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. 

Celestial Clockwork (or): Waiting Around for Grace, cont'd

Well, (she said, to the empty air) you can't have thought I'd forgotten, for the heart is persistent, down to its last agonized beat.

I don't know if this will make any sense. Maybe it will only make sense to the ones who need it.

I wrote the linked post quoted above back in September 2021, after a particularly haunting sort of day, the kind where absence feels as solid as presence should be, and loneliness is so sharp you can almost trace the outline of what is missing from your life. 

The title was from a song that was stuck in my head at the time, called Waiting Around for Grace, about which I'd privately mused that "Grace", aside from a desired state of being, might as well have been a dear friend you'd once arranged to meet at a certain time and place, who never arrives because she'd died long ago. (A feeling not unfamiliar to me - my best friend has been gone 20 years now.)

It was a significant day, spiritually at least, and aside from the post named above, I had continued to write and ponder on it for a long time. I'd always expected to finish this related piece called "Celestial Clockwork" when I figured out what it all meant, but 4 years later, I don't suppose I am any closer to knowing, so I guess I'm just going to post it today. 

This is what I wrote, back in 2021: 

Celestial Clockwork

 The restlessness started in mid-afternoon. It wasn't uncomfortable, exactly, but unfamiliar. Like craving food while having no appetite. 

The sense of needing something gnawed at me, though what it could be was not clear. I ran through all the possibilities in my head, all the things a person might conceivably need, but nothing came up a match. 

I went outside to where my husband sat under a tree, partly to consult him, but mostly because I couldn't stay still. "I need something, but don't know what, " I said. "Do you ever feel that way?" He looked up into the branches, thinking for a moment. 

"No, never."

Trying another tactic, I asked "well, what do you need, then?"

"Chinese food." he said.

Okay, we could do that, at least. Get the keys and go. You know how it is with these things. When you don't know what you're looking for, you might find it anywhere.

...

The restaurant seems out of place in the market plaza; the curling manes of the stone lions not in keeping with the stark façade. Like a few things I've come upon in my travels, these lions do not want to be photographed. It's simply not possible to get them both in the frame. I gave up trying long ago. What's the use of having the yin without the yang?

Inside is a darkened maze of wooden booths and bamboo screens. It's very quiet. The servers dart about soundlessly. In the center of the maze, the buffet tables are steaming. There is something slightly surreal in this, I think, the bright shimmer in the dim room. Visible heat. Strange how a sense of unreality can creep into most mundane of scenes. The transmutation of the unseen into the seen.

My husband has positioned himself at the end of one of the tables, and while I know he's just waiting for the General Tso's chicken, there's something about the sight that puts me in the mind of a chess piece awaiting the next move. In turn I position myself near the cauldrons of soup, another chess piece, if a less imposing one. In the stillness, I can feel a clock ticking both inside and outside. Above me, I notice, the ceiling is painted like the evening sky. 

Outside the restaurant it is silent. Amid the oblique geometry of the forecourt, the breeze moves in angular bursts. Pigeon feathers hover and swirl before drifting away. It's still summer, and hot, but the air has a trace of melancholy, the end of the season in a tourist town. We take our food and head home, and somehow things seem different, even though it's not clear what has changed. There is a vague sense of a far-off glimmer. Perhaps some unseen satellite ascending.

....

I don't know from astrology; I only know I like charts and glyphs. It's a comfort to me, mapping the arcane. Planets transit the houses, the moon changes its phase, a stranger on the street turns to catch your eye. Who can say what it means? I just like to think about it. 

Anyway, it helps with the restlessness, which has begun to metamorphize into an uncomfortable prickling, the feel of a cheap wool sweater on a hot day. The clock is ticking, I can feel it now that it has come into my awareness, though it must have always been there. What it is counting down to is a mystery. Perhaps some enigmatic matter of fate, which I can sense now like magnetic north or the pull of the ocean across the plain. 

