Stories

The sun woke her up the next morning, the memory of her dream still fresh. She was picnicking in her orchard, eating pomegranate seeds at dusk, while Hades, who sat beside her, watching, brought each seed to life with a light of its own as her lips touched it, just to amuse her. A group of nymphs burst into the room, giggling and shoving each other, and suddenly grew quiet when they found themselv...

Persephone had a secret, one she could never tell her mother. She had never enjoyed the gossip, the pointless aggravation, and the churning of vanities and ambitions that surrounded her life in the living world, the daily rehashed dramas of the nymphs’ latest trysts, the self-centered empty dalliances of the male gods, the petty envies of the spurned minor goddesses, the closed-minded expectations...

Rose Brecht had an enchanted childhood, rendered even more so because she’d been born blessed with a vivid imagination.  Her mind made up worlds and stories, so complex and filled with detail that even the grown-ups had trouble telling them apart from reality some times.  Though they got her in trouble more often than she liked to admit, these worlds inside her mind felt very real to her, even tho...

Local: Denoting a variable or other entity that is only available for use in one part of a construct, relating to a particular region or part, or to each of any number of these. My beloved child, there are so many things I wanted to teach you! We all live in a subset of reality that only reaches as far as our minds and our senses. We occupy a small room inside being, and in that room we’re like th...

Fractal: A complex geometric pattern exhibiting self-similarity in that small details of its structure viewed at any scale repeat elements of the overall pattern.    [This observation is unrelated to the manuscript, but it refers to an event so unusual for the climate of this region I thought it would be worth recording. Today, July 24, at four in the afternoon, it snowed. The large and very cold...

Scale:  The relative size or extent of something. The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale....

Clarity: The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible. [Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the hand...

Constant: A number expressing a relation or property which remains the same in all circumstances, or for the same substance under the same conditions. The universe is a living contradiction, and I stopped trying to reconcile its paradoxes a long time ago, so I will state this knowing it doesn’t yield to logic.  Existence is constantly in motion, endlessly transforming and renewing itself, and yet,...

Rapture: A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion. I will describe a personal experience for you, because it is the best way I can think of to illustrate the concept we’re about to discuss.  I went out into nature just before dawn, during that ghostly hour that puts a chill through one’s bones no matter what the season. It is unfamiliar, that hour, a time when we’re usua...

Revelation: The divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something unexplainable relating to human existence or the world. The expectation to understand everything, while worthy, is unreasonable. Some things can’t be counted in the time frame of existence, some knowledge is so alien to our mind we can’t put it in a structure of understanding. Don’t shun such knowledge and such things. It is...

Shift: A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.   Let’s talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between.  This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality do...

Option: An act of choosing; a thing that is or may be chosen   Like all naturally evolving systems reality doesn’t behave according to a predetermined plan, it runs on repeated trial and error and on eliminating the fruitless branches in the tree of choice.  Even though you can’t see it, reality presents and tests options for itself constantly and automatically, in a manner you may recognize from...

Synapse: A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter. There is an interstitial stretch that fills the space between knowledge and learning, a field where ideas roam free.  Inside that space there is no organizing structure, everything melds together in a chaotic jumble, free to create associations and break them as ea...

Sympathetic: Relating to, producing, or denoting an effect which arises in response to a similar action elsewhere. Frequently actions, states and events emerge simultaneously in various parts of reality, acting exactly the same, like synchronized ripples in its fabric.   Sometimes an event gets reflected by another, completely bound to it like an object to its shadow or to its mirror image.  Never...

Concentration: The relative amount of a given substance contained within a solution or in a particular volume of space; the amount of solute per unit volume of solution; the action or power of focusing one’s attention on mental work. You are familiar with concentrated essence from the flower oils and hydrosols you have sampled in the apothecary shop.  Concentration eliminates the bulk of a medium...

Derivative: An expression representing the rate of change of a function with respect to an independent variable.  Some phenomena are not about themselves. They take you one level, one dimension down into the substance of things, they are measurements of change, gauges of the inner workings of the world, consequences of movement. Every atom in existence is a player in a giant set of games of variab...

Precursor: A substance from which another is formed, especially by metabolic reaction   You can think of precursors as the ancestors of an event. Everything that is has evolved from something else, which also evolved from something else. The universe is a giant chain reaction still in progress. What you are looking at right now is a step in a very complicated sequence of transformations that start...

Current: A fluid motion in a definite direction, especially through a surrounding body of fluid in which there is less movement We all see the world as a collection of solid objects independent of each other and relying on external impulses to set them in motion. I would like you to set aside that view for the duration of this lecture, and imagine existence as a self-activating fluid. Underneath t...

Timing: The choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done.   Don’t mistake timing for scheduling, or planning.  It is difficult to explain what timing is, some things are easier to demonstrate than to describe.  You have already encountered timing, and you take it for granted, because it is woven into the fabric of reality and occurs naturally in all the processes that work well. I...

Folding:  Bending (something flexible and relatively flat) over on itself so that one part of it covers another. Today we will talk about folds. The purpose of folding is to minimize the surface of a thin flat object for better storage or transportation. Just like a tablecloth, all things that get folded will display distinguishable characteristics: grooves, lack of wear, wrinkles.  We fold memori...

Cycles: Series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order. Existence runs in cycles. Some of them, like the seasons, the water cycle or the tides, are obvious, others, like the mechanisms of life, or the rise and fall of empires are not.  Every quiet and settled system displays a natural tendency to suddenly and inexplicably generate unrest after a while.  This happens because existen...

Layer: A sheet, quantity or thickness of material, typically one of several, covering a surface or a body   Life is the sum of an almost infinite number of layers that sort out your thoughts, feelings and activities.  This creates a lot of confusion as life’s level of complexity increases.  You can usually focus on one or two layers at a time, the ones that come to prominence because of current ev...

Megapuzzle: A life-sized construct (game, toy, or problem), designed to test ingenuity or knowledge   To start your instruction, what is life?  Life is a giant puzzle made of pieces you can see and pieces you can’t see, and the more pieces you can fit together, the better your understanding of life and the more you can do.  The mistake most people make is trying to solve the puzzle only with the p...

Beloved, I don’t know when these teachings will reach you, but reach you they will, in their good time, such are the rules of this round world. One thing I know, I’ll be long gone and many centuries will pass before you are born, you, my star, my destiny, my wonder.  I have so many things to teach you and wish I could be there with you, but it doesn’t really matter, we’re all immortal, our kind, w...

There is nothing strange about me, and I can't explain why I can sense people from centuries past talk to me in my sleep and in my waking state. We are born with all sorts of abilities, I suppose, and I wouldn't have known mine was weird if it weren't for other people telling me so. We use our unlikely gifts the best way we know how, the best way they fit in the normal fabric of reality, which the...