The Twisting Tree

Crucified on the hard wooden floor of my mind I lay awake and aware of my body as though for the first time.

The distant ceiling spirals deeply away into a bottomless rooftop tower. 1,981 raindrops drum the ground around and at each point of the circular pagoda. Overhanging tubes of bamboo, like the teeth of a cantankerous old giant, funnel cascading waterfalls into great puddles, releasing spray and splashing noises. The rain slows and eventually ceases.

The heat grows.

Healthy body, healthy mind, healthy living, healthy life.

Love your body, love your mind, love yourself and the world will respond in kind.

The voice floats to me from the cross-legged silhouette, framed by a huge stone portal that is filled with the blue-grey, dark-dawn. Over the voice’s shoulder the last star promises to return, slips away silently.

I roll onto my side. A single sleep tear drops onto the meditation mat. Within it, I see, in time the sunlight filtering through the haze of burning jasmine scented incense and tall green leaves. A red and white cockerel heralds the morning with its calling as a breeze gentles in.

Stone gargoyles watch over the courtyard from either side. Ganesha and his mouse, happy and content with a conker, preside by the bronze covered doors draped in a necklace of marigolds.Nearby a pair of rabbits lay entwined like yin and yang in their hay. Small trays of flowers lay before every entrance, welcoming the spirits of the land into the new day. In a cage a large fat black bird, with a long hooked beak calls out greetings in three languages to no one walking past.

At last I stir, as a galaxy of dust motes whirl in the slowest motion possible, a dance perhaps to a rhythm… The floor vibrating begins booming and banging. The music vibrates through my legs and feet; my back and bum, long gone to sleep are numb from the meditation, now hum with a new energy. I flex my knees, stand and begin to move, to enquire what this vessel on earth can do. Turn about and around, one hundred pairs of people are beating the sound of the drum with their heart beating feet. Legs hop and skip, bodies twist and twirl. Skin dark, skin light, skin golden and rolling, tattoos unfurling like banners and kites, teeth shine white, beaded braids curling, sweet smelling sweat soaked hair spins in the air as I move in, through and past, turn and duck, step sideways and back. Throw hands in the air, punch fist to the floor, spring up and jump into space between five other faces full of rambunctious joy. Ecstatic feeling thrills through me and I close my eyes again. Let my head sag back, arms out to my side, wide…

…Toes sink into the hard wooden floor of the Pagoda hall. Down into soft powered grit. Something washes over feet, sinking ankle deep to meet with cool water fizzing clean. Open eyes see little at all. The drumming of tribal music becomes the rushing pounding greeting as the Ocean charges in, then it breaks, white caps unzip across the shore. A huge full Moon rises up revealing the sea, painting silver stairs glittering like pearls raining.

To the left a lighthouse flick flashers its beam across the reach of the dark sand beach and the purple galaxy shining night sky. As regular as a heartbeat and like the tick tock song of Big Ben that erupts to the right, gothic arches spiralling high, sand spewing nigh in its wake. A white clock face, straight black fingers point to the crime and lie that there is a time other than Now. Water rushes around your ankles and shins, a scratch and scrape, something touches skin. You look down, see a gleaming, shining, moon catching glass bottle with a rim of blood. With the tide a new wave rides something else to see. A plastic bag snags on your toe, a beer can, a crisp packet a magazine about T.V. Sudden sickness burns you inside, fall down and hide your face in the water that is hotter than shame and colder than guilt, pulls you in, draws you lower, weights you down, heavier than a crown.

Begin to heave, start to wretch and all the fag nubs, chewing gums and bits of crap you ever dropped to the floor fall out your maw and onto your hands. In desperation climb up, run and jump, duck dive into a watery world of dark, moonlight negative. Legs become joined, a single fin, you kick, you swim, seeing becomes a thing of thin sound whilst sound becomes your vision.

You seek and call out to the vast watery silence, seeking those that once roamed, mighty and majestic, nomadic and unbound. Nothing…ness. In the empty darkness of the ocean you cease. A single moonlight beam becomes the crease between the black curtain screen and stage. Around you a universe glitters and shines like a snow globe, a hundred million planets and lives swirling in slow slowest motion waiting for you to… Rising up.

Breaking the surface a millimetre at a time, each and every drop that rolls off your skin falls like a dime in moonlight, chimes as it hits the mirrored night like water. Spinning, now you’re a crystal chandelier of tears. One for each sea creature we failed to feel as ourselves.

Up and up, spinning so slowly… on the surface you see your reflection surrounded by stars, beneath the reflection you see another face, whose is it? As I see you, seeing me, what do you see when I look in me?

Earthrise finds you sitting on a cliff beneath a withered and twisted tree. Soft, brilliant morning light shimmers on the surface of pools and lakes between patches of trees and the seashore. The waves, so fast below are nothing but slow at this distance. Kookaburra bird’s call out from treetops, whilst the moon grins a Cheshire cat smile goodbye, says cheerio ta ta for a now and disappears into the baby blue sky.

How do you feel when you reach the land of your perceived destination? Observe the familiar culture in a strange place. Short cut lawns, sun scorched lines meeting titivated borders containing arid plants and vines. Excitement, anticipation, tiredness and a softly nagging sense that all this is unnecessary. Yet in penning these thoughts reminded perhaps that it is the act of moving that is destination enough.

As the safe and parental arms of western culture begin to enfold, in arms of airports and highways, high-liners, skyscrapers and Elton John on the radio a question takes hold… What is the use of a therapy that retails its own illness?

Look to the horizon, ever the wanderers’ greatest misleading friend and guide, seek out the distant quickly receding tide of wild. The vanishing spaces, the trees and forests, the swamps and the deserts where the wild things still roam, clinging on in the face of civilizations concrete advance, as we become Gnomes in someone else’s garden.

Yet, nature nurtures and waits for the day when we put ourselves to reckless sleep, like Snow White biting apple deep, waits patiently for its prodigal children to return to the wild within and without, a place called home.

Above us is a tree, black barked, old and hoary, with knobs and knots and forget-me-not’s growing scruffy about its glory. It is twisted to our eye, frozen in death, but outside of the fast passage of our time it has barely breathed one breath.

It is patient and it is still young in its stretching, reaching, grasping of life. It has learned to weather the strife by bending and shaping itself to the blowing of the wind.

And the invisible powerful force has learned to mold and rend, to become apart of it not divorced. So all can see that it is real, it does feel, it exists though it can’t be seen except where it will stay… Not all is as we see it to be… A twisted tree is twisting… still.