The Big Hot

FICTION / CONSCIOUSNESS

The Big Hot


Affirmations of Eternity
In the Time of Global Warming

A Novel

John E. Darling


Preface

   This manuscript was found on Cyprus in 233 G.T.  It was written in a notebook, one with handmade paper, with India ink, which the author thought would best survive the times of Great Turning.  People never knew for sure what technologies, if any, would be in place in the future, much reduced circumstances of humanity after global warming (such a tame name, it was really the Big Hot and it was crazy and painful) trashed everything.  He put it in a clay pot enclosed with several larger clay pots, having learned from history that this was a good way to endure moisture. 

   It bears witness to both the old world and the new, the decline of its systems and the restoration of much of the old pre-urban mythologies, as well as the new ones – mythology meaning the guiding inner wisdom, widely shared, that helps people walk a balanced path, with heart, one that has compassion for all living things and does not repeat the unfortunate errors of civilized man, who was so infinitely selfish and arrogant, much to his discredit and doom.

   We have preserved all the books, music and movies of civilized man, as they are very instructive and quite laughable in how blind they are about what was coming.  This present work was transitional, written and lived by people from the old world, as they endured much aguish, personal, physical and of course spiritual, as they were forced to find new ways that would be sustainable in a much-punished world.  And to love in very different ways that ennobled the human soul without enshrining the ego.

   Its poignancy, here in its century edition, 100 years after its discovery, is that the authors understand the errors of their ways and are part of that small wave of survivors who were not only willing to change, but opened their hearts to the received wisdom of the planet, which were speaking to them clearly about what is in their hearts -- what has always been there.  We are lucky to have had this small percentage of people to redirect humanity and allow us to endure in appropriate numbers and with a mythos that is realistic, connected to nature and can allow us to sustain.


B. Meadows
Editor
LibroSunDigital
Knosos, Kriti, Motherland
333 G.T.



For SageAnn










Copyright 2004 and 2011
Oregon Darlings Press
Ashland, OR




This story and all characters are fictional and any resemblance to anyone, living or dead is purely coincidental.  All rights are reserved by the author and no part of this work may be reproduced by any means, except brief quotations in reviews.  Or you can talk to your friends about it or think about it, without fear of infringement of any copyright.








1.

Denys speaks…

I had been studying the climate and reading the news stories for many years and knew what the signs would be, when the climate would be collapsing and there would be upheaval, dislocation of populations and the beginnings of starvation.  I’d thought long about where to go and what to do.  I felt it would be the end of humanity, so my thoughts were about how to die, how to be the last man, looking back philosophically on a long Age of Man, which had undone the planet.  Very existential.  I would let loose and get drunk a lot, even take up smoking again, after all, what was there to lose by having poor health?  It should be fun.

   I am a classicist and always fancied myself a pagan at heart, though I would never dream of prancing about a fire in mask or headdress, hooting and rutting.  But I knew the pagans had it right, seeing nature as the divine -- and sex, childbirth, feasting, bonfires, wine and such as her expressions.  I wanted to be close to that and it certainly wasn’t going to happen in America, I was pretty sure, so I flew to London and decided to make my way to the Eastern Mediterranean by ferries and trains, seeing the continent I hadn’t seen since college days.  I would even hitchhike, as I’d done back then, in the first decade of the millennia.

   Ironically, I am also undergoing heartbreak, grieving, morose bouts of loss, from a breakup, but after six or eight of these over my life, I am taking it less seriously.  I could clearly see that romantic relationships and monogamous pairbonds didn’t work, only for a brief period of a few years, if you were honest, then they descended into projections of disappointed longings from unfulfilling childhoods, as if the lover were supposed to fill the painful gap left by abandoning parents.  It just wasn’t honest, I surmised, standing on the rail of the ferry boat, quaintly called the Normandie, in honor of the bloody beach where so many died to liberate the continent from the madness of fascism and Nazism some 75 years earlier.

   Now, that war was a massive globe-warmer, back in a time when scarce anyone knew what greenhouse gases even were.  Such fools, we were – and remain to this day, with everyone reproducing and driving their personal cars as much as possible to the last dying day. 

   I lit a cigarette, an organic one with brown paper.  Charming, wanting healthy cigarettes at this point, but they did taste better.  I bought a couple glasses of wine from the crowded bar inside, tossed one back quickly to get a proper buzz, then sipped and savored the second one.  It was calm, a light wind, light enough to light a second smoke. 

   There was a peace, no doubt about it, in knowing you would die and there was nothing you could do about it.  But you could go to a beautiful place, with ancient sacred ruins and stay as much out of the way of the yowling, hungry crowd, especially the crowd in America, always the most yowling and hungry.  And rude.  I didn’t want that.  My disdain for my home country was always with me and I’d learned to mask it and try to find something good in the banal culture, but I’d always felt I was European at heart.  I wanted to die there.  It was the land of my ancestors, I told myself.  Maybe I could find something that would explain my rapacious race, a people who would knowingly destroy a whole planet.

   It felt good to smoke.  It had been decades.  I’d been doing healthy living and was trim, but I always missed the pang and strange satisfaction of smoking. 

   I noticed a woman down the railing, toward the stern from me, also smoking and, like me, looking out at the Calais Strait with a certain knowing satisfaction playing on her lips.  At least, that’s what I caught in a cursory glance.  I didn’t want to stare.  But I turned, so as to face the other, starboard, side and took her in with more curiosity.  She was nice looking.  A man can tell that at a hundred yards or more, I’d always thought – and I’d confirmed it talking to other men.  Something about the square of the shoulders and the ability of the lower spine to curve out as it descended.  And the face always matched that athletic sway of the body. 

   She was alone.  She did not have her fence up, which women show by preoccupying themselves with a book or phone – and by just not looking around.  She looked around.  And her look said, here I am.  I’d learned over the years that, after catching a woman’s gaze, even for the briefest of moments, it’s best just to walk into it, without any line or pretense, if you are going to do it, so I did it.

   “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Warm for March.” I waited to see if she spoke English.  If not, I knew French and German, with some Italian and Spanish.

   She nodded, smiling slightly and looking me over with a glance.  “Yes, too warm for March, I’d have to say.”

   It was English, with an Irish accent. How much we size up in milliseconds.  Her last four words - they displayed intelligence, sensitivity and a certain structure to her conversation – and her mind.  I liked it.  It seemed like my rhythm, like she’d picked it up or offered a map of her own rhythm for me.

   “It’s a little too warm everywhere, sad to say.” I surveyed the horizon, looking for the first sight of France.  I let the silence hang there.  I’d always thought it rude if men tried to steer the conversation and fill the gaps.  A woman should be allowed – and be able – to talk, as an equal.

   “Yes. World’s going to come down around us in not too long, I suspect. But it’s still beautiful.  And what a historic spot here.  I bet William the Conqueror had no idea that in a thousand years, we’d be standing here talking about the end of it all.”

   I nodded. “It does appear she’s about to kick us off the boat – or at least greatly increase the fare. Pardon the horrible metaphor.” I was naturally self-effacing, if not self-mocking at times – and I found this disarmed people.  I looked at her glass. “Would you like another bit of wine?”

   “Please, that would be nice.”  I brought back another for both of us and held out my flip box of brown-paper cigarettes, saying they were organic and she might live a week longer.  She laughed.  I asked her destination.

   “Seeing the continent, the ancient ruins and museums.  I like Greece, especially.  And you?”

   “Yes, Greece also, or I should say the Aegean or Eastern Mediterranean.  I love the old temples and city ruins.  Feel strangely at home there.”

   “Really?  Why?”

   “I don’t know. I feel the ages.  Feel I’ve lived there before.  Of course, I like to imagine being there when it all was new, imagining what the people felt, what moved them.  I imagine being in love then with someone, what it must have felt like.”

   “Even though the old Greeks shoved their women into the kitchen and kept them there?”

   “Yes, that is difficult to get around, isn’t it? The flower of patriarchy.  Hard to believe they couldn’t see women as a great and beautiful mystery – if I may say so.”

   “You may say anything you like…”  She paused.

   “Denys.” I extended my hand.

   “Sophia.” She indicated her chest, her self.  “There’s not a lot of reason for pretense, is there?”

   “Ha, I guess not.  Y’know, you always picture people running madly through the streets raping, breaking into jewelry shops and of course staying drunk 24/7, when the world ends.”

   She laughed and took a big drag of my cigarette, blowing it into the wind. “Funny, what I see people doing instead is slowing down.  They’re looking at the world that used to hurry by them.  They’re seeing it, the little things – and having utmost respect for it.”

   “Yes, cherishing it.  As I’m cherishing this moment.  And this amazingly delicious cigarette.”  We laughed.

   “Kali,” she said, accenting the second syllable.

   “Ah, good. I remember a few words of Greek.” The word meant “good.”   ~











2.

Sophia speaks…

I trusted him immediately, loved how he had decided to smoke his little, brown cigarettes and made no excuses about it.  And I loved how he asked me to write alternate chapters in his notebook, which clearly was the story about what was happening between us – and this in a time when it seems the world will end, I mean, really, who is going to read it?? 

   But there it was, an affirmation of something that would endure and be read by people yet unborn, perhaps, and this while we were smoking ourselves to death, I really had to laugh.  He charmed me.  There was no guile in his eyes or in anything he said.  I knew I was beautiful but he clearly didn’t care if he got to be my lover.  There was something so seductive about that.  And again, that was an affirmation, even a charm, a spell that the world could not end.  What affirms eternity more than love between a man and a woman?  I like his literate style, kind of like a novel.  It’s not the way I write.  Mine is like a letter home.  Hah. 

   He didn’t mention that he has an iPod and it was in his ears when he was scoping me out.  He slyly turned it off.  I pulled the wire that hung out of his jacket pocket and looked at the song he left it on.  It was “The End” by The Doors, omg, I mean really.  How morbid.  He didn’t write about that.  But it charmed me even more.  It says, ok, man, that is some self-pitying shit there.  “This is the end, of everything that stands, the end, of our elaborate plans, the end,” they sing.  Cute.  And this was sung in the sixties, when they didn’t know global warming from shit.  I let our hands touch when I gave it back to him. 

   Ok, he seems a lot older than me, like 35.  But I like that.  So, the fucking world is going to end.  I don’t care.  It never was much anyway and I’m of that generation born after 2000 who grew up with no vision or hope at all – just drugs, drinking, random sex, whatever.  I mean, our parents didn’t offer much to take to the bank, did they?  And they were so depressed. 

   Anyway, Denys comes up to me and tries to get me drunk.  I could tell right away he was all educated, so I use some lines from 30’s movies, like what Kathryn Hepburn would use on Spencer Tracy.  We held onto those old movies from before the nineties, man, I mean, there was a world that made sense, even the fucking world war 2.  I wanted to hook him.  I liked him.  He even wore a sport coat, with freaking lapels.  It was so continental.  I had no expectations, though.  I knew he wanted to get to know me.  I relaxed and just got to be myself and soon let the pretense go.  He looked lonely.  I could tell he was on the rebound.  Had that lost look.  Was drinking a lot.  I didn’t want him to go away. 

   He said something about people really stopping to notice things and smell the flowers now.  I agreed.  I was doing it too.  It was amazing, being on the boat and feeling the sea move us up and down, like it was some kind of miracle.  Well, it was a miracle.  When he gave me the wine and cigarette, that was a miracle, too, the way it tasted and the way it affected my mind and how I felt.  It was beautiful.  And to share it with him was beautiful, too. 

   He bought me dinner in Calais, what was left of it when you raise the ocean 30 feet.  Actually, it was a new town, east of Calais, rather makeshift, but serving as a new port.  I said let’s go see the old menhirs and monoliths in Carnac.  It was almost the full moon and it was a very warm evening, like 85 degrees.  So, we hopped on the methane bus and went out there.  We had our backpacks and sleeping bags.  Everyone carried those now, when they traveled.  You never knew what you were going to find and you had to be self-contained. 

   “Cold-hearted orb, that rules the night,” I said, as we walked through the long rows of standing stones.  I wanted to see if he recognized it.  “We lose the colors from our sight,” he said completing the line from Moody Blues.  God, it’s so nice to find a man you click with and who laughs at the same things.  He’s wise without being full of himself.  Well, we’re all a lot wiser than we were a decade ago. 

   We read the sign.  The 3,000 standing stones were put up before the Celts or any civilization, about 3300 BCE.  Let’s be quiet, I said.  I want to stand here and feel all those old people who built this.  As it turned out, we were quiet for hours, not a word.  We would stand in one place, then another.  Soon, it was like we were being led in a certain pattern and rhythm and as we did, the place opened up to us and it was like we were hearing voices, telling us stuff, I mean, I turned to look at him with wide eyes, like, are you getting this?  He would nod.  It sent a shiver all over me at first, but then I got used to it, like, of course it’s supposed to communicate with you.  Why else would they put it here?  It’s a machine!  It’s like a very old iPod and you just had to surrender yourself to it, so you learned how to swoosh the buttons and pads around.  We took hands.  I took his hand, I should say.  That was a moment.  Actually, it’s not like “I” took his hand.  I was directed to take his hand, at this one certain spot, where we made a big turn and started down another long row of stones.  We both looked at each other, with our jaws kind of hanging open.  I mean, it wasn’t sexual at all.  It was like holy.  We didn’t hold hands in the old romantic way, with your fingers crawling all over each other and getting intimate.  We let out hands come out in front of us in some ritual kind of way and my hand was on the bottom, facing up.  It just wouldn’t work any other way.  Holy shit, I said, this is really happening.  Tell me you’re feeling what I am, Denys, are you? 

   He pointed to his ear and held his hand open, like, do you hear it?  I stopped.  There was this vibrating hum all over the place, like the stones were tuning into us and totally humming to us.  You didn’t ask why.  You just knew this was amazing and a miracle and it was meant to be, not some random psycho event.  And certainly not some evil demon thing, like the churches would have said.  It felt good.  It felt right.  You knew it was supposed to happen. 

   As one, Denys and I turned to face each other and just looked into each other’s eyes.  How can I describe this?  Why try?  You just knew we were not the first ones to feel and know this with all these stones.  It was not some boy-girl thing.  He was a soul, a man, but bigger, a soul, an eternal dimension.  I knew immediately that we were in love, but, man, it’s sooo much bigger than that.  It was like the planet soul unveiling itself and being present here in this good man.  I gestured with both hands that I was taking my heart out in front of me and giving it to him.  Tears rolled down his lovely cheeks into his beard.  He smiled.  I so needed to see that, that he was not freaked out by this.  He took my heart, my spirit heart and rubbed it over his whole torso, like he was smoothing it into every cell. 

   Then he stood there.  He seemed to be waiting for me to lead him.  Omg, I could tell, I WAS leading.  I was like some priestess seer, connected to something big, ok, I’ll say it – Goddess.  That fits.  All I did was point at him and nod and smile.  Like, Denys, you know what to do.  Just let it move in you.  He put out both palms as if receiving rain or stars, then he put his palms over my breasts, lightly and pushed them in ever so gently, again, as if he were applying something to the inside of me – and to my womanliness, my breasts.  And we’d never even kissed.  But here, it was like we were marrying.  No, it was way beyond that.  Marriage seemed so small beside this.  It was like we were marrying the spirit of this lovely amazing world.  And in that, we, Denys and I, were somehow connected forever and knew something, well, something almost no one knows.  It was the first time in my life I seemed to understand some kind of design in the world, in this life, in why I’m here.  It was the first time I felt I belonged.  It was the first time I felt hope.

