From the Rift — Story

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1. By the Lake

Where thoughts drift

Looking out at a small lake, I watched the black ducks drifting.

>{1} They are so much smaller than back home.

The light wind from the east created gentle wave patterns on the lake in front of the gray palace, where botany from all over the world was at home.

Perhaps a sign that the world is large, yet somehow becoming smaller.

Another thought drifted through my head.

Back to the stars
back into the expanses and depths
of our being

The windows of the gray palace were fogged over from the humidity within and the cool single-digit air outside. The green of the plants shimmered through only as vague outlines. Everything around me was artificial, artificially beautiful. The sun was shining, warming me through my black coat that fell past my knees. A group of teenagers sat down beside me, perhaps already young adults. I did not even look up. They spoke a language I could not understand, and never would. To my left, an old lady in a purple-yellow jacket, a complete lapse in taste from where I stood, was lecturing her grandchild. The girl was hopping skillfully across the stones by the water.

A question cut through my sinking into thought:

Why are old people so afraid something might happen? If nothing happens, are we even living?

A small smile crossed my face and I sank deeper into my world.

In the end, neither left nor right held any interest. The athletic girl and the boys beside me existed only at the edge of my peripheral vision, though I still gave them the attention they required. Most of my focus was on my phone screen.

System: Mail received - Importance: very high

The message had appeared two minutes ago.

>{2} I felt it was time to sink deep. Once again, I was grateful for my phone's special capabilities. Right now, no one should know how much I communicate, or with whom.

>{3} Instead of getting up and rushing to the nearest metro station, I closed my eyes and enjoyed the stillness of my own world, the one that opens within me when I turn my attention inward.

II. Color of the Soul

Years ago I had an encounter that began with a question and ended in empty space. The question kept me thinking for a surprisingly long time before I gave an answer.

>{3} Intuitively, the answer was clear to me at once.

I had closed my eyes only briefly - *everything as always in my inner world* - and after letting my gaze drift, I saw a gray figure. The outlines were blurred. I could see without making anything out. I knew no other world before my inner eye.

Admittedly, I hadn't really thought about it; I just wanted to sink briefly into my world, and that process simply takes some time. Only when she asked again:

She: And? What color would you describe yourself as?

and clarified:

She: And I don't mean your favorite color.

I said, in a stoic tone:

I: Gray. It was so, it is so, and it will always be so.

Weeks later, after trust had built through hours of shared experience, during a platonic visit to her small basement flat, she showed me a little book. In it she had written the same roughly two-hundred-word text hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in handwriting that was tiny in places but always beautiful. She wrote it every night, truly every one. No page had a square centimeter of space. Every corner, every gap, every margin she had filled with this text. It was hauntingly beautiful. She would not let the book leave her hands. She only leafed through it for a long moment in front of me, this book so clearly precious to her. She never gave me the chance to read the text she wrote every night, not even when I asked.

Perhaps she sensed I was not yet ready.

One thing I have known since that night her book fell into my world -
no matter how gray-ve the world, a good soul never loses its color.

She revealed to me her answer to the question from weeks before; her soul color was not black or white. Nor gray. With the vision of her book rushing past my inner eye, I surfaced again and looked at the message for the third time, still flashing on my phone screen.

My intuition told me: >{4} you don't need to open it. You know its content, you know the lines.

I opened it anyway. I looked at my gray screen and let the message slowly drift past me.

At every crossroads she stands
Not always do you take her path
And if she does not go with you
I come from the darkness
From the shelter of the shadowy forest
I pull her from you
From you into the depths
Darker than the night
She sees your dream
Does not understand what you mean
Take heed - I am not your friend
Yet wait in the empty space
Meeting at half past seven

When the last line had fallen into my depths, I felt an emptiness inside.

>{5} It looked blue-gray to me, with a grainy background of dark gray-green. Calm chaos, somehow. Stormy stillness. If this emptiness could be described at all, it would be like that.

III. Beautiful Memory

It didn't take long for the emptiness to fill again. I had no desire yet to resurface and lingered in my gray. The message had to rise deeper within me to the gray landscapes of my being. Sink to the summit and climb up into the valley. Suddenly, I thought of my grandfather.

I remember little of what my grandfather told me - he died too young, from the mines. Grandmother said he used to say: *"The work has dyed my lungs and soul the color of the mountains."*

Grandmother: He may be right. Only he knows why.

But I remember very well a few lines from him, directed at me. He must have told them to me on the second Christmas evening, not long before my fourth birthday. I often dreamed of it, sometimes even today. He sat in his simple wooden armchair with minimal padding, which is why there were always at least three checkered, folded wool blankets there. I sat on his lap and he bounced me with a smooth movement of his right thigh. He looked at the Christmas tree, where about twenty real candles, three-quarters burned down, cast warm golden-yellow light into the room. He had just begun to sip his second glass of wine of the evening. The rest of the family had gathered in the kitchen a few minutes earlier for a crisis committee due to problems with the gas stove. I was alone with him in the living room. Suddenly he said:

Grandfather: Listen to me.

I looked at him and we held each other's gaze for an endless moment before he began to speak. I had stopped playing with the two wooden blocks in my hands, eager to hear what would come.

Grandfather: People think black is death and terror - white the light and the good - and green nature brings the color.

He paused, longer this time.

Grandfather: But I tell you - no matter how dark and deep the black void seems, at its depth it is gray. No matter how bright and blinding the white light, at its height it is gray. No matter how colorful nature - beautiful violence brings its patterns back to gray, here and there trimmed in color. In your eyes I see beauty in the cruel. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen. When my time comes, my soul's vortex is yours.

We were still looking deeply into each other's eyes when he finished. I intuitively took my right index finger and held it up, blocks in my left. He set his glass on the windowsill and, with his right index finger extended toward the sky, made a flowing motion downward, slowly letting his arm sink past the armrest until the finger pointed completely downward, toward the floor.

That must be how it happened, because I saw it over and over in my dreams. So often I woke just as his arm sank past the armrest. He died a few months later, shortly before my birthday.

>{3} I felt no grief. His death left me indifferent. I knew he was still with me.

I was he, he was I,
and yet we both
are so much more.

So it was, so it is,
so it will always be.

IV. The Melody Resounds

I had sunk deep enough. Slowly I opened my eyes again. The gray gave way to a blue-gray lake, the glassy botany palace with its fogged windows to my right, the now-deserted stones to my left. I looked up and gazed into the distance, over a stone bridge toward a small hill beyond. The trees a muted red, here and there a few muted greens or yellows - it was winter, after all. I looked higher, into the sky, a pale gray-blue.

>{1} Something seemed off.

I turned around. The sun still shone in full brilliance, just as when I had arrived at the park, not a cloud in the sky. I turned back toward the hill.

>{2} Something was definitely off.

I stared up at the cloudless sky again. For minutes. It was the colors. They were all muted. Gray.

>{3} Not sure if I was back in the reality of the outer world or still in my gray inner one.

I closed my eyes again. Everything a dull gray once more. I shook my head, and chaotic patterns in shades of gray flowed into my world. After a short while, I opened my eyes anew. And the colors? ..radiant once more, yes the colors, no longer dull, no longer with those gray depths and streaks.

The phone was still in my hands. I looked at the black screen, pressed the side button with my thumb - no message on my lock screen. I entered my ten-digit code: numbers, Arabic and Cyrillic characters, and at the end one of personal value from the language of the North.

>{1} It reminded me of a fir tree, with a small bend at the lower right edge.

Then the fingerprint. Then another iris scan.

>{2} Surprised to find no new text on either of my two prepaid SIMs or the four eSIMs, I opened my mailbox. It was still deep night at the main office; no messages should have come through, my assignment was clear.

The loading process - bouncing through satellites, private servers, a clever chain of networks - a true Iain cyber-labyrinth - took its time.

I looked once more at the water before me, then up the hill, then into the cloudless sky - the colors radiant.

>{2} I was in reality.

I swung my gaze back to the screen and saw exactly one new message.

Incoming: Subject - Change of Plan // Going Hunting - received 2 minutes ago.

V. Tea in the Smog

I loved the hunt. It fulfilled my being, and unlike most hunting practices, our goal was not to kill or weaken our prey. Often, finding and scouting it was pointless. It was not a classical hunt, and the methods we used were our own. Our prey did not camouflage itself with natural patterns in its surroundings. It hid behind uncertainty and multiplicity in the chaos of the modern world. Often found, but never caught.

>{2} The state, which loves order and hates chaos, usually dismisses our prey as insignificant - here and there, as evil.

Surely you wonder what we did with our prey once we had it on the line. My boss, who was also my closest confidant and hunting companion in the virtual cyber world, said something at our last meeting in person - at a chai stand near the airport in New Delhi - that still echoes in me today. I had met Iain only twice in my life, and I have my doubts whether that is his real name.

>{4} What I never doubted was his good heart.

The last meeting with him had not started well. The hunt was unsuccessful, we had been outplayed - *completely fucked over* - and in the end I was nearly taken out. You could also say they wanted to get rid of me while I was visiting one of my contacts in Rishikesh, in a side alley between a Hindu temple and a yoga resort, with a view of the breathtaking sandy banks of the Ganges. The holy river, which rises high in the Gangotri Glacier of the Himalayas and winds down into the jungle, passing Rishikesh on its right before heading east.

>{1} Fortunately, the river is not yet completely polluted this close to its source.

In that alley I was talking with an instrument maker; he built strange-looking guitars, sitars. The sitar had dozens of strings and looked like an overcomplicated, bulky acoustic guitar. From my four previous visits I knew that not all strings were played - the majority served for resonance.

>{2} Fascinating instrument.

I was looking at a particularly worn one standing in the corner while listening to the instrument maker describe his observations from the past few days, when intuition struck me. My stomach cramped, and I knew I had to run. I moved slowly toward the window, and when I heard the door creak below, I knew there was only one way out. My intuition saved me - that, and the jump into the raging Ganges. I nearly drowned in it, and again it was my intuition, and of course the raft full of rich Indians from Mumbai, that saved me.

>{2} Tourism is somehow also a form of pilgrimage.

How did I get back to Delhi? Through the jungle, then over and through the foothills of the Himalayas, more or less, hitchhiking in overcrowded Jeeps, overloaded trucks, and on the back seat of an old iconic motorcycle whose name the young driver enthusiastically tried to drill into me. I had deliberately not taken the direct route back to Delhi to cover my tracks. At the end of my motorcycle ride, I felt sick from all the curves of the mountain roads, and I had arrived in Mussoorie with great detours. I pressed a few bills into the driver's hand, for the ride and to do me one last favor: Order a taxi to take me to Delhi.

Fortunately the taxi driver was silent the entire seven and a half hours, and dropped me at the roadside three kilometers from the airport - we had gotten stuck in the absolutely insane rush hour traffic of Delhi. On my way to the roadside I was honked at only seven times and nearly run over three times, when a hand appeared from nowhere and pulled me toward a thela - a simple wooden cart with an improvised roof of blue plastic sheeting. It was a small chai stand that also sold some vegetables. There were countless such carts in Delhi. And suddenly I stood before him. He was dressed entirely in black. Black sneakers, black pants, black hoodie, black cap pulled low over his face, black breathing mask - only his eyes were visible.

Perplexed, I spoke, after what felt like an eternity of making sure it really was Iain standing before me:

I: What the goddamned fuck. I almost died. I want to leave this hunting shit behind me. My hunt keeps turning into a flight.

Iain: You cannot leave me and the hunt behind. Our patterns will echo into eternity. How do you think I found you? Do you know why we do this shit?

A moment of emptiness hung between us, in which we both looked into the depths of the other's soul through the gate of the eyes, before he continued:

Iain: We hunt seemingly evil people because the necessary task of bringing balance to the world is a thankless one.

I was still looking into the emptiness, and he continued speaking.

Iain: I can express it more beautifully so that it reaches you. We seek stars because the sky is not enough for the balance between good and evil.

Still gazing into the empty space behind his eyes, where the flow of a person from past through present into future is reflected, I lowered my head slightly and closed my eyes for a moment - a gesture of assent.

>{4} It was too deep for words.

Iain reached into his pocket and pressed a small gray package into my right hand. He spoke quietly:

Iain: Sometimes the flow rests in the darkness, but it never stands still.

It came from my depths; I answered gently:

I: So darkness is a friend of our hunt?! Our shadows have apparently met in the depths for good reason.

With our hands slightly raised upward, we shook, pulled each other closer, and paused briefly in the embrace, with lowered heads. Then we went in opposite directions, but both through the dirt and smog of the beautifully chaotic Delhi.

VI. Angling

Turning my attention back to the email from Iain, which had arrived three minutes ago, I opened it. A single sentence.

Iain (Email): Follow the melody; you can hear it.

>{2} I heard nothing yet - perhaps my frequency was not properly tuned.