This might be an unlikely claim from someone like me, but sometimes there is no point in asking why. Every so often, things just are, and you won't get anywhere pretending otherwise. I meditate for an hour, surfing relentless waves of inner itch, but all that happens is wanting to shed my body like a dry lizard skin. So, lacking any other solution, I mentally track the planets through their whorl of nebulous destiny. I don't believe for one moment that, say, Venus transiting the 7th house has an actual, physical pull on anything, but I know - the way one knows these things - that recurring patterns in the chaos are a signal. Cosmic tarot. Symbol plus placement plus synchronicity. 

It's Saturday, the 11th of September 2021, and aside from the internal ticking of the clock, there is no sound but the echo of blowing leaves.

At home, I skim the edges of the yard, looking for a place to land. It's easier to think outdoors, and there is much to ponder. The ticking of that clock, for one thing. Why do I suddenly feel as if I'm one of those number slide puzzles with the tiles slightly out of order? That I need to figure out what to shift before the clock winds down? It must have been just after 6:30 when I settled down in an out of the way corner behind the house. No one would be likely to find me there. My restless heart ached for peace, among other things. It seemed I was supposed to do something, and there is nothing worse for an aching heart than to feel there is some unknown move you should make to resolve the pain. 

I sat there in the dusty heat and tried to clear my mind. Somewhere up above I was dimly aware of planetary gears. I was conceived in September and born in June; there has always been something autumnal inside me, a wistfulness, an animal-like alertness to incipient change. I felt it keenly at the moment the clock went silent. A dust devil rose from the ground like a phantasm, present only briefly but portentous all the same. Somehow, I knew - at that moment, like a weight falling - that the first part of my life and its purpose were over. Whatever signal I had been sending like a determined firefly had gone out into the aether, and now there was nothing to do but to wait for a signal in return before moving forward to the next.

....

And that (having never become clear on her purpose) was all she wrote. 

Not that there was no more to the story, you understand - there was so much more to the story, so many layers, and loops, and walking one careful foot in front of the other down what seemed like a fateful and fated road that somehow instead came to a dead end. 

Yet, the feeling remains. The sense of absent presence, a third energy, a golden thread, an intangible field on which unseen action is meant to play out. My life has changed completely - sometimes serendipitously, sometimes forcibly pummeled into a new shape - from the way it was in 2021. But where this journey goes or why, I have even less of a clue now than I did then. 

As for Grace, I'm no longer waiting for her arrival. I accept that she isn't coming after all. Even the Chinese restaurant with the curly-maned lions is long gone, and the Texas hill country is far in the distance. I had a heart attack last year, and now my agonized old heart beats more erratically than ever.

Even so - for the moment, though - it still persists. 

The picture at the top of this post was taken as a somewhat mocking nod to that very same linked piece, outside a florist in Detroit one night in the autumn of 2023. Perhaps you can tell by my pained smile, that - despite the signage - grace was not exactly forthcoming for me at that time. 

Blue Redux/Chapter 24

Tuesday, the 27th of June. Again, the brightness of the sky draws me outside. The heat this time is stunning.

It's a little more than a month since the day of the blue paint and crescent moon, though the sense of layered time remains. Even if the air feels on fire, the sunlit grass and the shadows are the same. 

Out front though, the yard is empty. Around back, everything is still. In this space is absence, as solid as the heat. There is no longer any sign of laughter or murmured conversation. Cicada drone is the only sound. 

I sit down on the same rock as I'd done before, feeling as curiously old/young as I had in May. The emptiness of the place runs though me now, draining into the hollow ground. It's that sensation you get when the party is over, the guests have left, the visitors have had to go. I know this absence is the price I pay for moving on. My mother has said she never wants to see me again, and the current me, the chronological one, is resigned to this, knowing there was nothing else to be expected, though I worry a bit about child me, who was always so desperate to please. Child me is surprisingly stoic, however. It turns out, like the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon, she already knew the score. 

The sun is searing, blisteringly hot. It's the hottest June on record, they say. I get up, seek some cover among the trees. I pluck flowers from the whitebrush and desert willow to save, because they don't have them where I'm going. I occurs to me that I am trying to fold Texas away, put it in a box like a keepsake, knowing that in a years' time it might mean something more to me, but it just as likely won't mean a thing. 