   Also, as we were leaving, we saw another couple who seemed to be doing what we had been doing.  I mean, they were not standing around gawking and talking.  They seemed to be moving as if “held,” like we were, in some ritualistic, very present way.  Then we saw a group, about six people, doing the same thing.  We exchanged our “did u see that” glance again.   ~








3.

Denys speaks…

Sophia and I went out to Carnac and at dusk began walking the long rows of standing stones, thousands of them.  They spread out for seeming miles in all directions.  No one else was there.  When she took my hand, it was the most natural thing I’d ever done – and it came rushing back to me that I felt I’d been here before.  I strongly knew I was available to this kind of place and ritual and magic in my early teens.  I think all kids are.  That’s why they put them through those initiations at that age, out in the wilderness.  There’s so much to find, so much we don’t have any idea about, we moderns.  But I think the world situation, that opened us to it.  We were open.  When it came, I knew we wanted it.

   It was also the strangest thing, that as I walked with her, I felt none of the usual impulses about, oh gee, will I get in her pants, is she my true love, will I be finally fulfilled and no longer lonely?  It was way beyond that.  I felt how ridiculous my first chapter was, posing as some Hemingway or Fitzgerald, entering a shipboard romance. 

   I strongly realized even the Greeks and Romans had lost this by just going inside their minds, their power and control trips – and that, while they went to mystery schools, they probably did drugs of some kind and were not available to the real magic of the world.

   And who is Sophia?  I don’t know.  No, that’s a lie.  I do know.  I’m just very afraid of what it means to love someone at this level, where it doesn’t really seem like “me,” this bearded, scholarly guy from America who is “loving” her.  We have been taken inside something.  And some big power did it.  Something intelligent and aware of us.  Something about love.

   I will try to be objective, cognitive and descriptive.  That’s my training, as a professor and writer.  I observe.  I never or rarely experience.  All my life, I’ve looked out at the world and just seen trees, hills, buildings and they were just things.  They were resources for me or other humans to manipulate or own. 

   Anyway, we’re walking down these rows of stone menhirs and I’m thinking why in the hell would any group of people put in this much energy to line up a bunch of rocks?  It must have taken hundreds of hours, like a month, to set up just one.  I’m realizing, ok, they needed a calendar of the full and new moon and the summer and winter solstice.  Then I would get, well, that’s a lot of work just to know the time of year or month when you can get pretty close by just looking around.  Trees dead – winter.  Flowers bloom, must be spring and so on.  Moon will be full in a few nights and who really cares? 

   But we’ve always approached Stonehenge and these rock things rationally, like, ok, this one is lined up with the solstice sun, fine, got it.  Now they know it’s the longest day.  It all came down to “knowing” stuff.  But what if it were a machine, a vehicle, something to crank you into, well, the music of the spheres.  What if it’s all alive?  What if the planets, asteroids, sun, moon, are all alive?  What if the earth is alive?  Well, why shouldn’t it be?  It’s like a body comprised of lots of living things, like organs. 

   And if it’s alive, then it must have thoughts!  So, what does it think?  I think we found out last night.  It thinks…Sophia is looking over my…we slept together last night but we didn’t   ~












4.

Sophia speaks…

We didn’t fuck.  We will, though.  Denys is looking over my shoulder.  I grabbed the notebook away from him.  He’s touching my legs.  Denys, you’re writing, shit, you’re head-tripping all about why the planets and rocks do thus and so.  I think you may have missed the point.  Which you will get soon. 

   Later.  We lay about the next day.  We made love.  Yes, it was unbelievable, which is to say perfect, rich and good.  It was what you always knew sex should be.  It was what you always knew you were born for and if you didn’t have it, you would descend into bitterness, being fat, being a good businesswoman with lots of money for revenge. 

   After that day, the day after Carnac, I knew I would not have to waste my life on that.  After that, I only wanted to have a baby and to have him be with me for it.  That was all.  Millions of women know what I’m talking about.  Few men do.  But Denys does.  Men must change.  That’s why they have been able to destroy the planet, they have been so unable to feel their penises beyond the elementary desire to fuck and rape and spurt and own.  That is how we got here, with the seas grown up 30 feet around our collars.

   Anyway, Denys was good.  He was wonderful.  He knew how to fuck me.  Sorry, should I say that word?  It’s so strong and sudden.  Whatever.  Let’s call things what they are.  No one else ever has fucked me, not really, so sad.  I know that night at Carnac opened his penis, his heart (is there any difference between the two in a sane man?) to me and he was able to see me and love me all the next day from his whole body.  Women will understand what I am talking about.  I have never known anything like it.  I hate to admit it took a man to make me know it.  But something made him sane and good.  I just want him to fuck me forever, every day, like that.  That is what men are for, but they don’t know how to do it.  They are obsessed with fucking but they don’t know how to make a woman happy.    ~











5.

Denys speaks…

Sophia is in a bad mood.  I cannot understand her.  We made the most beautiful love, hour after hour yesterday and yet she seems inconsolable.  We have just met a few days ago, of course – and the world is ending.  That could affect her.  I’ve tried everything.  I’ve apologized for everything.  So, I just don’t care now.  I can leave and be free to face the end of my life and the end of humanity’s sound and fury, too.  Fuck it.  It’s so stupid.  When a man distances a woman, that’s when they always seem to warm up and pay attention. 

   On the way south, we stopped in Paris, to see the Louvre, though Sophia was not keen on going in a big city with this kind of social instability.  But it was ok.  It seemed people were intent on not letting it be out of control and mad, like some Road Warrior movie.  I mean it was guys like Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson who created this mess and using that model is not going to get us through it. 

   I wanted to see Venus de Milo and Winged Victory, both ancient Greek.  As we gazed upon the sculpted fabric of both, we got that same feeling again, the hair standing up on the arms, the neck.  We could see that something was alive and moving.

   “Something was transmitted to this guy as he sculpted this, I think.”

   Sophia responded, “That’s the perfect word.  The statue is a transmitter.  We’re in the place now, I mean spiritually, to receive it.  We never could before.  This is why they made those!  Not just to look at, own or brag about.  That’s why the major religions were so against graven idols – because they worked!  The ancient people received communications from the gods, but not the mono male God.  Neat!”
  
   We’ve left for Languedoc this morning on the train.  It’s still running.  Always a matter of fuel.  This one seems to have some fuel, though it was very expensive.  One gets the feeling everything is a one-way trip.  How will there be fuel to get back?  How will there be enough money to get back?  What value will “money” have a month from now – these vouchers on paper or coin?  What value will a thousand of these paper things have a month from now?  Who will honor them?  What will have value is food or cut up pieces of wood you can burn – certainly no gold ingots, precious coins, signed first editions, originals of Van Gogh.  How would you care for them?  Who would want to schlep them around?

   Now, Sophia, that is something of value.  No one is as beautiful as she.  She is starting to rub up against me now, feeling the muscles of my back, tingling the nerve endings of my skin.  I grow hard, swollen, she wants…











6.

Sophia speaks…

I think Denys is educable.  Of course, all women think that.  But I keep seeing it in him, the way he can “go round the mandala” as we call it and come out at the top, owning his shit and saying how he is wrong and full of it and loves only one thing, me.  Of course, a man never loves one thing, the woman, but as long as he gets it that he must become of one focus and devote himself to life, to love, to the woman’s vagina and breasts and babies, then he gets it and is on the right track.  Then a woman can love him.  Then he is not a piece of shit, like most men.  It is fun writing this, knowing he will read it in a matter of hours.  We are heading down to Langeudoc, much warmer, which is nice.  It can never be too warm for me.  It can be too cold, very easily.  I think that says we are all from Africa. 

   What I want is for Denys to make love to me hour after hour and to adore only me.  Why is that so difficult for men to understand.  They always talk about wanting to fuck, screw, suck, blow, touch and see any part of a woman, yet when presented with the infinite opportunity from a woman who wants all of it forever, they only think about being trapped and getting free!

   But you know this, don’t you, baby?

   And then I look at the people on the train and waiting at the station and they are so slack-jawed and emptied.  They have given up.  They have got drunk and screwed and woken up to the emptiness of life.  And now it’s a life that is falling out from under their feet.  There are jokes in the paper about rich barons giving away their estates to any takers, but there are no takers.  Who would want to keep up the silly thing? 

   But there is a freedom in all this.  It’s giddy.  I feel free.  More than ever in my life.  Denys, do you feel free?   ~










7.

Denys speaks…

I do indeed feel free, my lass, my loove, my bare-breasted sepulchre of the divine feminine. 

   We arrived last eve in the Dordogne Valley, the area of Lascaux, the caves and paintings from some 30,000 years ago.  We had to walk a few miles from the station.  We asked along the way for directions, but the locals looked at us like we were surely insane.  See the caves, not from 30 decades or 30 centuries, but from 30 freaking millennia ago?  Talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  This was like wanting to rip the mattress tags off the deck chairs. 

   Anyway, we had to walk a long way and when we arrived, there was no one there at midday.  It had been abandoned.  There was no one guarding the replica cave, which surely didn’t have the energy or anything of the original and there was no one guarding the original, which had been barred to the public decades ago, because their breathing was causing mold all over it.  It was all barred and locked.  We broke it with rocks.  It took a while.  But soon, the doors swung open to us.  Nothing was going to stop us.  We made lanterns of shallow jars we found in the trash and filled them with whatever flammables we found in vehicles or tanks behind buildings.  It couldn’t have been much different than 300 centuries ago, when the cave people tried to find things that would burn, from the fat of animals, then found a way to light them and went inside the caves.

   Why are we here, Sophia, I ask her.  Because I am a fucking pagan, she replies and I answer only to nature’s call and respect only her limits.  Oh.  Like at Carnac.  Exactly, she says.  You know Lascaux is the fucking Sistine of all those hundreds of millennia before the stupid pyramids and kingdoms and armies and religions.  Oh, yes, I knew that.  So we went in, way in.  It was like the original discovery of Lascaux, I’m sure, a century before, when some schoolboys pulled up some limestone rocks and slid down under the earth with torches and found, well, what we found. 

   Here it was, the mammoth, the ox, the wild lion.  They lined the walls forever, in every direction.  We stood there, with light flickering over all of them.  They could have painted anything, everything, but they painted…animals.  No gods.  Ah, there were no gods to paint.  But we looked at each other, that same look as at Carnac, which said, let it happen, let it come, let it live.
 
   We came to a big swelling enlargement of the caves, which had many old footprints frozen in the mud of the cave’s floor.  We walked the circle.  For hours.  Would the light hold up?  Not likely.  What would happen when it died?  We soon found out.  We kept marching in a circle as the last flame guttered and died.  Sophia came close and grabbed my head, my hair, my shoulders, as I did to hers.  Then we said, keep going, just keep going.  Maybe the mind and eye cannot stand nothingness, but soon colors began to appear – and shapes that seemed to define the walls, new walls, new dimensions, palaces, ah, and here were the gods and goddesses but…they were animals!  They were lions, mammoths, bears, deer, boars, the legions of them slaughtered and made extinct, made barnyard vermin by man.  That’s the accusation that was in their eyes.  They knew.  They were confronting us with clear, patient witnessing, not really accusation.  Their time was gone.  Now it was our time that was coming to a close.












8.

Sophia speaks…

It really was amazing, how we’d believed that you needed lamps to be in the Paleolithic caves. It was only rational.  But you didn’t.  It was self-explanatory.  If you needed lights, they never would have been able to do any of this.  Maybe lights were ok, to see it for a moment in its finished glory, but not for the process, the experience! 

  It was morning and warm, so we slept in the meadow by the caves till midday, then walked into the little town of Montignac near the caves to eat.  The restaurants were closed, but someone came out to talk to us.  We both knew enough French to get by.  One old lady offered to make us a meal – or rather invited us to have a meal with them.  It was hearty and we offered to pay them, but they smirked and said it wasn’t likely our Euros were going to be any good anywhere in Europe.  The monetary system was breaking down.  What people needed and wanted was food and gasoline, plus other fuels like propane. 

   This sounds a little scary, we said.  Her family was philosophical about it, especially the very old man, who remembered living under the Nazis when they occupied France and things were scarce.

   “You find ways,” he shrugged. “People learn that they need each other, so they start doing things together.  Like hunting, fishing, storing food, canning it, gardening, hunting for roots.”  He motioned to Denys and the younger men. “They’re going out hunting now.  There are plenty of deer and we can make dried meat for the coming months.  Go with them.”

   The old lady said, come, you can help me bake.  I will make some meat pies that will last a while and we will make hardtack while we have the ovens hot.”  There was a woodburning stove out in the back shed.  She opened the little door.  “See how big the wood needs to be. Can you go after a lot of wood that size?  Here is an axe to cut it up.  I used to do this as a girl.  I’ll show you how to cut it when you get back.”  She gave me a broad piece of canvas to loop sticks into.  I felt like that painting of the Meadowlark, where some feudal woman is out gathering sticks.  I used to pity her for the narrowness and labor of her life.  Now, suddenly, here I was doing it. 

   When I came back, I asked if she had the internet.  She said there was a computer down the street in someone’s house – after we make the meat pies and hardtack, so I worked till dinnertime.  She, Solange, said, ok, now go hear the news on the internet, if you want.  I did.  It was sketchy and there was so much blogging and opinion and rumors, I didn’t know what to believe. 

   When I got back to her house, she said she had heard it all on the radio, just like the old days.  Clearly, main parts of civilization were going down.  Anything having to do with gasoline was imploding, not just because of diminishing supply but also because it created more greenhouse gases.  But they would put utmost emphasis on keeping radio going because it was much simpler than tv and who needed the damn pictures anyway.  And also the internet, that would be kept going no matter what. 

   Denys came back with the men. They had shot a deer, a nice fat one and were cutting it up and hanging it up to dry in a screened area, to keep the flies off.  They were cooking up the organs and making kidney pies and liver pate and God knows what.  I told Denys what we’d learned.  He was shocked and seemed scared. 

   “Food,” he said.  “That’s going to be the main issue everywhere.  Food takes gasoline to grow, fertilize, spray, harvest and drive to market.  I’ve studied all this.  Just in a few days here, we’ve stepped back into the 19th century.”

   “So, how do you like the 19th century?”

   “Well,” he smiled.  “It’s not so bad, really.  I had fun with the men.  There was a sense of purpose and like we all were in this together and we had to do it.  It wasn’t some sport.”

   “We made pies and hard bread.  It was fun.  I like Solange.  She taught me stuff.  I think they like us.  They don’t have a lot of young adults here.”

   We ate all together.  It was fun.  We joked a lot.  When the 6 o’clock news came on, everyone wanted to listen to it.  Parts of Paris were burning.  It was happening in all big cities, because people were leaving to find food in the country.  That was scary, frankly.  We felt self-conscious, because, here we were, out in the country eating their food. 

   “You are welcome,” Solange said. “We don’t know what will happen, but we have adopted you.” The men nodded assent.  She obviously was an important person in the village.
   They weren’t saying the obvious thing that was hanging in the air.  It was a European thing that they weren’t saying it, so Denys, being American came right out with it, of course – that it seemed a lot of people would have to die.  It had been mentioned on the radio, by expert folk they were interviewing.  It really gets you.  Of course, you don’t want to be one of them.  And you don’t want wars and mobs and killing over bread.

