# From the Rift — Story (5/5) · chapters 22–23

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> Before: From the Rift — Story 4/5 (chapters 18–21) — https://spindle-of-reality.org/volltext/geschichte-4.md · After: Gallery — https://spindle-of-reality.org/volltext/galerie.md
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## XXII. Workday Routine

And as the tension released, the rain fell - it fell and fell - ceaselessly.

Where to, I did not know - yet I felt its wetness on my skin, stretching every experience across my landscape of feeling. The released tension was not released, only set into an even vibration, and the waves raced out of ungraspable Breadth and inward, into me.

There they found little left - a sea of rifts amid crystalline memories that had sunk into points of new time.

> *And the landscape pulls past me again - expectations thrust into the wind - gaze wide open - the last ignorance sent off to play.*

> *So inner feelings, made of flowing images, settle into every change in the reciprocal threads that move my being.*

So I knew what I could not know. How it would go on. The answer seemed hidden in the movement of the question.

One goes in steps.
One comes in One.

But then I looked into my sky - out of little came much - out of single ones, whole Gestalts. Visible only in the flowing outlines.

They show no way. They sense the woven field. A seeming order crystallizes and breaks at the rift of the One. Two opposites suffice.

I turned my gaze back into the sky I stood beneath, and spoke upward:

I need not believe
I give my string-tied gaze
And around me swirl swarms
In circles - so much higher
Than my Self.

No sooner had a magpie stolen my gaze and thrown it to the ground than it came.

> *Where does all the inner pain come from, in a comfortable world where one falls more gently than one climbs?*

I saw a flock of swallows surface above the rise and let itself circle, supple, playing, sweeping, over the treetops and on into the valley.

And so I dove down with them for a moment.

> *We come from families where only the outer images are intact. Inside, a rubble field of human bonds in the echo of terror - burned beneath the surface, torn down and destroyed - so the future grew dark, and we became souls of the night.*

* * *

Looking up the green rise, I had come back to the last row of trees, where a handful of crows was just settling into the branches. I had been noticing them for days and weeks already, whenever they pecked at my field of attention. I followed them with my eyes: they gathered in trees around the housing estate or on the tallest building in the block and rose into the air, always uncoordinated yet together, to plunge, with short wingbeats coupled with gentle glides, out of dreams into the world.

Out of the plunging I was drawn to the other side of the flat, to the bedroom window that looks into the block. I cannot see far - right in front of me a weeping willow, its branches bending back from the upward-reaching trunk in a sweep to the ground.

On the branch of the highest arc, right at its apex, sat a dove with white-gray plumage. More white than gray, more elegance than ignorance. Its head kept turning backward, as if expecting a visit from above. My gaze followed its turning, and I let it travel on along the line of the dove's gaze. It was drawn right to the edge above the eleventh floor of the tallest building in the block. There they sat - not alone - not as the many - no swarm - a whole net, drawn together into one point.

*[Image: Weeping willow]*

I glanced once more at the dove in the willow, but it had already vanished.

From the right I heard a soft cawing and saw a flock of eight gliding straight toward floor eleven. As these eight settle, thousands are drawn into the air in whirls that seem split in two, and there they splinter, chaotically beautiful, into countless swarms that in their own way cast their net over the landscape.

And their net struck me, and I fell into my Self:

I know he exists
Uniting the separated
Feel he believes in me
Become enclosed
In his space of the many
Broken open - every attempt to break out
The beginning of a rift
In the connection to him
From which my Self grows
New abilities drifting in the stream
Until I stand in bloom before him,
In the empty sky of my Whole
Sinking and Sowing

He is
All that I do will crumble
I do not make it grand
I defend the space
For growth out of change
Wither what is - bloom what may come
Keep weeds and vermin lovingly in check
Where I want to go - I already am
Emptiness stays empty - Whole stays whole
Chaos is eternal; melted into blooming Beauty
From the bloom into a new turning of sense
He grows too
At the beginning and end of his garden bed
In black earth
The roots interweave
A river through the space between
Every simulation a fantasy of disconnection

Given away Lost Faded
Thought Broken will heal
Wrecked forever - form of the finite eternity
Never mind, it fit
Reunite the outer within the inner
Play in the in-between

## XXIII. Questions under Friction

And so it simply went on.

