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. 

The Cold Grue

I'd first read the term cold grue in the story Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was an arcane term to me, but I knew what it meant the moment I read it. I'd known that feeling since I was a child. It usually arrived in November, when it arrived at all, and lay mostly under the surface of winter, waiting to loom up at certain vulnerable moments - something that seemed almost sentient, a grey existential chill that was not merely cold, but deathly.

The appearance of the cold grue was something I'd come to dread. A rising uneasiness, the sense of something minatory, searching along the ground with the wind. I'd felt it a few notable times in my childhood - the visit to Liberty Hill, a playful seance gone awry that my cousins and I held on Thanksgiving, 1980, and the time surrounding the violent death of my aunt not too long afterward. Every holiday season since has been an exercise in keeping it at bay. 

Having spent my much of my life in Texas, it was something I'd associated with my home state, something that lived in the winter landscape there, so I did not expect to find it the first time I visited northwest Ohio in 2022. But on the second-to-last day of my trip, there it was, drifting toward me in waves as I stood on the steps at the art museum, as ominous and melancholy and as pure in form as I'd ever felt it. 

 

I'd never expected my path in life to lead me to the Midwest, and certainly not to such an unadulterated version of the feeling I'd been hiding from. Perhaps it was just my mood that day, I'd thought. Maybe it was just that I was standing in a sculpture garden. As I'd written in one of those links above, the surreal nature of modern art always did leave me a bit uneasy. Or perhaps it was just a temporary, momentary effect of the weather. 

When I did move here in 2023, it was summer, and there were only the aquarium blue sky and cornfields and the sound of daylight crickets in evidence. The cold grue was far from my mind. I would walk through the swamp preserve in the afternoon, or the marshy edgelands next to the mall, studying wildflowers and cottonwood trees. We visited Lake Erie. Then autumn arrived. 

The grue did not come right away. Gradually, though quicker than I would have imagined, the landscape changed its character. There is no real autumn where I'm from, so to watch it take on color and atmosphere was fascinating. Did you know that leaves will simply fall off of trees, without being blown down by wind after drying up from drought? I didn't, so just to watch them was like standing in fairyland. I was very lonely at the time, but it was beautiful even so. I spent so many evenings out there, learning about my newly adopted home, trying to take my mind off the rest of my life, which had quickly commenced unravelling. I learned about being cold, putting on more and more sweaters every time I went out. The skies became greyer and heavier, the chill wind fluttering the remaining cottonwood leaves. 

Near the center of the swamp preserve is a forest of skinny black ash trees. In summer, they were green, humming with insects, but no sooner had November come the skinny forest had transformed into a leafless, slightly hallucinatory labyrinth. The effect being a bit like a hall of mirrors, if only to reflect the inner self. I always felt uneasy when passing by, but as the fall closed in and the temperature fell, I found myself drawn to the place. There was something familiar down among the ashes, something ominous and melancholy and cold. I was so lonely, so heavy-hearted. The reason I'd moved here had fallen apart. I was unwelcome and unwanted, my future in serious doubt. The cold grue beckoned with frigid fingers down this forlorn path. It came over me with such intensity that day that I realized I was in the center of it, as if it had all come down to this singular point in time. I sat down and spoke to it. 

"What are you?' I said.

"The process of dying" it replied.

"Why are you here?"

"It's the earth's dying season"

"Why have I felt you in so many circumstances, then?"

"Because all deaths are the same to the dead." 

My phone rang. I gathered my things and stood up to walk home, wondering if was still existing in my world at all. 

I've moved on since that day, slowly piecing my life back together, trying to find any remnants of my lost inner light. The cold grue remains, in the autumn wind, in the snow, in the garden that has gone to seed. I'm not so troubled by it anymore, even if I am still haunted. I live in a place with all four seasons now, and have a lot still to learn about spring. 

The Opposite of Presence

It's late mid-winter in northwest Ohio, and the wind is achingly cold. The fields are empty even though they are not empty. The silence is a deafening roar. 