   I will let Denys write about it.













9.

Denys speaks…

   So, yes, I blurted it out – “Looks like not all of us are going to be around a year or two from now.”

   Everyone looked at their plate and nodded or just were silent.  The silence dragged on.  I felt, of course, I had violated manners at the table.  I was embarrassed.  I felt, ok, you should just live with the obvious and do your best and not belabor the obvious. 

   Finally, one of the men at the end of the long table spoke.  His name was Pierre.  He wiped his mouth and said, “It’s for the best.  We have no right to be doing this.  I mean wiping out all the other animals and forests, like we were the only thing that mattered.  Nature knows best and she’s doing what she has to do.  I think we all have to just respect her as she does it.  We are not God’s favored creatures, you know.  He likes all the other ones too.”

   There followed a long silence again. 

   “We are grateful to you for this food and home,” I said.  “I want you to know that we accept what Pierre just said so well.  We do not expect to be special as nature does what she has to do…and we will be moving on.  It is a sad time for all of us.”

   Solange made a small whimper and I could see she had tears in her eyes.  Her husband put his hand on her shoulder. 

   “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I blurted.  “I’ve ruined our meal.”  I started to stand up.  Solange pulled my sleeve and had me sit.

   “No, no, no, it’s all right.  We are all in this together,” she said. “It is a sacred time for us, for all of us and we should accept it and learn from it.  We should also celebrate, as we would any other time, when we have guests.”  She raised her wine glass. “I would give a toast to Mother Earth, her infinite wisdom and her love.  She has been good to us for millions of years.  May some of us survive with that wisdom and learn to listen to her and love her again, like the people who painted our caves.  They did not paint gods or man.  They painted the animals and clearly loved with them and lived with them in a balanced life.  With that same love, I toast this deer we are eating tonight.”

   We finished our meal with much talk and gusto and laughing.  It was a rare moment.  Then the men got out some fiddles and a drum and we pushed back the table and danced.  They taught us their dances.  We got quite drunk and Solange was kissing all the men, inspiring Sophia to do that same.  The men appreciated that, as she is young and very beautiful.  She kissed them with all her heart. 

   Solange showed us our bedroom, which was a room in the barn.  The slightly gibbous moon was coming in the windows, shining right on the bed.  We knew this was going to be a full night of love.  We had not really had the time to do that yet.  Or the nice bed.  I wanted to do everything slowly.  I took off her sweater and her blouse, undoing the buttons one by one and touching the flesh inside, just very softly.  Finally her top was off and I wanted to let her sit there in the moonlight and take in her lovely breasts.
 
   “You are completely beautiful, Sophia.” I was kneeling on the floor.  I had moved back a few feet to take her in.  She brought her hair forward so it went off her shoulders.  She smiled slightly.

   “The end of the world isn’t so bad, is it?” she smiled. 

   “No, it’s a special time.  Let’s make it a quality experience.”  We laughed.  I pulled off her skirt and she sat there naked.  I would touch her thigh, occasionally and she would shiver and giggle.

   “Can you get pregnant?”

   She laughed. “It’s a little late to ask, isn’t it?  Do you care?  Do you want me to?”

   “It’s not exactly the environmentally correct thing to be doing, is it?”

   “I can feel that if we do it tonight, I will be, especially with this full moon.”

   “Well, I’m not carrying any condoms around.”

   We looked at each other long moments.  I’ve never let myself just be seen by someone like that.  Nor had she, i could tell.  Tears came to our eyes, both of us.  Soon, we were weeping, sobbing like babies.  And still looking right into each other’s faces.  We were sobbing for the world, well, really for humanity.  The world would live on, like it did after the dinosaurs and so many other things extincted.  Life would go on, we knew that.  But we felt so deeply sorry for us all.  So many of us were going to die, so many of us good women and men, so many babies, artists, lovers, race car drivers, pretty young girls who make espresso drinks, teenage boys at their video games.

   She held out her arms for me and pulled me down on top of her, opening her legs for me.  We cried and fumbled and tried to start and eventually we did.  When our tears were gone, we started laughing and made love, I’m sure, as no one has ever made love, with such relief, with complete abandon and embrace – and we did it half the night, over and over, stopping to talk, whisper, cherish, touch.  I think it was the first time I ever really, really looked at the face of a woman, taking in and kissing every little dear feature and praising it, the eyelashes, the curve of the cheek, the ear, the little hairs on the back of the neck.  I kissed and drank in every part of her.  We even stopped to talk about our toes and how good they were, helping us walk and never getting any love.  We laughed ourselves silly.  And finally, we slept, letting ourselves sleep until late in the morning, letting the sun wake us.  And we made love once again, sweetly, slowly, murmuring and purring to each other like cats, until…












10.

Sophia speaks…

   Until Solange called to us “coffee!!”

   How sweet that word was.  There wasn’t necessarily going to be coffee in our new world, was there?  It had to be shipped around with gas and who knew what climates would support it if the tropics were going to be a lot hotter.  Inside she had fresh croissants and chocolate – and we whispered, hm, chocolate might not be with us either.  We savored them as if we had never tasted this miracle before, yum. 

   Speaking of yum, omg the sex.  It feels so wrong to call it sex.  It was wayyy beyond that.  I’ve never made love before.  That’s what it felt like and that’s what I kept saying to Denys.  I’ve never loved, I’ve never fucked, I’ve never touched or been touched!  What was I doing all those years?  Some kind of rough, desperate groping and screwing. 

   I had Denys laughing his ass off.  He kept pointing at himself, as if to say, me too.  He was an amazing, sweet, good, dear, passionate Pan Green Man lover, but again, he wasn’t even trying and he kept saying that.  It was just flowing through him and us and in us and all over us and my pussy has never been alive, never felt, never been born, never done what it was meant to do.  Till last night.  And many times we gave each other that “look” we are getting more and more familiar with, the one that says, can you believe this is really happening?  This is vast, universal, divine. 

   “It’s She,” I whispered.  He nodded.  He knew who I meant.  He’s not stupid.  She is always here.  We just have been too preoccupied, scared, dumb, grasping, angry – too human.  I mentioned that.  He just nodded.  We knew better than to belabor the divine.  Pretty soon we’d be writing down fucking commandments about it and start the whole shittin cycle again and be burning heretics before you knew it.

   We stumbled in the house.  I felt so good.  I knew what it was to be feeling like a woman now.  But the radio was on and it had news of fires in a lot of big cities, because people were leaving, starving or dying and there were fewer people to put out fires, when they happened.  So the fires kept going and pretty soon they were too big.  In Paris, the radio said they were blowing up big sections of city blocks around the historic inner city and would concentrate on saving that.  It was scary.

   “Where are these people going, the ones who are leaving Paris?  Do we know?”  Again, it was an unspoken question (and answer). They were obviously going into the country.  For food.  People need food.  The country has food.  Everyone knew that.  We didn’t need to say it.  People are not going to roll over and say sayonara, guess I’ll die.  They are going to get food.  All the food will be considered as belonging to everyone, I’m sure.  I felt like I was going to scream.  Here I was munching a goddam croissant and I was suddenly sick to my stomach.  I said I had to get some air.  I’m sure a flashed a pained look at Denys because he said he’d come with me.

   As we put on our jackets, the radio said that some kind of international council had formed and decided they would focus first on preserving communications on the internet, radio and some kind of tv, even if it was just webcams, for the ages – that these would never go down. 

   “Well, isn’t that nice? We can all watch each other shrivel up and talk about it.” Denys gave me a “be quiet” look (Solange smiled, though) and we went out into the warm – very warm – spring morning.  I pushed myself into Denys’s chest and he dutifully put his arms around me, though I could tell he was scared shitless.

   “Let’s walk, let’s just put one foot in front of the other, ok?” I said.  After a while, we were feeling that resigned, weird feeling, like when you know you can’t do shit about the bad situation, so you kind of “become” it.  You let it be what it is.  I think fear comes from thinking you can and have to do something.

   “Kinda sucks, doesn’t it?” Denys said.  I was starting to get his humor – kind of gallows sarcasm humor like some guy about to be hung saying, I hope that’s a new rope – wouldn’t want it to break cuz a guy could get hurt.  I liked it. 

   We found ourselves strolling past the open gate of the old caves.  We stopped and were looking at this slope with only this hole and blackness beyond it.  Symbolic.  That’s what we both thought and said.  The blackness, long forgotten, through the door to where we all came from 10,000 years ago.  We looked at each other and both raised our eyebrows – an invitation.  He grabbed a bunch of small sticks, with a few fatter sticks in the middle and lit them as a torch and we went in.   ~












11.

Denys speaks…

We stood in front on a big horse in the Hall of the Bulls, that first big place inside.  It just kind of blows you away, the sheer oldness of it and knowing it was painted by people who’d never seen a wheel, a road, a metal object.  Suddenly, Sophia says, Denys if you could say something to these people, from who we are now, what would you say?  What would I say?  Wow, I thought, what could be more appropriate?  It’s like we owe them some kind of explanation for what we’ve done but at the same time these are the people who started us down that road, with their spears, arrows, little statues, beautiful art, their rituals, their awareness, which was exploding at that time from the much more crude and simple lives people had before.  They were becoming human, really human – the people we are today. 

   “I would say…I am saying, actually…Hello, you old cave people from 15 millennia ago, who did these paintings, god, I can feel you here so clearly.  You are here.”

   “I’m here, too, and I’ve got some things to say also – and to ask you.  It’s me Sophia!  And this is Denys!  SO HEAR US NOW!  WE WANT YOU HERE LISTENING AND TALKING TO US AND WE’RE NOT JUST FUCKING AROUND WITH SOME NEW AGE BULLSHIT RITUAL!!”

   I must have jumped back a few steps.  I was in awe of her.  I had only sensed but not seen this side of her, this depth of her.  It was electric.  I thought, well, that’s cool, getting your rage out and being clear.  I wanted to edge my way out into the sun and have a cigarette, frankly.

   She whirled on me, her face lit up by the fire I held.  “NO!  You are staying here with me, man.  No one leaves till we get what we came for – and THAT INCLUDES YOU, YOU CRO-MAGNON, FLINT-KNAPPING SONS OF BITCHES!!  You must have known what you were getting into!  What you were getting US into!”

   Then she started prancing around me as I held the fire.  She was stomping her feet and bellowing out some rhythmic, incantive sound and beating on the top of her chest with her open palms, occasionally lapsing into English and chanting, you-show-up-now-you-come-be-here-I’m talking-yes-to-you-and-we’re-not-leaving-till-you come-I-know-you’re-here!!  Then back into chanting.  Where did she get this?  Where did she get the sex we had last night?  Where did we get what happened at Carnac?  Where did anything come from?  It just was – and you believed it and knew it and you fucking well stood your ground and took it and that’s what she was doing.

   “We have to find it,” she said to me.  “There’s going to be one painting that’s the one we’re going to be talking to.  Find it!”

   I edged along the wall, looking, holding up my torch and trying to feel which one it might be.  But soon, here was one, a bison, obviously dying, retching, its guts hanging out and there was a spear in its side. 

   “Yes,” she said calmly.  “It’s waiting.  It’s listening.”

   I breathed and waited for the words.  I was not in my normal headspace anymore, that was clear.  She had shifted us into some kind of altered state, but it wasn’t just our minds that had changed.  That was white man thinking – that an altered state happened inside your skull.  This was happening and it wasn’t inside our heads.  This was real.

   “Where were you taking us? You knew you were changing,” I said.  “You knew you were opening up your minds and becoming much more than you were.  This art shows it!  You must have known this would have effect on your children and their children and theirs.  Where was this going?!!”  I was crying now.  I found myself on my knees.  I dropped the bundle of sticks and the flame guttered out.

   “Leave it,” she said. “Now you tell us, talk to us.”

   The embers got smaller and out of their tiny orange fragments, eyes emerged and rose up, standing in front of us.  It whispered.  Was it some echo of water?  Was this real?  It was whispering a few words, slowly, but in no language I ever heard.  Only one word I clearly knew – “ma” or ma-der,” obviously the word for mother, which is has the same root in all Western languages.

   Other orange eyes now appeared behind the first speaker – and some lower to the ground, as if children. 

   “Speak to us so we can understand you!” commanded Sophia. There was silence.  They laughed and were talking among themselves.  So they had humor.  From then on their voices seemed to be in English, with other words we could understand sprinkled all over. 
   “We are here.  You called us.  We are always here.  What do you want?  You speak with power.  We like that.”  They all laughed again, filling the chamber with roaring echoes. 

   “What is happening to the earth?”

   “She’s not happy.  Her guts are hanging out.  Because of you – all of you.  Many spears in her.  She is like the bison there.  You can kill her, but the herd never dies.  Sometimes the hunters all die.  That’s why we paint all these animals here inside of her.  We love them.  We put them back inside Mother after we eat them.  We give back to Mother with the energy she gave us when we kill the bison.  We take her inside us, then we take the animals back inside her.”  They all laughed again, like they were explaining the obvious to a very stupid person. “You know what we mean?  You see it, right?”

   “Where are you now?” I said.

   “That’s not what you need to know.  We are here, back inside her, the Mother.  You know that??”  He put his open palm against his forehead, just like in the movie “Clan of the Cave Bear.” 

   “Yes, we talk to her many times, to Jean.  She was trying to tell you.  But you ask again.  We will tell you.”  They all laughed again and then, amazingly, they touched us or rather stroked us, ran their hands down our hair and shoulders, kind of moaning, like you moan when you stroke a baby.  It felt good, comforting.

   Sophia said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you and cursed you.”

   “You scared.  Is ok.  You very scared.  We will hold you.”  Two of them stood behind each of us, their hands on our shoulders, moaning little baby moans to us. We could see now, as if there were many lanterns going. 

   “What can we do?  Are we all going to die?”

   “Yes, you are all going to die.”  It was a woman’s voice now.  “All must die.”

   “You know what I mean.”  They all laughed again and stroked us.
 
   “All of one kind of animal dies, too.  Like the big mammoths and rhino with two nose horns.  All gone.  Too hot for them.  That was when the ice finally went north.  But it always comes back.  Is like Mother breathing.  Slowly.”  They all howled and were slapping their legs and jumping up and down.

   “Is that happening now?”

   “Oh yes, to lots of kinds of animals and plants, too.  You killed them.”  Again the hysterical laughing.

   “I mean to us humans.”

   “I don’t know.  Most of you will die.  There is no way around that.  It’s going to get very hot, like it got very cold so many times.  It’s her way.  Hot-cold, sleep-wake, eat-starve, live-die.”  She was grinning and laughing.  I could make out her face now.  She was very beautiful, like a modern Euro woman, and had paint on her face.  The man standing beside her was average height, strongly built – and they both used their eyes much more than we do.  Their eyes were wide and darted around constantly, intensely aware and alive, curious, ready for anything.  I sensed this is the way all humans used to be.  I knew it in my heart and I missed it.

   “What should we do?  What can we do?”

   “You try to stay alive through the dark, ice, fire, tigers, all of it.  What else can you do?  Who is left, they go on when it’s nice again.  It’s her way.  You learn what works and what gets you killed.  You try not to get killed.” 

   Their laughter was getting irritating, but how could you not laugh with them?  They were so childlike in stating the obvious.  And they had no malice at all.  They would not hurt anything for the fun of it.  They would only kill for food.  Their joy radiated out of them without a single inhibition or defense game.  I tried to put myself in their place.  They must think we are devils or sick in our souls.  Well, I guess they’re right.