Iain must have picked up a signal or pattern, and I trusted him. I stood, glanced at the patterns in the stone I had sat on for so long, and made my way back toward the metro station. Not thirty meters walked, heading toward the bridge I had been staring at, when a girl came toward me. Her little brother was right behind her, holding their father's hand. The girl had a light step, a bright smile, and a small blue speaker dangling from her neck.

>{1} A speaker?

I pricked up my ears and listened. After a few seconds I realized she was learning English. From her speaker came a mythological epic, a fantasy masterpiece of Chinese literature. I sharpened my attention.

Sun Wukong, "equal to heaven," had just been subdued by Buddha Shakyamuni. Or one should rather say: Sun Wukong had been deceived. Instead of leaping from the hand to the end of the cosmos with his heavenly somersault, his jump ended at the Buddha's fingertips. None of the deities in heaven could harm a single hair on the stone monkey, let alone end his life - not with weapons, not with the elements, not with poison. So the Buddha imprisoned him in the Mountain of Five Elements, where the monkey would be fed molten metal and wait in the depths of the mountain for his redemption.

>{3} I remembered - my Ma always read to me from her favorite book at bedtime. That is why I loved the book too. It gave me many lessons for life.

The masterpiece - an old pilgrimage of a simple monk with his mythical companions, from the East to the West and back, in search of holy scriptures. A story of cosmic importance.

Lost in thought, I saw my mother sitting beside me at the bed, her necklace with a cross in her left hand, a Turitella in her right. She often told me what they stood for.

The cross for the sacrifices we make
And the pain
That we carry on our shoulders until the bloom of the beautiful
The sevenfold spirally wound shell for the circles
That we turn and thus carry the upper downward and the lower upward

Before she left my room, pulling the door nearly shut, she usually said:

Mother: Except at the end and beginning of reality, it's always about balance.

On a small card she had written to me:

I am always there
when you need me.
Whether hard or soft,
poor or rich -
to me you are forever mine.
So you remain wholly your own.

Find one with a great heart,
who shares your dreams
and unites her flow with yours.

Then suddenly the scene changed, and I walked with her toward a large wooden door with beautiful medieval carvings. It was the door of our city library. I held my attention on the carvings until they blurred, then opened my eyes, let my gaze sweep over the meadow behind me, spotted the girl with the speaker around her neck, spoke a small prayer into my right hand - or rather a small thanks:

We shall meet again in the whole
For I thank you
You do not know for what, but I carry the memory within me
Our shadows dance
And you take me with you
On a journey into balance

... and tossed the words to her with a smooth motion. I looked to the sky, then to the ground, and knew:

The hunt has begun. The dam is broken; the wave cannot be stopped.

VII. The Yellow Sea

Swift steps drove me through the crowd pressing through the park. My vision was slightly blurred, yet I found my way without thinking, without actively orienting myself. I got on Line 7, stood by the door, gazing out the window, and rode through the underground, forty minutes, all the way south. Out of the underground and back into sunshine, breaking on thousands of glass facade panes into a radiant mosaic, finally splashing onto gray streets - a gray-yellow metropolitan sea.

Dark green cap pulled low over my face, I walked eastward for three blocks and turned into a side street. In the distance I saw it - a yellow sign with black lettering at the bottom and a calligraphic character in the center. It was a restaurant, not just any restaurant - the best kebab in the city, at least according to a street artist who painted melancholy, brightly colored, very abstract oil paintings and stacked them to the ceiling in the tiny back room of his studio. He brought his never-ending dreams of fallen tightrope walkers in modern love dramas to canvas. Colorful paint, but in dark gray forms and figures.

After my visit to the "Yellow Sea" a few days ago, I too was convinced that there could be no better place in the city.

>{2} Fresh lamb on a spit over special quince wood charcoal from the north of the country, prepared in a semi-covered fire pit made of light, sand-yellow firebricks, is simply unbeatable.

The kitchen with three chefs dressed in black was completely visible through a large glass front on the right side. The three chefs wore black bandanas with a single gossamer-thin yellow line in the center and bustled through the heat of the brick oven in - clearly - coordinated chaos. I stood on the opposite side of the street and now looked through the large window front to the left of the entrance. I gazed into a large room, some twenty tables of dark wood, surrounded by couch-like benches with ocher-colored fabric covers. What was special was that the tables, the seating, the candle holders on the walls and above the guests, like the room and its walls, had no corners. Not a single corner, and the longer I stared in, the more the room began to move. Apparent waves flowed from the light sources across the tables and disappeared into the wooden floor. The room appeared like a yellow-brown sea in gentle wind.

Nearly lost in the yellow sea, I surfaced again and turned my attention to the patterns of the woven, close-fitting, colorful little caps worn by the waiters, who were dressed in khaki shirts reaching almost to the knee, with black pants and shoes. According to my research on the phone during the ride on Line 7, the little caps were called doppa - a traditional head covering of those regions. I recognized one of the waiters. He was on duty as he had been a few days ago and walked with smooth stride, tray full of empty plates and glasses, toward the at least five-meter-long food counter of matte black stone. This counter connected the kitchen directly with the main room, and the faint smell of burnt quince charcoal completed the atmosphere, bringing it near perfection.

Slowly I drew my gaze back from the yellow sea and turned my attention to the entrance door. Seven wavy, horizontal silver stripes on anodized matte gray aluminum, winding upward from the very bottom, ending at different heights with slight flourishes. Without further thought I opened the heavy door and stood in the small entrance area, separated from the main room by a door of frosted glass. The anteroom was lined entirely with dark wood, floor included - only the left wall was ocher-colored clay, and I stared at it. In flowing script, all in black, something was written there in a distant language. On the ride with Line 7 I had fed the photo from my first visit into my phone's translator. It had returned:

On yellow sea in great distress
In a vessel made of sweet wood
The scent of black coal pulls through death
And makes us, our ancestors, our children proud

I still stared at the wall and let the calligraphic characters sink deep.

>{3} They possessed an intangible elegance, as if painted by the wind.

Seven times I whispered the lines softly to myself, then I turned toward the glass door and went through. He stood before me, nodded briefly, and made a clear hand gesture to follow him. I followed, observing the pattern of his doppa.

>{2} At first I thought the woven yellow-white pattern on dark brown background was meant to represent a butterfly, but the wings were not curved. They extended from the head, going outward, straight backward. The shape of both wings seemed more like an inverted heart and not like curved butterfly wings.

I followed him to the back right corner of the room to a small table with two chairs and little incoming light. He pulled back the chair facing the window and took my coat. I sat down and was about to tell the waiter that I would like a white tea with a jujube, as last time, but he was already three meters away at the wardrobe hanging up the coat. I turned my head back toward the kitchen counter and followed with interest the actions of the waiters and chefs in the yellow sea.

Suddenly a voice very near to me:

She: Beautiful to see you at sea again. Long enough has your storm rested.

I turned completely toward the window front and thus toward the person sitting opposite me at the table. Her gentle face barely visible, turned away from every light source, her hair appeared vanilla-yellow in the golden shimmer of the room, and on her folded hands resting on the table, besides long white fingernails, three rings were visible on the right hand and four on the left. I could only fully see the three rings on the right hand. On the middle finger were two thin silver rings that merged into one ring through a tiny golden stone at their center. The ring on the index finger must have been through quite a lot, the bronze ring had much black patina, which made the dragon winding around the finger appear even more mythical. On the ring finger was a simple silver ring with an engraving of flowing characters that I unfortunately could not decipher, no matter how much light would shine on them. I gathered my self and let her sentence resonate within me. Then I answered:

I: I am always at sea, only without storm can I find no one and no one finds me. I follow the flow of my intuition, which streams from its center. What I wonder is why I encounter you here.

She shrugged slightly, the corners of her mouth pulled upward slightly, as did her eyebrows.

She: I believe in you because you gifted me your faith. You let your faith die between us, so that it might sow life within me. Thus I now lead with me your army of the believed-dead. Death is but a shadow of everything that was lived. You will say 'But? But a shadow?!' I say yes. They spring from light and yet have power over their creator. Light's creation paints with them. Shadows are everything we see, everything we are, and yet the light is so much more.

A long pause fell between us. She took two sips from her wine glass before I spoke.

I: The flow of the whole decides when dead faith sows new life in the depths. It is a blessing that you can lead them. You seem to do justice to the thankless task of creating balance. That which I need most in great storms.

Over time I had learned to stop thinking at these meetings, to speak from somewhere else inside me. A place from which we spring, and which turns us into shadows.

She: We will stand by your side. The believed-dead have always stood in life's storm. Like stones on the table, four blocks from here, where the light extinguishes late.

I had no idea what she was talking about - 'stones on the table...' Yet I sensed - I was where I should be.

I: Beautiful to hear that one is not alone at sea. I follow a melody, do you hear it too?

She: Which melody? I hear only you.

I nodded and she continued.

She: And now to the business part, so that you're well equipped in the storm, even when we're not with you. It will be in the inner pocket. Small, light, a loose iron, if you understand, not very long-lasting, but effective, surely half a dozen, with much luck a whole one. Everything understood, do you need anything else?

First I nodded slightly, then I pushed my outstretched right hand from left to right while lightly shaking my head, to symbolize that everything was understood and nothing more was needed. Then I said:

I: Let us order food and enjoy the yellow sea.

She beckoned a waiter over and answered:

She: Before the storm rises.

VIII. Golden Wind

This time the encounter had not begun with a question, and did not end in emptiness. Rather the opposite - "Beautiful to see you at sea again." - and moreover, something now rested in my inner right breast pocket. I stood again before the far too beautiful aluminum door of the yellow sea and already missed the hem of her being, cast upon me from her soul. Her soul a violet-tinged pink in the gently dancing shimmer between yellow and red. The hem can only be felt when she lets her dark fog fall - her veil that lets no light through.

During our silent meal I had noticed how we could tell each other things without speaking.

The visit to the yellow sea echoed deep in my streams of thought, and the many kebabs grilled over quince charcoal, deeply savored, now lay heavy at the bottom of my stomach. I wondered briefly what she might perceive in me - closed my eyes for a moment - and steered my stream of thought toward other shores. Opened my eyes and walked, against the wind, down the street.

I stood two blocks north of the yellow sea at a large intersection in the middle of the mega-metropolis. The pedestrian crossing light had just turned red and I used the time to touch my chest once more and then let my hands slide into the side pockets of my jacket. I felt the fitting outlines - my insurance - the business part of the sea could be relied upon.

>{2} I still needed to inspect the objects and familiarize myself with them, but this was surely not the right place for it.

The light would not turn green and my stream of thought gave me no peace, and my stomach too was overfull and announced itself with loud rumbling. I decided on a small wall behind me and sat down, while leaning slightly into the hedge of green-red bushes directly adjacent to the wall.

I watched the chaotic bustle around me, which compared to the last hours seemed like a still mountain lake. The last hours felt like a dream, and for me it had been a beautiful one. I dreamed little in recent years - only with my glittering medicine did I sleep truly peacefully. As a child it was different.

>{4} I was never in the military, but my ancestors seem to have carried the war into my dreams.

Their cruel deaths in the chaos of worlds had woven themselves into my life's flow.

I learned early to interpret my dreams
And their depth and magnitude could simply not be overlooked
They were nonetheless simply knit
And their message I have internalized:
Every decision that is not mine
Can - no - will mean death

Whoever wants to live must sacrifice, their family, their friends, their love, but also their hatred, their will, like their desire, and above all their own thoughts, to let their Self dissolve in great beauty in the small soul. But the value of beauty, which is opposed to the sacrifices, must balance itself in the whole against the chaos of the soul.

Suddenly my vision blurred in the chaotic bustle, the traffic at the intersection drove, on the left side of my field of vision, into a black nothingness. My gaze sweeps to the right and a dense yellow-brown veil clouds my sight. Before me the high-rises crumble to gray dust and a strong wind carries it upward. The sky slowly turns gray, the modern metropolis around me transforms into a dirty-gray wasteland. No matter where I look, a landscape as if the city had experienced nothing but destruction of ungraspable magnitude for the last decades.

>{5} Rubble and ash.

I let my gaze sweep again from left to right and then, as if from nothing, a golden ray struck me. Looking into the distance - it was not just a ray, it was an entire trail, gold-yellow, it played with the gray of the dust and flowed through the rubble landscape. Gold-gray patterns emerged, into which I truly could have let myself fall, however I did not, I heard steps from the right - many steps, in uniform rhythm.

I remained calmly seated and released my gaze from the trail and turned my head slowly back to the right. About twenty men in old-fashioned military clothing appeared, not too far away, from the yellow-brown veil. The clothing was covered with a gray layer of dust, with weapons in their hands they marched with iron determination after the golden trail, into which I had just wanted to let myself fall.

