Gazing Toward The Unseen

7 AM on an overwhelmingly ordinary morning. Everything as it's expected to be. Suddenly, there is a brief, flickering moment when the uncanny crosses your path, or you've crossed it. The faintest breath of another world existing beside you.

It is always there, hidden in plain sight.

Liberty Hill

I swore that when it got dark and cold I would tell this story, and since it's 28 degrees and black as pitch outside, I guess the time has come. This all began long before the terrible winter of my aunt's murder, but it shows that even then, I understood that the land held a profound and dreadful power.

1.

The tale begins many years ago, when I was little girl and my parents' marriage was on the verge of breaking up. Not that I knew this is any official way - my parents didn't talk about such things - but I knew it as a sick feeling in my stomach, a sense of the precariousness of everything I knew as my life.

My sister's wedding that September had brought things to a head. With only me left at home (and too young to have much say in the matter) my mother began a pattern of taking day trips to various places, usually a tourist attraction somewhere within a hundred miles. Possibly she was taking these long drives to think, more likely she was doing it to punish my dad by disappearing to parts unknown. Whatever the case, the effect was that I ended up being dragged from one end of the hill country to the other, visiting a variety of caverns, Presidential homesteads, candle factories and granite batholiths in the bleak and barren landscape.

Now, the thing about the hill country is that in the bright light of summer, you might be able to convince yourself that it's friendly, or at the very least benign. In the autumn and winter, though, all bets are off. When the sun goes in and the clouds loom and the limestone no longer fills the air with reflected light, the land reveals its true nature, a place so desolate it can drain the life right out of you.

It was in this atmosphere  - the greyness, the nausea  - that we visited the international sculpture park at Liberty Hill.

It was one of the rare times my brother was with us, and I suppose it must have been his idea. He was working on his second art degree at that time in San Marcos, and perhaps it had been suggested as a place the students should visit. At any rate, it was a long drive  - more than 80 miles according to the map. I sat in the back of the station wagon, facing rearwards, watching the road unwind endlessly through the bleached horizon.

I wish there was a way to describe how bad it felt, how utterly wrong it all was, but then again, perhaps it's for the best. Suffice it to say there was nothing good about this moment (the lightless cold, the frigid wind) nor in the future (would I have to go with mom to see that man, who I knew all about even though I wasn't supposed to know?) My helplessness made me feel that I would shatter into a million pieces.

My memory of the town of Liberty Hill itself is vague - I recall an old, ramshackle town, seemingly derelict in a way that that did not seem merely empty, but frightening.  The sculpture park was something else again. Very modern, very abstract. Curving, hulking shapes shining whitely in the gloom.

I left my mother and brother to argue among themselves and lost myself among the artworks. I was very young and did not understand why the sculptures didn't look like what they were named, or what they might mean, or why  they disturbed me so. They were only stone shapes, after all, and yet, the combination of the sculpture and the bitter wind and the nature of the land itself filled me with a horror that was beyond me to express.

Finally I sought refuge behind a statue called Tierra Madre. After studying it for a while, I could begin to see the shape of a woman curling around on herself and felt better for being able to understand. Of course, I know now that Tierra Madre means Earth Mother, but didn't then. I only knew that I felt safe there for the moment.

The last thing I remember about Liberty Hill is my mother's voice, faint in the wind, shouting at me to come on, but I didn't move. They had to come find me.

2.
If the trip to Liberty Hill was the first hint of seasonal depression to come, then the December murder of my aunt cemented it as an incontrovertible fact. Winter was a thing to dread and fear, and aside from a few isolated moments over the years, it was true. Rarely would anything good come in this time and place, and even if it did, despair kept most potential pleasure at bay.

Things were somewhat better when I moved from the hill country to the coast; winters were still cold, yes, but there was not the hostile landscape, there was still an ambient light. Coming back here after nearly 20 years was tough. Being reintroduced to that particular kind of gloom was tougher still. Intolerable, to tell you the truth.