   “Does the Mother care if we survive, I mean as a species, you know, a kind of animal?” Sophia said.

   “She just gives and gives and gives, that’s all.  She gives more than enough.  You learn how to use it.  But you don’t use too much.  There is a dark place there, when you try to get ahead of her and…”  She started grabbing at imaginary food in front of her and trying to stuff it in her face. They all went nuts with laughing.

   “No.  those can’t live.”  She pantomimed staggering and falling to one side.  She shook her head from side to side.  They all fell silent and looked at the ground.  She picked up one of my sticks off the ground and held it in front of us, slowly bending it until it broke.  They all gasped.  Their eyes went wide.  The children started crying.   ~












12.   Return of an Uncanny Sense of Who Is My Friend

Sophia speaks…

They were fading.  Then they were gone.  We left the cave.  It was late afternoon.  We talked to Solange, asking her if anyone ever saw the cavemen.  She glanced up quickly at us and said, “It sounds like you found the answer to that question.”  We nodded.  “It’s only happened a few times and people don’t talk about it.  Bad luck.”

   I thought – how often the truth gets labeled as bad luck.  No wonder we’re such a fucked up species.  We’d talked and decided to move on, despite the hospitality we were being shown.

   “You may have to come back here,” said Solange. “Just know that you can.  We may need you, too.” 

   That was a month ago.  Something seemed to call us to the Mediterranean, the north coast.  I think we were looking for “our people,” our tribe, if you will, a group of people we could live and work with.  There was going to be a lot more hunting and gathering.  Solange had said that, in the news, people were grabbing up all the canned food.  It would only last a year, if that.  I marveled at peoples’ thinking.  What good is a year if the system can’t sustain itself?  There was the short-term, quarterly bottom line thinking again.  Rip it off for all it’s worth right now, then let’s look for the next village to pillage. 

   We walked down the paved, two-lane road.  It’s hard on your feet.  There were no cars, just an occasional official-looking truck, seemingly carrying some kind of supplies – and people were going back to using horses, which was pretty cool, but some people, if you get them five feet above everyone else, think they are hot shit.  They aren’t. 

   Anywhere you would see a long row of trees and bushes, you would know water runs there, a creek or something, and where that creek and a road intersect, that’s where you would find people camping and hanging out and starting to farm, obviously planning to stay there a while.  Farmers who owned the land gave up on trying to run people off.  They got beat up and told to go to hell, they don’t own the land anymore.  The land belongs to everyone or at to those who can defend it. 

   These communities were the new thing, a new way of life.  At first it was scary.  You wanted to meet and greet people, but they were all strangers.  In time, though, you could pick it up at a distance, which were the good groups and which were rowdies and fuckups.  There is a sixth sense and we’ve always had it or we never could have survived and evolved.  It was a voice in you and man, it spoke.  It said, hey, do I wanna stop and let down my guard with these people and instantly you knew the answer and if it was no and they started to give you shit, you were ready to defend yourself.  Denys and I both had started carrying “walking sticks,” which really should be called head-bashing sticks, and we’d started to practice with them, feinting, jabbing and (almost) whacking the shit out of each other.  It was pretty fun, especially when you factor in that this ain’t no game – you could be saving your life.  It was attitude, too, and, as Denys points out, I have plenty of that.  Got it from my brothers.  It’s also an Irish thing.  If you come around looking like you would put up with some shit from people, man, you are going to get it.  And if you are a girl, you are going to get raped and not just once.  And if your man ain’t there to claim you and stand those boundaries, you should get rid of him fast and get a real man.  A guy has to be ready to fight, not just ready, but he has to actually want to.  That shows and other men respect it.

   We got knives, too, big ones, good for taking a deer apart – or a person.  The knives are about two feet long, like a short sword.  Denys got them from an old museum that was abandoned. They could move quickly and would both whack and pierce straight on.  Denys had taken fencing and he taught me all the simple moves, the disengages, feints, parries and such.  He’s really taken to this manhood thing.  I find I desire him more than ever, by the way.    ~












13.   The Mother Reclaims

Denys speaks…

We’ve taken to traveling off the paved roads.  They’re too hard and also they leave you exposed, right out in the open, so if someone is coming at you, well, you just don’t know what’s going to happen.  They could be brigands.  That’s a word that’s revived from history.  It means highwaymen, people who always want to rape the women and kill the men – and take what they want from you.  It’s more fun going off-road and trails are developing across the country.  Fences are coming down. 

   Today, we are walking across the south of France, near Italy.  I see the long row of green in the distance, signifying a creek.  We skirt up around it till we’ve got the wind in our faces, so their dogs or horses can’t smell us and we get a view of them with our little binoculars.  What do we look for?  Well, we know it when we see it.  I think we look for the presence of women and children, which signify some kind of extended, stable community, with people able to feed themselves.  They also dance in the evening.  That’s a fun thing that’s come back.  In this group, we see all the good signs.  Seems to be about 20 people.  We watch them for several hours.  We ask ourselves if they seem to want company.  That’s something you feel in the sixth sense.  We don’t get any bad signs.  We guess that they would probably want to add to their group, to a point, for security, diversity, news from other parts of the region. 

   To alert them to our presence, we move around upwind, so the smell comes to them. Their dogs bark.  We are standing in plain sight, a couple hundred meters away.  We wave slowly and let them see us smile.  They take their time.  One looks through his binoculars, then speaks to the others.  One man bows down from the waist, a friendly, honoring gesture and the others do it, too.  We’ve seen this before.  People are relearning manners.  It’s nice, more than nice.  It borders on sacred – honoring the person as a divine being who deserves honoring.  We bow back and advance.

   The first thing they do is offer us water.  It’s from the creek.  It’s good water, as is almost all water these days.  There are no factories dumping shit in it – and no cattle for foul runoff.  All the animals have been set free and are hunted, very sparimgly.  Anyone overhunting or trying to be too much of a carnivore is spoken to sharply and his meat taken and shared widely. 

   “It is a beautiful day – and so warm,” the man smiled.   It was a standard greeting, to take time to describe the weather then sardonically mention the Big Hot, as it had come to be called.  Global warming. 

   “Yes, the earth is good to us,” said Sophia. That too, was a standard salutation, not complaining about what the earth or weather was doing, but accepting and honoring that it did the right thing.  The Big Hot was the right thing.  It was her answer to us.

   “We are about to eat.  Would you honor us and spend a day with us?” The man signaled the path of the sun through the sky, indicating we would be given a 24-hour trial visit and if everyone liked it, it might be extended.

   “We do not want to trouble you,” Sophia said.

   “It is not trouble, but an honor, if you would stay,” he replied.  Sophia and I bowed and held it for a beat.  We were honored.  They had checked us out with their sixth sense, their instinct and decided that wanted us, our energy, our news, our human presence here. 

   So, you see, a formality has set in.  I think it’s a reaction against the rapacious self-interest that about destroyed the world.  Frankly. 

   They offer us wine.  That’s one thing that absolutely will endure.  People are tending the grapes and even though the weather is changing a lot and the climate isn’t right for most grapes, they still get tended and stomped and fermented – and to mess with any vineyards, that just doesn’t happen.  And the wine is for all.  No one can hoard it.  It is considered “her” blood, meaning Mother Earth or Queen Nature.  That’s another new phrase that’s come into the language.  I like it.

   After a glass or two, we all warm up to each other and have been telling jokes and then it’s time for “real talk” so the main man says, what news, my friend?  He’s a strong man and the way that he poses the question, you know he wants the information as part of his survival strategy – and you know he means to survive and will.

   “There’s a lot of reclaiming going on, of course,” I say.  Reclaiming, restoring, rebalancing and such words mean people dying – dying back to normal numbers that the earth can live with and support.  We don’t say “death” because it helps us get away from the idea it’s a tragedy and wrong and sad.  It’s her way.  It’s right and natural.  You accept what’s right and natural.  You honor it.  It’s sacred. 

   “Yes there is a lot of it,” he said.  “There’s never been anything like it on the planet.  We’ve all had to ask ourselves about that.”

   Well, there it was, the big question.  Every individual person indeed had to ask her/himself about that – why am I here?  Am I necessary?  Do I need to be here?  Or was I just born because everyone wanted two or three children, then to give them all the best stuff, home, possessions, college education and release them on the world to consume – and this had been going on heedlessly since the Industrial Revolution, but really long before that.  Disease took out the surplus, but then we learned about sanitation and vaccinations and went out of control with our success.  And that was not to be.  Not for long.

   At that point, someone came and whispered in his ear.  He nodded, then smiled.  You learned to celebrate this.  “Another reclaiming,” he explained.  Someone had died.  It was a young woman and she’d died from what appeared to be typhus or typhoid – bad water.

   “We’re doing the air burials,” he explained, which meant they would go stick her body in the crotch of a tree for the birds, worms, flies and bugs to recycle into animal life and eventually plant life.  To burn the body would add to the carbon burden of the earth and that was a no-no.  To bury it could pollute the water tables, which needed to be preciously guarded.  So the birds and insects were having a banner year.  As well they should.  The sky burials would also encourage the return of wolves, coyotes and other carnivores and scavengers who needed to thrive and help trim the newly-released herds of sheep, goats, cattle, horses, all the former domestic creatures. 

   “It’s good to give back to the Mother.  The spirit endures, the spirit of all life – in Her wisdom,” I said.  It sounded like cant, like babble, but it was true at its heart and there was no way around it.  He smiled.  His name was Rogere.  There was a woman who came up and gave him bites off the grill as they were preparing dinner.  She smiled.  Her name was Brigitte.  Sophia and I glanced at each other and knew we liked her.  We liked him, too.  God, why?  We liked them suddenly because we could feel their energy.  It was instinctual.  We were being drawn together.  It was being done by something outside ourselves.  It was not like, ok, I like her, or they like us – it was, ok, it was the planet energy, same as we first felt at Carnac and again at old Lascaux, what a place! 

   What was the queerest thing was that she came up and offered some food to me and even offered to put it in my mouth and as she did, she pressed her body against mine, pushing her breasts into my side and smiling at me, then at Sophia!  But I got it.  I instinctively turned to Sophia, to disown it, brush it off, make a joke, something, but I saw her and the woman exchanging the most warm and knowing connection.  Her man – I guess he was her man – smiled at her.  It was all ok!  It was clearly an affirmation of the wider energy, the planet energy and as such, nothing could be wrong or bad with it.  It seemed something almost conspiratorial between the women.  It was delightful.  Whatever had just happened, they were clearly in charge of it!   ~












14.   The Planet Mind

Sophia speaks…

   Yeah, right, whatever.  Women have always had this conspiracy.  They just never had the power, that’s all.  Men had it and as long as men had the power, women had to fight against each other, just to get the means of survival – money, prestige, credibility, mainly the last thing.  That’s what matters.  Now we have it.  Mother has spoken and she voted men out of power.  You carry your swords around but it’s only to protect us from other men, not from anything real.  It will pass.  You’ll see.

   So we gave the woman a sky burial.  It went on half the night.  A lot of drumming, torches and prancing in a circle.  It would stop every few minutes and someone would tell a story from her life -- what a good woman she had been, how she raised her children, how she faced the Great Pruning of humanity with grace and ease, knowing she didn’t need to be here or had been here long enough.  She had gotten typhus and did not want to be brave and fight against it so she could live and take up more space.  She had done that.  Let the animals have it now.  Those were her last words – and people chanted them as they danced around the tree that her body rested in.  “Let the animals have it!”  Everyone chanted, with each verse inserting a new name – let the raccoons have it, let the sparrows have it, let the salmon have it, let the bear have it.
 
   It was hard to absorb this, the reverse of all we had been conditioned with, that it was our world to go forth and multiply and have dominion over all the other creatures.  I mean, come on, what kind of god would say that?  It was so clearly the thought of men.  They all shouted their goodbyes to the woman, whose name was Maria.  They shouted their thanks for her, well, to be blunt, for her getting off the planet, to make room for the Great Balancing. 

   One thing the burial ritual and dance did was pump everyone up.  There was so much energy.  It was like a human sacrifice.  You realize how brief life can be and how you’d best seize the moment, today and really get what life is all about.  Back at the fire in camp, one glance around revealed that everyone felt it.  They had the same eyes we saw in the ancient people of Lascaux, alert to everything, dismayed by nothing, guided by that planet energy.  Drums beat harder, flutes cut through the night, sparks flew like mad off the fire and soon the barriers were down.  The women joined hands and formed a circle inside the men and would stop, as if on cue and kiss them, taking of an article of clothing each time, inviting the men to draw nearer, still circling, letting each man have his treat of life with her.  It was as if we all knew what to do, as one mind.  Well, we did know.  We were guided by planet wisdom and all ended up sleeping in piles, in a great circle around the fire.  A lovely dawn awoke us.   ~










15.  Thinking Like the Night

Denys speaks…

Ok, I can’t believe Sophia did that.  I can’t believe the women did that.  So lovely to be rid of that demon about men’s lust, cheating and generally living just to boink as much as possible and sperminate the world. 

   Women are in control, aren’t they?  And we surrender to the feminine – and are loved, delighted, informed, calmed, taught by it.  It seems so obvious now.  How could we have missed it?  It was dear and rich and good to be loved by the women.  Although it would have fulfilled any man’s fantasies in the old world, it was nothing like the old lascivious, profane, obscene or whatever you want to call it.  That was dead.  The Planet Mind would not support it, so it would seem.  I feel a thousand pounds lighter!  Sophia is not “mine” to love or own or be loyal to.  It’s all in her hands and I love it that way!

   The group of people clearly accepted us and we were all joking and drinking tea the next morning.  They pointed out places around the countryside where they had planted veggies, mostly dark, leafy greens and root crops – the best stuff. 

   “It’s most of what you need and then we hunt an animal about once a moon, in fact on the full moon, at night.  It’s very exciting and it’s coming up soon.  You’ll love it.”

   That’s how they indicated their acceptance.  They just said things as if you understood you belonged and would be here in a month.  Everyone knew it and there was no discussion or voting.  You listened to the planet energy and you went with it. 

   As we were talking, I was replaying images from last night and realized how big and dark Sophia’s nipples were.  I turned suddenly to her.  “Are you?  Are we??”  She put my hand on her belly and smiled.  So, there was going to be a new life in the midst of all this dying.  Everyone noticed it immediately.  The women all knew it last night when she was dancing.  They took it as a sign from the planet goddess that we belonged with these people.  That was the meaning of the dance.  New life was being welcomed in all its meanings and dimensions, without limits. It was the first new life since the Big Hot really came down on us, said Brigitte – and who knew what sort of world this child would grow up in.  I tried to imagine telling it about the old ways and how incomprehensible the child would find them.

   We had heard from people passing through that at least half the world’s population had been reclaimed by Great Mother.  You can just feel the difference.  There’s not as much busy static in the air.  Birds sing louder, more of them.  There’s almost no one driving on the road now.  They’re burning all the bodies because of disease, so it’s adding to the greenhouse effect.  Only fitting, ain’t it?  Even in our death, we rob the carbon bank.  Oh well, let it burn, baby, let it burn.  It IS getting hotter, ha! 

   Sophia shouts and dances and sings - So let it get hot!  Let’s take out all those huge coastal cities!  The old glitzy, high-rise Riviera and Monaco are way under water.  Cool.  Let’s all go down there and lay in the sun on the new beach, way up in the hills.  Let’s claim some bigtime real estate and become the new old money.  The family was howling and clapping and beating it out in a reggae rhythm as she was strutting like a model and pretending to smoke on a long cigarette holder.

