The Color of the Fire

Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present, or so they say, though I sometimes wonder. Sometimes I think that all of time must already exist right here, though we might only see glimpses when the conditions are right. Sometimes I think maybe we are all watching from the future, and the past is only filling itself in. We feel it in our bones and then later we say, "I knew it all along." 

There are certain times of the year when I catch sight of shadowy shapes gliding by my windows, but when I look there is nothing, only a crackle of static or humming in the air. Not leaf-light or flitting birds, but something both more and less substantial. I wonder about the source of these apparitions, whether it's the past or the future leaking through. 

I think about what imprint we make on the world around us, the color of the fire that emblazons our presence in this world, or the spark of life that exists outside time. 

There is no way for me to know yet, but for now, I can speculate. 

 

From the Kitchen Window

 It's been hard to communicate lately, so I keep to myself and scrawl things in my little book. 

Visitants

 That which is not seen. 

The Inscrutable Sky

All astrologers would appear to agree - the conjunction of Neptune and Saturn means something, though exactly what is in dispute. Perhaps it means clarity, breaking free from illusion. Perhaps it means war, or maybe peace. Perhaps it's rebuilding from the ashes or finally learning a lesson once and for all. Only time can tell. 

All I know is at that moment, I was standing in the hallway, lost in the diffuse sunlight from of glass-block window at the edge of my vision, and felt a shift out there, somewhere. Beyond. 

Ephemera

The story so far. 

Presence Out of Context/Underworld

Message, January 21, 2026. 7:21 PM.

Question: If you were dreaming right now, do you think you would sense the presence of the you who was dreaming? The presence of your sleeping self?

If you could, do you think you would recognize yourself as that presence?

I ask because this evening, I was out in town. The sun was below the horizon, but the sky was still a luminous (if ominous) grey. The lights of the town suddenly seemed to become more distinct, more vivid, with a strange depth. Despite the people and the traffic and the shops all around, I could feel the miles of snowy landscape around me, like a sort of echo.

It all felt slightly unreal. Memories flitted through my head not quite at random - us standing outside the art museum in the November wind, you and me on that drive from Texas to the Midwest. Other, things, too. It all felt similar somehow.

It wasn't just cold grue, but layers of it, like layers of time.

The radio played "wrapped around your finger" and it all felt so haunted that I began to question it, the meaning of it. It was as if I were hearing the song in its proper setting for the first time, the proper context, which allowed me to detect an essence I'd never noticed before. Something liminal. What was it I sensed?

My stream of consciousness was like so:

Underworld landscape. What would it feel like if you were dead and didn't know it? Would it feel like this? No, not quite. We are not entirely ghosts. We are something else. Has the rest the world disappeared, has the real world been obliterated and left this shadowy world behind? No, not quite that, either.

And what was the eerie, nameless presence in the atmosphere?

When running through all the iterations of what this was like, I realized that it was most like a dream, but as seen from the other side.

As if I were in the dream without knowing that I was being dreamed.

Except for the nameless, eerie presence of something unknown. 

***

It's been a few days since this happened, and I'm still thinking about it. Would you recognize your own presence out of context? The remnants of your own energy in a place where you used to live? 

Or (as my husband pointed out) the presence of your higher self, the eternal self that already knows all? 

I told him, if that were the case, I could think of two times such an awareness could become evident: if your higher self intervened to nudge you in a necessary direction, or that you, in your physical existence, had become so nebulous that you began to blend into that other world. 

I still wonder which one I experienced. 

But I suspect I know. 

Crystalline Winter

The sky is Uranian blue.