Cracks in the silence

The glass splinters, the words move

Begin

“Start writing…” is the prompt, and indeed, start I shall. Or rather, restart. I once wrote, but a year ago my pen disappeared from my pocket on Rottnest Island. It was a Kaweco pocket fountain pen and went with me everywhere. When it left, my writing left too.

Splinter

Today I discovered a splinter in my heel. It seems to have been a new thing, I had not felt it before this morning. It hurt when I put my weight in just the wrong spot. I could see the splinter, a dark shadow on a grimy foot, but it would not budge. I walked warily, awaiting the stab of pain.

This evening, Natasha removed the splinter. It was a shard of glass, well embedded. I felt new born.

A return

A few months after losing my pen, I found parts of the same Kaweco only missing a nib. I have a vague recollection of once needing to buy a whole pen for its nib, and keeping the nib-less pen. I contacted Kaweco agents in Australia for a nib. They said they would order it in. I didn’t hear from them for over 6 months and forgot about it.

Two weeks ago they emailed me. The replacement nib was available. I ordered the nib, refillable ink cartridge. Both arrived in short order. My pen is back in pocket where it always was, filled with red ink. And my words have returned.

Open bracket

The past year of silence has been a year of reflection and a year of action. I have had nothing to say, but plenty to do. I have built things, the foundations for a community, a new home, water supply, tree breaks.

I have reflected on grandiosity. A persistent theme in recent psychedelic journeys was myself as saviour of the world, and myself as the Storyteller creating reality. I avoided psychedelics for the year to avoid these grandiose delusions. And the saviour retreated into his bunker, the Storyteller fell into silence.

Questions

What right do I have to express myself in a world perhaps over-saturated with voices? Who needs this additional voice flung into the shouting storm? And what do I have to say that hasn’t been said before?

Close bracket

It just might be true that the psychedelics spoke true, not of grandiosity, but of a deeper truth that hides in plain sight. It is the power of each and every one of us to write our own reality, to save our own world, that our power is far greater than we ever dare imagine.

That the world is formed from the words we weave, the seeds we sow, the magic we send forth in a willing Universe. We are all and always divine, creator and created, witness of that which begs to be witnessed.

A vision

There is something that has pressed on my chest since I first felt it several years ago. A vision. A vision of wholeness, of villages and cities and solitary hermits, all given to the exaltation of the place within which they find themselves.

A crystalline light formed from the nurture of a place, light that spins out to mesh with others, weaving together a world more beautiful than could ever be imagined. A world that exists because it can be imagined, that becomes real as it is spoken into being.

Opacity

This is not intended to be clear, a guidebook to follow. Nor is it even a call for followers. It is, instead, a writing into reality a world that wants to be born. I feel it moving down the birth canal. We all do, even if for some it looks like the apocalypse or disaster or the end of the world.

It is all of these.

A creation

The world that wants to be born needs to be first imagined into existence. The alchemists knew it all along. The imaginal realm is far more powerful than its dismissal as fantasy would suggest.

Imagination is the root of creation, the creative force that beckons in dreams, in visions, in the millions of synchronicities and miracles that populate our every single day. It IS creation.

By imagining the world I’ve been brought here to become, I create the world that becomes.

And so I write. Once again.