Walking with Alissa

Soul-making

The manifest world of life and death: what a strange marriage. Breathe in and it is life, breathe out and it is death. The self-mind that dies each moment is renewed, is given life. My aged mind is more innocent now; there is no thing left to accumulate, nothing to reap and take to silo. I have the holy river of my dreams, the holy fire, too. I have my Angel, and another as well. Is that enough? Some questions just echo.  I set before you life and death, cursing and blessing, etc., etc. So says the antique God. 

I love the beautiful and eternal Angel within who lives and dreams me. Today I will say this mantra many times.  I used to wonder why there was something rather than nothing, but trying to imagine nothingness is hard work, and little comes of it. Then I wondered who it is that I have loved that has neither home, center, nor face.  Who embraces and who embraced? Who is longed for and reposes behind the masks of individuation? Then the Angel appeared to me, spoke to me, sure in language strange, and I knew. Nonsense to some, holy fodder to others, a side note or nothing to the many, but when all is said and done, the unbeguiled will lead the lambs back to the fold, and only the lost will be the ones who are found.  

My Lucid Dream

I am standing on a stone arch bridge above a stream that is a sickly yellow: clouded, polluted, and choked with the detritus of a culture gone rogue. The water suddenly clears; the discarded car parts, the bike frames and paint cans, all of the foetid miscellany, become trout that glide lazily in the still pools beside the riffles. Bright yellow jewel weed covers the banks. I wake within the dream. There is adoration. I wash myself, feeling the chill of the bright waters upon my arms and face, my torso. The baptism is done. I am cleansed. The Angel has made himself known, and I have been offered witness to something miraculous occurring within the deepest recesses of my underworld. No darkness can ever go there. The living waters will always be at hand, always be steadfast and beyond the thrall of circumstance.

My Walking Friend 

Alissa is a strange being. She sees things. Spirits, dead people, auras, all seem to be within the acuity of her senses. “Am I crazy?” she says. “Who are the sane who will judge?” I respond. As for me, I tell her that I will always give her over to the willing suspension of disbelief. Alissa has no artifice, no pretensions, and is quite loveable. 

Walking to Meet Alissa

Her house is across from the town cemetery.  I count my steps from my house and normally arrive around step 712. She waits half hidden behind a bush and steps out to meet me with a wry smile. Your aura is this or that she will tell me. Green, perhaps, today, or green and blue on another, and sometimes a bit of gold tossed in. She will say that the heaviness that she often sees draping itself across my back is or is not there today. There is a brittleness about her, brought on by an injury that seems unwilling to fully recede. Her gait is stiff and tentative, her hair grayish blond and thick, and her eyes a mottled blue-green that she claims are hazel. She peppers silver sparkles across her lids and cheeks that look like faery dust. Presence and absence co-exist within her, sometimes amicably so. 

Walking with Alissa

First she pauses to give my dog Annie a treat. Annie was a wanderer in the Mexican desert and trusts few people, but she likes Alissa. I never ask Alissa how she is doing; the words arrive quickly and dependably. Her themes and moods have a repetitive constancy: Fidgety, morose, yearning for a surcease from pain, worrisome for her sons still making a way in the world; equally she is grateful, giggly, prayful, composed, wise.  

She tells me of past lives that we had together, makes prophecies assuring me of good health, and often speaks of her long and painful life. What is her fondest wish? A new emergent self with dewy and luminous butterfly wings? Would that I had that for her. Perhaps the Gods will place before her some holy sufficiency, a consolation, while holding something superordinate in abeyance for another time, another place, another world the Gods have yet to imagine for us. 

Our walks have a sweet rhythm of chatter and silence. Dark secrets pass between us; soft laughter, and the penetralium of mystery like a soft covering mist between and around us; a binding agent. Between the words we guard and respect each others quietude, our sparks of divinity; we guard the places within that are too deep for thought; the places that await a new language of spirit.  

Alissa’s Gift to Me

I am lying in bed reading. Early evening and there is anxiety and a faint yearning for rescue. It subsides as a wave pulsing outwards; a strange sensation, a gentle qualm of something having departed, and I feel as if I am being gently lifted. The holy river of the dream is flowing. I give all of my pain to it, and the embedded rock of sufferings emulsifies and commingles with the waters. They are flow, too, now; they are motility. What divine alchemy is this I whisper, what wondrous thing? Nothing is banished; no aberration or idiosyncrasy of my nature harmed, berated, betrayed; yet everything changed.  There is a trembling elation. 

The next day I ask Alissa, “What were you doing around eight last night?”  

“Oh,” she says. “I believe I was sending my gift to you and to my youngest son.”  

“Thank you,” I say.