No matter how I tried to cope, the reality of my surroundings intruded. I tried everything, from remembering in small doses (such as writing the above-linked Girl Who Was Witched Away) to trying to block it out entirely. None were especially helpful, and always I'd end up in the back in the abyss.

In the late autumn of 2016, again feeling desperate, I hit upon an new idea. If there was no way to block the bad memories, perhaps replacing them would work. I would pick one of my few good winter memories and focus on it intently, inhabiting it as much as possible. Don't think about the miseries of childhood. Don't think about Liberty Hill.

I chose the memory of meeting my ex-boyfriend, Michael, the man I'd almost married. It had been a bitterly cold and dark December day when he'd swept in and carried me away. Michael, bless him, was crazy about me, and for all his flaws, the memory holds a special place. For a month, I'd put all my mental effort into recreating the feeling of that time, dragging up every half-forgotten scene.

Writing When Dark Comes At Six was part of this effort - I'd even returned to the place where we'd met (on another, suitably frigid day) to take the photo for the post. And then there was the rest of that story, of course, How he'd taken me to meet his family, to their endless stream of parties, how he moved me into his house almost immediately after he'd managed to pry me out of my girlish floral dress.

In the first few weeks, while we inhabited that glorious, secretive bubble that new lovers do, there was a lot of things to learn. Not the least of them was that Michael was a wealthy man from a wealthy family, and like many such people, irresponsible with money. He kept his cash in a gold clip, which he was constantly losing. There was always a kerfuffle at some club door or another because he'd lost a wad of bills, only to have the clip turn up in some odd place, like a camera case or a gumboot. It was funny, but also quite astonishing to me. He managed to casually lose more money than I'd ever possessed.

Lying on my chilly bed in 2016, I marveled at this once again. Michael and his money clip. Michael, the buffoon, who'd bought me a car because he thought it would look nice with my hair. But I'd married for brains, not money, and there would be no beating back winter with luxury items now.  I closed my eyes and resurrected the memory again.

When I woke up an hour or two later, I spied something shiny on the bedside table. With a growing sense of disbelief, I realized it was a gold money clip. Where had it come from? No one in the family had ever owned such a thing. It was disconcerting, how this object had seemed to have jumped from my memory to the waking world. It could hardly be true, and yet, there it was. As if  I'd willed it into existence, a sign that I was finally overcoming the worst of the past.

It was a mystery how it had got there, until I tracked down my teenage son. He'd been messing around in the backyard rockpile, he said, when he'd spied a weathered green box among the rubble. The clip was inside, and he thought I might like it. He brought the box out of his pocket. When I looked inside, I felt a surge of horror as well as disbelief at the name on the lid.

This had gone from disconcerting to not funny awfully fast. First, an object like the one in my memory appears, now the name of something I'd been trying to block out turns up along with it. The Cosmic Joker was at it again. This required a thorough examination, so I pulled out the velvet insert from the bottom of the box and found a little paper slip.

It contained the name of the shop where it had been bought, called Things Remembered.

The Cosmic Joker had hit a home run.

...

I've given up trying to figure out who the clip belonged to, or how it came to be in our rockpile at all. Perhaps, as my great-auntie had once told me in a dream, "things materialize."  Perhaps it meant, as a friend said, that I owned the narrative now.  Maybe it was gift from the landscape itself, as a reward for my sheer persistence, and to remind me that its power isn't always a terrible thing.

I put it in my purse, and it's turned out to be good luck since.

There's only one thing left that continues to mystify me - the signature on that slip of paper. No matter how I try, I can't make the letters form themselves into a name. But that makes sense, really. the ineffable forces of nature would have an enigmatic writing style.

The Edge Of Autumn

Just days before the equinox and blazing hot. Autumn merely a celestial notion.

I'd been expecting a package and news had reached my ears that it had been delivered that very afternoon. Fantastic. With hope in my heart, I walked down the road. 

It was the same walk I'd dreamed of once long ago, and though now I was wide awake in the sun, a subtle hallucinatory quality had  nevertheless begun to steal across the land. 