My focus was entirely on them. One of the soldiers let himself fall back in the group and as time passed, he inconspicuously separated himself toward the rear. Without looking around further, he turned left - in my direction - and walked straight toward me, while the remaining soldiers marched on. I still could not make out his face, but he cut a heroic figure, with the fading golden trail at his back, while the wind majestically lifted his gray dust-covered coat.

When he had come closer, however, something else was written on his face - indifference paired with penetrating determination. Every contour was underscored by deep, broad, small, large, dust-filled wrinkles. The closer he came, the more complex and manifold the wrinkle-landscape became, shaped by his gently shifting features.

>{4} But what truly streamed into my soul was his deeply piercing gaze, from eyes that opposed reality itself.

The normally white background, the sclera, was a dark black-brown, as if coal had been roughly mixed with dark earth. The iris a matte gray with shallow lighter and darker streaks in gold-gray tones, as if the trail of the rubble landscape had begun a dance with the gray dust of the air in the depths of his soul. And the pupil glittered silver-white, like fresh-fallen snow in the reflected light of the full moon.

Soldier: You here, in the dried riverbed of my being.

He said with a scratchy voice but gentle undertone.

I: I don't know where exactly I am, but it is somehow beautifully cruel, cruelly beautiful.

I answered honestly.

Soldier: Beautifully said, you must know, our beds are all like this. Chaos has formed them and only my blood can see the traces of dried beauty. To then flood them again with a flowing wave of being. Like water, seeds seep into the bottom of the bed.

I was not aware of what exactly he wanted to convey to me, nevertheless I nodded in agreement and after a short pause I asked what was burning on my tongue.

I: Into which battle are you marching with your comrades, or are you just coming from one? And where will this golden trail lead you?

Soldier: We fought a battle on the bottom of the sea, where our sacrifices to reality lie.

I: What sacrifices do you speak of?

Soldier: Let me elaborate. We sacrificed our being up there...

He pointed to the ground before he continued.

Soldier: ...sunk our potential in the infinity of the whole, so that a seed in the light of our past darkness can bloom anew in the future.

My gaze met his and the reflecting white light from his pupil would not let me go and drew my stream of thought into emptiness, while he continued speaking.

Soldier: We went together into the frozen night, my comrades and I, believing we could give it light and find meaning. In the end we all perished together in the chaos of our time. For a long while everything was dark and the fight, like the search, hopeless. But we know nothing else - it has become habit. Then a few days ago we broke through the front. At first there was only black darkness. A black that made dark coal look white. But instead of being swallowed by this darkness, we paused. After an eternity, a tiny crack opened in the black emptiness where we stood, and a small creature crawled forth - or rather, only its shadow. It spread its wings and pulled a tiny golden trail from the depth of the crack behind it. Since that moment we have been marching - without pause.

I: I hope the shadow leads you out of the darkness. I wonder why you are telling me all this. Do not misunderstand - I am glad to listen. But you seem to know me. What do I have to do with any of this?

He took his right finger, pointed to his ear, led the finger to the middle of his face until it was at the level of his nose tip, and from there made a smooth arc downward toward his heart. Arriving there, he drilled the finger into his chest and led it in a swirling movement upward until it pointed straight up above his head. Then he spoke.

Soldier: You are neither light nor shadow, you reflect deeply sown balance. You are my future, I your past, we lie in the same bed. You have rekindled the fire of your source, given me some hope with just a drop of water, and brought us the golden flood.

I: The effect of your words within me shows how great your sacrifices were. I will take your spoken words seriously and weave them into my being. May the flood swell between drop and sea.

Gift this world balance
Death swims in frozen chaos
On the sea of emptiness
Into which you have managed to sink

Soldier: I must catch up to my comrades. You don't want us to be late.

He turned around and walked in march step, without turning around again, toward the fading trail once more. I stared in his direction and spoke quietly to myself.

I will do it for you. You are my...

IX. Red Crossing

In the gray dust, a red light suddenly appeared.

And a moment later I was staring at the traffic light at the pedestrian crossing again. Still red. A thought formed as I recalled the encounter in the yellow sea, especially the moment when she said - "The believed-dead have always stood in life's storm. Like stones on the table, four blocks from here, where the light extinguishes late."

>{3} The light... perhaps it refers to the exposing red light that glows in the darkness, no matter in which city.

They were, no matter where in the world, peculiarly human places. Four blocks from the yellow sea - I took it literally, I pulled out my phone, opened the map and drew a circle with my finger around the position of the yellow sea, so that it stretched at least four blocks in all four cardinal directions - the search radius. However, it seemed to me, in this metropolitan jungle, very unlikely, if not impossible, to find the building by chance.

>{2} I needed at least a direction.

I still stood at the traffic light, as if rooted, when suddenly words echoed in my ears. Next to me stood a couple of Western origin, she wanted to cross at the light, he presumably back to the office. He said something to her that took on a life of its own within me.

"Please do not forget!"

In my imagination, a room constructed itself.

A few seconds later I stood in the middle of an empty courtroom. I looked around - not a soul to be seen. But after a moment, a voice echoed through the hall, sounding serious, as if a judge were pronouncing his verdict:

Judge: Please do not forget. Only when no call for revenge resounds in the region of darkness will peace flourish in your world of light.

I nodded, turned around and left the hall through curved double doors and stood again at the red traffic light.

Finally the light turned green and I could cross the street in the stream of hundreds of people. I simply let myself be carried along by the stream, I was still internally processing the message from the courtroom.

It seemed to me as if I had heard the words before. Not just heard, they were preached to me.

Then the memory returned - the masterpiece my mother read to me at bedtime. After the Tang Emperor in the underworld had left behind the eighteen-fold hell beyond the Mountain of Perpetual Shadow and had arrived with Judge Cui at the six-fold wheel of soul transmigration, it was time for the Tang Emperor to stride upon the path of nobility, the path of aristocracy.

Judge Cui expressed it in his counsel
For the Tang Emperor
Who was about to ascend again into the world of light
Only when no call for revenge resounds in the region of darkness
Will peace flourish in your world of light

I knew it was time to celebrate a mass for chaos and beauty, to redeem the wretched, homeless souls.

Where this mass could take place was not yet clear to me, but I knew - at the latest after my visit to the yellow sea - that I was on the high seas, and it was now time to find chaos.

I had arrived on the other side of the street, opened my map on the phone, realized I was heading north, turned instinctively to the right and walked down the street without further burden of thought.

X. No Hunger

It was getting dark and the last two hours of my search had been unsuccessful. One building scraping the clouds looked like the next to me. Every other one I could not even enter without access authorization. I had just arrived at the next intersection and looked down the street to the left - dozens of grocery stores and restaurants invited me to stroll and feast, yet I still had no hunger.

The first shop that caught my interest had countless variations of nuts and dried fruits, I looked through the window for a long while and wondered where all the nuts might come from.

>{2} I found no answers within myself and walked on.

The second shop that attracted my attention was a small ramen stall. Perhaps twenty square meters, simple, transparent plastic curtains at the entrance, three tiny tables in front of the kitchen counter at the end of the room. The menu was written with chalk on a black board and in the kitchen was a giant steel pot in which the fragrant broth simmered with huge bones swimming in it. From the street one could already see how the cook behind the counter was transforming noodle dough into ramen with smooth hand movements and extraordinary dexterity.

>{3} I had found my place for dinner, but the hunger had not yet arrived, so I left the ramen fragrance behind, stomach heavy.

I pulled my cap deeper into my face and walked further down the street. Past a fish shop, two enormous stores that sold nothing but fruits and vegetables, these had all types and cultivations one could imagine and more, a leather manufactory, a porcelain and jade dealer, as well as a shop specialized in cooking knives.

>{4} Something pulled me past these shops, my attention did not stick to them, as if I were sitting in the passenger seat of a fast car, from where I can see the landscape but not enjoy it.

Shortly before the next major intersection, a small alley opened up to my right and my gaze caught on a round sign. I walked a few steps into the alley. The sign looked as if a serpent were stretching its head out of it and not only cunningly observing the people passing beneath from above, but also hissing at them with a forked tongue.

The longer I stared at the sign, the more the serpent's head moved in my direction and its red glowing eyes emerged.

I felt how my right hand became heavier and weight fell from my heart.

The serpent hissed in my direction, I raised my right hand and a pitch-black object was in my hand and my vision darkened. The shape and form of the staff could not be recognized, no light could penetrate through to it. The waves of red light emanating from the serpent's eyes were broken by the darkness of the staff and then swallowed.

Just before the last light of the surroundings disappeared into the darkness, I managed to wrench my hand free and let the object glide back into the inner pocket of my jacket. The little light there was returned to the alley and the sign revealed itself as a stylishly curved teapot.

I touched my chest discreetly, felt the same shape as before, a smile flitted across my face and a wave of fulfillment washed through my body.

My soul spoke to my Self -

No matter what happens
We descend together into this depth
For a new time
Born in the chaos of this world

I looked around briefly to see if I had attracted attention, saw nothing conspicuous and strode with empty determination toward the door, above which hung the seductively smooth teapot.

XI. Clay Vases

I set my first foot into the room behind the door and could feel I had landed in a special place. The four walls of the room were virtually invisible, on all four were shelves to the ceiling filled with clay vessels of various sizes and colors, from white, gray, yellow, brown through red to a greenish clay vase standing centrally in the room filled with seven bright white roses.

>{5} The most beautiful flowers I had ever seen.

Shopkeeper: Hundred-year-old peonies, be assured no evil spirit will overcome you here.

Came from the left in passable English from the shopkeeper who was just placing a gray clay vessel with a flower-decorated lid back on the shelf behind him. I turned to him and answered with a slightly puzzled face:

I: Beautiful blossoms, what besides keeping evil spirits away is attributed to these plants?

Shopkeeper: To effectively ward off evil spirits, the roses must be deeply rooted, at least fifty years of growth upward and downward, otherwise you might as well just trust your superstition. But those I have over there in the lower corner of the shelf, in the white vessel with the black circle on the front, they are not very old, but effective in pain relief, nourishing the blood and regenerating your cool and calm energy, your Yin. You know... in balance with the heat of Yang. Also used much by women to prevent menstrual discomfort or relieve muscle cramps. With your tension, though, I would rather advise acupuncture.

I: If I had a lady by my side, I would buy some from you. And yes, the tension in the body is high when one has set one's sails into the wind. You must have good knowledge of human nature to read the tension from me so quickly.

Shopkeeper: Set one's sails into the wind. Do I have a little poet before me?

I: No, sometimes my soul speaks and not my self.

Shopkeeper: I'm glad you stumbled into my shop, sit on that stool over there and I'll prepare you a tea that gives you the necessary calm in the great storm.

I sat on the small stool next to the small table, made of dark wood, decorated with green jade, with the greenish vase in the center, from which the seven peonies flooded the room with harmony through their beauty.

>{3} I would have expected differently, had I not laid aside all expectations, as one must do on the hunt. Perhaps the same applies to life.

I looked up and down the walls, trying to catch a sense of what might be stored in all the vessels. Meanwhile, the shopkeeper fetched a small wooden stepladder from the corner and gathered one container after another from various shelves.

He placed them in the front left corner of the room, where there was a round hole in the wooden floor, diameter a bit more than a meter, twenty maybe thirty centimeters deep, and in the center stood on black earth a small metal frame with four legs, beneath which was already some wood, neatly arranged in cone form, so that air could draw into the structure from below.

I sat on my small stool and absorbed the energy of the room, letting my gaze wander again and again and watching the shopkeeper as he carried an iron teapot to the circle in the floor. He placed the teapot on the frame in the center of the circle, sat on the edge and opened the containers one by one and began filling the pot with dried leaves and herbs. What was conjured from the last container puzzled me somewhat, he had fished it out of the vessel by one of its legs, an elongated, black, dark-looking, dried locust. Tenderly he threw it into the pot and directed his gaze at me.

Shopkeeper: To come from six to seven, on the path of eight, you must still pluck for me a rose petal from the hundred-year-old peonies.

I nodded to him, looked at the harmony of the seven roses in the green clay vase directly before me and decisively reached for the first, white radiant petal that had drawn my attention. I let it glide from my fingertips into the pot. Now he nodded to me with a satisfied look, reached for a glass carafe and filled water into the pot, ignited the wooden cone under the pot and we both looked into the blazing flames, as if our souls were merging there with each other.

The crackling of the flames hung in the air and wove itself into the harmony of the room. Beneath swelled an intangible scent that streamed from the pot in gentle waves. An indescribable feeling permeated my being, a full emptiness, a superposition of all emotional states of my experience, all were there but no feeling truly present.

>{4} My stream of thought dried up and I felt like an intangible form in the shape of light gray, rearing clouds.

He looked physically weak as he sat by the fire, in his simple dark green shirt, black cloth trousers and open dark brown leather shoes. His black-gray hair combed to the side, round glasses with black frames on his nose. The wrinkles of his skin spoke of life's experiences. But as soon as I looked into his eyes, everything shifted - his dark, deep brown eyes drew my attention with tremendous strength into their black center.