   It was such a howl.  It was dark and the fire was high.  We had our sentries around the camp, not standing there in plain sight, but way off in the glades and ravines, moving around and checking things out.  They were accomplished archers and if something were amiss would put an arrow into this one tree in our camp, silently.  And that’s what happened.  We looked at the direction the arrow came from and six or eight of us slipped away, telling the others to keep dancing and beating the drums.  We moved like shadows and thought like shadows, something we picked up hunting by moonlight and learning to hide from the deer – and each other, just for fun. 

   We would move from bush to tree to ravine, then just stand or sit – and wait.  If you wait long enough, what you are looking for will appear.  And it did.  It was a group of men in long, hooded robes.  We moved easily behind them, so they were between us and the fire.  We’d heard about them.  They were being called the Medievalists and they felt these were the Final Days and it was their job to see that the sinners got their due or something like that.  They clearly were stalking the camp and not doing it with much stealth.  They galumphed across the field, snapping twigs, breathing hard and letting their silhouettes stand out against the fire. 

   We didn’t want to just kill them.  We wanted to give them a chance to say what they wanted, why they were here, whatever.  It’s amazing how sharp your senses get when you live out on the land, in nature night and day – and especially having to hunt.  The long-dulled sense of smell had become especially keen and we slipped downwind from them to see what we could smell.  There it was, that nasty scent of steel, grease and lead.  They had guns.  Such weapons were frowned on by our new breed of country-dwellers as being way out of balance with the Mother, not to mention noisy and unfair to an animal, if you were hunting.  If you’re in nature, well, nature gives you plenty of gifts and tools to take care of yourself, to hunt down anything, if you really want to.  Getting found with a gun automatically branded you – and you didn’t get much chance to explain yourself.  You were bad.  No one wanted you around.  You would never be trusted.  Period.

   With hand signals, two of us split off and slipped directly behind them, five of them, actually joining their party without being detected. 

   We stood there “thinking like the night,” as we called it, making sure we didn’t even have thoughts going on, so there would be nothing to trigger their sixth sense, if they had any.  So, one of them muttered something like “…just walk in there and blow them away.”

   “Do you think that would be wise?”  I couldn’t resist.  I had to say it.  It was so Robin Hood or D’Artagnan or Scaramouche. 

   “Why not? The bloody pagans are already standing at the gates of hell with their fire, demon drums and their wanton bitches.  Let’s help them along,” the apparent leader replied.

   “I mean, didn’t our Lord tell us thou shalt not kill but rather to love thy neighbor?”

   “Well, of course he did but…hey…” His robe went open as he realized they had company - and as his hand went for his gun.  We stepped to the side and our men (behind us) had arrows sprouting out of these strangers’ pudgy bellies in that same instant.  It’s painful to get gut shot, so our sentries kindly sent shafts whistling through their hearts before they hit the ground. 

   As much as we wanted to jubilate, we moved back into thinking like the night, crouching into the tall grass and moving back into the forest line.  We had to find out if they had anyone else with them.  We stayed still for a long time, probably an hour, then slinked along through the edge of the forest, covering the whole perimeter.  There was no one.  We had to really strain and go deep into our inner silence to test if there were any of their nasty friends in the immediate region of many miles, but there seemed none. 

   We knew they would be missed, so, not wanting to give them a air burial (too visible and actually, too honorable) and not wanting to bury them inside the Mother, we dragged them near where we knew some wolves, the great recyclers, had their dens.  Yes, wolves have come back quickly, though we haven’t seen any yet.  They are understandably scared of us.  We burned their nasty-smelling clothes.  And we knew we would have to talk about what to do – move the camp?  Stay and defend our fields?  Should we be married to these fields or should we become ever more the gatherer-hunter?  To me, that sounds a lot more interesting (and fun) than the barnyard.  Creating crop surpluses is what started us down this dubious road to civilization.   ~











16.   The Planet Voice Is My Conscience Now

Sophia speaks…

   You remember how we talked of the Lascaux people, how their eyes had such fire, aliveness, movement, curiosity, how their souls came through their eyes without inhibition.  That’s the way the men were when they got back last night.  We sent a few other sentries out and then the men began telling their story around the fire.  They were on their feet, not sitting.  They began to enact it, stalking, studying the foe – and then that hilarious part where Denys sneaks up and joins their conversation.  The children were wide-eyed and screamed to hear it again and again. 

   I realized, god, this is just like a tribal stone age gathering with story-telling, dance, drumming, the hunt, all of it.  But this was a manhunt.  I had to say it.  I couldn’t let it pass.

   “But we killed people tonight.”  The whole place fell silent.  Everyone looked at the ground and nodded.  We all were thinking it.  We all knew there was no choice, so we made the choice.

   “I feel that we’re laying down the pattern for humanity, if there’s going to be a humanity a generation from now,” said one woman, a Canadian, named Rebecca.  “If we has been passive or tried to reason with them, they would kill us.  If we run, they will hunt us down.  I think it’s important we go with instinct and trust it -- and avoid the conceptual approach that got the world where it is now.”

   “There is a time to kill.  There will always be a time to kill.  It makes you learn and judge when that time is.”  It was Jacques, one of the archers who had killed the men. 

   “We must come into balance with the Mother.  That’s all there is to it.”  It was a man in the back, I couldn’t tell who.  “Only a small portion of us humans are going to come out of this.  It will not be the predator, the dominator, the rapist of the earth, the conqueror of other peoples.  That age is passed.  These people who tried to conquer us are dinosaurs from that age.”

   “He’s right,” said Denys. “Even of those old dominators did succeed in wiping out us people, the ones who are trying to live back in the Earth’s will and ways, they would still die, just like the dinosaurs, who had such huge teeth, claws, armor and might.  When you threw climate change at them, their power could do nothing to save them.  They rolled over and died.”

   “Yes,” I said. “I did need to put it out there.  I want to be conscious and choose as I, as we go along.  I was glad when I saw Denys and the others walk back into this circle, alive and smiling.  I could never imagine myself saying this a year ago, but what you did was good and beautiful.  You saved us – and how you acted came from Planet Wisdom.  Your eyes have the Planet Wisdom in them and your bodies are rich with the power of life and earth.”

   I could not help myself, I swear.  It was as if hands moved me over to that man, the archer who had just spoken, Jacques, and my hands took his and I kissed his hands.

   “To bed children!” the women all clapped and shouted with mock sternness.  The children giggled madly, screamed and threw little sticks at us.  They knew what was coming.  They had seen it before. 

   The drums started beating, slowly and the cooing and hooting started, from the throats of the women – and the men were saying “Oui! Ya! Oh yes, baby! Bless us, you good ladies, your beauty and energy make us men and guides this beautiful world. Come to us and give us this love that is all meaning, all hope, all life in this world.”  God, it was beautiful.  How much a woman I felt.  I know that no woman in that sorry old world before the Big Hot ever felt like a woman, not like this. 

   I first went over to Denys and kissed him. “You are my man,” I smiled.  I know, he smiled back, squeezing my hand.  “Her hand is pushing me over to this warrior stud who saved us, as you did, my sexy good man.” 

   God, where were these words coming from?  It was a ritual exchange happening.  We women were soothing the egos of all the men, making sure none would be hurt or feel less than any other man.  It was so important, we could feel it.  And we looked long and deep into their eyes, the eyes of the “partner,” if that’s what he was, with all the sexiness, mother love, life force, all that, until he would smile back at us and know – this was all coming from Planet wisdom, from Her heart. 

   [N.B. And years later, I can note here that this is where it started and it was a pattern we were to see not just in our clan but in almost all clans, though some would stick with the strict pairbond. These were the groups influenced by Buddhism, Hindu and Zen from the Early Times.  It was not in the European or American psyche to put the power and scent and surging of love on the back burner like that.]

   As we’ve been saying, the sense of smell has really come alive and is such a major part of starting to make love.  I went over and slowly let my nose come into his space.  It was so sexy.  I smelled his lips and let the stubble of his chin brush against my cheek.  I so wanted to smell his chest!  I peeled back his tunic vest thing.  It was all he wore.  It was bare skin under that.  I bent my knees and smelled his chest and let my nails trace across his ribs and belly.  There was such cooing and mmm’ing and I realized the whole tribe (?) (I guess we ARE a tribe!) was taking it all in, like a ritual art form worship happiness gift we were all part of.  I looked around at all of them with such glee in my eyes, I am sure, and started getting into this mock clawing, stalking, devouring thing, slinking all over his body and peeling his clothes off slowly. 

   Need I say he was standing tall, omg.  You don’t know the energy of a man till you’ve tasted one just back from battle.  Hate to say that.  It goes against all that ‘do unto others’ stuff we were conditioned with in the Old Times.  But it’s true.  You never smelled anything like it – fresh baked bread, coffee, wine, honey all mixed with earth, sticks, grass and some unknown dark, fetid, dangerous, fermenting pow!  This energy belongs only to a man you want.  How can this be wrong?  I felt my last inhibitions slipping away.  The last filaments of my divided, guilt-tripping, conscience.  I realized, hey, the Planet Voice IS my conscience now and it knows no evil or meanness. 

   I gestured to the others to go ahead and follow suit, but they were glued where they stood, gaping, with huge smiles of their faces.  Soon they began gently stomping their feet to the drum and chanting, “It is She here – and She loves us, this is Her and She fills us, this is Her delight and She spreads it like honey for us.”  It was call and response, just like in church, but the words were a little different than in church and it was mostly in French, with some Americanisms thrown in and it all rhymed.

   And I held his manballs in one hand and gripped his lovely ass with my other arm and gently, so sweetly took him in my mouth and licked him up and down until he showered his sweet power out into the fiery night sky.  Then I pulled him down on top of me and made him fuck me, which he had no trouble doing, for a sweet eternity of fucking unlimited dear happiness.  God, he could fuck.  But as I write, I realize, it’s not like “he” can fuck.  No one gave him special classes or talents.  He was Planet Heart and he loved me with that heart!  The tribe screamed its joy and they did follow our example – all mixed strangely and beautifully with music, drumming, dancing, chanting and hooting. 
Even the children were hooting and laughing in the background.  Goddess knows what they were doing, but I don’t think they’re going to need any fucking therapy when THEY grow up!  And this man – he and I will always have that.  And the tribe will always have that, another bond among us.  









17.

Denys speaks

   I have lost my capacity for incredulity.  What happened – the battle, the love feast, the tribe, seems the norm now.  There are no “good times” or bad times now.  It all flows according to Planet Heart, it seems.  There seems to be no “I like you” but “I don’t like you.”  It’s so odd, everyone seems to have one favorite beloved but treats all others with equal affection, respect, openness. 

   I know.  It’s ego – ego is shrinking.  The sense of separate self, me, I, this person, with this name and personality and history, it’s slipping away, being overwhelmed by the joys, large and small of being loved by so many people and just living in this day, the present.  This is what Buddha meant!  But I think he left out the part about tying it in to human life itself, living in community, raising kids, hunting, eating, making music.  Whatever he meant by finding the ‘clear light’ of enlightenment, well, I can’t imagine how it could be better than this.  The suffering he promised to liberate us from – that was the ego.  This mad sense of isolation in the individual mind.  And ‘falling in love’ in our Old Culture was a brief breakthrough and relief from that, being seen and touched for a few months before drowning back into the sea of fear that is the individual ego.

   I am curious if this is happening to other groups of people.  I’m finding myself wanting to find out.  What if it is?!  That would be so amazing and right and wonderful, but I can’t let myself get up hopes.  The rest of the world could be on the track of madness, greed and violence it was always on, but just made worse by the collapse of the old social orders.  Who’s keeping the peace?  Are cops and armies on the job?  The roads are strangely empty and we have no electricity.  We wonder if we went into a smaller town, perhaps on the Gold Coast, which is not far from here, they might have solar or wind power and internet or radio.  Some of us are talking about wanting to eat fish.  We want to see if any survive in the Mediterranean, which has become much warmer.  But we are doing well. 
   I wasn’t jealous!  What a difference the end of the world makes.  Really takes the focus off your personal needs and fears, doesn’t it?  It’s like – we’re all in this together and if we can’t love each other and respect each other, well, we’re all going down the tubes and we should.  In fact, knowing that Sophia loves me (and knew to assure me of it and look into my soul, as it were, before she did her “sacred sex”) made it all something we all shared in, were honored by and were loved by.  The other women were not slow in making sure I was loved.  How do I spell this out?  It was not “fucking” but the true energies of nature and the bonding of the tribe.  It supported “me” as an individual -- and yes, I’m getting how ridiculous that sounds.  Why do I need to be supported as an “individual?”  What’s that?  Frankly, it’s what goes against the survival needs of the tribe -- and the need to know and love all and treat them as self. 

   I’m realizing how much fear, blame, rage and war is tied up in all the suppression and rules around sex, when, really, it is such a gift, the sheerest gift and miracle of this earthly life.

   There’s also the sense of this being too good to last, too good to be true – that human nature is harsh, competitive, ultimately ruthless, and for better/worse, this changes and guides society.  But there’s also a sense, a strong sense, that that is thoroughly insane and its day has passed and it’s not ok to shoot up the birthday party – the rebirthday party.  We’ve moved beyond that. 

   Is human nature really changed?  Even a little?  One must hope so.  What could change it more than the world coming undone?  Can nothing wake us up?  If this can’t do it, what can?  We would then need to decline into extinction – and would certainly deserve it.  But yet, we all recognize there’s a piece of the divine, a big piece, in all of us and this is not there in any of the animals!  Where does this come from and why is it here?  Does it mean we’ve been chosen and that, as a stepchild of the gods, we will be saved and taught and allowed to evolve, learn and reign as the godlets we’ve always suspected we are?   ~









18.   Paris is Burning

Sophia speaks…

   Nice speculations, Denys.  I hope there will be someone to read them in the centuries down from us and realize you were a prophet and not a fanciful, sensitive fool.  I agree with all of it, of course, but what I really need and want is enough strong men to protect our tribe and ensure the safety of me and my growing baby, the one in my womb, the one stirring and making her first little kicks.  It is such a trip!  Life inside me!  Death all around me!

   Death!  There, I said it, wrote it.  We always refer to Goddess or Planet reclaiming those who went out of control and harmed her.  Well, we’re dying bigtime.  Not the people in our tribe.  I mean the world at large.  Jacques, the man I, ahem, had that sacred rite of ecstatic union with, omg, he goes into the nearest big town, big enough to have good internet access, phone lines and power (I think it’s Toulouse) and he surfs the shit out of it and remembers it and comes back like some storyteller and we all gather around him and listen!  By the fire! 

   Well, guess what?  Paris is burning!  You’d never guess why.  It’s not because people went mad and torched it.  It’s because there’s hardly any food so people leave town and all it takes is one person to forget and leave the stove on and up she goes.  There is little to no fire department to put it out.  The other big problem is just as mundane – and destructive, so fitting for the capable, wise human race.  It’s toilets.  We need to poo and pee, but with sketchy power, the water and sewage treatment plants can’t handle it and it backs up and before you know it, you have typhoid, typhus, plague, all that shit.  So rats multiply and so do their fleas and you don’t trust any drinking water and people finish off the Perrier and they’re toast. 