Most of the time, it's not so obvious that this place is on the edge of the desert. In the brutal last days summer, though, with no soft greenery to cushion it. a barren moonscape reveals itself. Layers of memory (it seemed to me) had become exposed like rocks jutting above the surface, the bleached and jagged bones of the earth. 

I remembered my father, my siblings and the neighbors we'd had, and the games we'd played, among the limestone outcroppings that had their own names and the dry creeks and river bed. The agave, a huge, old towering thing, reached its spiky leaves to the sky. The needly hooked tooth edges snagged my attention, the way things do when the world goes strange.

Yes, the landscape was feeling restive, and really, who could blame it? It had been a relentless season

I was halfway down the road and the wind was picking up. Shades of the old dream again, but this time the wind was scorching, hot enough to distort the air. It rattled and hissed and shook the trees. Soon, like the dream, it began to howl. 

No sooner had I reached the place where the two roads met than I felt it, that mysterious, indescribable sense of another reality overlapping my own. I stood there for a while, half-hypnotized by the spinning vents on top of old Mrs. Kirtchner's house, wondering what it was that I felt, and how to even talk about it. But all I could articulate to myself was that I was standing at the edge of Autumn.

Well, hang around a crossroad long enough and you are bound to discover something.

My package was in the mailbox. What was in it? Eh, just stuff. A red herring, as red as my dress in the equinoctial wind.

I walked back home, once again full of knowledge that was beyond me to explain

A Multitude Of Moonmen

For many years now, I've had  recurring dreams of sending tiny little letters in tiny little envelopes through a series of tiny mailboxes concealed in strange places.

It's never been clear what the messages are, or to whom, but in the interest of evoking this dream, I have made a collection of tiny cards and envelopes. Perhaps soon I will know where to send them.

Caduceus

At the medical center in Victoria was this imposing caduceus sculpture.  It always struck me as a little strange. Victoria being such a conservative place in general, it seemed even less likely that the medical center would be possessed of such a flight of modernity. Especially one verging on a sort of Pagan spookiness.

It was one of those places where the dullness of Victoria had cracked and weirdness leaked through.

Will O' Wisp

A will o' wisp dancing over a field.

More information about will o' wisps here and here.

A Walk In The Woods

It was one of those days, when strange shapes and mysterious figures seemed to lurk at every turn.

Temenos Tropicalia, Or The Color Of Sacred Space

Last week, my son and I went to lunch at a restaurant with an unusual color scheme. Despite the statues of Buddha and the mandala wall hangings, it had a distinctly Jamaican flair.

It had been my son's idea to eat there, he had been wanting to come for a while.

After we'd ordered and sat down at the table, he told me why.

He said, I don't understand it,  but for some reason this feels so much like home. As if I came from somewhere that looked just like this. But I can't think of where. Just 'home.'

While there were a few places in Victoria that had bright color schemes, they were few and far between. While it's possible this is what he was remembering, what he wouldn't have known (unless he'd read that post linked above) is that I've had dreams of similarly colored places my entire life. And if anything feels like home to me, I suppose that would be it.

It occurs to me that perhaps sacred space doesn't always need to be a space at all. Maybe it only needs to be a color.

Coffee After Midnight

When  you are able to take a night drive with your beloved, and you have change for a cup of coffee, even the most ordinary symbol can become beautiful.

The M stands for McDonald's but maybe also Mysterious, Mystical, Midnight, More.

Genius Loci

We named it the house sprite because we didn't know what else to call it, but Genius Loci is probably more fitting.

The first time I recall noticing it was the morning of my third birthday, when I got out of bed and found the house empty.  It was so quiet, the only sound was the humming of the fans. I was still small enough then that the house seemed big and mysterious, something wondrous to be roaming around alone. I wandered down the hall, past the open bedroom doors which suddenly seemed to have a strange significance. It's beyond me to describe it now, but there seemed to be a presence there, something unseen that seemed to vibrate with delight. It was my birthday, so I was full of anticipation of course, but the giddy otherness seemed unmistakable.