>{5} There unfolded a bright space full of emptiness, and so began our conversation over a pot of wondrous tea.

Shopkeeper: Be so kind and fetch us two cups, they're over there on the shelf, behind the bright yellow clay vessel.

I walked over, took two of the tiny porcelain cups and went with them to the circle.

I: A barely describable scent lies in the air, what fragrant tea have you brewed together for us here?

He took the first cup from my hand, placed it on the floor beside him, and heaved the heavy iron pot from the fire.

Shopkeeper: A seven-tea for your eighth path. An immaculate lotus flower from the black mud of reality. A yellow chrysanthemum that radiates against dark desire. The locust for clarifying connection to the underworld. Some saffron for a protective shield around the mosaic of your heart. A piece of ginseng for a calm spirit in the storm of your thoughts. Some leaves of green tea, Longjing, for the fullness of your attention. And the peony petal for beauty in your doing. Thus you will be able to gather your own being in the present moment, to let it flow back into the stream of reality.

I absorbed the information, like the rising scent of tea from my cup, with every breath. When he had finished speaking, I simply lifted my cup slightly, he did the same, and we both drank the first sip.

I drank three more large sips and then...

A feeling rises from below into me
It permeates my fibers and my spirit
It does not settle and does not rest, but swells
I feel the connection into a filled abyss
That stretches into the expanses

I begin to feel like a ship
Half underwater, half at sea
Every wave lifts and lowers my being
The waves that carry me come from the depths of the sea
And lead me straight into the storm of my being
That towers on the horizon

I directed my attention fully outward and sat again with tea in hand on my stool. My stomach cramped slightly - I should probably go to the bathroom.

I did not need to say a word. The shop owner looked up briefly and pointed to a passage in the corner of the room from which he had fetched the stepladder.

I placed the cup on the floor and staggered, slightly cramped, into the corner of the room, until I could see around the corner where the stepladder must have stood.

XII. Fine Grain

A large solid wood panel was set into the wall, not just any piece of wood, the wood, the wood with the pattern from my dreams, dreams of once more walking through the library door with Ma by the hand.

The wood before me was decorated with wave-like patterns just like the medieval door of my childhood library. The waves flowed from the edges into their divided center, where two whirlpools emerged, parallel lines melted and ran into forms becoming patterns.

>{5} It must have been crafted from a single trunk, for upon closer inspection I realized that the waves were the grain of the wood.

I stared at the grain, the pattern that had already burned itself into me as a child.

My Ma's sentence came back up:

Ma (Memory): Except at the end and beginning of reality, it's always about balance.

I continued staring at the grain and followed the flowing waves into the swirling forms and out again, only to be drawn back in. I spent a small eternity doing this. And lost my attention again and again at the same point.

>{3} It seemed to me like a game, the pattern of the grain invited me to play. In playing, I was concerned with one thing - to break it.

Too often I had watched my Ma as she went to mental war against strangers in the park, with black pieces, while I was on the playground or soccer field. On a rainy day I ran to her from the soccer field, the boys had gone inside because of the weather and I wanted to go home. Ma was just about to let the last moves glide across the board and checkmate the man in the black coat who had a black umbrella in his left hand. This was not necessary, the man said calmly:

Man in Black: Your playing style is terrible, it grinds down, takes my space although I have it, it destroys thoughts and forces emptiness upon me. My position freezes and your pieces use the gaps as if they were water in a sieve.

Then he took his king and laid it sideways on the board to signal his resignation. Ma just nodded and said:

Ma: Where they no longer see patterns flow, you break their game.

The gentleman in black looked slightly puzzled, thought briefly, and then nodded with a slight smile. Ma turned to me:

Ma: Had enough soccer already?! It's just rain, not a thunderstorm.

I shrugged. Ma looked into my eyes, took her bag and we walked heads held high, side by side, through the rain to the car.

I let my finger continue to flow gently and smoothly over the fine grain of the wood, when my finger faltered in its movement once more. I was at the lower right edge of the pattern, slightly above knee height, where the waves outside the central whirlpools flowed further apart.

>{4} A thought bit into my consciousness directly - he had said: "...my position freezes and your pieces used the gaps as if they were water..." Had I stumbled upon a gap in the fluidly grown grain of the wood?

I bent slightly at the knees, took my phone from my pocket, activated the flashlight function with a quick double press on the lower side of the volume control, and directed my full attention to the illuminated spot in the door. I took my index finger again and slowly traced the grain until I faltered again. Four times from one side, four times from the other side. Nothing happened, and somehow I wasn't getting any wiser from it.

I stood in the corner of the shop and didn't quite know how to continue, until I felt something deep within me, a swelling, as if the empty mudflats of my soul were being flooded, as if a round glass were being filled with water from the bottom. Before the flood reached my round hill, in which my consciousness unfolded fully while swimming, I placed my finger again on the grain of the wood and closed my eyes.

>{5} The flood within me continued to swell and reached my chest. I listened to my heart as it pounded within me with deep resonance in rhythm - one..two..three..four - the deep resonance became muffled and the energy-laden feeling of the dark flood flowed over my shoulders down my arms.

Simultaneously the level rose from the shoulders up the neck. In the same moment that the first surge overstimulated my countless nerve endings in my fingertips, the flood lifted my consciousness onto its rising sea. I slipped into an unimaginable tunnel, first incredibly dark and black, then a floor and laterally rising walls could be seen, which gave an impression as if someone had frozen the open ocean in a strong breeze and given it a brownish shimmer. But somehow I never really saw the contours of the waves clearly and the more I looked into the distance, the more everything seemed to be in motion. I could see far, the half-open tunnel went slightly downhill and the sky was glaring white, so that one was blinded when looking up.

I had just tried one last time to look into the sky and shook myself slightly when I wanted to refocus my downhill gaze. The entire ocean landscape seemed to sway. I felt the flood within myself again, it lowered repeatedly toward my chest only to rise again over my neck. I began to tilt my head right and left, taking my hips and legs with me.

>{3} The flood within me, as well as the ocean before my eyes, everything followed me without delay, we rocked a dreamlike synchronous dance.

The tunnel became a stormily surging weave of wave patterns that repeatedly towered up only to fall back upon themselves. The flood within continued to sink and I felt pressure building, but strangely it didn't weigh on me but on the interaction between me and the flow of waves around me. The pressure developed its own dynamic over time and drove me further and further to the left and the tunnel wall began slowly to tower above me.

>{4} I had underestimated this dynamic, it had quickly gained momentum and had torn control of the flow of movement from me.

It went up and down, smoothly through wildly curved patterns with an insatiable urge, like frictionless gliding on mirror-smooth ice - beautiful until the loss of control - we were heading directly toward a seemingly insurmountable wall on which we would shatter. Beside me were now patterns of spatial planes that my mind, with its view from below, could no longer grasp by far. With full momentum we glided along under a spatial wave of uncrossable depth and slid along the abyss directly under the arch of the wave. The level of my flood had sunk far below my chest, at the all too near fall into a never-ending abyss full of emptiness.

>{5} The emptiness that simultaneously towered the waves and let them crash back to the ground.

Narrowly escaping the abyss, we shot with leftward spin into a gigantic pattern of waves flowing into each other, growing like a tree from trunk into crown at the sky - we had crashed into the wall.

We flowed between the wave-like fibers of the trunk and it felt as if a current of movement was pushing from behind. Pushed up into the crown, there the distances between the wave patterns widened and small whirlpools formed everywhere beside them.

I was completely sunken in the flow while we were pulled along by a mighty fiber of multiple interwoven wave patterns into the depths of the crown. There opened a giant whirlpool of downward-flowing waves, of which we were already a part before I could even realize it.

>{4} I enjoyed the exceedingly tragic flow of my being, through a landscape in which my self had no control - it was tragically beautiful.

Beautiful waves
In the descending flow
Into the bearing emptiness
Beneath the whole of my being

It went downward with spiral momentum, ready to plunge into the empty abyss at the end of the eternal spiral. The waves, however, slowly became gentler and every pattern lost itself in a strangely uniform smoothness, over which I glided with dampened momentum.

Then suddenly an enormous pressure on my interior, as if a huge pressure wave had swept at breakneck speed over the smooth landscape, and I tore my eyes open.

>{5} I stared at the grain in the wood, I stared at my finger, I stared at a tiny depression in a barely visible hollow a small piece beside the flow-breaking gap of the grain.

XIII. Sailing Ship

Nothing had happened, the riddle unsolved, no door opened. I applied some pressure with my finger on the hollow and felt a slight vibration. I let my gaze drift over the grain, but nothing had changed. I searched the entire wooden panel for possible alterations and small cracks to find hidden mechanisms, but had no success or lacked the necessary patience.

I leaned mentally exhausted with my shoulder against the wood in the wall, nothing happened. I stared at the gray concrete wall beside me. Gray concrete wall - I turned around - another gray concrete wall - between them the beautiful wall with wooden grain.

>{4} I must finally have gone mad and succeeded in locking myself in my inner world - it was beautifully cruel, cruelly beautiful. As my dreams always were.

I closed my eyes and spoke a small prayer:

I sat in silence
Stood in the storm
Drank the emptiness
Spat everything full
Lay in pain
And never ran away

I opened my eyes and stood, contrary to my hope not again in the corner of the tea shop, yet still confined to two square meters before the beautiful wall. Astonished, I turned around, I had heard a clear clinking behind me - glass on glass. I was not alone on these deep levels and there must be a way out of this confinement.

>{5} And this path had opened directly before me, on the fourth side of the tiny room opposite the wooden panel was a seven-stepped ascending staircase of concrete, it seemed to lead me up to muted yellow light - perhaps a corridor, perhaps a path into new expanses.

I stepped before the first step of the staircase and felt a slight unevenness under my left foot. I took a small step back and on the floor, chiseled in concrete, a ship was visible with a small inscription. The ship was embedded in a smooth wave that explored its depths to the left and its heights to the right, the ship was a simple semicircle, open upward, with a straight mast in the middle bearing a triangular sail in the wind. The ship was centered in the wave and seemed to sail from left to right.

The ship sailed through my thoughts and I was ready - for whatever would await me above.

On each step was another small inscription and they seemed to want to communicate something to me. From below, the first step, to above, the seventh step, I read the following:

wholly down
wholly empty
wholly there
wholly here
wholly up
wholly full
wholly still

Entirely still was obviously not true, I had heard glass clinking again on the third step and now, where I was at the very top, looked into a long, narrow corridor with four simple wooden doors on both sides.

>{2} Seven steps to the eight decisions - or what?

Intuitively I assigned each door an inscription from the stairs. The four doors on the right side were from front to back: wholly down, wholly there, wholly up and wholly still. The doors on the left side were from front to back: wholly empty, wholly here, wholly full and the rearmost door I paid no attention to for now.

It was not thinking, the decisions fell from the raging stream beneath my consciousness directly into my action. I took five steps and stood before the second door on the left side, pressed the handle down and entered "wholly here."

I stood in a large storage room full of shelves and large freezers, the shelves filled with hundreds of boxes and canisters. Directly left beside the door was a large shelf with thousands of small beakers that could hold no more than a hundred milliliters.

I was just about to venture deeper into the room and examine the freezers more closely, but I heard sounds again from the corridor, then footsteps, a door opened, a few loud steps across the corridor, another door and then there was silence.

I held my breath.

Friend or foe?!

From the footsteps in the corridor I was certain it was a woman - the heels had given it away.

I reached into my jacket, which I had never taken off even in the tea shop. To my astonishment it was not a black staff but a handgun that I drew from the inner pocket. Not so astonishing, really - the shape had already suggested it after the yellow sea. But the woman in the yellow sea, her words, her actions, had something magical about them. With her objects it was surely no different.

>{3} I pushed all thoughts away. I had no time for the constant natural phenomena that say as much as they blind.

I closed the door behind me, moved slightly to the left and pushed some beakers aside and placed the weapon on the shelf. Then I retrieved a small plastic bag from the outer right jacket pocket. I removed all bullets except one from the magazine and packed the bullets in the bag and put it back in my jacket pocket.

Then I examined the handgun more closely, it seemed to be a custom piece, after the meal in the yellow sea she had briefly talked about special materials - polymers, ceramics, woven fibers, names that slipped from me as soon as they were spoken, though there it was about the coming mission to Mars, in which she had been indirectly involved for years, and not about weapons - or who knows really.

I had listened to her for a long time and had asked only one question, when she hinted that evil had already made it to the red planet.

I: How do we get evil under control?! Is it even good to want to control evil?

Woman in the Yellow Sea: If you want to tame evil you need a good fishing rod with a hot, no burning line. And you better hit the eye - No, precisely the iris.

