Womb.

It tasted like a mixture of powdered milk and fertilizer, and the abundance of the pulp was not anything near your average serving of fiber. One of the eldest was pouring a clear liquid out of a clay-cast urn, into husks. When he finished, he raised the clay vase to his lips, and drank.

He spat a generous amount into the fire, clearly to prove that it were fermented in some form, then continued to pass the husks around counter-clockwise; the three began to sing.

When I began this journey, it was upon the consideration of my grandfather’s advice.

He’d approached me during thanksgiving dinner the year prior. He told me that he had a strong sense of imbalance when we had first shook hands upon his arrival, and couldn’t rid himself of the foresight he accrued shortly thereafter.

My wife and I had been happily married for the better half of a decade, and our family was flourishing. Our daughter was an honor roll student, and was well enjoyed by her peers. The relationship between my wife and I had been nothing short of conventional, the few arguments we had gotten into, were futile in meaning.

Both of us had a steady income, and there weren’t any foreseeable problems.

Yet, when he approached me, something in the bottom of my being acknowledged the warning with such great intensity, that- to this day, I still can’t quite decipher whether or not what came to pass was self-fulfilling prophecy.

As I drank down the husk, I recalled my grandfather’s final advice he’d given me just the week prior, after he was diagnosed with a bout of pneumonia which proved to be fatal.

“Action shapes destiny”, he told me, “But more so, thought shapes action”. As I pondered the implications of what I’d just heard, he continued on, in order to solidify his message: “And most importantly, to choose to do nothing is still a choice in the eyes of the universe”.

I HAD chosen to do nothing; I’d become content with my stagnant lifestyle, and had spent ten long years, refusing to see that I’d stopped growing, stopped learning.

I do not regret getting married, or the idea that I produced a beautiful daughter whom I’m infinitely proud to call my own, but the fact remains that once it came to pass, I’d lost everything of the free spirit that I was in my younger years.

Once the divorce came, I had lost so much of whom I once was, that I became a shell. Work became a menial task that had no reward, and life outside of work was nonexistent.

I’d become a ghost.

Except that my grandfather had insisted on keeping contact with me throughout the entire period.

I finished the liquid, and placed the husk into the flames as following the motions of the others. The proofed drink hit the lining of my stomach with a ferocity matched only by the blackening edges of the husks within the pit.

As my stomach embered, and the shaman sang, I lay back on a flat rock that protruded the earth, almost begging to support my heavy head.

I watched the universe give up its nature.

I felt as attached to the dead earth at my back, as I did the infinite expanse that lie before me. As the forests and flames of my peripheral vision began to recede, their nature was encompassed in this phenomenon, and all at once, I was enveloped.

The earth was travelling at a rate that seemed to be adequate with the assumptions made by

Astronomers of the early eighteenth century, as the limbs of the cosmic expanse held her like a newborn.

I relished the sensation, as my vision folded inward, and I could see my wife, in her rocking chair, soothing our newborn back to sleep. Soon, there was nothing but attunement.

My vision adjusted, and the night was ablaze with life. I could remember so vividly this image, as though I’d created it with my own being. From behind, my grandfather spoke. “It’s miraculous, is it not”, I reeled my head to see him, as alive and healthy as I remembered from my childhood. “They believe it’s the womb from which all of life begins; and the one which we return to, when we leave here”. I was stricken. I could remember so clearly this night, this conversation.

“But Grandpa, I thought babies came out of their mothers?”

In a form of Déjà vu, the question passed my lips as though the instance were streaked in time, a permanent resonance, meant to aid in the foundation of a destiny.

As we reenacted this memory, there was a look of knowing in my grandfather’s eyes.

A sense of rejuvenated fire, that had once and many times been subdued by worldly endeavors, only to rekindle itself stronger, proving it should never be squelched by such frivolities as life.

“My boy, of course, But you must see. You must learn, that deep within all of us, is an immortal spark. And that spark carries everything that you have, are and ever will be”. “Like your soul”, I asked.
“Precisely, and while in flesh the one that gave birth to you is your mother, this miraculous cosmic ballet is all of ours, always. And with the respect and adoration you show your mother, you shall never forget to show her the same. Through, in and of we live eternally connected by this beauty”.

“I wish I understood. I know I do somehow, but I have a lot of questions.”
“That’s the beauty of the life we’re given, that we don’t understand, that we can ask questions. This is a school my boy, never stop learning”.

The thought of my mother began to become increasingly prevalent, and for the first time in a while I wished I could call her.

With a sense of blinding abundance, the view of the sky that night faded, as a bell began to ring in the background.

“Get your lazy ass out of bed, before I call the truancy officer to do it for you!”

“Damn it Mom, Its only 6:55, I’m not going to be late.”

