dream:path to refuge

All that we have to do is cross this forsaken city.  It seemed a simple undertaking, some time ago.  But with every grey and dreary new street that opens, each more desolately crowded than the last with the lifeless inhabitants of this place and their castoffs and contaminants, our goal has begun to feel impossible.

There are six or seven of us.  Sisters and brothers in the Order, bound by the journey, its long miles, and its urgency.  Our destination, whose clear image shimmers constantly in my mind's eye, is a spacious oasis enclosed in a pearlescent pink-gold geodesic dome.  It's the only shelter within reach of travel, the only unadulterated air, the last safe ground for miles.  The place has a name Latin in origin, which carries the essence of its power.  With as much intention as I carry the word, knowing that it means my hope of refuge, it does not stay with me.  There are only later vague efforts at approximation, which include "palladium"  "hypericum"  and "aeolium".  (Words which on investigation prove to be mineral, vegetable, elemental:  perhaps this place is ultimately pure archetype).  In the moment, I only know that there are many trees there, and water flowing, and the contrast of this greengold mirage to the wasteland of concrete and rubbish around me keeps my weary feet moving.

Our group has walked for miles, without a map, clinging to hope that we are closing the distance with our general trajectory.   On every side, massive stone walls shade the view a uniform white-grey.  Though the buildings appear ancient, the air is suffused with the same pallid color, as if granite dust were just now settling on every available surface.  There are no plants or trees to be seen anywhere. While the crowds around us don't appear to offer a direct threat, we're keeping our heads down, avoiding eye contact, just the same.  What we sense is a menace more unsettling for its intangibility.  To all appearances, the ashen citizens of this drab cityscape are not physically unwell; they seem to have simply lost their souls.  To have forgotten any connection to life and the living.  We slow our pace at another crushed intersection, the most distressing yet for its pathos of vacant-eyed people, heedless traffic, and animals wandering amid spoiled food and garbage.  To our left is what must have once been an elegant plaza, its marble statuary broken and splotched with bird droppings. On the corner, disturbing heavyset wild dogs fight over heaps of dead rodents and rotting meat as the walkers pick their way among them, apathetic, oblivious, their faces a grey approaching that of the stone.  The dogs become sick as they eat, then return from what they have disgorged to snarl and snap vicious teeth over more of the same.  I can only hope that the people fare better for food here, but so far there's not much evidence in support.  With gritted teeth, we squeeze past the gruesome scene, and under the momentary reprieve of a sagging sidewalk portal.  "Excellent!", exclaims a woman in our group, startling me with her buoyance.  "We've finally come to the crossing of two numbered streets.  We'll be able to catch a long-range transport from here."  But I am overwhelmed, leaden, and groan aloud with the critical mass of surrounding sadness:  "This spot is the worst of any yet!  I can't possibly stay here another moment.  Let me walk on, anywhere but here, and I'll catch up with you soon."  The others attempt to still my protests, reminding me of the impracticality of setting off alone, while I counter that, worst case, I'll find my way there by asking for the name of our safe haven, which I'll be sure not to forget.  Just then the woman who spoke earlier informs me that our expected wait for transport, an inconceivable half an hour, has already passed.  We raise our eyes for a sight of the transport that will at last take us out of this miserable place.

Suddenly, back on the plaza, a gigantic, magnificent slate-colored Percheron thunders across the stone.  Its impossible size is matched by its more-than-perfect muscular form.  Stray sun beams strike and richochet off its storm-cloud-dappled coat.  On its back rides a policeman in riot gear.  He is of normal size, but his mount lends him the illusion of mythical proportion.  Wan, ochre light glances off the face-shield of his helmet.  He does not brandish a weapon, or make a move of violence toward any, but something in the vision which he and the great horse present is a precipitant, an abrupt coalescing, of all of this city's stark, oppressive desolation captured in a single entity.  I am rooted, at once repulsed and longing to stare at the pair's brutal beauty. But the glimmer of foreboding solidifies:  we must move on, before we are too late.

Yet to accomplish the journey's next stage, it is vital that we concentrate and augment our own energies.  While the insensible crowds part and stream around us, we set our feet and stand, shoulder to shoulder, faces toward sun's dissipate, near-spent illumination.  Hands cupped in front of third chakra, the solar plexus, we call into reconnection.  Speaking the ancient words that affirm the all that is One and the One that is infinity, quietly at first and then with gathering potential.  My acute initial discomfort at unveiling these secret ways in public is replaced by a liberating wonder when, out of a current deeper than word or voice can track, a deep, honeyed hum of many invisible voices joins us, rich and resonant, flowing beneath our quiet speech and bearing it up, bearing witness to its vibrant continuity and community.  Unseen, atemporal, but potent and very present, this transcendant caravan swells us up on its surge of living memory and dream.  We are not alone or forgotten.  More than intuited or imagined, the voices become our transport, and dimensional space expands:  still the same impersonal city, and also a thousand welcoming ways opening simultaneously.  We don't see the road, but we are on it.  We will, be it at hope and vision's end, set weary feet on the last path to refuge.