An Altered State of Mind: Parables of an Alchemist

“An Altered State of Mind: Parables of an Alchemist”

Part 1—The Dragon and the Muse

At three in the morning, the darkness feels permanent. My partner breathes deep in her dreams, while the dragon is tightly curled in the warmth of his corner pile of blankets. The night had frozen in place. Against reason, my body left its warmth in my lover’s bed. My feet braced against the floor’s cold surprise of my presence. Even with thirty years of familiarity, my feet shuffled in protection and my hands groped for assurance. The labyrinthine walk through the hundred years of hallways and down the twisted stairs, left me staring out a frosty kitchen window into night’s grip of blackness. I am fearful of my comfort with the darkness; but I don’t want to disturb the feeling of being disturbed.

On All Hallows Eve, my internal clock rolled over to remind my soul that I’ve traveled around the sun 65 times. On that first pilgrimage day, long ago at the exact same in the morning, my dad left my frightened and bleeding mom on the doctor’s back room table. He had been instructed to fetch the nurse from another Oklahoma farmhouse down the road. My trickster-treat nearly killed my mother.

Pondering the darkness of this cold morning, I wondered if it wouldn’t be better if the sun never came up again. At least we might not be subjected to the continual onslaught of emotional terror; mass shootings at synagogues, churches, schools, civil service offices, concerts, and local bars, all too familiar hate crimes, racism exercised from authority figures with weapons, homophobia and the of the denied rights of transgender people, the fear evoked from the non-threat of the oppressed in a walking caravan 900 miles away, a war-torn man-made famine that is starving millions, abandoned refugees, global unrest, and mentally unstable leadership. Nothing feels “great” and I tremble at the past horrors that might happen “again.” I can feel the apocalyptic horse coming to collect her due for those who falsely assume they are the bride.

My depression headed South. My head throbbed. I needed coffee and medication. But I couldn’t stand to be blinded by artificial light. Instead, I sat in the dark and waited to see if the sun actually made another appearance before caffeinating and medicating. If, perchance, the king chose to hide on the other side of the horizon—I had been practicing my blind man’s shuffle.

The dragon stirred. I could hear him begin his serpentine journey through the darkened house. His name is Jesus Jameson, and he’s been living with us for thirteen years. He lost his eyes three years ago. I just heard him bump into the credenza down the hall. For some reason he always bangs his head on the same furniture. The familiarity of pain, I guess. Jesus is headed for the back door, evidently, he needed the old man’s nightly relief. He wound his way under my chair, reminding me, that if I ever wrote anything again, I should say that though he looks like a Jack Russell—he acts like a fire breathing dragon. He might be the prophetic image of my future. Maybe the thought of such things has caused the words of my soul to wander aimlessly for a time.

I intentionally stopped working on a book two years ago when I began the stint as an interim pastor. My spiritual guide suggested that working with people in such pain could bleed into my writing. At first, I shrugged him off. But after deleting a few dozen pages of garbage, the book went on sabbatical. I kept writing sermons and the occasional book review. That seemed like an amenable way to assuage the muse. I assumed she was hanging around, though I hadn’t seen her since I had stopped working on my book. Two months ago, I decided to stop writing sermons because I rarely ever looked at my notes when delivering the message. The paper I held was more like a pneumonic device or a talisman, prompting my memory. But an unexpected consequence of not writing the sermons revealed that the muse had either gone away or was taking a very long nap. I had been keeping my journal, my notebooks, and recording my dreams, but the muse must have been bored—she was silent.

On All Hallows Eve, I woke up with the words “The Dragon and the Muse” circling through my mind. I laid in bed a while thinking I might go back to sleep. But then I heard a familiar voice threaten me with, “write it or lose it.” I wasn’t going to take a chance. I had no idea what those words meant, but I scratched them in my notebook and stared into the darkness, waiting.

The dragon wandered back into the house. He banged his head on the credenza. He probably went back to bed. I thought about following him, now that I had the odd words tucked away in my notebook and nothing else seemed to be flowing.

And then I heard something stirring at the back of the house. It sounded like someone with an aged body painfully struggling their way down the hallway. Maybe the dragon was teaching someone to walk in the dark? I wondered what Jesus felt like when he couldn’t heal the blind man on the first pass.

And then I felt a presence engulf the room. A wave of brilliance radiated into my darkness; so intense I could see nothing but her glory. The Muse has awakened and she had been transmuted into the Queen of the Crone Forest, Mother of the Black Sun. She gained power as she drank my lusty need to know her again.

Euphoria arose from an empty cold cave deep within my body. The room spun but the Muse caught me before I tumbled into nothingness.

“My love,” she whispered. “Can you see me?”

“Strangely so,” I said.

“The eye of your imagination has been liberated. Come, follow me into the realm beyond this reality.”

She flowed into the Light of the Darkness, me clutching her warm dark gentle hand. “Look,” she said. And I witnessed her swallowing the rising sun.

We stepped into altered consciousness—the realm of the seen and unseen, the real and the imagined, the dead and the living—where what could be is becoming.