   So we’re in the middle of what I’m sure will be called The Big Die-Back.  Last night we all gathered in a hut and talked about it, real seriously.  We can’t be in the middle of this, here in the lovely south of France.  Google News and CNN and YouTubeToday all say people are headed out to the country.  That means here.  We can fight them, but no way can we defeat them.  We’ve adopted a plan that we call Enough Rope.  You know, give them enough rope and they’ll use it to hang themselves.  We have no choice.  We have to let them do it.  So I think we’re going to the higher elevations, that is, the Alps.  It’s warm enough there.  Whoever’s going to die, we must give them time to do it.  Then, when all the fungus, worms, ants, wasps and rats have eaten it all up (and multiplied beyond their means and died) we begin to come back.  It’s a plan.

   Btw, I miss our sweet, short weeks of love.  They went so fast.  But maybe the children will have a different world in which to know that.   ~










19.   Money is Certainly Worthless

Denys speaks…

   We heard from the internet there’s a wave, a mass of population coming down, not just from Paris, but the bigger cities all around – in Germany, Belgium, Holland, too.  We don’t want to get to know them or even meet them and discuss how’s life.  So we set out a few days ago from our long camp of several months – of which we had grown fond. 

   We had to let our crops go.  No time to wait till they’re ready to harvest.  We have horses and the men have learned how to ride them well.  We are almost at the summer solstice and the temperature is well over 100.  It will get hotter in July and August.  We wanted to check out the Mediterranean.  We came down through the Languedoc and, heading east, had to give wide berth to Marseilles, where people are streaming out into the country and ravaging it. 

   We are in the area of Nice. The sea is a lot higher and the beach is grass, trees, farms.  Off in the water, we can see the tops of some of the tall buildings that were the glitzy Gold Coast.  It’s very weird seeing fishing boats making their way among the tops of these buildings.  They bring some fish and squid to the grassy shore to share with the multitudes, who greedily gather and gobble it up.  They attempt to give it to people who are their family members or fellow villagers but that’s not to be.  People surge forward and demand it and get it.  What can the consumer use to buy food with?  Money is certainly worthless.  What would anyone do with gold at this point?  What do people value?  Food.  Everyone needs water, good water that won’t make you sick, but there’s no assurance where you will find it.  People know water is better further upstream, but the food supply is less dependable there, at least to the unskilled, so they gather round the edges of seas and lakes, where streams flow in, so they can get seafood.  But still, people die in large numbers.  It’s nature’s way and no one grieves about it much.

   There are many boats saved and tied up along shore, that is, boats you can sail or row.  The big yachts, which need gas, have been left to float out to sea and many have burned.  A bunch of the guys and I have set out to sea in sail boats and become pretty good fishermen, though the marine life seems to have dwindled from the heat.  You have to let the bait down much deeper, into the cool water to get anything, and you have to be patient.  We brought back some pretty good-sized fish today.  Everyone was happy and they’d found some good greens to go with them.  We can’t last here, though.  Too many people trying to get at too little food.

   So, we had a meeting and decided to head up into the upper country of the Alps foothills, where it should still be temperate – and, mainly, where we can get away from all the madness.  We left a few days ago and are heading up into the lovely foothills of the Italian Alps.

   Among us, there is such a mixture of grief and something else I can’t put my finger on.  I think it’s glee or some kind of mad gladness.  Let’s face it, we’ve never been really free before. 

   I’ve made good friends with this Australian, Keefer, in his late twenties.  He absolutely loves it, the riding on the horses, the hunting for food with arrows and spears, the cooking over campfires along the way.  He’s especially grown good at being a sentry and bodyguard for the tribe and is eager to ride up to any strangers, long before they get close to us, to ask them, in English, who they are and where they’re going.  He does it in an eager, game way, pretending friendliness – but here he is holding a long spear and showing a quiver of arrows over one shoulder.  His bow is at his saddle.  He thinks he’s Mel Gibson. [adventure movie actor of the late 20th century, from Australia – ed.]  No one messes with him and all the strange women admire him and many want to join our tribe.  We are careful not to allow much of that.  He is careful too, about mixing with women of other groups. 

   Strange.  While there seems little jealousy in our group, you feel you don’t just touch women of other groups – or even make eye contact with them, unless the two groups decide to camp together.  Then there is usually wine, dancing and mating.  But it’s still careful.  It’s up to the woman.  She must assure the man that she is at liberty for the closeness.  Funny, it’s emerging that women are the ones who say what goes about getting close.  No one has even spoken about this, yet here it is.  You don’t see men claiming women and saying, ok, this is my wife.   ~









20.   You Don’t Own Me

Sophia speaks…

   It’s not strange and it’s not funny, Denys. 

   It’s real and it’s happening and methink it’s some kind of natural, even genetic coding or understanding that’s emerging – or reviving. 

   It seems like we’re rediscovering something, a way of behaving and living. 

   Well, why the fuck shouldn’t women control fucking???  Who has to bear the babies? 

   So, therefore, who should determine who puts seeds in her?  Who has breast milk, the best food in the world? 

   But clearly, what I’m feeling is that it’s not all about reproduction.  That’s very important, but what I’m feeling even more is that, hey, I like to fuck and I like to decide who I do it with!  And you don’t own me!    ~









21.   Your Beauty

Denys speaks...

   Hah!  Do I sense a challenge here? 

   I’m a little hurt, even rejected, Sophia. 

   You didn’t need to throw it in my face like that!  I mean, if you’re such a confident, powerful Goddess woman type, you could show a little grace. 

   Oh, and who are you planning to fuck?  You’re very beautiful lately.  It’s our baby.  You’re glowing with life in the midst of all this death or recycling of stupid humans – and it’s very sexy.   ~









22.  You Don’t Own the Child, Either

Sophia speaks…

   Wow.  What was that? 

   When he said “our” baby, I jerked.  It didn’t feel right.  Something has definitely changed.  Also, when he called me beautiful.  I felt it was a come-on, like I was responsible for being a gorgeous babe for his sexual use. I’m going to have to go meditate on this.

   Just sat by a lovely creek for a few hours this evening.  Really beautiful.  I need that alone time.  Brigitte joined me at the end, when she could see I was done.  We have got up to maybe 5,000 feet elevation.  It’s still very warm, even in the evening.  The women went off to gather greens.  We’re getting a good knowledge of what’s good to eat.  If we don’t know, we choose one of us to nibble a tiny bit to see if it’s poison.  If not, she takes a bigger bite, then bigger – and we wait to see the effects, if it causes something to happen, like having to pee more or feel more energy or more sleepy.  Then we share that info and are learning to use plants for purposes like that.

   Anyway, I told Denys what I got in my meditation.  It wasn’t like meditation at yoga class or something.  It was just sitting and really seeing things – the world, the creek, the grass lapping in the creek, the fish swimming in schools.  It was like it all started opening up to me and talking to me, even the light reflecting off the water.  It was happy.  It was alive.  It had energy and light I’d never seen before.  I got that, hey, sorry to say it people, but it was all happy we were dying, we people.  Not me personally.  It was opening and giving me a gift of understanding that it was glad we were getting back into balance, into a population level it all could live with.

   I put my feet in the water and the little schools of fish came up and began brushing against my skin, to check me out and when I didn’t hurt them, well, I think they could read my mind, I swear.  It gave me goose bumps all over and I just reached my hands out to them with such love!  I cried.  And just at that moment this lovely, warm breeze came and wrapped around me and all the grass and leaves waved in my direction.  They were loving me.  I could feel it!  I knew it with all my mind and soul that they were aware of me and knew me.

   That’s when I began to hear a voice in the wind.  It wasn’t like fucking English omg, but I could understand it.  It was in words, thoughts, complete thoughts!  Not sentences.  More like finger paintings with a whole message I could understand.  And as I wept, the water opened up to me and the light on the little waves formed images that I could see and understand, but I couldn’t explain them.  They were friendly, though.  And they were there.

   It changed me, Denys.  It like informed my thought patterns and they are different now.  So, like this whole question of why I jerked with you said “our” child and called me beautiful, I mean, that’s why I went to sit by the creek.  It wasn’t meditation, but more like seeing in a crystal ball or something.  I loved it!  Anyway, I totally understand what I want to tell you about that. 

   I love you, man.  I always will.  It’s like eternal.  And this child?  It’s not ours.  It belongs to itself.  And it kind of belongs to me, because I’m its mother.  But that will pass, I think.  Then it will belong, sort of to all the tribe.  I really got that, too.  We are a freaking tribe, my man!  Just like in the days of the Celts or Indians or cave people!  But the child – and take this with love, Denys – the child is not yours.  You guys, you men, shit, I can already see it happening, the men will be like uncles to ALL the kids!  Like pals, like brothers, like some kind of wise, fun scout leaders or something.  You get it, I know.  I’ve seen you doing it already with the kids.  And you love it, I can tell.  But this kid will be the niece of all the men.  She’s a girl.  I can feel it.  That was in the pictures in the water.  The men aren’t going to know who the father is because the women aren’t going to let them know!  Then the men, if they don’t feel ownership of the child, won’t feel ownership of the woman!  Do you see the implications?  It’s kind of huge.  I’m sure you see it.   ~









23.   It Gives Me Shivers

Denys speaks…

   Wow.  I had to let several days pass for that one, over a week.  I’ve been calm, strangely.  And I haven’t spoken to anyone about it.  I’ve been observing people more closely, too.  There’s something to what Sophia says.  I see women spending more time with each other, in pairs, threes, fours, groups.  They’re getting together late in the evening. 

   They are telling us men to watch after the kids, to take them out in the woods to learn to follow and observe animals, just learn their ways.  It’s quite an education for us and the kids – how the deer walk, how often they stop, whether they follow trails, what makes them turn left, not right, how they react when we throw a stone off to the side of them.  They move briefly away from it. 

   Hm. We are doing the uncle thing.  And I am growing to treat all the kids as sort of my kids.  I like it.  A lot.  I was kind of afraid of having kids, what with the world so messed up and now I have a couple dozen. 

   But what are the women talking about as we take care of the kids?  I asked Sophia, how was the meeting?  It’s a circle, she says, not a “meeting.”  And she smiles a smile that’s very self-confident and bright-eyed as if to say, don’t worry, it’s good for you.  But nothing about the content. 

   Yesterday morning, Sophia tells me – you and three or four of the other men get on horses and follow the creek down to where it meets the larger stream, the one that’s almost a big river.  Take the kids who are about seven to 12 and get us some trout.  Teach them to fish.  She said it with absolute command, but complete kindness and humor, too.

   “We’ll make fish tonight and have a lot of greens with them, probably some good root vegetables too.  We have a little jerky left.  Maybe make a stew with the veggies.  Sounds good, huh, Denys.”  It wasn’t even a question.  It was a statement.  That’s what was going to happen.  We will enjoy it.  You have a task, not just to get food, but to teach the kids.  God, I never wanted to do anything so much in my life as what she’d assigned me. 

   By the way, “God” doesn’t sound right anymore.  Must think of another word.  Also, I have a great tan and am getting buff across my chest and arms.  I walk with better posture, too.  I feel women looking at me with more interest, even appraisal. 

   I notice I’m not commenting about what Sophia said – about the baby not being “my” baby.  Surely, that has to push my buttons and make me feel small.  I’m waiting for that to come up.  But I don’t feel it yet.  I am still sleeping with Sophia, though.  I should say, Sophia is still letting me sleep with her.  We have been in this nice meadow for two weeks and we like our spot, for now – and our little nest, with tarps over it.  She indicates every night that I should sleep with her.  She beckons.  But she’s not letting me assume it’s “my” bed.  And every time she invites me to it, I swear, I can’t help but bow in some kind of reverence to her.   It gives me shivers.    ~








24. You are the Bridge Between Men & Women

Sophia speaks…

   Ok, we’re crossing a line here and from now on, Denys, what I write here is not to be repeated to anyone.  I realize this is becoming a historical document, perhaps, if it survives.  This is a crucial crossing in the path of humanity, what we’re going through, like the so-called Agricultural Revolution, but kind of in reverse and it might be good to have a record of it.  So, I’m going to write candidly. 

   Anyway, you are kind of different from the other men.  You are older, sweeter, wiser and I think you have more feminine genes in you, so you already sense what is happening and you like women a lot.  I’ve always noticed that about you.  So, things are changing.  It may not be smooth.  But I think you will be ok with it. 

   Later.  It’s really hot.  It’s hot all night.  We’re starting to sleep in the afternoons, because it’s too hot to do anything else.  So, we’re doing a lot of things through the night.  Some of the men are having a rough time with the changes.  Like Keefer.  He wants to be in charge of things more than he should.  He wants to be in charge because he’s a man and has testosterone and lots of energy and is a good leader.  Those are cool things, but they’re not reasons he should have any power over anyone, especially a woman. 

   We women are determined to do this in a Taoistic way, not with force.  In our circles, we women have talked about how the men killed those other guys, who meant to kill us.  I said I wasn’t happy with it.  But yet, shit, what were they supposed to do?  I also had to be honest and say it excited me and I loved them being men and saving us in battle.  They all felt the same way – both ways.

   I told them about the vision of ecstasy I had with the creek and grasses and fish.  They almost all said they’d been having the same things happen.  Strangely, it hasn’t been happening with the men.  I said the vision clearly told me there are better ways to live, to make decisions, to run communities than to use force, even in defense of ourselves. 

   “If we’re not learning new and better ways, then we’re not evolving and we’re not going to get through this evolutionary bottleneck thrown up by nature in response to our greedy shit in the way we lived for centuries.  We have to look further and open our eyes and tune ourselves in and see the new ways,” I said.

   I suggested we do a Burning Man, which is to build a man out of poles and sticks and fill him with our shit, that is the old egos we had, the stuff that made us angry, crazy, jealous, afraid, all the time.  Then one night, you dance around that sucker and say thanks to the ego for all its shit and games and burn that motherfucker.  It’s a ritual.  It’s letting go of something, letting it die.  So something new can come in and grow.  We don’t know what that something new is.  But we feel it.

   They loved the idea.  We’re going to do it at the next new moon, when it’s all dark. 

   Denys, now you know something the other men don’t know.  I trust you.  You won’t be speaking about this to the men.  I feel you are like some bridge between us women and the men and we need you there.  All the women like you a lot.  They said you can be clued in on what’s coming in through us women.  I know you’re down with that.   ~










25.   She Takes Ideas to Her Women’s Circle

Denys speaks…

   Yes, I’m down with that.  I’m also down with survival and what I notice is that there are a hell of a lot of mosquitoes, much more than anyone remembers.  It’s the heat.  They reproduce more with heat, obviously.  It’s not getting below 90 at night, it seems.  We’ve had to protect ourselves by wearing various nettings and trying compounds and herbs. Daisies and peppermint seem to work. 

   What we want is to survive, to learn how to live with all these changes long enough that we get through the evolutionary bottleneck.  Like, with the big die-off from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, I think it was mostly the ash and dust in the atmosphere that killed them.  It blocked sun and made things very cold – and it may have been only a few years, but it was long enough.  I hope that’s what we have here.  Brief.

   Of course, I accept what’s happening and I hope for nothing, really.  If we all die, we deserve it.  But if it’s a bottleneck, allowing a small percent of us to make it, then we want to be in that small percent – and create some new kind of human society that can live in balance with the whole environment and biosphere, not just exploit it. 