My Other Waking Dreams

Alissa likes to hear my dreams as she avers to have few of her own. First I will tell you that when I was a child, I dreamed of a witch who threw me against the rocks that bordered the wide tidal river at the back of our house. My father was nearby but froze and panicked. I see him while awake in the dream, and then I awake in terror. A visage of my mother I now know, and of my father’s incapacity to act.  Later, meaning the later of the middle aged and then the old, I dream that I am in a bookstore. I approach a young woman shelving books and say, “Please do not let me alarm you, but you are a dream. There is no need for panic; take a deep dream-breath, for I who say this to you am also a dream, and the other world I visit you from a dream as well.” She gives me an incredulous look, and clasps the books tightly to her chest.

Once, I am fishing, standing in a river that I often waded in as a younger man, and which has now become an archetypal presence and part of my soul-making. I become awake there and say to myself that I must phone Alissa and make the first ever call from the dream world to the other. It will be late, but she will understand the strange beauty of it all.  I dial her number, but the insipid notes of what used to be called ‘elevator music’ are the sole response. I re-dial and re-dial and then wake, frustrated.  

Another time, I return, awakened to my holy dream river, the one flowing solely within, and try to follow it upstream to the place where I sense the deities must reside. My heart is so full in that moment, but briers entwine around me, enclose and engulf me. I can go no further. The dream journey ends, and thereafter my reverence becomes reserved solely for the unknown. 

Now, when I feel an encroachment of shadow, I would prefer to implore the Gods by name, but my Gods no longer have names. My Gods and my river share this; one of my Angels, also. 

The Other Angel

But I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.

My other Angel is a blessed poet, Angel Two. Angel One is soft mystery; Angel Two is keen and piercing. He made the human heart numinous within his words. I invoke One, feel conjoined to Two. It was another act of grace to find him.

Grace changes little of what is, but makes each journey an allegory, a figurative story to give to a holy river, a holy fire. Reverence for beauty, and for human life that must traverse its time here, contending with the animated dialogue between the deepest instincts of both our mortal and immortal natures. All that and more the poet-Angel taught me. He is a dark Angel with an effulgent radiance. How can that be? I mention him, evoke him, only once to Alissa. She says, “Well, I can see your Angel wings sometimes.” I offer a half-smile. I know that our times are little given to imagining our Angels to life, nor if we do, having them arrive with wings unfurled. I remember in that moment feeling an aridity in the air, and a barren wandering within. I prayed for water. 

My Leave-taking of You 

They are all gone into the world of light!

All who risk abandonment of self will be remade. All who pull up anchor take voyage on a wild, uncharted, and endless sea. Belief keeps the Angels at bay; religion is the means by which man created God. The path to light is rimmed by darkness. Nothing is as it seems; everything is touched by the hand of a divinity.

I awake often at night, compelled to make count of my griefs, my losses, my sorrows. To each visage I again offer love as both remembrance and presence. I offer myself the vision of the dream river, and I say, “I love the beautiful and eternal Angel who lives and dreams my life.” That is my invocation. My pain is given over to my river, and the intractable frozen waters still within me, I pray to become part of that flow. Blessings often enter in disguise, but for the resolute, revelation can wait.

With all of my dead ones, there arise thoughts of another conversation that I wanted to have with them, something in my word bank remaining on the shelf, some remnant query into their own penetralium of mystery.  That is the way of it. Nothing is ever really over. 

As my friend Rod was dying, I said that kind of thing to him: “You know that after you have taken your leave, there will be some cache of words that will remain hanging between us.”

“Yes,” he said. “There never really is any bottom to things when love is in the mix. There is only an apparency of an ending, and life lives within death as death lives within life.”  

 Alissa says that our conduit to the dead remains open, and that in some strange way it is a two-way street. She has her own losses and mournings. “Blessed are those who weep, for the river of life will run swift and deep within them,” she tells me. 

My rest I wish to come easily tonight, visitations and processions of memories by invitation only, the divine ones left to go about their own business. My dead I leave to their own caprices. I offer open house within, and there they tend to come and go with impeccable manners and calm reserve. On occasion, I feel them gently press upon me wordlessly; less commonly, there is a blazing intensity to their arrival, and an immediacy of their desire to be remembered, to hold and be held in the reciprocity of love. “Go to my river,” I tell them. “Go to my river and make it yours.”

Mick Vogt has a love for poetry and good literature.  He has written stories and poems for most of his life, and now, at 78 years of age, he has put aside more time to continue to hone his craft. His stories often touch upon the loss of the sense of the sacred in our culture and imagine worlds and people where that is longed for, has remained intact, or is in the process of being restored. He likes evocative storytelling and imagines a time where we might all learn and speak a new and poetic language of spirit.

A Song for Mick