Too many creatures laid to waste in the depths of the fills.
I met these three, who had quite the story to tell.
The village they had come from had been struggling with corrupted values, violence, and disharmony among even the closest of families. They told me that the village had a tradition of punishing people with a huge stone amulet that would weigh down the shoulders of village members who were accused of mischief and evil.
But the three told me they had discovered that the source of the corruption actually came from the amulet itself.
It was the action of placing it around your neck or allowing it to be carried within a bag or container of your own that allowed the amulet to corrupt your mind. So the villagers who had been punished and had worn the amulet once, inevitably found the amulet in their possession again, frustrated and shameful of their punishment and becoming more vulnerable to its power again, causing a horrendously vicious cycle. There was no integrity anywhere. Soon, everyone in the town had been accused and had worn the stone over their chests. The village was now on the brink of absolute greed and destruction.
Fearing what their home had become, these three had separately fled the village, and unexpectedly found each other in the hills a fortnight later. They decided to pool their resources to try to survive outside of the village until they found a more peaceful home. The three found an ancient cave nestled in the hills to use as a temporary shelter.
But after attempting to spend the night there, they started to realize that it was more than a cave. It was also a tomb. The farther back they explored, ancient scriptures began to appear on walls, floors, and even ceilings. They observed the ruins and inferred that the amulet had been stolen from the tomb many decades ago by an explorer from the village with ill intentions who had disrespected and looted the tomb.
“The spirit in the amulet was nothing more than a person,” the girl with the dark hair and white dress said vehemently. “She was shelved in the depths of the tomb, and died long before our village came to be. The amulet was deeply cherished by her in life, and her spirit awoke and became very upset when the amulet was taken from her resting place. She followed the amulet out.”
The three explained this to me: When a spirit is disturbed, it cannot move on to the next life. It stays trapped, halfway bound to a decomposing body, without the means to keep the consciousness occupied with things such as senses or physicality.It is a soul without the sacred outlet of expression, and while there are no flames in limbo, it is clear that it is one of the worst hells. It is an eternal sentence, until another soul recognizes their pain and suffering and sympathizes with it rather than fearing the sorrowful power of it. It is “when the boundaries of life and death are broken with love” that a disturbed soul will be freed. It is very rare for another to sympathize for another soul who does not have a physical body.
Understanding this, the three knew that their home could be saved if the cycle was broken. They had snuck into the village in the dead of night, passing horrible implications of what had occurred in the daytime. They told me that they hoped their mothers and fathers would have the strength to avoid the powerfully overwhelming results of an old woman’s unbridled grief. The three managed to snatch the amulet off of a sleeping child, and the three of them had been taking turns holding it at arms length since.
They concluded their story with an intriguing message: they were now on route to a fabled monastery that was said to heal evil spirits forever rather than simply banishing them. They told me that the monks who resided there practiced the purest of cleansing power for all souls.
The determination of the three, and also the unrelenting influx of calming truth and understanding that emanated from them made me realize that there were much better solutions then the ones that I had been used to. The three pioneers didn’t want to win, they just loved their home and were happy that they didn’t need to fight. They just knew what had to be done to keep the world in balance.
I hope I see them again while I am down here - I hope some of their ways will follow me back upstairs.
I could not decide if the bayou was truly as colorful as my depiction, or if the high concentration of freely developing psilocybin had totally altered my perception of it. And then I knew that this was the most perfect state of the bayou, untouched, and that nature had created our perceptions in every sense of the word so there was no use in thinking of it or drawing it in any other way.
One could not tell if the area was comprised of just a single individual or many billion lifeforms vastly multiplied; everything was made of mycelium, and while it took the form of trees and brush, up close, the webbing of the intricate biome was clearly visible as the only material that wetland was made of. There were bone-white mats of mycelium creating shelved reefs below my boat which extended below the surface impossibly deep. What the mycelium did below the reach of light was an unseen mystery. There was also a strange essence of movement. More than once, something caught the corner of my eye, and I looked around expecting to see an ancient deer or possibly a heron, but there was nothing but the mycelium for miles.
Our forests of today are limited to certain materials like bark and leaves. Before I went into the basement, I hadn't ever thought of a forest to be able to exist in any other way. No evidence was left of such an environment in the primordial waters; the mycelium had packed up everything before we could study them like we could the dinosaurs.
I hadn't ever considered that the shape of a forest had to do with more than just the materials it was made out of. But clearly there was a template that any earthly material could follow in order to make a forest, which the mycelium had so beautifully proved in its untouched environment. This led me to the conclusion that every forest, since the beginning of time, was following the mysterious rhythms of the Earth’s heartbeat. Whether it was made out of bark or mycelium, whatever material that resonated with the heartbeat and could catch the vibration would inevitably grow into the pattern.
The forests are one of the primordial earth’s most favorite expressions of her internal heartbeat. Throughout time the variety of what could be called forests have dwindled to the hardiest of pines and oak, and although the ancient mycelium forests have retreated into small caps, when ingested one can feel the intricacies of the old bayous alight in one’s mind.