Now I stood in a storage room full of chemicals, beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks, and who knows what was stored in those chests. I had pushed the magazine with a single bullet into the unique Glock and was about to open the door to the corridor, ready to cast my line.

The corridor was empty and all seven doors were closed. I pulled the eighth quietly shut behind me and crept through the silence.

I stood for some time before the door, back right, and listened attentively. Nothing was to be heard.

And then she opened the door and I stood before her, weapon loose in my left hand, my right over my heart, she with white lab coat, black leggings, mid-high black boots with small heels, black hair tied back in a ponytail, round black glasses, a beaker with some transparent liquid in her left hand, a pipette in her right and a gaze through dark brown eyes that sends weak people to their hell.

I: May I come in?

XIV. Dark Eyes

She: Stay completely still

I did what she said, while she took three steps past me and looked down the corridor, toward the stairs from which I had come.

She: Did he send you?

I: No one sent me, I follow a melody. But yes, I spoke with him, drank some tea. I only wanted to go to the bathroom. Now I stand before you with weapon in hand.

She: You got here without his help?

I: Well, he pointed me the direction to the bathroom. However, I couldn't find it.

She: Come in first, I hope you had a calm crossing?!

I went through the open door into a modern laboratory - any biomolecular scientist's dream - she followed me and pulled the door shut behind her. I asked:

I: Crossing to where?

She: Not so important, your boat drifts. Good that you found your way to me.

I: As well as one can drift in the currents of a storm. Beautiful laboratory, I see many different solvents on the tables, beside all the high-quality equipment, what are you working on here?

Her eyes opened somewhat, probably slightly pleased about the attention to her work. Her gaze remained serious but no longer hostile.

She: There is much to dissolve. The sea on which you drift is a complex landscape that only spans across in flow. Death must always dissolve anew its wholeness in the emptiness, thus life flows through intangible reality into the eternal, far above the clouds on the horizon. I dissolve lived death into experiences of being. Death is mirrored in every cell that weaves life. I break their patterns in solvents, such as acetone, ethanol, hexane, sometimes chloroform or naturally most beloved in simple dihydrogen oxide - my beloved water. One brings light, the other weight, water protects the balance.

I: I believe I am here to learn, to experience, how we dissolve the line to be in the overarching equilibrium. The feeling overcomes me that reality is not graspable, as described by you, yet thus I never know what dissolves in my hands

She: Help me a little to span the chaos in the laboratory and we will crystallize your experiences into something wondrous. You spoke of seven-tea - optimal, it catches the light, hovers above darkness, and creates a landscape of weight in the pull of equilibrium.

She looked deep into my eyes and raised the beaker under my face and said simply:

She: Spit into it

I still had the taste of the seven-tea on my lips and did what she demanded. She took the beaker with her to a table and set to work directly. She first took a small glass rod and stirred the saliva with the solution that was already in the glass. Then she filled the contents into small plastic tubes, cylindrical at the top and conical at the bottom. Closed the sealing lids of the six tubes and opened, with a finger press, the round lid of a small box, about 40x40cm, that stood on the table beside her.

>{4} In this box was something that looked like an embedded black wheel, it was a black rotor with thirty-two small holes around the edge - reminded me directly of roulette.

I looked over her shoulder and saw that she placed the six tubes in positions six, seven and eight and in positions twenty-two, twenty-three and twenty-four, thus the weight of the rotor was in equilibrium. She closed the lid with a smooth hand movement and after three, four button presses on the front of the box with stylish ventilation slits on the lower quarter of the case, the centrifuge began to spin.

>{3} A vibration growing stronger with time carried itself, across the table, into the room.

I: And now what are you doing with my saliva?

She: Right now I'm isolating the cells contained in your saliva from the rest of the solution. The centrifugal forces help me with that. Afterward we will break open the cells with some ultrasound and through the proteins equipped with, figuratively speaking, small fishing hooks, from the genetically modified seven-tea ingredients, get them on the hooks with the help of antibodies. After that we can purify the proteins that interest us from the cells with a simple affinity matrix. Fused amino acid chains are folded into functional shapes, and some shapes love stress and fear - kinases, transcription factors, heat shock proteins are upregulated - the molecular patterns mirror what we have lived through. An optimal level of experiences - which we will try to crystallize - read up on it on quiet days, if it interests you. I'm happy to give you a few names.

I: That sounds like alchemy. You fuse fundamental patterns of my being, without which I probably couldn't walk in reality, and transform them into a new form, a crystal, with hopefully new properties that remain woven with me?

She: Yes, you grasp it quite well already, alchemy is not limited only to metals, every entity, whether atom, molecule, protein, cell, living being or beyond, can with force from within blossom anew in the outer flow. The crystal will influence your influence for a very long time - if you understand.

A laugh moved through her face, before she quickly covered it with her hand.

I: I want to say yes, but a strange pressure builds in my head when I want to speak it directly.

She: Let me guess! On the left side.

I: Yes, somewhat above my left ear

She: Trust your heart, listen to the rumbling from below and observe the storm above you, but grant it no fear.

The centrifuge beeped and the lid sprang open.

She took the samples out and I followed her to the back part of the laboratory.

She poured the liquid from the tubes and refilled them with a new transparent liquid, some buffer solution, using a pipette. She used the pipette to mix the cells deposited at the bottom with the new solution and collected the solution from all tubes in a small beaker.

The beaker was placed in a styrofoam ring and lowered into water, in a much larger test tube, holding about a liter, filled with ice water. Then she inserted a thin stainless steel antenna mounted on a stand upside down from above into the liquid of the small beaker and gave me some ear protectors.

>{5} She made a few more settings on a box to which the antenna was connected via a cable at the upper end. Then she made a short hand gesture, I put on my ear protectors. And one felt and heard the first pulsating surge of energy that was sent from the antenna and hit my cells and faded in the ice sea.

She turned around, walked past me with two smooth steps and had to say or indicate nothing for me to follow her out of the laboratory door into the room left beside it.

A room full of plants revealed itself, and by full I truly mean full. The room seemed quite small, but was clearly intended as a retreat. The air was a dream, oxygen rich, fresh, not too warm, not too cold, with slightly elevated humidity.

>{4} In the middle of the room was a large fern. Dark green were its fronds with reddish tips. They were arranged circularly, in the style of a lotus blossom, and grew directly from the black earth on which I stood. It was pitch black and transformed the room into a truly mystical place.

Behind the fern was hidden a small, already set, wooden table and two simple chairs of dark wood. We sat down, took off the ear protectors and she poured us both a cup of tea.

We simply sat there. I was in a kind of trance state, since I had entered the room, and could grasp nothing that flowed past me on spiritual levels.

Then she suddenly asked with gentle and calm voice:

She: You want to tell me something?

Normally questions trigger thoughts, sometimes a whole storm of them. And somehow we believe that we derive our decision from them.

>{5} This time nothing happened in me at all, I only instinctively turned my head in her direction and when I looked into her deep brown eyes it broke out of me - as if my heart had transformed into a geyser.

Every pattern - damned to break
Every pattern challenges the flow for its streaming - waves arise
The wave breaks into asymmetry
Laden, mass plunges into gravitation
Thus enclosing the space that is not
So chaos comes in two forms
From nothing and everything that is
Be aware, it springs from chaos and flows away
Yet it forms loops
Being in mutual transformation in infinite orbits
Thus a beautiful spindle stands against chaos
Being is a full form of empty shapes
Chaos and beauty within it can do nothing but change
Change is life, being different and yet the same
Human like everyone, yourself like no one
Life knows not time
Time is not life, but only its will
Inside it is empty and outside mere form
It knows nothing and thus pretends nothing
Except that it wants back into the depth
But must first shake off this form
After it has gifted it to the whole
Has left the breeding ground of chaos behind
And bathed before the depth in the flow of true beauty

She: I know a beautiful place for bathing. What are you afraid of?

I know my fear
Have taught it to be afraid
Now they are afraid for good reason
I carry my past into the now
And it is dark - full of gray figures
They have led, guided and yet followed, have given and taken
Have gifted the poor, fought evil
As well as shot innocents from behind without flinching into the head
And then coldly pushed them into the ditch
All this lies behind me and is thus always before my eye
Have only dreamed it, yet truly overcome in them
Everything has remained the same and in one has become something different
I stand in their debt, because I am
But never am I, for I always transform
When I am not, their force steers me back
And their hope for an eternally-new-being united in my form of the I.

A long silence reigned.

I: May my self stand by me.. - Let us go bathing.

She: Let us first drink our tea in peace and eat a small something. We will need some strength and patience for descent and ascent.

XV. The Descent

The tea was gone, the sweet lotus seeds settled in my stomach. She rose from the table and I followed her, past the great fern, back into the corridor, two doors further to the left.

As she pulled the door open, she turned her gaze toward me and spoke in a grave tone:

She: No matter what we are about to experience, be aware: wholly below, nothing is stored, yet all can be found. Wholly above, all is stored, yet nothing can be lived.

Then we descended, step by step, down a spiral staircase that had revealed itself behind the door. Further and further into the depths.

>{3} I could not see the next step. Everything was dark, or perhaps I was blinded by the beauty before me.

We had been descending for several minutes, and slowly I could make out more of this wondrous descent.

The step on which I now stood was no step at all. It was three clear yet somehow blurred, rope-like strands spanning from one side to the other. I could see through them, yet saw nothing - except myself.

On the outer right ran a small ledge against the wall; a thin stream of water flowed there in a channel, like a miniature brook, following the curve downward. When I looked to the other side, the sight mirrored itself, yet the water here flowed with seemingly equal force, not downward as expected, but up.

>{4} From these two streams the stair-strands burst forth like fountains, on one side tinged blue-gray, on the other a warmer yellow. In the center of each step a swirling, mirror-like play of light emerged: blue-gray-yellow. At least, so it seemed.

Of one thing I was certain: the stairs were made of water. If I fell through, at least I would not strike concrete, though I would likely drown, in time, somewhere in a deep sea.

A fair bargain.

I entrusted my weight to the next step. As I did, I spoke to myself:

Here you shall carry me.
I offer to the element
that brought life into flow
my trust.

I walked on with resolve. It dawned on me that wholly below can be a long way, if one does not fall.

And the possibility of falling was ever-present: to the left and to the right, on the inner side as on the outer. This wondrous spiral staircase had no walls. Only the silver-gray channel of the brook wound downward in a gently jagged spiral, shimmering softly.

I took a step inward and dared to look down.

>{5} I saw nothing but darkness. A darkness that, deeper down, slowly coalesced into a hexagon with a silvery-gray outer sheen.

I gazed into the blackness between the six corners and quickly lost myself.

A dark voice crept from the undergrowth of dreaming attention and pulled at me. The words came slowly, one after another, rising from the black pit of my imagination:

Leave your counter-current behind
and come into my Nothing,
where you will finally find all
that you truly desire.

My right foot began to lift from the water's surface, ready to swing through the air toward the abyss.

>{4} I wondered how long I would fall, whether the silver spiral channels would accompany me to the bottom. Or would I simply plunge into water down there and keep sinking?

A great riddle and a small temptation, to know what waits below. Unless it turns out to be above after all, and I break through the ceiling of the sky and trigger the greatest of falls.

In the midst of my step toward the abyss, a hand suddenly rested gently on my shoulder. Her voice, smoother now than in the laboratory or the garden, poured life back into my consciousness:

Water can fall,
plunge swiftly into the depths.
Water can float,
rise with ease into the heights,
as in warm humid air.

But what water loves is the in-between,
the flowing,
whether as dynamic cloud-painting in the sky,
as crunching ice in glaciers,
or above all as the liquid elixir of life
moving from brooks to raging rivers,
standing still in lakes,
swelling in the great ocean
where everything becomes small.

Being mostly water herself, she kept me from falling and guided me back onto the path between the opposing yet directionless channels, which only span across when I place my weight upon them.

>{3} They should break, yet I hover. They force me to walk, yet I do not know whether I will arrive above or below.

In the end it matters not.
There are no goals,
they dissolve in the waves of the sea
like crystalline salt.

And when I hold white stones,
shaped by pressure, in my hand,
a flood rises within me
from the ashes of long-faded embers -
anthracite-glistening streaks
pull through my blue blood -
it is about my images at the core,
not about insignificant noise at the edges.

And so I ventured back between the channels and placed myself into a river of movement. Not falling, yet drawn by a great emptiness, with the aim of arriving below, only to briefly look up.

XVI. The Seventh Table

And so I suddenly found myself in a curious blend of café and casino. The room was quite spacious yet simply furnished. A bar equipped with everything needed for preparing tea, and behind a glass shield an abundant selection of sweet pastries.

In an asymmetrical arrangement, set diagonal to the bar, seven square tables were scattered across a room with an unusually low ceiling. Around each table stood four simple black leather armchairs, their seams shimmering faintly golden in the yellow light of large bare bulbs that hung straight down on plain black cords.

