8

As a boy I once ventured into the hills to cut cedar. After a grueling day I lit a fire and heated stones to bury beneath my mat for insulation against the cold. I could not sleep with a feeling of foreboding--and soon something strange and invisible came to blanket upon me. Intense chills crawled up my spine, waves of force began to swell and gain strength like the sea in a storm. I thought I might perish. I cried out to the gods to spare me. The force subsided, but I remained stunned and unable to move until the sun crested the hills at the dawn.

Over the next few months this mystical wave would return and with each event the fear lessened. As time passed I began to tolerate even to hope for these energetic experiences. Something in me was changing.

Finally one summer day, resting at noon, the waves came again with a new intensity. My eyes were shut but I could see through my closed eyelids! Why was this happening? Then came another startling realization. Encircled around me stood a quorum of four pale beings, human in form, radiant and magnificent.

"Now is the time!"

I suddenly floated free of my physical husk. This was my Commencement.

Only a few seasons later I found myself spiraling out and away from Mother Terra herself.

Hermes had given me a warning, "follow a curved trajectory, avoid the angles as they are dangerous and threaten to ensnare the wanderer." Such words were initially troubling to me and beyond my earthbound understanding. But with an unveiled vision I did indeed see such intersecting angles like the woven strands in a loom--a grid that interlaced through fathomless space--a most strange cosmic architecture. Woven by whom?

And by my winging away in a spiral pattern I likely avoided the fate of an unwary moth to be caught in the web of a hungry spider.

CONTINUED