Muddy sun sets in grey sky. Cell towers blink on the horizon. At dusk, the belt of Venus appears in the east, but close, so close that it feels that the edge of the earth is near.

The pain in my bones signals my own existence. 

I step into the field to pose for a picture, but already I am disappearing from the landscape. It doesn't know me and won't miss me. My greatest value now is in being gone.

Inside, invisible to see, I recall that it was only a year ago that I watched the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter from the end of my street. Every night the planets drew closer and closer. It seemed to mean something then, it must have meant something; even if I can't remember the way it felt now. I watched and waited and was happy then, until the planets moved apart, the way they always do.

Crescent Moon in the Window, Crescent Moon in the Sky

Sometimes it feels like something is about to happen, but nothing happens. I wonder if I missed it, made the wrong move at the wrong time. Perhaps something did happen, but it's too subtle to register in my dim understanding. Maybe I stepped across the line into another dimension, which is so like the previous one it's impossible to tell. Maybe I'm like the foolish protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, who comes to believe that the extraordinary thing that was going to happen to him would be that nothing happens to him (spoiler alert - he was wrong). 

On nights like these, I go outside and look at the sky, hoping for insight to descend. It is out there, waiting, but I can't reach it - there is something in the way.

Sometimes, twilight clouds hang heavy over the house. The cat hides under my bed at the sound of thunder. Sometimes, the wind from the lake batters my west window like a ghost demanding entrance. Erie/eerie. 

One night in the dead of winter, my housemate and I were lying on my bedroom floor, drawing. Far above in the icy sky, we heard the sound of a plane. "I'd hate to be up there on a night like this" he said, and for a moment our imaginations drifted along with the pilot, mapping the edge of the atmosphere. 

Last Thursday I went to a lecture at the planetarium. I felt dizzy as the projected sky spun around and around. The astronomer pointed out what the astrologers call fixed stars. I remembered watching the sky night after night from my altar rock, and later, when the world was very different, standing by the gate and gazing between Aldebaran and Pleiades.

My own past words come back to me, here in her future. "The word on the astral is things will never be the same. You may not notice, though. They've always already been forever changed."

The Blue Hour

Outside the window, it was the blue hour. 

Sometimes when I walk down the road in the evening, the world goes fuzzy at the edges. Like a carefully controlled hallucination just beginning to break apart. 

How is it that I am here in this place? In those moments, it feels like the real me is somewhere else. 

9 crows roost in the sycamore tree. I don't know what it means, only that it makes me shiver. 

My tarot cards show nothing but swords and empty cups. 

Pluto, 29° 59'

It's the time of endings, and even the birds are restless. Footprints in the snow, walking away. I see (to my surprise, though it really shouldn't be) that I wrote this exactly 2 years ago, and this nearly 3 years ago, and wouldn't you know it's all to do again, because submission to Fate is a constant process, it doesn't matter in the slightest that you are so very tired now.

"Sunbursts can appear in photographs when taking a picture of the sun through the diaphragm of a lens set to a narrow aperture due to diffraction; the effect is often called a sunstar."

Sunburst - Wikipedia

February morning, just after sunrise. Steam rising from the night-time drizzle, sun glint between cedar pickets. Astra, the kitten, is chasing a beetle as black and shiny as she is. Existential dread gathers in the sodden wood, but I tell myself to let it rise and disappear like the steam from the rain. It will be alright, I said.

And it was. 

Winterlude

Being that we're under a winter weather advisory again, I can't help but be carried back to last year's storm, which was no ordinary storm, not even a freak storm, but something dark and ominous, even before the lights went out. Or maybe it just seemed so me, a Texan who's never been so cold in her life.

Is it silly to admit that with the onrush of cold wind last night I felt a tinge of fear? 

Snow has always been a short-lived novelty in this area, but it's becoming more and more common. Perhaps it will become so common that we'll even start buying mittens, so we don't have to try to catch snowflakes with our chapped and frozen fingers, like I did last year.

There are certain days when winter seems like its own world, and this is one of them.

Last Night I Dreamed...