>{3} Somehow cheap, yet imbued with immense style.

Five of the seven tables were fully occupied. Three were filled with four elderly ladies each, all with gray hair or at least gray streaks running through black. They moved small white stones engraved with flowing, curved symbols across the green tabletop with cheerful ease.

The table in the far left corner remained empty, and to this day I still wonder why. Only three armchairs stood around it. A fourth was nowhere to be seen.

I had scanned the room carefully with a slow, sweeping gaze, until at the end of my sweep my eyes came to rest on the seventh table. It stood directly before me, just a few steps away, to the left of the bar.

And at that table sat a single person, back turned toward me.

>{4} A plain black baseball cap on the head, short gray hair peeking out at the edges. The skin at the nape of the neck was a caramel brown in the yellow light, and even from a few meters away I could make out three moles arranged in a diagonal from lower left to upper right, crossing the neck like a quiet constellation.

I must have stood there for half an eternity, staring, until a thought crawled up from the depths of time:

A line
reaching from head to heart.

Still half-lost in thought, I suddenly noticed movement before me. The old man had extended his right arm outward over the back of the chair and, with his fingers held together, made a gentle beckoning motion in my direction, his head remaining perfectly still, facing forward.

My legs set themselves in motion. My feet glided over the floor covered in red carpets, woven through with calligraphic inscriptions in white and black. What they meant I did not know, but their flowing forms carried me into a lucid state.

>{5} The room dissolved into a black vortex; the elderly ladies, like the staff behind the bar, were gradually unraveled by golden streaks that connected and spiraled upward, weaving themselves into a larger pattern.

In the center: the old man. He remained calm and composed in his armchair, his left hand enclosing an object I could not see. With his right he was just reaching for his cup of tea as I finally stood before him, intending to offer my hand.

The cap cast a deep shadow across his face, allowing no clear view of his eyes. He wore a plain white shirt and black suit trousers and gave a slight nod, indicating that I should sit opposite him.

After three savoring sips of his tea, he placed the white cup, covered in delicate brown micro-cracks, as though it had once shattered on tiled floor and been patiently pieced back together by a master with brown resin, onto the green surface of the table.

My God, how beautiful is the violence of breaking.

And from beneath the shadow of his cap, he began to speak in a muffled voice:

He: My boy, what great promise did you make to your past love?

I: I will turn stones into gold.

He: You devoted yourself to alchemy and sacrificed her for it?

I: Did I? If so, not consciously.

He: You are pure consciousness. Where do you think we are?

I: At your place.

He: It is mine as it is yours. Look at the flowing boundaries, how they drift along in golden streaks.

I: Truly beautiful, the way the ladies weave around us.

He: They are your curse that lifts you into blessing. Speak to them as if you were uttering a prayer.

I: If I must do that to learn alchemy, so that I can take the power into myself to melt the chaotic ice-desert and bring it through transformation to white-green blossom, then so be it.

He: Do not overreach yourself, you are already in the middle of it. I am only a rock standing in your current, making waves. And do not trouble yourself with the fate of others; I tell you from the heart: the silent Chaos comes, and the spanning Whole will judge them. Superficial beauty is in truth ugly, it fades as quickly as it bloomed. The patient Emptiness will pull them all into unfathomable depth. So live, my boy, your dying has earned you the aid of the dead.

I: You have nearly succeeded in putting into words what is sacred to me. But all that is sacred cannot be captured in words, is that not so?

He: You bring the world neither light nor darkness, it is a thankless task. Its transformation runs so deep that, for anyone who cannot dive beneath, it is barely perceivable. You mirror for them the rationally impossible act of eternal equilibrium.

I: So it is true... no one will ever thank me.

He: Only the unexperienceable levels of the smallest and the greatest are black and white. In the in-between, life dwells in gray, and only through the workings of change does empty space become wrapped in color. You need no thanks. You strive toward the blossoming of consciousness, willing to walk through the beautiful hell of life. Stand on neither shore, go bathe in the stream and invite them in. The shadows of those who leap are eternally in free fall.

He slid his teacup toward me, stood up, gave a slight bow. I returned the gesture. With surprising grace for his apparent age, he moved smoothly around the chair and walked in the direction from which I had come.

>{5} Then he dissolved into a spectrum of gray streaks within the black vortex, and I sank into my gray world, silent in the armchair.

Shortly after surfacing, the black-gray vortex with its golden streaks slowly faded, and the room returned to its former state. Only now I sat alone at the seventh table, exactly where the old man had been.

I drank the remaining half-cup of delicately floral white tea, went to the bar, and was about to pay when I was asked:

Voice at the bar: So, had experiences that reach deeper than any knowledge?

I nodded gently and slowly pushed my way through the door marked as the exit with two characters.

XVII. The Light

I stood in a narrow industrial back alley, wedged between two sheet-metal facades that rose at least a hundred meters high. The many rusty fire escapes overhead blocked any view of the sky. The alley wore a bleak, desolate air, and at my feet lay a swamp of pale-brown puddles of unknown depth.

To the right, a small river of foaming water blocked the way; it poured out from beneath a door that stood diagonally opposite. The spacing of the pale-brown puddles allowed me a relatively easy path to the left.

I simply wanted to move forward, without knowing where. My attention was devoted entirely to the filthy patterns on the ground: brown puddles, plastic waste, mud, and dark asphalt stains. I followed the few beautiful threads my imagination could weave, desperately trying to break the chaos of the soiled forms into something resembling lovely patterns.

In the small, tapping steps I took across the dark spots, I found a quiet joy and lost myself in the space between mental vision and physical action -

>{5} Until a spring-loaded aluminum door slammed into my skull with full force.

I staggered slightly backward, tripped into a large brown puddle, and ended up half-dazed leaning against the facade, unaware of what exactly had just happened. I tried to stand upright, but my vision turned inward. First it darkened, then slowly an orange-red warmth appeared.

And then I lay there, feeling how the right side of my head alternated between warmth and cold, until phases came where I felt nothing at all and sank completely into darkness.

At some point I began to dream, and the most bizarre scenarios played out: what she might meanwhile have done with my saliva in the laboratory. Created a crystal through which she could peer into my soul. Identified the greatest vulnerability in my immune system to smoothly dispose of me. Cultivated my cells with hers to create a new form of life. Injected herself to glimpse my memories.

Why she would do such things remained unclear to me, and that was not the point. Perhaps she had already tossed the samples into the trash precisely so I would hallucinate these very scenarios.

>{3} And so I drifted in the sea of uncertainty, not knowing whether there was even a shore at all. That is how dreams are.

Then the door was flung open, and even in my dreamlike sleep I felt the sudden draft of air on my skin. A few seconds passed, then I heard the rhythmic sound of high heels. Short intervals, clear and sharp, casting ahead of them a shadow of determination into my space.

>{4} All warmth fled my world; the shadow grew larger, and my interior grew colder.

As though my blood, every molecule, every protein, every cell of my body, and with them every electrochemical signal and every experience woven into their flow, were slowly being dipped into liquid nitrogen, freezing instantly into fragile ice.

And in this metastable state of crystallization, my self became a mirror and sent the following words into my consciousness:

They have no idea
what wars have raged within you
without us ever standing on the front lines.

The blood of generations
has backed up far in the rear
and broken open the depths,
not before you, but within me.

I followed their calls,
sat amid the spiritual rubble
of present reality,
received their hope
and gave them mine.

They believe the future is what matters -
yet we finally know where we come from.

The words echoed through my crystal-clear yet completely frozen state of being. And the emerging resonance slowly cracked the ice, allowing a breath of real life to flow back into my body.

I could not move, could exert no influence on what was happening. I melted. At first everything was the familiar gray, until it became stranger, almost uncanny.

>{5} It felt as though I were walking high in the mountains across a vast snowfield into dense clouds. Everything white, completely blind, though no, because everything glowed.

It was different, unfamiliar, almost eerie, but I tried to surrender fully to this new color of dream. Yet nothing happened; everything remained white, blinding white, and I utterly blind and clueless.

Until I realized that my eyelids were pried wide open, held in place by some kind of clamp, and a massive surgical lamp was centered directly on my pupils.

A familiar voice said:

She: I finally know where you come from. You are, without doubt... hmm, how shall I put it - charged.

>{3} It will be hard for you to answer under all this light, but I know you will understand me well.

She: I do neither good nor evil, I act in the spanning sense. You will understand what I mean better than I do myself. After all, your self came to me, which was a great riddle. It makes sense to give you something in return.

I took a closer look at the patterns in your cells to see whether you really are what you appear to be. I did not know what to pay attention to in the analysis, except that I expected significant differences and potential anomalies.

Everything seemed normal, until, in a last desperate attempt, I examined the epigenetic changes and modifications to your DNA, as well as the post-transcriptional modifications of your mRNA, even more closely. In real time, so to speak.

>{4} And it was truly fascinating.

Something stirred in me and wanted to ask, but no word crossed my lips. Too blinded, every forming thought drowned in the light. She seemed to see it in my wide-open eyes and answered:

She: I would call it synchronization of the parts, or harmonizing structural transformation. At your most fundamental biological level of being, you are able to recognize yourself in the stream of golden light.

Within your cells swim DNA and RNA complexes that rotate and coil. Like certain export channels in a cell, they simultaneously hold a crossed structure of mineral cofactors, individual ions of manganese, magnesium, iron, and zinc, in the flowing center of a movable amino-acid loop with the beautiful motif: PGEGGRGEGLGGP.

The rigid prolines, the P's at the ends of the amino-acid sequence, hold the loop in stable orientation, so that the loops stand in rapid equilibrium with the ion inside them as well as with other loops in the flow of light, reading it simultaneously.

>{4} The loops appear entangled and react to incident light: they reflect it, let it pass through, forward it onward, and a tiny number of photons are absorbed. It is almost a lens through which one sees into the greater whole.

She: You are surely wondering now why I am telling you all this while you lie here in blinding light, and why we are not sitting at the table sipping tea together. Why I did not invite you but instead picked you up half-conscious from the street. And above all, what will happen now.

Well, some questions I will answer; some questions one asks and should never believe any answer. And with that we come to the heart of it: we stand in the light.

>{5} I will give you a new vision, and take an eye from you for it.

For that I must face my fear, and I must get my trembling hands under control. A little white tea should help.

She left the room with the same rhythmic step with which she had entered.

Only a few minutes passed before a gentle floral scent filled the space.

XVIII. Tremendous Attention

Female Voice: I see you have already accepted, or why is there no movement in your window to the soul? Can you smell that? You have been left to yourself long enough.

I: Could you please leave me to the numbers?

Female Voice: You want me to leave you to chance? He dwells in numbers. Where is the value in that?

I: A number has no value. A mere form, utterly empty. Its apparent fullness comes from invisible threads that hold the number in its shape. From one number to the next, they multiply, become many, infinitely many. And yet they all sink into the circling zero, and when added together they unite into a Whole upon the sea of Emptiness.

Female Voice: You want to go into infinity?

I: I am, therefore such a wish would be absurd. But do you not feel the waves, the eternal tide returns. I make my heart a rock and let them break upon my love.

Female Voice: It is true, the waves can be felt. The flood is coming. When you speak from the depths of your heart, yet your love no longer answers, then who speaks...?

I: You are remarkably attentive. You are already speaking from that place.

Female Voice: Oh, you are saying I can only love what truly is?

I: Love can only be found in experience, not in your heart. Another spirit dwells there, one that wants to see and feel nothing. You must behold her golden tail, give her a home in your world only to send her back into hers, then experience will mirror a Golden in her name, to be felt forever.

Female Voice: I will dream of it.

I: Do not live your dreams. Too many continue living in a sea of broken dreams. They need only let themselves fall and sink. Yet they fear that intuitive truth will overwrite their rational logic. And attention is not written, it is given, to the flowing context of reality as to the empty yet pulsing space of dreams. We are melting pots of being, standing on a bridge between ice and swirling blossom. We carry Nothing upward to experience Everything, charged with chaos, toward fulfilling bloom, so one becomes Nothing and is Everything: an eternal time-folder, if you understand.

Female Voice: How do I find a path like yours? I want to learn to fold time as well.

I: I follow a young path. It has the potential to become a riverbed. I have given birth to it and sent it forth from my fire. I stood in flames and my spirit crumbled to ash. Finally alone in black Nothing. Gazing attentively into Emptiness, simply nothing. Here, at the very bottom, no one wants your gift, yet you see all the way to the top. Your heart contracts until it nearly breaks. So offer the last drop of love to your Self and stare attentively into the void, until the Self is You.

Female Voice: I know the black Nothing. I believe I have encountered it in my dreams these past weeks. There I become I?