Over top the clothesline again I see the daylight moon. It has grown from the thin crescent of 25th May, dwindled and grown again into a fat waxing gibbous. In recent days the boys have been increasingly restless, the grown-up ones wanting to get on with the rest of their lives, the younger one impatient to be somewhere else. After years of stasis, things had suddenly begun to move. Action brings good fortune, so the I Ching and Pink Floyd say, and perhaps this is true; in fact, I'd say it almost certainly is, as inaction has done us the exact opposite. But for every action taken there is a world left behind, and this, I think, is what I am looking at now. 

Absence of presence as presentiment. The empty space where we used to be.

It's a melancholy feeling, to be sure. 

䷗

But let us allow hexagram 24 to have its say. It is advantageous to have a direction to go. 

The Opposite of Absence

It's high summer and the landscape is breathless. Even the cicadas have gone silent. We move in slow motion if we move at all; I feel like a photograph that's been captured mid-step.

The hallway light flickers, the dishwasher churns, a patch of sun creeps across the face of the kitchen clock. The kids tell me about the hum of the powerlines on the corner, but I find that I'm too old hear it now. 

In the bath, a stray yellow leaf clings to a hand towel on the rack, its parched edges furled like wings. There's a vibration in the air that feels like waiting. It's nebulous but heavy, the opposite of absence. 

In The Weird and The Eerie, Mark Fisher asked "who or what is the entity who has woven fate?" 

I listen to the soundless space where the hum used to be. I get the feeling I might know the answer. 

The Visitation, Part 2

Photo of the Andromeda Galaxy, 1899

In last night's post, I wrote about the way my great-aunt Nina paid a visit at the moment of her death. In the ensuing years, Nina would turn up again, often in dreams, but at least once or twice, I believe, in a more physical way.

Usually, Nina's appearances in dreams were urging me to check up on her husband. Nina's husband was by then nearly blind and mostly deaf, but with an oldster's peculiar bursts of energy, he still found the wherewithal to embark on some harebrained schemes. Sure enough, when we'd check up on him, he'd be heading full tilt toward the verge of disaster. Nina and her husband were very devoted to each other in life, so it was not surprising she would have kept an eye on him in death, even if she had to prod her sister's wacky grandaughter to do it.

A more personal message came in 1996, not long after I was married. I was sound asleep when the doorbell rang. I got up to answer, not noticing I was in my mother's house, far away from where I'd actually gone to sleep. I opened the door to find great-aunt Nina standing there, looking as vibrant and healthy as she ever had. Behind her, the dark sky was filled with a glorious array of stars and galaxies.

"Nina!" I said, now realizing this must be a dream,"Oh my gosh, how are you?" "Oh, wonderful. Just look at this" she said, gesturing at the expanse of stars. "I haven't been this happy since 1944." (1944 being the year of her own wedding.)

I told her I was glad to hear it. She replied, meaningfully "yes, but this is your day." I knew she meant that the living should embrace the pleasures of the living. She said she wanted to tell me that my new husband was a nice boy. "and he has beautiful hair. Tell him I said that, he'll appreciate it."

So I did and he did.

Things went quiet for some years, especially after Nina's husband passed away. But then on the night of January 14, 2015, there was this (text copied from another site where I'd written it down):

(Note: earlier in the night, I had asked whatever compassionate diety might be listening if they could help me out with some advice. I was hopeful, but not necessarily expecting anything.)

The dream begins in the parking lot of a place I used to live. There is a woman there whom I don't know, but we are talking. She says, "I lost 20 dollars in this parking lot once." I replied, "well, lets look around, maybe another one will appear." Sure enough, there is a $20 bill lying on the pavement. I pick it up and hand it to her. We talk about how amazing it is, the way things just seem to materialize in that parking lot. I say "I wonder how it happens? What is the rational explanation?"

Suddenly, our conversation is interrupted by my great-aunt marching into the scene. Great-aunt died in 1991, but she looks as sturdy and practical as ever. She cheerfully waves a finger at me. "You!" she says. "You! Always wanting a rational explanation! Things materialize. Things fall from the sky. Fish. Frogs. Horsemeat in Kentucky. What's the rational explanation? Let me tell you" - she waves her hand to indicate the heavens, or the world around us - "there isn't any rational explanation!"

