hand empty, Little One twists backward, straining to see behind her, to glimpse again what her dreaming showed her and the Way denied. But of course she sees nothing, for there is nothing to see. And she holds her empty hand to me, unbelieving, and cries, “We were so near it . . . we were so near . . .” and weeps piteously for what she never held, but lost nonetheless. Her tears tumble to the ground like a swarm of tiny hot-mouthed mice, hundreds and hundreds of them, which now diligently set about devouring from beneath us the very pathway on which we walk. In moments — even less — the soil and grass and gravel vanish into the bellies of the myriad hungry mice, and the mice, too, are gone, swallowed in turn by the belly of the great gaping hole which their own teeth have carved and into which Little One and I now find ourselves falling.

Downward, downward we fall, as if our path has led us here, tumbling and floating and sliding deeper and deeper into the belly of the earth, until at last we come to rest before what seems to be a trapdoor constructed of cobwebs and dust, and the great blind two-faced beast who stands before it.

“Greetings to thee, Guardian,” I say, for we have met before, he and I; the memory of our meetings like salt in the seas of my very lifeblood. At the sound of my voice he turns toward us, this sightless creature, showing us his moonface, white and ridged and distant, and in his familiar honeyed voice he says, “Greetings also to thee, old friend, and welcome.” For he, too, remembers. “And who is it,” he asks gently, “who comes with you this time, on this walking of your Way?”

Of her own accord and without hesitation Little One steps forward in the face of this deep, strange beast and puts her hand to his unseeing eye. At her touch he sighs, as if stirred by ancient, troubling dreams. “Please,” she says, my brave, foolish Little One. “We are lost on our journey. Will you tell us . . . do you know . . . is this the way to the Center, or to the Edge?”

The Guardian smiles, although his moonface has no mouth, and shakes his head. “Do you not know even now that they are one and the same?” he says sadly. “You have forgotten, sweet child, what you have always known: That on this path, no one can ever be lost. There is only one Way, and that is forward, and only one destination, and that is Home.”

“So I have taught her,” I say, but Little One is not listening. “Home . . .” she repeats, with great longing in her voice. “That is where I want to go.”

“Then so you must,” the beast tells her; yet still it seems she does not hear, as she continues:

“But the journey is so . . . is so very . . .”

“No, Little One,” I break in sharply, seeking to stop her, stop what can never be stopped – has never been stopped. “Do not say it, do not speak the words . . .”

But heedless of my warning she completes her sentence: “. . . so very long, and hard . . .”

No, I repeat silently, but too late, the words have escaped, and they dance now in the dank and gloom like fireflies, mocking: . . . long . . . hard . . .

“As you speak it,” my old friend says, “so must it be,” and I sigh and murmur: So must it always be, when we choose to see it so. And with one turn of his massive body the beast swings wide the trapdoor of cobwebs and dust, and steps aside, saying, “Prepare then to leave the realm of the Dark Goddess, and enter that of her sister the Crystal Virgin, who like the Way is always one and the same.”

Do we step forward, Little One and I, and enter through the door of cobweb and dust? Do we walk on our own into the Virgin’s realm, the Nether World?

No.

No, but we stand still together, hand in hand, and the great door the Guardian has opened moves toward us, like the gaping mouth of a hungry beast moving toward prey, or the mouth of a suckling babe toward its mother’s breast, seeking life. In a breath, a heartbeat, we are swallowed whole, embraced entire by the soft flesh of the Nether World, that which like myth itself never was, yet has always been.

East of dawn and west of sunset, on the far side of forever.

***

I know this place for what it is; but Little One, still green, unbruised, does not. Her blood does not yet burn nor her belly groan with the awakening soul-dark Knowing of the What, or of its older twin, the Why. Mine does. My blood rises in rosy conflagration at the Knowing, searing, scorching my skin from the inside; my belly is sick with it, sickens for it, this Knowing, and dies a little, then dies a little more. I fall to my knees, weeping. The tears hiss and steam against the inferno that my flesh has become, and stream, juices of my broken heart, in pools and puddles around me.

“Little One,” I whisper, “save me,” but she does not hear. Still green, unbruised, she cannot. Instead, she dances, she sings. For her, this place is a garden, shining, bright; I know this, for I have seen it so myself, on another walking. And even now, even in the pure hell of my Knowing, I see through remembered unbruised eyes the perfect heaven of hers.

She dances, as I weep, and together her dancing and my weeping birth the Way, step by step, as together joy and sorrow have always done. And even as I weep I walk, while Little One dances, because it is the Way and we can but follow its call. Twilight turns to night, and night to day, and still the Way unfolds before us, and rises to embrace us; and as we walk, and weep, or dance, our own shades and shadows walk beside us, glimmering, wavering, reflections on glossy water; and above us and below us glimmer the shades of those who walk other Ways.