I: What do you mean you know it? Do you have any idea of the depth of the human plane? You must have experienced something. Those who come to me are the ones who cannot imagine walking, so they fly. Those who fill mystical books at night because family violence made them grow up far too soon. Those who allowed black souls to bind them in white chains. Those who stand in empty rooms and dare not look beneath the carpet. Those who from birth could only stumble along, rejecting every help because beautiful images and stories sprout from dirty ground. Those who had already left their dying bodies only to awaken once more in white sheets with new courage to live. Those who end the war in the family for themselves and step into the Now with a seed for peaceful childhood. Tell me, what have you experienced?

Female Voice: A holy war rages within me. And it is not about peace. It is a storm of violence.

I: In time you will learn to love it. In it I grew old.

Female Voice: But here there is neither defeat nor victory.

I: Yes, the process is a thankless act. So take care to remain in your center and, in your attention, keep the equilibrium... how shall I put it... don't fuck it up.

Female Voice: I will give my best and accept my worst. Is a war raging in you as well?

I: What do you think? That my family, at the core of the vortex, did not nearly drown? That all that blood, shot and spilled, did not open dead springs that flow through my being today? Do you think that? Do you really think that? The third is for eternity, and I have been waging it since I first had images in my head. Everything mirrors itself, and it sends me between poles.

Female Voice: I no longer think much. I have respect for what is coming.

I: Find your dead companions and follow the streaks. I send my companions from ungraspable planes into a subconscious battle. The line is shifted in the heart, not on the battlefield. And if we wish to live upon it, it must be brought into equilibrium. The desire, no, the drive for a fulfilled life kills good and evil alike...

I could speak no further. An image pierced through me: myself strapped to a kind of dentist's chair, eyelids clamped wide open, staring directly into blinding white light.

>{5} I tried with all my strength to see more, but all that appeared was the faint outline of a small, slender figure that enclosed the emptiness on both left and right and pressed me back into my own Nothing.

Female Voice: The drive for a fulfilled life kills good and evil alike... and what remains is the human. You surely wanted to add that. We are finished with the operation. I have injected you with something that is clearly already taking effect. The wound needs time to heal. I will give you the necessary rest. Thank you for the conversation. You will recognize my gift when you see it.

XIX. Angels Without Wings

And so I lay there. Where exactly, I did not know. I must have spent an eternity in deep anesthesia, for only slowly did a gray veil begin to lift, and with it the sensation of returning to my body.

I could feel my heart beating dully, blood swirling in smooth eddies through my chambers and flowing down into my fingers and toes, though little of it yet reached the upper heights: my head.

>{4} And that was what I needed now. For the more my vision returned, the more I wanted to close my eyes again.

I had not yet begun to grasp the full extent of what lay before me, let alone truly see it. I still felt suspended between a deep psychedelic haze, likely from the fading anesthetics, and complete shock paralysis.

>{5} The horror of my world had taken shape. She sat in the cage.

And so I sat, half-minded and newly sensed, in an old, battered treatment chair. I looked down and saw many small bloodstains decorating the gray floor in mottled patterns.

It was no ordinary cage. It was a swarm of flies, buzzing in continuous orbits, forming the bars. Ah, if only it had been a wonder of nature.

But the figure inside the cage was an emaciated, utterly shredded crow. It had scarcely any feathers left on its body; one could see mostly its skeleton, and the wounds looked glassy. As though the flesh had dried up when the blood stopped flowing and healing had never begun.

>{4} The wings consisted of only four feathers each, symmetrically arranged, and through the vast gaps between them it seemed physically impossible for the crow to fly. Yet it did.

It gave the impression that it had to fly; its food, the swarm of flies, appeared to hold complete control over the half-dead bird's freedom of movement.

So I stared through a wide gap in the cage, where the bars moved with a humming buzz, and looked into the crow's half-face. One eye pitch-black; on the other side, a deep blackness too, but no eye was visible in that hollow.

In its glistening gray-black beak it held a small silver chain from which a golden miner's lamp dangled back and forth.

The crow, seemingly imprisoned, or at least under the cage's control, hovered in the center of the black bars, beating its hollow wings, half-crashing. The cage followed her and guided her at once, the way water follows a riverbed and carves new valleys into it.

And so, from the intuition of my confused state, I began to speak to her:

I: Are you imprisoned, or are you being protected? You seem to be crashing into nothingness, yet you hover here before me!

I waited for an answer, but none came. Only the buzzing of the flies in my ears, while my gaze followed the small miner's lamp and it worked upon me like hypnosis.

And on its next swing to the left, I looked a little higher, and saw how the flies had created a kind of black-and-white moving film. They moved skillfully beneath the light falling from above, forming a simple street where five-story facades rose into the night sky on both sides of the sidewalk.

In the distance, a young couple, the girl clearly smaller than the boy, moved haltingly down the left sidewalk, apparently locked in intense conversation. They came steadily closer to me.

And to my left, a plain house entrance had formed out of countless thousands of flies. Even the nine nameplates on the right wall were rendered with names. There must have been millions upon millions.

Everything I saw, the opposite side of the street, the parked cars, the dark-yellow streetlamp light that reflected so beautifully along the hundred meters of slightly damp asphalt, the entire space must have been transformed into this scene outside my attention. Now I stood in the middle of this "fly-film production."

And while my attention was still drawn by the gentle glow of the softly dancing yellow light, the couple turned into the entrance. She pressed a round shape into his hand in agitation, perhaps a cake, and pointed down the street from which they had come.

He only shrugged, turned toward the door, and set the cake tin directly beneath the nine bells. When he looked up again, she sat with her face buried in her hands on the steps, and the moving image-play of the flies froze.

I looked around: the street was empty, no movement, only the continuous buzzing pierced my being. I looked back into the entrance: the girl slumped on the stairs, the boy's hand only centimeters from forgiveness at the threshold of the altar, her shoulders, frozen.

And as these words tore through my stream of thought, my gaze was drawn upward again to the bells, first to the plaque above the buttons that read:

Höllenstraße -
No mountains in sight here
and the Main will carry you away.

I was no longer sure what she had said to me in the yellow sea, four blocks or four floors. I felt as though I were on the opposite side of the world.

I looked at the names beside the buttons and saw that no one lived on the fourth floor. At least no names were written in the small designated slots.

I glanced toward the entrance door and saw on the right side five rows of two mailbox slots each. Here too the fourth row was unlabeled, and from the left slot protruded the small white corner of a letter, which I instinctively grasped.

With one motion the slightly thicker paper of the letter unfolded, and my two round gates drew the lines into forgetful depth.

We are those no one believes in anymore,
and so we are eternally grateful to you.

We died for life,
crumbled to dust,
and now dance in new wind.

We live between every line
people write, speak,
sing into passing breezes.

You are the king of the skies.
No one can harm you up there -
at least that is what you believe -
and perhaps you want to be right -
but do you not sometimes wish
to be the wind itself?

We do not sit in heaven;
we stood in white robes on the peaks
and flowed with you into the valleys,
where in the shadows we gave wings.

We realize what you imagine for us,
that is how they learn through the pain of life.
If only they knew, if only they could see.

In your life you will accept only gifts
that are meant to be lived,
for that is how they fill your spiritual emptiness
with material rubbish.

We loved and revered them so,
but we lost them in the dark greed for more
upon the sea.

By walking through hell
you defended the possible heaven,
and so the rift opened.

We march on until we fly again.

As I released my attention from the unfolded letter, a thought drifted past me:

You run far deeper through my inner being
than my imagination allows me to see -
and I am glad of it.

You told me
that some things will be heavier than necessary,
so that later we will be stronger than ever before.

At last I can say it:
She turns, and I no longer do.

I pressed the unmarked buttons for the fourth floor, glanced once more over my right shoulder, and as I did I saw the crow land on a streetlamp across the street. She spread her four-feathered wings, and I heard the buzzing.

I pushed the door open and stood in a familiar alley.

>{4} I looked over my shoulder again: the teapot hung directly above me.

XX. Taut Surface

I turned around one last time and gazed deep into the alley from which I now sauntered casually, smooth-stepped across gray asphalt where the drops falling from the sky mirrored lost light in glittering reflections, before seeping calmly through a few cracks at the edges into the abyss.

I raised my head - the clouds above me were not merely moving - they were streaming across the firmament. A slightly light-gray shimmering pattern in the center of the cloud cover caught my attention.

>{3} I tightened the cord. It took only a moment and from the streaming movements of the canopy a vortex emerged in the light-gray shimmer of my twilit night. The vortex seemed softly flowing in its glow, yet still at the core. The flowing cloud cover slowly tore further open - from east to west - and between the tears it turned calmly, enclosed by hovering water droplets, like a fish standing still in the counter-eddy of a tearing current.

A long gaze, a smooth motion of the hand across my forehead, beneath my chest, drawn back to my mouth, and it pulled me out of the alley back onto the bustling street.

The same street as coming, now walking back - guided by the remembered scent of the soup house - already falling onto the stool in the front corner.

I was just slurping the last of the beef broth, its fat eyes glistening, from the cream-colored bowl when my phone vibrated.

>{3} It could only mean that an important message had arrived. I let the final warmth of the exquisite bowl of Lanzhou ramen wash gently through my body, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and pulled the phone from my pocket.

Message: I hope you enjoyed the meal. Take the five for three, then exit two, east seventy steps right. Look down - all ground is just taut surface. Nice to see you dance. The river is holy.

It took me four minutes to the nearest metro station, six minutes waiting for line five, the three stops lasted an eternal-seeming eight minutes, exit two was contrary to my expectation next to exit five, but after I crossed the street outside and turned left it was exactly seventy steps to the right turn into a relatively wide pedestrian zone, beautifully paved with white and orange bricks in mosaic-like patterns, yet run-down. It seemed as though commerce in the shops here had wilted not too long ago. Slowly I strolled across the patterns of the bricks, looking left and right up and down the facades. Everything appeared locked up tight or abandoned and I was alone in the open.

Until I paused briefly to examine an old price list at one of the shops - a kilogram of long-devoured leg of lamb for a no longer legible price - when I noticed a rhythmic vibration transferring from the ground into my body.

>{3} As though the heart of a blue whale were setting the underground into oscillation. I touched the wall beside the sign with my left hand and my body received the bass reverberating upward even stronger.

I glanced around briefly before flicking my wrist three times smoothly, in time with the beat, knocking with the back of my middle finger on the white door to the right of the sign. The door opened a good crack and a head with curly black hair and round glasses emerged and looked first up the street, then down, before gazing skeptically into my face and asking without greeting:

Doorkeeper: What do we stand on?

I: Taut surface

>{4} What kind of question is that, he was not asking further, he was testing. And the unreflected intuitive answer would have been the ground..

Even as I spoke the second word his head moved slightly downward and with my last syllable rose again. I was in.

Doorkeeper: Around the corner to the right is the cloakroom.

I left the cloakroom behind and turned directly into a wide corridor with black sofas and a multitude of stools, chairs and small tables standing around in disorder on both sides. On most of the tables stood several plastic bottles, between them lay, conspicuously often, empty little plastic baggies; here and there jackets were draped over chairs or stools and the occasional backpack and dozens of handbags were placed on sofas or beneath chairs and tables.

Hardly a soul had settled in the sparse artificial light of the corridor, next to me someone lay motionless on the couch and at the staircase still some distance from me someone sat on a stool nodding gently with his head while his eyes were closed. Two friends stood close beside him and seemed to be trying to get him to stand up. I closed my eyes briefly, breathed in and at the transition to its opposite, walked on and let my gaze wander freely.

Nothing truly caught my attention, my eyes briefly snagged on a yellow package from which some biscuits had been torn - an old name in curved script, a breath of monads - only as I curved toward the staircase did I hear one of the guys say:

DJ Friend: We can leave him sitting here, he'll sleep another hour, then he'll freshen up and we'll really get it going again.

The sentence still echoed in my thoughts as I descended the stairs and noticed how the air changed. It seemed to vibrate in the truest sense of the word, I shook everything off, turned slightly to the right and took the last three steps before I plunged into the sea of sound.

>{3} And then something played out before my inner eye that I can only describe in hindsight as a kind of opening sequence. Barely possible to capture in words.

So cuts an invisible cord
Wound in attention
It divides and unites
So flowing reality falls into the riverbed of your being
Leaving a fissure in the heart

They think in a world like yours one knows no death
Yet it lies as medicine in every drawer
And it pulls at the dark void of their self
What do you know of people who have everything
But still want to take it all from themselves
Because they can find nothing within
Yet the white devil is just a message and twenty minutes away
All feelings grow cold
Thoughts so confused and dim
Grandma becomes her own executioner

Good souls plunge from the river of life
Down the stairs or bridge
And never rise again

Others lie on white sheets and are already floating away
But are not allowed to
Pulled back by unknown force

But at four in the night on the balcony
High again
No spirit is chained to tracks anymore

Young eyes watch their own sources extinguish each other
And then She stands there

Lonely

On her island in the in-between

And yes, then she stood there. I here, on the floor of the dancefloor, in the vibration of massive techno beats.