2-24-21
Last night I dreamed you covered me in sackcloth and ashes. You didn't understand why I wasn't grateful for the privilege.

 

2-25-21
Last night I dreamed I was burning words off a page. I wondered how much I would have to destroy before I was left with the truth of myself. 

In The Woods/Black Wings

 The woods are what they are, and there's nothing more to say.

The Turning of The Year

In that strange, blank time between Christmas and New Year's, my mind is often drawn back to the past to study the patterns that might affect the future.

This year, however, something seems different. As if soon the past will not matter so much, as if our timeline is diverging into something new.

I'm not the only one who feels this either. No one is sure exactly what it means, but we hope the turning of the year will be a fortunate one.

Best wishes and a happy New Year to you and yours.

Winter On The Edge Of Town

It's a day late owing to computer problems, but happy solstice to all.

Certainly, it's been an uncharacteristically sunny week for it. The clouds have only been rolling in at twilight, leading to some especially colorful skies.

At 4:23 PM, I was sitting with my little ceremonial fire (as you do) quietly waiting for a sign of what to expect in the coming season. I was just wondering if one would come when a crane flew over. At the same time, another bird dropped a heap of juniper berries on my head. A happy confluence of events.

It may seem strange, predicting good fortune at a time when the country seems to have gone mad and life expectancy is dropping (these things are not unconnected, IMO) but you see, I am determined to survive.

Someone once told me that so many people give up upon reaching an obstacle that by just refusing to quit, you end up much further ahead than you realize. This is my game plan. I am not strong, nor particularly stable, but I am exceptionally stubborn.

In that spirit, today I dragged myself from the haze of migraine and fibromyalgia torment to buy gifts for my children. My reward (aside from making the children happy, of course) was being there to see the winter sunset, this swirling configuration on the edge of town.

These moments pass, yes, but for me, the moment is enough, and for that I am extremely grateful. You forget pain, eventually, but transcendent moments can stay with you forever.

Here's wishing all of us a transcendent winter holiday.

Cold, Dark, 45 degrees

I can't recall a New Years day that wasn't so. There is no fighting the dead of winter.
There's only one song that fits my mood on days like this.

Might as well curl up with a cup of tea and dream of old romance.

The Value Of Writng Things Down

It's been a year now since I posted "the girl who was witched away".  It wasn't easy to write, nor was it very informative or even very good, but it seems to have been enough. Which is what I'd hoped for, after all.
When an icy wind cuts across the fields and the sky is a certain color,  the familiar twinge of anguish bites. Then I remember, I already wrote it. It's over, it's done. The twinge is only the remnant  a 30 year-old habit. It can be dismissed, sent off to the past where it belongs. It no longer lives and breathes.

The story doesn't have to belong to me any more. I no longer have to be haunted by it. It's just another damn thing on the internet now.

Thank heavens.

The Girl Who Was Witched Away

It's December and a dread anniversary is approaching fast. The Christmas season is always hard. A vague sense of horror drifts down from the plains, with leaden skies and a landscape that seems impossibly bleak.It happened when I was ten; I really can't say more, otherwise I will freeze and not write another word.

It interests me, though, in an uncomfortable sort of way, to remember that I had two main books I was reading at the time. One was Tales of Terror, by Ida Chittum, and the other was Angela Carter's translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. One was given to me by my sister. The other was a gift from my brother.Tales of Terror is still in my possession, but the fairy tale book was lost long ago. Perhaps I disposed of it in secret, as I found it unbearably creepy.

Indeed, I hadn't made the link with that translated book of fairy tales before I read Carter's classic The Bloody Chamber years later, but after reading only a few lines I was immediately hit with that sense of childhood dread. They had to have been written by the same person. An image search bore fruit - the illustrations by Martin Ware were burned into my brain.

I asked my mate, who'd never seen the book, to take a look at these illustrations and tell me what he thought.

"Good God" he said. "Is that from an Aleister Crowley manuscript? It's terrifying." 