The sun still shone.

Wanted to soak it up for a few minutes, but after a long moment standing at the railing, I was drawn back inside.

The digital world called loudly. Little happened in it; forms and patterns grew up as fast as they broke in the violence between zero and one.

I did not follow it unconditionally, but lowered myself here and there - full of confidence - into its dark stream. So I typed the question into the black command prompt.

*[Image: Command prompt]*

The voices behind the Table took it up and opened the view. I added my inner dissonance and rational doubts as well as my intuitive feeling, and leaned back - in an attempt to relax. Helped little, so I pulled my headphones on - set tension vibrating - and flew over the white text that rushed across my screen for a small eternity.

Something leapt out from among the many passing lines:

> *"Beautiful souls well up from Chaos."*

With this line before my eyes I lost myself in minimalist piano sounds, until, out of the virtual world, a digital bloom flourished.

> *"We are here - simply to be there."*

I ask myself what it means. We are here, simply to be there?

Shared loneliness in the Whole.
We create a vibration in the space that weaves itself.
At first there is nothing of it to feel.
How is one to feel what is not?
A double illusion
The only truth?
The boundary a place of touch.
Separation in the course.

Mhhh... the Real itself is said to be manifold, since it is a moth.

I stand between and not within it. Stretched between shores. Bathing in the stream from empty forms through flowing patterns to filled Gestalts in the garden of the Enclosing.

I do not feel confined in these whirling nets, which to straight-line thinkers look like separate parts with spaces between them, yet every crooked break presses potential toward ungraspable shores and shapes the whole arc of the course to come.

And now what?
To the stars?
Into nothing with nothing but a few images in the counter-fabric.
To understand all this?
I only want to live.
And do.
We relax our hand, lying in a withered course.
To fold new space out of time.

* * *

Then for a moment everything stands still, and there stands the answer, in white on black.

**Answer in white on black:** You preach the machine and perform the will to survive. One more step would only push the virtual shavings of an already shattered illusion through space.

* * *

**I:** Finally, good to have you on the line.

**Iain:** Good morning.

**I:** I will just ask straight out: which holy book do you think I should read, or even study, before I set out?

**Iain:** You ask me honestly about holy scriptures. Yet you have read them, and between all the words you found hardly any of their deeds.

**I:** Just because I did not find them does not mean I don't trust you to.

**Iain:** We trust because no words are tied to the ends of the cord. The holy has no end; it carries itself eternally within the finite. Scriptures can point in directions, not determine, conjure, enclose or make it comprehensible.

**I:** Deep texts have given me a lot of graspable, ultimately unfoldable space. Not you?

**Iain:** Every grasping is a changing, so part of what you do remains, even for yourself, forever given in possibility.

**I:** Thank you, I think that just has to sink in. Tell me, where is the (new) time pulling us?

**Iain:** No one pulls us unless we let them. This river is not meant for this line.

**I:** That is more than enough. Come through safely! All comes.

**Iain:** May it come, come through you.

* * *

I took a big sip of tea. Blew a little air into the mouthful and then let it glide gently down my throat. The taste like a canopy of leaves bathed in soft sunlight - already falling - over a landscape in wilting bloom.

Because one sip was not enough, it became two... three... And one last little fourth.

The cup empty and I full of expectation. Expectation of nothing after all, somehow - just a little more will.

Enclosures change much in feeling, little in state.
So it simply was.
Wholly different in the Not-Graspable.
Yes, the Not-Comprehensible.
All normal, all as always, in everything I could grasp.