As I have done.

For many days — or perhaps moments only, I cannot tell — Little One has danced and sung without ceasing. It is as if the Crystal Goddess has bestowed upon her the silent song that thrums in her young throat, that flashes between her feet. Beware this song, I wish to say. It will set your heart aflame, and burn you up. I say nothing, of course. And of course Little One would have heard nothing even had I chosen to speak, so loudly does the silent song sing through her. But I notice with surprise that my weeping has ceased; I do not remember when; and my once-tears, turned molten in pools and puddles, for some time had been flowing at our feet in a lovely little stream, glinting silver in imagined starlight and chuckling a sweet silver song all its own.

I had forgotten. In my Knowing of the sorrow, I had forgotten the Knowing of joy. I had forgotten that even as sorrow and joy must come together for the birthing of the Way, so does one become the other in its walking.

Forgotten that, on the Way, all things are one and the same.

Once, in moonlight, something unseen reaches out and snatches at the necklet Little One wears about her throat — gift of the Dark Goddess for her sister at the Center — and the silver spider’s-thread of moonbeam breaks, and the gems spatter down around my Little One’s feet like lavender-grey raindrops and vanish in the dust of the Way.

I do not see it happen, do not know the What of it, much less the Why; the hand that snatched has vanished too — an errant angry thought perhaps, a nightbird’s beak, the twig of a twilight tree. We do not know. It does not matter. Together on our knees we gather them up again, the amethysts and opals; and Little One sets about restringing them along the length of a new moonbeam, but finds her gloved fingers clumsy, inept. And weeping with fear and frustration she cries to me, “I do not know, Sister! Do not remember how these twilight gifts of the Dark Goddess are to fit together . . . can you not help me?”

I cannot. It is not given me to do this for her. And so I reply, “Do what you know to do, Little One.”

“But how are they to go?” she weeps. “I have forgotten. The opals to the outside, or in? — Amethysts to the right, or left?”

“Do what you know to do,” I repeat, the dust of the Way sifting thick and silky on my tongue. “Out or in, right or left, my Little One — to the Crystal Virgin it is all the same.”

***

With trembling fingers she tends to the task, with slow success, the gems slipping in her grasp, sliding from the moonbeam, like thoughts or naughty children, until at last there is only one remaining, an opal. But even as she stretches out one gloved hand toward it, the opal rolls away as if by will and tumbles into the stream of sorrows and comes to rest on the bottom, gleaming up at us from beneath the waters like the moonface of the Guardian, smiling, blind. She reaches for it, dipping her gloved hand into the star-dappled water, but before she can take up the gem a great grey fish slips from the shadows and snatches the opal from her grasp, in one instant catching the tip of Little One’s glove and drawing the glove off, leaving her fingers both barren and bare, and in the next instant swims away again, bearing with it glove and gem alike.

Now Little One weeps in genuine despair, and I kiss the tip of her finger where a droplet of wine-red blood glimmers, mark of the fish’s needle-teeth, which with my kiss becomes a gemstone — a garnet. I tell her, “Hush, my beloved. For see! — the creature of the stream of sorrows has taken from you one gift, and given another. And the glove lost has made way for the one you found . . . there! What did I tell you? Are you not glad you brought with you that which the Way would give you, to make ready for that which it was already preparing to take?”

And so it is. So is it always on the Way — the giving, the taking; the finding, the losing; and it is all the same. It is all the same.

Night becomes dawn, and dawn day, and still the Way unfolds in eternal twilight — no longer a path, solid beneath our weary feet, but only the moving waters of the stream of sorrows, a silver singing ribbon drawing us ever onward, ever forward, to our one destination, toward Home — and the Turning at the Center that will lead us out again. It twists, and turns, and tangles, like a witch’s knot, or a lover’s. And Little One grows weary of walking. How long? she wants to know. How long, and when, and why? It makes no sense, the Way.

“Those who walk it cannot see the sense of it,” I tell her, “not while they walk. And yet it is the Way you have chosen.”

“Is this not the only Way there is?”

“For now, yes,” I say. “In this moment. For this is the Way you chose at the last Turning.”

She sighs, her breath a feather on the breath of all time. “And how often,” she wants to know, “must we walk it?”

It is her hundredth asking of this question, always the same. And my hundredth answer, always the same: “Until you choose otherwise, my Little One. Until you choose otherwise.”

Or so we have chosen to believe.

For in a dream, beyond the drawn-down curtain of day-become-night, we sleep — but only for a moment.

And in that moment, we are Come. We are There — at the Center.

And for the hundredth time I see, in this moment, not our hundredth time of Coming, but our first.

And so the journey goes. So it is now, has ever been and will be, evermore, in the land of shadows and mirrors we call the Way.