“Don’t you dare talk back to your mother like that, you ungrateful little shit” came a voice from another whom I’m not sure, considering I made little effort to remember their names. None of them were good enough for her.

A hand grabbed my neck as to tear me from my bed, and suddenly, I awoke.

I sat up, startled, looking around. The three elders were in a form of deep trance that seemed unshaken by my rather forceful awakening. None moved.

I tried to stand, and run, my adrenaline still rising do to the violent moments passed. I collapsed, and vomited. My entire being felt as though it had been violated and a sickening shake began to take over.

I was dying.

I crawled back to the rock and fire, trying to scream. Even to just speak, I couldn’t.

None of the others were opening their eyes. I couldn’t breathe, it was as though I’d been thrown into a pool, and couldn’t surface. Every fear imaginable passed through my mind as I lay there eyes closed and teeth clenched. Was I drowning? How? Had I fallen into a puddle of my own waste? It’d be rather fitting, I suppose.

I exhumed a final breath, and let go.

Like centuries, darkness enveloped me again. This time there was nothing. No sense of one in all, no attunement, no cosmos. Just darkness.

I tried in every way to focus my vision upon horizons which didn’t exist.

Nothing would bare results, I gave up again.

As though being pulled through a vacuum, I began to fall, not knowing which direction I was going, or if there even were a notion, when suddenly, I was stopped dead, staring directly into the naked eyes of myself. Both of us took a step back, and in mirror fashion, analyzed one another, until my doppelgänger produced a blade and sent it shattering through my solar-plexus. I gasped, and fell to one side, and upon my decent, witnessed him also forcing the blade into his stomach, and carving from hip to hip.

He burst into a spectacle of cosmic regeneration, a form of pure energy that enveloped me as it had before, with a sensation tenfold. An infantile sense of confusion and wonderment filled me, as powerful as my grandfather’s words, and as innocent as my questions.

I broke into tears.

My sobbing became a distant sound, until they felt as though they were no longer my own.

Soon they were my mothers. As though she were miles away, I could just make out her figure sitting in her rocking chair, alone.

I did everything I could to get closer to her. She looked just as beautiful as ever, although she was stricken with such sorrow that I could not acknowledge the beauty. She was drinking, and remembering old photo albums.

She had often called me on such occasions, out of desperation. And more often than not, I’d shunned her notions as drunken breakdowns, or overemotional late-life complications.

It became clear to me that these were just about the only times I’d had contact with her during my marriage.

I was stricken with an unending wave of guilt, and self-loathing. All those years, I’d neglected our relationship. I’d become so involved with supporting my own family and keeping our life stable, that I’d stopped giving her the adoration and attention I did when I was young.

I spent my childhood preventing her from ever finding love of her own, and once mine came along, I’d left her with nothing. I couldn’t bear to be in my own skin, this sudden clarity was sickening.

I resolved to get as far away from myself as possible, but something forced me to focus even harder. I caught sight of a photo of my daughter and I, it was just moments after her birth. I was holding her in a rocking chair as her mother slept. I was crying.

They were proud tears.

The still frame of the moment shattered. My disgust was suddenly inundated by the memory of that day, and in a torrent of blindness, I couldn’t quite locate where my heart was.

I was lost in a multitude of tides, all of which converged on my being. I looked up at my mother, her face still wet, but her tears resolved, she caught my gaze.

She was as lost as I.

We shifted our eyes back towards the album, and found that we were staring at my grandfather.

It was in the hospital, the day before he passed. My mother and I stood at his bedside recalling all the times we’d had together, some of which, I wasn’t around for, being she was just a child. And likewise, a few were especially significant between just us two. It didn’t matter, we shared them all as though it could have been anyone.

Before he passed, he had asked her if he could speak with me alone, and she agreed and left the room to us. He knew I’d heeded little of what he’d said at the family holidays, but also knew how I’d handled everything following the divorce. I’d done little in the way of making sure to keep a strong relationship with my daughter, and was deep in a well of complacency.

“Doing nothing is still a choice in the eyes of the universe” was the last advice he’d handed me before his hands went limp, and his skin flushed of color. I broke down.

My eyes opened momentarily, and I caught a glimpse of the slightest sunrise, over the horizon laden with pines.

As I tried to figure my surroundings, I heard my daughter’s voice, “Mom, it’s only seven o’clock, I’m not going to be late, don’t worry!” Instantly, I felt inclined to intervene. As I began to threaten her allowance, I realized that there was no one but the almost-dead embers of the campfire to heed my threat.

The sun broke through.

As I tried to stagger to my feet, a younger of the group assisted me. He pointed towards a stream about thirty feet away. In an effort, and with his assistance, we reached the shore.

I began to undress, as he stopped me, and tried to hand me a drinking husk. I gave a smile that merited all the possible substance I accumulated over the course of the past eighteen hours, and jumped in.