>{3} And what a magnificent room it was. The special thing? An interwoven net that divided the room in two. It was no simple net, but an entire network with a thickness of at least one and a half meters, woven with thousands of beautifully curved knots of black and white nylon cord. A vast macrame pattern with incredible visual depth-vibration in the trembling strobe light that flashed through the fog clouds.

From well-hidden fog machines at the edges of the room and the corners of the ceiling, light gray mist was blown into the space and it formed an overarching cloud cover that reunited the divided room, at least in the upper reaches.

I gave her dress my full attention. It billowed softly in the vibrations that flooded the room from the speakers. She still seemed small in the vast space. Like a peanut - two together and yet divided in one shell. She had a tremendous radiance, like a dancing solar storm. Radiation in the face of flowing beauty, striking deep in the heart and carrying the bloom of life outward.

>{4} My self was in that moment a pure form, empty inside, but this form was all I had.

Emptiness?
I am empty, emptier than empty
So much emptiness that everything fits inside
Without filling me
For my form of self needs its space
I myself am nothing
Only mirrored balance
My being a river in its bed
At the bottom there is nothing to understand
Look too deep into my eyes
You sink
Until you drown or swim in the charged stream of rising emptiness

All at once a hard shove. I had to take a light lunge forward before I could turn, already slightly on the balls of my feet - ready for whatever may come. Three dark figures were making their way through the crowd toward the DJ's mixing desk and had already vanished behind the next dancing group.

Suddenly a peculiar tension lay in the air. The kind of tension you feel without being able to rationally comprehend even a fraction of it, but you are dead certain everything will derail if no one throws a stone into the river. Someone had just re-stretched reality and folded their forms with great dissonance into the pattern of the landscape.

My focus remained on the three figures and their movement through the crowd. They were just crossing the macrame when a thought pressed itself into my field of attention:

>{4} Every war crosses borders, otherwise it would not be war - war is holy - one only enters it when words fail.

In spiritual accord with the rhythm, not only my body moved but also my inner world:

>{4} I searched for words until I saw only images, lost in valleys drenched in red, fled through white mist over gray peaks, for a long time nothing but pain and this breath of lived balance. I am grateful to her, she always searches for the beautiful in all the gray - this SEEDWORLD. Flowed thousands of kilometers across the landscape, really to see clearly, but here I am understanding - I resonate in motion. My words are clear and cold, like glacial water. Everyone admires them from outside, but no one dares to bathe in them. Questions need no answer, in their depth every answer becomes a decision.

And in my eye a black grain catches and cuts sharply, like the starlit sky of the Thar in their souls.

>{3} The desert a space for the time between states. And so I entered this desert - the dunes wove themselves through the landscape beyond the horizon - in gray-golden gleam of their countless grains. I did not move. The gentle but cold wind pierced every one of my bones and drew me ever deeper into the wave-like patterns within.

And then I stood there, all alone, it was neither large nor imposing, it was beautiful but nothing special, it was gray surrounded by gold-shimmering grains of sand. I stepped one pace closer and in deep black script with a fine golden border, inscribed upon the stone backrest:

Rex Nullius
In solio meo sedeo in limine

I turned slowly and was about to let my body fall onto the stone slab when I suddenly perceived the bass of the music again and the macrame wove itself back into my attention.

>{3} I was back and had lost sight of the three figures.

XXI. All Comes

>{4} I feel most alive when death whispers into my conscience and so warns me of the abyss.

>{3} And it arrived in me, clear and distinct: "Set yourself in motion and bring the stones back into the river."

>{3} It is each time first a burden, before from movement itself the desire is born.

And so I set myself in motion, on the way to cross through the macrame. Driven by the feel of the bass I found my rhythm in my step - hidden in the dark space between the dancing figures.

>{4} So it carried me through the swelling room, and when I met the macrame with outstretched hands, it felt as though I were gliding through the gaps without dividing myself.

Neither black magic nor holy light.
Who would remain must become.

On the other side everything felt softer, but also duller. The sound left a trickling echo in my ears here. I moved slowly and in rhythm with the music through the crowd - most wore chic black and bared a lot of skin while letting themselves fall, dancing or sitting at the edges.

>{4} I roamed the room and kept watch.

For whoever seeks, finds.
Not what he wants - what he needs.

I looked into his eyes, let the impression briefly settle, and spoke.

I: Do we have a problem?

Black Brother: No, why should we?

I: There seems to be a palpable tension between us. Or am I sensing something here that doesn't exist?

Black Brother: Tension between us? In which direction is it pulling you, then?

I: I go my way, sometimes with the greater current, more often against it.

Black Brother: Keep walking toward death, my friend, my enemies wait for you there. For your return and their turning. Will you tell me where you come from?

I: I live between East and West, like the jungle between the two poles of this world. And where did you grow up? Surely not without drama, if one trusts your eyes.

Black Brother: Back where I'm from, you see them again and again, bright souls, dark hearts. Everyone who grew up with me knew at some point he'd never go under - sometimes proud, sometimes because they wished it for me, desperately. By now it's all the same to me what drama drips into my life-river, I enjoy the rain and water my seed in the black soil with it.

His friend to his right, casually dressed in black joggers, a black T-shirt and an open white training jacket worn over it, paired with black hair slicked back beneath a backwards cap - smiled at me, half mischievously, half warmly.

>{3} I gave the whole thing an accepting glance and picked up the conversation again.

I: You must have known a fair share of suffering.

Black Brother: Mhh, what is suffering once you're used to the pain. Suffering is something that carries you, that's why it's so heavy when it lies upon you.

I: What can I say.. brother. When I hear her speak about the suffering of others, I ask myself, should I walk seven hours through a few valleys, over sharp ridges to high peaks, to bathe in the humility of creation - or should I, with art, first take the balance below, only to up there, with a grin on my face, let an elbow slide onto the temple.

Black Brother: Lucky for me you can't strike me - I play without cards or pieces. At least we're bound on this plane. They believe they could be good, and so first the bad, then the evil settles in.

He looked past me for a brief while, someone or something had caught his attention.

Black Brother: But now tell me - where are you from?

I: Where did I grow up? I walk the way back and ask myself where the waves of life have carried me.. Was it worth it? Was enemy to everyone for so long, now I've got him as a photo on the wall. I see no light, yet want to count stars. So often it's three in the morning again and I play my music and in my thoughts build no castle out of sand, just a Tschibit with, not on, Hindu Kush, don't tell me I should run faster. I dive through the riverbed of memory to coming visions. Brother, welcome to no-man's-land.

Black Brother: You are where we are headed. And who would remain must become. Born King in the realm of men.

I: Grown out of a dark past in humility - become human.

Black Brother: A dark past?

I: My dearest spirit learned to dance in the yard, only to stand seven days at the end of the valley with the lads against four hundred iron machines and twenty-seven thousand souls.

Wanderer: Draw from your emptiness and all will become, not all will be good, but all will be. Just believe and all will be real.

I: From what depth do you suddenly speak. But you are more than right. All comes.

A softly swelling silence spread through the circle.

From the left a rather bright, yet scratchy, female voice suddenly sounded.

There were three women, without shyness, who had stepped up to us. Far right had beautifully drawn eyeliner that came especially well into its own on her pale face.

Far left was taller than me, had long legs, anything but thin, but not thick either - it was natural balance, and thanks to the black fishnet stockings paired with a black bodysuit they were lifted into full splendor.

In the middle, gray-green eyes stared at me trembling, her attention jumping between the men of the circle. She wore a kind of loose black corset with a woven mini skirt.

>{4} On the left side was a white orchid-stitch pattern. I followed the stem of the orchid from bottom to top, it was a flowing encounter, she moved her body slightly trembling with the rhythm of the freshly struck beat. My gaze slid further upward, always along the pattern, up to the beautifully embroidered bust, above which much of her own bloom came into view, and above that the flickering gray-green crystals.

She (middle): Wanderer you got anything else for us? We only got two out, how's that supposed to last us the night?

Wanderer: You love the stuff far too much. I'll come to you in a moment.

Friend on the right: Everything I love starts with K.

Friend on the left: If you help us, we'll love you tonight.

Wanderer: Not necessary, better love yourselves. Give us two minutes.

The women turned and walked a few meters to the side, settling on the stacked pallets at the edge.

Black Brother: Better love yourselves? You did not really say that.

Wanderer: I can die alone, but not lonely.

I: As real as imagination itself. What helps against loneliness.. except being alone.

Wanderer: Dear God, please bargain my balance with the devil.

Black Brother: What more does God have to do for you?

I: God can do nothing against the devil. Beyond crossed borders we let our guiding principles fall and dive back into old patterns...

Wanderer: ..patterns of violence.

Black Brother: How do you know your words are true?

I: I do not know, I give them faith, until.. the echo of experience gives me the knowing.

Wanderer: All else nasip.

The Wanderer was finishing his business - I let myself drift a little, dancing to the bass.

Black Brother: Watching you, listening to you, one doesn't know whether you'll go up in flames or a great flood will pour out. And what truly happens I do not know.

Wanderer: And still you get this feeling of standing on black soil with new roots beneath. You have fire in your eyes, but you move like water. Despite our strength, you are rooted in fruitful time.

Who will hand me the water?
I am the water itself.
Who will ignite me?
I carry fire in my eyes.
Who will bring the bloom in winter?
I am black earth where green meadow grows, beneath a white icy skin.
Who will carry me?
I am free of suffering.

I: Yet all I want is to be free, like the wind that brings the rain.

Wanderer: You are like a gift that one opens only so it may wrap itself anew.

I: We will have to let go in order to hold our being in the current.

The two of them nodded silently. We looked into each other's eyes briefly, seeking trust, found it, and left the location through a back exit.

>{3} Climbed into a small five-door with a long snout and drove off.

Are woven between worlds
Like Song Jiang the timely rain
Between Liangshan Marsh
And the high image of every soul
A simple being with serpents and birds

They opened their hearts entirely
In their flight
First you feel the pain
Then hate should come
Yet all that streams out
Is clear but not visible.

We stopped at a corner, the two of them got out, I saw in the rearview mirror how they disappeared into an entrance.

I looked up the stories of the gray facade beside me. On the third hung flower boxes without flowers; on the sixth a man in a white undershirt leaned over the railing, on the phone. Two above him, delicate hands were hanging laundry, then my gaze was drawn further up to the edge, where in that moment a black creature glided in soft hovering flight onto the roof.

They follow me, heed me not.
They do not come when I call.
They are there when I need them.
They are the messengers of death,
and in silent flight they sow life.

When I go,
I am pecked apart by thousands
who sow my last golden remnant
into black earth.
A depth you can do nothing against.

The crow swung itself in hovering flight onto the next roof. I let my gaze follow..

And out of nothing, the driver's door opened.

Black Brother: Now there's one who arrived.

It is not about arriving - simply being there.

My considered answer formed slowly, while the Wanderer slid smoothly onto the back seat.

I: I am simply here.

>{3} I skipped to the next song - Green Meadows - and we rolled toward the nearest subway station.

>{4} A brief handover, last words exchanged and an embrace given - I adjusted my cap and disappeared underground after a short glance at the sky.

>{3} Changed twice and the landscape pulled past me as a gentle rain set in.

>{3} The last steps up, door open, building one from the outside inward, and putting on a Wuyi rock tea - the one with the woody vanilla note.

>{4} Then onto the balcony to carry the inner into outer thoughts. As I stepped over the threshold I glanced outward at the sweepingly written card that leaned against a plant on the windowsill.

It read:

So what will come for us, boy?
What will be, when all this comes to an end?
Who will be able to begin?
Who will even wake from this evil dream?
Who will help us rise?

So at last I stood again on my balcony and let my gaze sweep across the greened landscape.

I have seen it, yet I no longer have it in thoughts. I have now understood it and that is good for him and for me. I pull the devil close. And I let it, for it will birth something new. Down at the smallest level I tried to overcome the heaviest illnesses - until they sickened me. Neither white mycelium in my hands nor gray smoke on white peaks saved me - only held me.

To Myself: Eyes toward the abyss - letting my whole being go and simply sinking. Thank you for this second time: full of needles - full of pain - full of heart. For me? For the whole family. Even those who never returned from the war. For the parts of our souls lost on storm days. We were sawn off, repressed, resisted or followed - and yet sailed into new vastness in icy stillness. Built it all back up and yet crumbled within. And no one saw, until now, what we left on the outside.

Then my phone vibrated.

Message from Iain: The time of leading is over. We send you back to the stars, where you will mirror, for us, the Whole back into Emptiness.

I looked at the street below me.

At last it is going uphill again.

>{3} I wrote to Iain:

I to Iain: We do that. The rain keeps falling on the earth.