It was good to know I hadn't been imagining things back then. All that winter, I'd been troubled by the spectre of Bluebeard's wife: the forbidden key bleeding endlessly in her pocket, forever marked by her shame.

The Tales of Terror book was much more comforting for being overtly scary, and the illustrations by Franz Altschuler were meant to be frightening, unlike Ware's stark, hard-to-put-your-finger-on unease. Actually, I had spent months gazing at it hopefully in Waldenbooks, itching to make it mine. It came as a present for Halloween, and by December of that year I had read it many times. 

The front cover is striking enough. The green ghosts rather reminded me of my old relatives, so it just seemed familiar and friendly, as strange as that may sound.

It was the back cover I really found unsettling.The plainness of the landscape. The sense of isolation. The shadows, which might indicate the time is just past noon. 

A lonely farmhouse on the hill. We all knew what happened in places like that. Or if not, we soon would. The landscape was familiar, even though I didn't live in the Ozarks. The Texas hill country looks much the same, especially as you wind upward where the towns get further and further apart. 

As it happened, we did make such a journey that December, in that gray empty space between traumas. We drove though Gruene on the way, which was still mostly a ghost town then - all abandoned buildings, fallow fields and the sound of rusted windmill blades turning. The water tower which looms on the horizon is notable for being the site of a suicide; the town manager, they say, tied a rope around his neck and flung himself off this mortal coil. All this is to say that the place disturbed me in a way that's hard to describe. You wouldn't recognize the town, the way it is now. Or maybe only a little. The old feeling is still there, in between the touristy shops. You just have to know what you're looking for. It shouldn't matter, except it does. I don't know why I recall traveling through that particular village that December. We kept driving and driving, beyond Austin and to God knows where, and I lay down in the back of the station wagon to shut out the sight of the hills and fields that seemed to go on forever.

Perhaps music could have been a distraction, but pop music was in a bad way then. Everything was ballads and minor keys and depressing. Or at least it seemed that way. The arpeggio and sighing chorus of Strawberry Letter chilled me to the bones. I couldn't shake it. Everything was wrong, but there was nothing I could do about it. I just lay there in the cold grayness, wondering if the feelings would ever stop. I couldn't foresee an end. That's one of the things trauma does to you - it takes away your future. 

There is an illustration from Tales of Terror that brings these feelings back for me, from The Woman Who Turned To Paper.

It was the one story in the book that was patently silly, but the illustration haunts me the way December haunts me. Somehow, it feels so much the same. And it's kind of funny, looking at what I've written above, one wouldn't think this would have had much influence on my artistic style. A person like me prefers to avoid old horrors,  not indulge them. Yet going through pictures for this post I found this little throwaway sketch:

I was somewhere between amused and disturbed to find it's nearly a combination of the Ware and Altschuler trees, above. It's amazing, what gets buried in the back of your mind.

There is one more book to mention here, or rather a story, though I hadn't read it yet. My copy of The Dynamite Book of Ghosts and Haunted Houses had not arrived from the Scholastic book club before school let out for the holidays. This was a disappointment, but it turned out my cousin had a copy at home, down south where she lived. She told me about it as we played around the area of the church where the hearses drive in, under the what do you call it, the porte-cochere. The first story in the book was called The Girl Who Was Witched Away, about a young girl who was proud of her red boots, but after the witch got her, all that was left were her bloody footprints in the snow. 

Above us, the sky was full of ice.

I don't have an illustration for this story, only one I made myself, years later.

from a photo. aged 10

The Girl Who Was Witched Away had been my primary reason for ordering the book, but by the time school resumed in January, I was rather a different person. Trails of blood in the snow and girls who went missing had lost all appeal. It's only in recent years I began to understand my childhood horror of tales like Red Riding Hood and Donkey Skin, the knowledge that lay beneath the surface without ever being spoken. No one in our family talked about the dangers of being female, but we knew it just the same.Carter's cautionary moral at the end of Bluebeard makes it clear that the young wife's travails were her own fault, after all.

It had nothing to do with justice or fairness, this knowledge; only the reality of death on the edge of winter.