When the family began to drift back into the house from wherever they'd been, the presence disappeared and I remember being disappointed. Still, the presence (if we can call it that) would turn up again and again.

Often it would be lingering in the kitchen when I'd sneak in to grab an illicit snack. That was the most common way to find it, but it wasn't confined to the house by any means. Sometimes you'd find it slipping  around corners or messing about the flower beds on sunny afternoons. It gave me the impression that it was giggling.

Simple enough to understand this as a childish whimsy, some externalization of my own nature. After all, the presence did seem somehow female and a little mischievous. Perhaps the sort of Family Circus type "Not Me" character that robbed the cookie jar when no one else was around. That said, it's not something I thought about much. It was just something that was there, a sort of mood or feeling that would crop up at odd places around the house. There was nothing to see or hear, and it certainly wasn't scary, so there was not much cause to wonder about it. Or mention it, either...you learn early on you aren't supposed to talk about things like that.

So it was in the years after I'd left home that it rarely entered my mind. It wasn't exactly that I'd forgotten about it - it figured heavily in memories of the Summer mentioned here, for instance - but what was there to say? Every place has its own mood and atmosphere, and it nearly always defies description.

It was certainly far from my thoughts the day I came back to the house where I grew up. My original family had been irreparably changed and broken by then, and the sadness was overwhelming. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the kitchen one morning and found the bubbly presence there, just like it was 1981 and no time had passed at all.

Since time had passed and I was an adult now,  I was curious. What caused this odd little sensation? It was not like a ghost, not something that made you feel watched or frightened; but it did seem to have identifiable movements, places where it definitely was or wasn't.

While going about my duties, mapping its rambles became a cheerful distraction. Given the unhappiness in the house, it wasn't hard to notice these pockets of delight. It most often hung about the kitchen and hallway, though it might turn up in the bath or utility room as well. It was almost never to be found in the front rooms, and outdoors it preferred the back or the side to the front garden as well. Perhaps it was something about the weather conditions that caused it. The handy thermometer / barometer on the wall and reports from the weather station helped keep track. It was an interesting idea, but alas, there was no consistency between its appearance and any weather conditions that I could find. Back to the drawing board.

Maybe it had something to do with negative ions - these are supposed to encourage a sense of well-being. I experimented here too, examining places and things that contain them, and while they were very nice, it just wasn't the same feeling at all. Water pipes? Perhaps, but the presence was inconsistent with the plumbing lines. Anyway, I'd never felt it out at the well. EMF waves? Maybe, but aren't these more consistent with seeing ghosts? There was no obvious explanation for something that must have been ongoing for 30 years or more. Assuming it wasn't just my fevered imagination, that is.

A few months passed, and one day my son - then about 11 - walked into the room.
 "Something must be about to happen" he said '"because that feeling is in the kitchen again."
"What feeling?" I asked.
"You know, that feeling that something's about to happen. Like you get before a storm. It begins with an A. An...something"
"Anticipation?"
"Yeah, that's it. It's in the kitchen right now, but it moves around the house."

Yes, that was it. Anticipation. That's exactly what it felt like, the purest sense that something exciting was about to happen. It was also the first time anyone else had ever mentioned it to me - confirmation that it wasn't my own imagination.

We talked about it a bit, and it seemed that my son's experience was pretty much the same as my own. Although after so many years, I'd learned that it really never seemed to herald anything in particular - even if at times it seemed to be egging you on.

At the end of that Summer, my husband moved up permanently. It didn't take him long to notice what my son and I had; it was he who named it the house sprite. He also pointed out that it didn't just appear in the house and grounds, it turned up in specific places around the neighborhood too. The corner of next road over was a favorite place, as well as the dry creek 3 blocks away. Which was accurate, I realized.

He had no explanation for it either, but was happy enough to have this little non-ghostly presence spreading good cheer. Heaven knows we needed it. Every little bit helps.

The house sprite hasn't been around too much this Spring, but tonight it's been hovering round the kitchen window for hours. The air nearly trembles with laughter we cannot hear. It's a mysterious thing.

It's almost enough to make you believe in fairies.