She then makes a joke about hoping the ingredients for oatmeal cookies would appear so I could do some baking (great-aunt loved baking cookies) and moved off back where she came from. The next thing in the dream, I was looking in my handbag and found a very strange sheet of paper with a poem on it (which I won't repeat here, as it seemed meant to be private) but which I suspect was the advice I'd asked for earlier in the night. 

When I woke that morning, the first thing I thought was "well, if I hear about oatmeal and raisins appearing from nowhere, I'll know once and for all this is true." I was only half joking.

A couple of days later, my youngest child was watching a TV program called The Odd Squad, a sort of humorous X-files for kids. I was going about my business, when I was brought up short, in shock. The clip playing on television described exactly that.

The clip is here

In the way of the Cosmic Joker, and messages from beyond, no one ever specified the event couldn't be fictional. I was struck just the same.

What's more, the events surrounding the strange dream poem have since come true, and continue to come true.

What's the rational explanation? According to the shade of great-aunt Nina, there isn't one, so don't even bother asking. Just bake some cookies and be at peace with this irrational universe.

Those Who Take Their Presence With Them, Those Who Leave It Behind

photo by Francesca Woodman

My friend and I were talking the other day about a girl we'd once known and loved. As a child, she'd seemed touched by magic, everyone around her felt touched by magic. I'd feel so bereft when she'd go away. Since we didn't see each other very often, it was my fate to be left behind.

The essence of this is distilled in dreams about her: we talk frenetically, tell half-understood stories, play confusing, yet fascinating games. The clock ticks in the background. There are months of things we want to tell, but there is never enough time. Her mother's voice calls from the distance, saying they have to go. Her real life is somewhere else, far away from mine. As always, I'm left with a vague notion of color and shadow, a memory where her presence once was. Nothing even as substantial as a ghost. Only an undefined longing fills the vacuum.

Childhood friendships can be mysterious, and I've long wondered about this ancient grief of mine. To this day, I'm not certain what I expected. I'm quite sure I was more attached to her than she ever was to me. Perhaps this was the source of the longing - underneath our apparent closeness in those days, I really knew who was loved the least. 

My friend considered this view, but ultimately disagreed.

He said, "It's just that she takes her presence with her when she goes. When she's gone, she's gone. Those kinds of people, there is an emptiness where they used to be.

'You, on the other hand, leave your presence behind."

It was immediately clear what he meant, though I'd never heard it put into words before. It was an intriguing idea. We thought through all the people we've known, whether their presence went with them or lingered. Despite the intangibility of a quality such as "presence", we were able to agree in every case as to who was which. We wondered at first if it was the type or strength of personality that made the difference, but no...there were similar types who fell into different categories, and exceedingly different ones who were the same. Nor did spirituality matter much - one very spiritual roommate left nary a trace of his living there, another had such a strong presence, even the years couldn't diminish it.

It's a nebulous, but distinctive phenomenon. Your beloved is not with you, you are totally alone.

Your beloved is not with you, yet some sense of  them remains. 

I wondered if missing someone more acutely contributed to the perception of absence. Again, my friend disagreed. To him, feeling the absent person's presence made missing them more difficult, a constant reminder that they really were gone. Plus, he pointed out, there are some people who drastically improve the mood in a room just by leaving it. Well, I certainly can't disagree with that.

To me, though, the absolute feeling of absence seems utterly lonely, haunted by longing. As if I might recapture something important if only I could find a trace of that person, somewhere, around some far corner. A sign or signal drifting on the breeze.

This last is how it seemed to me with the girl we'd once known and loved. Years later, when we were grown and living in the same town, I would catch hints of her presence. On the sidewalk, through a shop window, in the echoes of a stairway where she had just been and gone. Not much had changed, really...the ticking clock had been set in motion long ago. The mysteries of our friendship were never to be solved; ultimately, there is little point in loving someone who must always leave you. Instead, I learned to love the traces of her presence for the brief moments they remained, like little whirlwinds, so many vaporous wisps, so many childhood  ghosts.