45s on 33 – #71: “Fireflies”

After we got back, Rey-Rey and me went home, meaning our realm homes. After stopping off at the store for butter and milk and bread and contact lens solution, I got to the house. It’d only been about two hours since I left, though it felt like I’d been gone for weeks. Time is fucked up enough when it’s normal, but this off-the-grid fluctuating fourth dimension shit was going to be hard to configure to keep a personal schedule.

We had fried rice and chicken and tofu (separate skillets) cooked in tamari for dinner, and then I went out to the main looping path meandering through the woods behind our cultivated Bird Tribe property. Once you circle halfway around the main loop, there’s a secondary loop I built following animal paths that cuts back near a debris pile from decades ago. I’ve got various rock altars and hidden Buddha figurines all around back there, so I like to walk those non-circular circles to scope out the always-changing advanced mushroom technologies, and try to get my mind to settle.

On that secondary loop, right at the beginning, in fall and winter it is brown and angular, and the winter freeze squeezes up a fresh batch of trash quartz for harvesting in the spring. Whenever I pick up a quartz rock, I gently touch and tug at first, to feel whether it’s ready to come with or not. It’ll usually tell you. But in summer, once everything’s gotten bright green, by that debris pile on an angle it looks luscious with the sun filtering down into the ground-level green, giving everything a lime aura. Crows are usually back there in the distance, over at the wizard-looking neighbor’s land, dropping crow freestyles into the sky. It’s often times my favorite place on earth that I’ve found thus far. (This earth, meaning my specific earth – not all earths.)

As I was out there, summertime was official because the fireflies and lightning bugs were flickering up out of the green undergrowth as twilight started to get lit. Fireflies and lightning bugs are almost exactly the same, excepting fireflies possess a slightly higher upward mobility. So I sat there by one of my Buddha stumps (one in which the Buddha had long since left… I think sometimes maybe they come alive, or perhaps the crows took him, because I used to leave them peanuts at this same stump altar) and contemplated the fireflies and time and all this that had been going on.

A good exercise against the anxiousness is deep breathing, and I’d had a lot to be anxious about in my normal existence before all this other realm foolishness injected itself into complexifying being. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, at first concentrating on the breathing but then unconcentrating on it. The best way to think of it is that old Taoist mantra often seen in kung fu flicks about how you have to first know something, and then secondarily not know it, meaning it goes from conscious to unconscious. Once I get my deep breaths washing through my rib cage, I try to detach from thinking about it, or anything, always with my eyes closed to decrease the sensory distractions which always threaten to lead us astray. It’s fun to do this for a while and then open your eyes and see the world with supernatural crispness.

As I kept breathing, I imagined the fireflies floating up, and started to feel like I was floating up physically, just a touch. I’d like to think I’d be more lightning bug than firefly, but the floating sensation started to cease as I thought like that, so I went back to just breathing. Just breathing. Just. Breathing.

It felt as if I was floating for a good while before I finally opened my eyes, and there I was at tree levels, higher than human feet could know, and luckily my brain didn’t become startled and look back at my body like had happened when I was a teenager. I felt higher than a firefly so kept floating forward through the trees, towards the crow calls in the distance.

One translucent black grimy crow was nearby, who I didn’t see until he squawked at me, “Who the fuck are you?” He spoke crow, but I heard him say that specifically.

“Raven,” I answered.

“You’re not no fucking raven!” he squawked back, then flew off, zipping in the direction of the symphony of other crows further off. I thought about being Raven, and saw my body sitting by the debris pile back in the woods, and felt the umbilical cord of consciousness pull me back into that body.

I opened my eyes – my Raven the human dude eyes – and got really excited. I think I had actually turned into a crow. I know for sure I did, but still, I wasn’t quite confident in my thinking so.