   That’s what I want.  But it’s hard now.  It’s hell in a lot of ways.  The sky is often a weird orange, I’m sure from cities burning.  And from bodies burning.  Human bodies.

   I’ve suggested to Sophia that she take an idea to her women’s circle, that we fast every other day.  There’s just not enough food in our world now.  And that we eat meat just once a month, on the new or full moon.  The animals are having a hard enough time making it.  They don’t need us hunting them.

   I’m sure I must address the question – how do I as a man feel about handing over decisions to a group of women?  Well, frankly, I feel fucking great about it.  Looked at from the lowest point of view, how could they fuck things up worse then men have done over the last many millennia?  I don’t want the responsibility.  I want them to have it.  I believe they will do very well.  They have so far.  As to whether I feel emasculated, I mean, choke and puke, the very word gags me.  Who ever made up that word?  I find I am just not identifying with the whole idea of being a “man.”  I am this person or animal who happens to be a man or should I say, happens to be the gender with the external dingdong and bigger upper body muscles and so fucking what? I’m still great in bed and that doesn’t have anything to do with my manhood. I reject that shit!   ~









26.  Sister, Help Me Lift This Heavy Pot Off the Fire

Sophia speaks…

   Yes, he is good in bed.  He really knows what he is doing.  Well, he listens to my body, what it wants and he’s more than willing to do it.  He doesn’t perform.  He just wants to do it.  It makes me excited, happy and nuts.  He loves that.  I see him looking at the other women now.  I don’t feel jealous.  It’s very nice.  More than nice.  It’s fucking liberating. 

   The women and I have started building a Burning Man in the middle of our little village.  The idea comes from the Celts.  They did it in ancient times, supposedly burning enemy captives and sacrifices to gods.  The kids love it, the ones big enough to climb around and build things.  We’re telling them what we want.  It’s very interesting.  We are not laying some big announcement on anyone.  We are just letting it take its course.  Word trickles out to the men about what we are doing.  We say it gently, with love and humor.  It’s about burning the past.  We’ve asked them to make little carvings and models of things they want to put in there and burn.

   But one man Gabriel is does not like it.  He also doesn’t like our women’s circles.  His woman, Marie, has told us he wants to wear the pants and won’t let her have anything to do with other men, even talk to them.  They’re from Holland.  What used to be Holland.  It’s not really there anymore.  All the lowlands have flooded.  He hasn’t adjusted very well to it.  He looks very sad or mad.  Marie likes our circles, but she’s, well, not confident about speaking up.  We have to pry things out of her.  There are no secrets in our little tribe.  It’s not hard to see what’s going on in everyone’s lives.  He’s not helping build the Burning Man.  He says he had nothing to get rid of and sees no purpose for the ritual.  He snorted and walked away.

   We’re not going to pressure him or anyone to conform to the wishes of any majority.  What we’ve been doing, when we are in our circle, is come to a consensus, verbally, in a kind of mystical way, really, where we speak of the goal we want and we take care that it must be in accord with the Planet’s Will and well-being, not just with our well-being as one species on the planet. 

   We speak blessings on this good Earth and invoke her seas, skies, forests, valleys and of course all her creatures, from the big mammals down to the amoebas squirming in the mud.  We ask them all to talk to us, be with us and inform us, for we are more and more clear we will do nothing that they all can’t live with. 

   So, that’s where the Burning Man idea came from.  It’s a letting go of things, thoughts, behaviors that don’t work for the good of all creatures.  We humans have so many of these, it’s hard to even notice and speak them all, but it does well to do this ritual of summoning all life to witness and love us and guide us.  We are very paranoid of falling back into the usual power trips, ego trips, arrogance and abuses that have been so much a part of human history, but at the end of each session we pray long to Her, Goddess, which really is the planet and her life, to help us.  We even say, we are willing to pass on, all of us, off this planet, if it must be for the common good of all life.  We will extinct no more species and we will not brook any human activity that does.  Even that sounds arrogant.  So we meditate on it and how we can do that in ways that are…god, it’s hard.  Gentle?  But not passive.  You get the idea.  We will act kind of like Gandhi taught – or Lao Tsu, probably even Jesus, though certainly not many of his followers. 

   So with this Gabriel fellow, we are simply not reacting to him, but we are witnessing him, you might say.  We are not ignoring him.  He knows we do not support him and what he is saying.  We do not simply want him to leave the tribe and go be a jerk somewhere else, either.  It has to come to a head here and it seems Goddess or the Planet Will is making that happen, so it seems.  He knows everyone is looking at him.  But there is nothing for us to do.

   Like the fasting, every other day.  I put that in the bowl the other day, after Denys suggested it.  We have this big bowl of water in the center of our circle.  When someone has an idea or inspiration or direction, they put a bay leaf in the water.  We meditate on the leaf before the woman even speaks about it.  This is all to remind us that nature has a way, a course and things take time.  Most things take a long time.  Which is very different than the way humans have been living. 

   I presented it like this, “Perhaps it’s in her will and way to have us fast every other day and drink only water.  And let’s eat meat only once a month, at the full moon.  Perhaps that would help her balance the world and let some of her people live on and learn her ways anew.  She is the Giving One.  Perhaps she would like to give this.”  Then there would be a long silence.  So different from the old ways, when many voices would start in, without even really listening to the last person, each contentious, rebutting, disputing, seeking to have its way, without caring how the other person feels.  Perhaps that time is over.  Its seems the planet’s will and way, to me.
   Then another woman would eventually say, “I can see that happening.  I can feel the clarity arising from it.  I can hear the Planet Voice in it.  Perhaps it is her will and way.  Let us look further.”  That idea of looking further was a reminder that we don’t know and can’t know, except through waiting, watching, feeling the Planet Will.  So, some of the women, including me, have stopped eating every other day.  We didn’t emerge and announce an edict.  We gently worked with our own selves. 

   Gabriel has not liked this idea of fasting every other day.  He has become more resentful, even going off to shoot a rabbit with his bow and arrow and eating it in front of us.  It triggered my shit, I will tell you that.  I felt such anger rise in me and I started for him.  But Brigitte took my hand before I got halfway there and said, “Sister, will you help me lift this heavy pot off the fire?” 

   Hah, I knew immediately what she was doing.  Even her choice of words were a lovely metaphor.  I could not resist her.  She had an impish upturn of her mouth as she said it, although she wouldn’t really have cared if I lit into Gabriel.  We are humans, after all and we know it.  We are pagan humans, not plaster saints full of bullshit.  We’ve been over that one, too, in our circles, about not letting an ethic settle over us where we are all expected to behave certain ways.  There is only one thing guiding us at all times and that is learning to live in balance and respect with all life and the soul of this planet, our good Earth.  We have to win back her favor and we know we are babes at this and don’t know how to do it.

   Brigitte pulled me off into her hooch – that’s her private woman space, bedroom, not part of a common area – and put her arms around me.  “Breathe,” she said.  So we breathed in each other’s arms for a long time.  Really works to have someone hold you.  And to breathe.  We breathe a lot.  What did it do?  I got back here.  Which means now.  I really love Brigitte.  We have become like sisters.   ~









27.   It Changed Us

Denys speaks…

   What to do?  This Gabriel character has been slapping his woman around.  I say “his” woman – he’s the only one who uses such words anymore.  She was smiling at another man, Keefer, and he, of course Keefer liked it.  He’s a friendly guy.  Plus, he liked her attraction and like almost all guys, wanted to make the woman happy.  And get laid.  Of course.  Sex, the greatest joy is the source so often of the greatest misery.  Or it used to be.  We’re trying to get rid of all that and we seem guided to do it. 

   But this guy is locked in his ego and is identified with whether this woman is loyal to just him.  I mean really, didn’t we learn from that possessive ego tripping?  Everyone had to have his own woman and home and car and career, all divorced from any reality of what was happening to the planet.  I mean, it was fucking dying, man – and still is and it’s because of us and our ego trips and what we own and possess and conquer and hold and identify with. 

   But I rant.  Back to Gabriel.  We guys are doing what we see the women modeling for us, which is to be in deep hangout and witness him and mirror him and try not to lecture him or set him straight or punish him.  He is what he is.  But “his woman” kicked him out post haste and he’s sleeping in the common lodge or the woods.  Still, he won’t let go of her and we see him giving her the evil eye.  Some people mention they are afraid he could do something violent.  So, we have really put him on our radar and are tuned into his movements, energies and thoughts.  It’s pretty interesting.  We are all taking responsibility for him.  He isn’t.  So we are.  I just realized that.  We are saying, hey, he’s in our tribe, so we’re responsible for him.  We must let him be who he is and we must not let him hurt anyone. 

   Later.  It was the full moon last night and we burned the Burning Man, with people putting in things – objects, wishes or goodbye notes written on paper, a title to a beloved old car, driver’s licenses (lots of those).  No need for ID now!  Each person would give a little speech about what they were putting in the Man and why.  Lots of marriage licenses went in, too.  There were some tears and people sentimentalized about what a sweet old institution it was, but others would shout – we’re tired of being institutionalized!  And there would be great laughter. 

   Well, it was pretty horrifying, suddenly.  We lit the man and it got burning pretty good, with flames starting to climb and out of nowhere dashes Gabriel, into the Burning Man.  He climbes up onto the second level, out of our reach.  People react so strangely and amazingly.  Everyone started whooping and over and over chanting his name, Gabriel!  They were waving goodbye.  We all got the message right away, he had convicted himself and found himself unworthy and unable and unwilling to live in the new world and must get off it.  And everyone just accepted it.  The flames grew higher and hotter and he began to scream as the heat began to toast his clothes.  We couldn’t look, most of us.  But you couldn’t shut out the sound.
 
   Then, suddenly, Sophia grabs my shirt and yells, “Knock it down! Get him out of there! Go, get the men to knock it all down!  Now!”  I paused and gave her a questioning look.  She screamed at me, “We are not fucking Nazi scumbag killers!!!  Do it!”

   By then, everyone could hear and see her.  The men all reacted as one and down the Man came.  We grabbed Gabriel out of there and rushed him over to the creek, dousing him in the waters.  He was mostly ok – a lot of redness and bubbling of skin.  He seemed to lay in the waters in a kind of peace, like he had died or thought he had.  He clearly didn’t want to get up, so we held him in the water.  The women, as if on some silent signal, moved in to take our places and held him, laying in the water, with it flowing peacefully over his burns.
 
   They held him there all night.  They gestured us away, us men.  I could hear Sophia saying, “We have you now Gabriel.  Just relax and feel the good water.  We’re here.  We’re not going anywhere.” 

   It brought tears to my eyes, as I left.  I thought about it, how, if we survive these times and tales are told of our travail and crossings and lessons, this will be one of the great stories of a new kind of human on this earth.  Kind of corny, but, well, it changed us. ~










28.   Healing the Lost Man

Sophia speaks…

   There is no ‘why’ to what happened.  I did not do it for ‘reasons’ and cannot explain or justify it.  It came from Planet Wisdom, which could just as easily have let him burn.  But that’s what came from within me, way deep within me, to save him.  I felt there needed to be a model for saving human life again.  So much of it has been wasted, so many dreams, lives, hopes, children and their hopes. 

   I knew or sensed that the other women were with me on this and they all sprang to the effort.  So did the men, who are more and more bowing to the energy and its beauty, lawfulness and wisdom.  It SO isn’t women having power over men.  No one feels that. 

   We let Gabriel be healed by the sweet, flowing waters of the creek.  They were temperate, as it is August now and very, very hot, even at night.  We women all held him with our hands under his body.  We let ourselves feel him, the pain in him, not just from the heat, but all through his being, his soul, his nervous system, which I’m sure was so used to being uptight and guarded against…what?  Against life, love, women, even sex.  He took his sex as an expression of power, domination.  Marie made that clear to us.  We’d made love to her, too.  It healed her.  She could then understand how it could feel, to be loved, seen, cared for, caressed, whispered to. 

   Now we were doing it to Gabriel.  We felt and saw that we could not bring this on too quickly.  We just stroked his whole body very gently, all over, including his python, but that just briefly, to let him know there was no part of him we found wrong or less than good and beautiful and right.  We were trying to pull him back into the web of being, of nature.  We saw that he shouldn’t be alone, not for many days.  We set about taking him in, a day or two at a time, into each woman’s hooch.  He was pretty quiet.  He could see we weren’t going to engage him in much conversation, but just to hum to him and cuddle up with him and love him, look into his eyes, stroke his face and hair.  At night, there would be more than one of us with him.  We had to break down that illusion that he should get attached to one of us.  Marie was not part of this.  She needed to heal from him.  We would burn candles and a little incense, gathered from the woods. 

   After we could see he was crossing over the line, into belonging, surrender, letting himself be loved, we let him know we would begin making real love with him.  He wept.  He tried to say he didn’t deserve it and how could we do this to him.  As came out in our circle later, we didn’t buy into that.  We knew he was angry, too, not just all grateful.  We had taken away his manhood armor and his shot at fiery martyrdom.  It remains to be seen if he can be “in” love with us.  We are very loveable women, we know, but not for all men.

   One of the younger women, Siobann, made love with him last night.  She took all night at it.  She wouldn’t let him use any of that old energy of “fucking” or using her, but devoted herself to trying to teach him the real arts of love and what makes a woman happy.  As I have taught Denys, though he was pretty good at it to begin with – and he listens to Goddess, lover of smiles.  That’s what we call her.  It’s from ancient Greek, the Homeric Hymns, so Denys told me.  He’s a scholar of the old ancients.  We love the name.   ~










29.   A God for Global Warming?

Denys speaks…

   It’s been raining hard for a couple weeks now.  This happens.  Think ten times harder than in the old days, with lots of flooding.  We send Jacques the many miles into Como, in the northern foothills of Italy to use the internet and find out how the weather is in other parts of the world – and how the human race has fared.  It’s of great interest to us all and we gather round to hear the tales, though he confers with Sophia and a few of the other women leaders first.  They don’t screen anything, so Sophia tells me, not yet.  There may be something, someday, who knows? 

   I asked him how is the Sahara.  It would be nice if it were still dry.  He said it was unbearably hot and did get a lot of rain, like everywhere else.  Oh well.  As for the world population, after a year, it appears about 95 percent of people are gone, maybe more.  That information is stunning to us all.

   Odd, you can feel the increased sense of peace, without so many peoples’ minds yammering, scheming and grabbing.  I’m very philosophical and fatalistic about it and I believe in karma, so I am good with it.  Everyone here is.  But we do feel compelled to go see for ourselves, soon – and to check out what new communities are doing for food.  And sanity.  It’s been very hard on people, but I look at it as a sorting mechanism, like natural selection.  Well, nature IS selecting, by changing the rules and seeing who adapts.  God DOES play dice with the universe!  And why not?  She was sick of us.  We were such insufferable asses!

   One thing on the internet is the rise of Islam, among its few remaining adherents.  They have joined with Christians and Jews to attemptthe final solution of wiping out all who do not believe in the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths.  As if.  Like, let’s just get it down to One True Religion, then the world will work.  I believe we tried that.  It was called the Dark Ages – and it climaxed with the burning of women.  Commentary on the net is that even the Muslims are finding it hard to make an enthused go of it, with a God who would do this to mankind. 


   I must confess I am blown away by how the women treated Gabriel.  They are saints, but really, they just are letting Goddess be in them and evolve them.  They are listening to what we’re calling Planet Wisdom, which is the same as Goddess.  I always felt women could be so much more than they were.  Now they are. 

   Sophia.  I still love her.  Who couldn’t love her?  But it’s not like the old ways of being so in love with the one true love you finally found.  God, that all seems so banal now, so amazingly self-indulgent and based on wishful delusions.  She just IS.  She’s such a beautiful woman and soul.  Lately she’s taken to…I almost said “fucking.”  Even that word seems so ludicrous now.  What she and the other women do in their lovemaking is like what I’m sure spiritual seekers spent years working on.  But we still say fuck as kind of a joke. 

   Sophia is planning to go off on her own in the wilds.  Feels called to do it.  I can certainly understand that.  We’ve been talking about the gods, spirits, entities of nature, all the non-tangible, conscious beings that in our old world we barely recognized but sort of sensed.  The women seem to be getting more and more in tune with them.  I sure haven’t heard anyone mention God or Jesus or The Lord since all the shit came down.  That seems so urban, so connected with civilization and its power – the need to use that to have power over other humans in civilization.  It seems such a transparent fairy tale now.

   I wonder what “gods” will emerge for this new society.  I believe we anthropomorphize gods to fit what we see and deal with in our world or society.  For the ancient Greeks, they made gods for romantic love and for war, as well as civilization and nature, then wine, as that became important to relieve their isolation in their civilized world.  I wonder what will be important to us in a few years, when the big Die-Off is over, if there are any humans left.  Will we have a god of global warming?  One we call on for global cooling off?  Will we have one for mere survival of the race, what few are left?  Will we have one for arrogance, so that we don’t become blind to our own crazy choices that ruin the world?  How could we not have a god for that?   ~










30.   Just Hang On

Sophia speaks…

   It’s fall, but just as warm as ever.  I went on a walkabout for a few weeks up in the Alpine foothills above our camp.  It was lovely.  I’ve never felt so free or real or good.  Of course, there was a big poignancy to it, what with most of humanity gone.  We got an F from Mother Nature.  Well, that’s how you learn, isn’t it?  We thought we didn’t have to adapt but could set our own standards and make nature adapt.  Haha.  That old myth of folly and all the religious scripture crap that went with it – go forth and multiply and have dominion over all the animals, I mean puh-leez.  That old shit is useful now as a model of human arrogance and self-deception.  And making gods out of whole cloth who happen to look human, then putting words in their mouths.  How could we have been so blind?

   So, the new myth that should likely endure forever, if we survive, instead of being favored by God and created as his masterpiece, is going to be one of learning, humility, owning up to your mistakes, living in balance with other life and with nature – and I’m sure Mother Nature or some such embodiment of this real and present natural world is going to be at the center of it, one would hope.  But we do hear from the internet that there are still enclaves of people loving the End Times and feeling validated and yearning to get to their respective heavens.  Well, I hope they go soon.  Just don’t take me with you.

   My walkabout.  Sooo beautiful and good.  The peace!  I swear the world is different without being crammed with busy humans and all their endless, shabby, desperate thoughts.  Their thoughts are gone!  I mean the energy, the air, the whole feel of it. Being up there alone, living off greens, berries and creek water, omg.  And nobody bothering me!  Nowhere to go!  Just makes you realize how much of our lives in the old times we spent rushing to and fro, never really letting ourselves relax and be.  I mean, I would just sit in one spot for hours and hours, looking out upon the beauty of it all and feeling such fullness.  I didn’t want to come back, really.  And the other animals didn’t fear me.  They would come fairly close to me and nibble or graze, didn’t even look at me.  They knew I was safe.

   And nighttime was amazing.  It got so I was spending most of the nights awake, just sitting or walking around and would sleep in the heat of the afternoon, under a pine, by a creek, which was tolerable.  At night, spirits come out.  I call them spirits.  Who knows what they are.  Some were animals, some people, some were something else.  They had light around them.  No wonder so many seekers or shamans from so many civilizations went out on vision quests and got so much understanding from it.  I did.

   They did not fear me.  They saw I would not hurt them.  They saw I was neither predator nor prey.  They saw I was tired.  And I saw they were tired.  A raptor of some kind flew up and landed not 20 meters from me.  It was dusk.  I could see how tired and puzzled it was.  It looked over at me, just glancingly, just enough for me to see into its mind and heart.  It sat there for hours, way into the night and as it did, we let our guard down and began to feel each other with this kind of right brain sixth sense, psychicly, empathically.  It was so beautiful and good.  I realized that he knew the world had changed and it was questionable whether he could live in it.  But he let me know – hang on, just hang on.  Just get through this night and then the next day.  Think about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.  He flew off after a mouse or something he’d seen then circled back, in the dark and sat in the same place, tearing the mouse apart and chucking it down his throat.  Then he just sat there the rest of the night.

   I swear I saw the whole history of animals – and our history when we were animals, that is, when we lived more on instinct than mind.  I realized we always had mind, even when we lived in the trees and were basically apes.  I realized this bird had a mind, just like we have, but they don’t live “in” it.  It, the mind, just comes in and out when they need it, like claws or some other organ.  I realized all animals were just as intelligent as we think we are.  And they have feelings.  Except they don’t have fear, like we do, rolling it over and over in the mind.  They know they will die and they always accept it and don’t dwell on it.  But they do their best to live.  And that’s what this raptor was doing. 

   And he was teaching me that.  I saw that it was mostly a technique, not of using the mind, but of turning it off and letting nature or the universe tell you what to do next. 

   I realized that Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tsu, all those guys and many more who didn’t get recorded, had gone to the wilderness for their message, but back in civilization, hey, everyone could see they had that look in their eye, that happiness, that they had overcome the misery of yadayada human thought and the ego it creates – and they wanted to codify it and make a system, like, oh, here is how you get there.  But that’s the mind trying to overcome the mind.  It’s not gonna happen. 

   I was so overwhelmed with the beauty of all things and the rightness of all beings.  Am I going to go create a system for the humans I know?  Fuck no!  The biggest favor I can do them is shut my mouth and just say it was very relaxing and rejuvenating.  I think, one by one, they might get it.  I think we were meant to get it.  I think it’s an intended step up in evolution.  We had to have this big die-off.  Had to.  The mind had become our master.  It bloated up into a tyrant, claiming to be us.  It ain’t.  It so ain’t.  So the Big Hot is a gift to us – and certainly is a gift to all the other life forms, as it gets rid of this monster we had become. 

   The question comes up, and people mention it, how do I really feel about the death of most people?  Why aren’t I running around crying, screaming and going quite insane?  No one is.  No one we see, anyway.  The answer, I would guess is that Great Mother aka Earth or Nature, spoke.  She batted last, as the Americans used to say.  The reality is, who misses them?  I will never see my parents, brothers and sisters and all the rest of them, but, frankly, no meanness intended, who cares?  Far from being awful, the end of the world as we know it is pretty fun.  A little hot, though.   ~










31.

Denys speaks…

   We got a laptop with wireless from town and have a hand crank or pedal (like a bike) generator to recharge the batteries, so we have the internet here now.  Quite amazing.  It seems about 98 percent of humanity has died in just this half year, mostly from the broken food chain, but with a lot of suicide and, I think, people just giving up and deciding there’s no point in living.  The old way is gone, so it’s the collapse not just of civilization, but of all meaning.  I think most of humanity had pegged its hopes and meaning on God and religious institutions and when none of that saved them, they assumed it was the Final Days and Judgment and all that and they would go to heaven, so they went. 

   There are little enclaves of fundamentalists trying to wipe out the evildoers who brought this down on humanity, but it seems disorganized and kind of loopy and desperate.  Their web pages read like a lot of ranting and blaming.  But the fact is, we brought this on ourselves, mainly by driving a lot of vehicles. 

   Believe it or not, the Muslim radicals have turned against the other major religions and mounted a Crusade against the holy shrines of the Jews in Israel and the Christians in Rome. They are sacking Rome and bringing down St. Peter’s Cathedral, so says the net.  Well, it energizes the masses, doesn’t it?  Never mind survival and dealing with global warming.  They of course blame the other big religions for bringing down the wrath of Allah.

   I’m kind of sorry we got the internet here but we felt we should know what’s happening and I’ve been delegated to read it every day.  I filter out and pass on what seems necessary to the group.  The tribe.  That’s what we are.  They can tell by my body language and attitude if something’s alarming.  I mean what could be alarming after 98 percent of humanity gets wiped out?  Alarming means something coming this way.  The fundamentalists of any religion could be a problem and they are fairly near.

   I made it a point to get some time with Sophia.  She’s been busy and seems to have emerged as the leader of the women, if not the tribe.  They look to her.  She does not try to take power and run things.  She’s just closer to the new seemingly eternal truths we’re working with.  People learn from her.  They see that what she says does not come from some personal ego agenda, but rather for the good of all life.

   I must admit I feel a bit put in the back seat.  She has less time for us to hang out as we used to and laugh, have sex, mess about, talk aimlessly.  I gestured to her today to come walk with me.  She was wearing skins, btw.  So am I, light ones, draped about one shoulder, like in the caveman cartoons.  It’s comfortable.  There have been plenty of dead animals around to gather furs from.  We scaled up the foothills several miles.  I have a spear I carry, in case some desperate animal attacks us.  I also have a Glock, loaded, in case some desperate human does.

   Anyway, she and I got our workout and new vistas and are sitting by a creek in pleasant silence.  We like that. 

   “So it was pretty good out there?”  She knew what I meant.  I said it like a Wisconsin farmer, with the lilting, kind of ignorant, but heartfelt drawl. 

   “Ya, she was a good one,” Sophia answered, like she was talking about a corn-husking.  We howled and rolled on our backs, kicking our feet in the air.  Then I took her face in my hands.  Her hair was all falling in her face.

   “It’s like the old times, just for a second here, isn’t it?”

   “Ya, she’s like the old times, when we was young, before the world ended,” she said.  We were seized with laughter, the kind that won’t let you breathe, that makes a woman pee her pants, and she did. 

   I reached up under her deerskins and took her breasts and ran my hands over her strong, lean, Irish back, though there was technically no more Ireland.  It had joined the things of the past, like the word Celt or Druid. 

   “You’ll always be my Irish lass, at least while I’m alive.  The next generation won’t know what the hell that is.”

   “Well, they will always have my Irish lilt.  You can’t snuff that out.  Though you dumb Americans did.  And by the way, I think you should fuck me.”  We howled till tears ran down our faces.  And then I did what she asked me.  Of course.  We were so longing for the old world of names and places and accents and rituals that everyone understood and loved, but they were no more.

   “Who knows where all this is going?” says I.  “I think we are making the first few sticks and stones of a new world entirely.  And they will remember us in legend and myth, if we humans live at all.  But they’ll never know the pain we’ve had to live through, the loss of the whole world and almost everyone we know.”

   “Do you have the heart to go on?” 

   “Sometimes I don’t know.  Sometimes, I just want to walk into the river and die.”

   “I know.  Me too.  But just remember, you’ve got me, Denys.  I will ever be here.”

   “Well, you’re getting swept up in your clan leadership thing and you’re being the incarnation of the Great Mother, leading the tattered remnants to a new land and all that rubbish.”

   She kissed me warmly and long.  “This is the Great Mother.  I’m the one who recognizes you as my man and lover.  You are not just the father of this child.  You are the father of the earth and humanity.  You really are.  It’s been given you to do.  Just do it.  Don’t think about it.  I find it helps if we realize we’re already dead.  There’s no reason why we should be alive when 98 percent of people are dead now.  Why do you think we’re alive?”

   She was polite.  That was the huge thing Sophia had going for her.  That’s why people loved her and wanted her to be their clan mother.  She listened and she looked you right in the eye and she had a ready wit.  And she was sexy.  Very.  Sometimes, she would walk through our little village in such a sexy manner, almost is slow motion, with her lovely hips going from side to side and everyone would stop what they were doing, even the women.  She could be present for anyone and make them the most important person on the earth.  It wasn’t “politeness.”  She meant it in her heart.  She would shift herself so that you knew she was you.  She felt you.  She knew you from your start as a seed.

   “Alive?  I only know I’m alive to love you.”

   I gave her back what she was giving me.  I boiled it down to two people in the now, in love.  She nodded. 

   “I know.  I know that in my DNA strands that will be walking this earth a thousand generations from now.”

   I took her in my arms.  She loved it when I pulled her strong back to me and felt the alley of her spine and the muscles that went out from it.  Sometimes I think that her back is the sexiest part of her.  And the way it blossoms out into her lovely ass and comes around in her soft waist.   And also up to her lovely round shoulders.  Seen and felt this way, I knew her as an animal, a paleo-woman, the progenitor of her species, hungry, alive, funny, casual, knowing she was in a gigantic, rolling cataclysm of nature but just accepting it, not giving a shit.  Yet giving everything she knew and had.

   “And, my lovely, what do you know from being out there on your walkabout?”

   “I know that we can die anytime and still be alive.  I died.  I died as that lovely Irish lass you knew and I became all one with all the animals and loved them and I love you now.  And here I am back as this woman.  But I will never be just that woman again.  Such vastness is just a breath away.  I know that now.  The women know I know it.  They want me to hold that for them.  It’s not easy to die like that and yet when you do, it’s so freeing and good and right.”

   “Can I do that?  A man?”

   “I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  A man always wants to go elsewhere and discover other.  A woman goes deeper within, into what is.  You can love me.  That’s how you will know it.  That’s how all the men will know it.  Through me.  And the women.  It’s just like they tried to say in all the myths and cave paintings and idols. 

   “Now weren’t you going to fuck me again?  I’m going to sit here and…let you get it.”

   And she did.  She sat there and looked right into my eyes.  Her lovely breasts stood right there pointing at me.  She had this little half-smile and looked at me with such confidence in her womanhood and sexuality, then would run her fingers down my thighs, almost touching it, but she wanted to just offer me her womanhood and let my body, gad, my soul, react to her and be enveloped in her confident love.

   Soon, she came over and wrapped her legs about me as I sat and we came together, not hurried, but smoothly, over the hours.  She wouldn’t let it end.  She brought it to the peak of ecstasy and managed to keep it there.  She would tell me little stories and the energy would back off.  It was charming.  I knew what she was doing.  She was showing me the energy and love had no bottom, no end and it could go on forever.  That’s what all men, all that are left, need to see, isn’t it?   ~


--END--


About the Author . . .

John Darling, M.S. is a writer, journalist, teacher and counselor in Ashland, Ore. He has been published in Gnosis, CoinAge, Living Simply (Australia), Pacific Northwest, Oregon Magazine, The Celator (Ancient Art and Artifacts) and others.  John writes documentary shows on history, the arts and nature for public television and wrote “Crater Lake: Mirror of Heaven,” shown on PBS.

He has been a daily journalist on the staff of The Portland Oregonian, Medford Mail Tribune, Ashland Daily Tidings, United Press International in Salem, Ore. and was news director/anchor for KOBI-TV News in Medford, Ore.

He was executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. He was U.S. Marine Corps journalist and editor of Pilot Rock (alternative magazine of Southern Oregon) and People Newsmagazine of the Ore. Dept. of Human Resources.

He has been a counselor since 1976 and led seminars in men’s consciousness, loving relationships, rebirthing, shamanism, prosperity and hypnosis.  He also writes and performs weddings.

He has a B.A. in history from Michigan State University and M.A. in counseling from Southern Oregon University.  John is a fourth generation journalist and was born and raised in Lansing, Mich. He has three children, Heather, Hannah and Colin.   ~