CIRCLE OF LIFE

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The following is one of my favorite passages from the book to read aloud when I do author appearances. Most of the book is about the traditions, with as little about "me" as possible, but here I did allow myself to share some introspection.

From "The Circle of Life"  by James David Audlin
Copyright © 2006

It is winter now as I complete this book. Snow fell through last night, and now this morning the Catskill Mountains are wrapped in a cocoon of white. The world around me is silent and still. The stream near my house is frozen; the voice of the water that has spoken to me since last spring is hushed. The eagles who I heard singing last summer are gone. The flowers who gave me a vision of Morning Breeze have long since faded and dropped their glory; now their heads are bowed toward the snow, their knees broken in prayer. I have not been up the steep forested hill to the ceremonial ground, yet I can visualize the Sacred Stone People’s Lodge under a white mantle, with no footprints near it except for those of a few wild creatures and perhaps a spirit or two. But I know spring will soon be here. Life will rise again from beneath the blanket of snow, renewing the world around me. The stream will burst its mantle and talk to me again. The eagles will return to the high trees, circling in the Heavens overhead. The primroses will lift their faces up to the dawn again. The lodge, like the bear, will come forth from hibernation. And up on the ceremonial hill I will unexpectedly be given a wonderful sacred gift. The Circle of Life will turn and turn again. Always winter and summer, death and life, follow each other in their dance of beauty and harmony and peace.

The number of years in my life has nearly doubled during the time that it has taken me to write this book. I am moving into my Grandfather years, whether I feel ready for that awesome responsibility or not. Being an elder, a Grandfather or Grandmother, is not a matter of having children who are parents, or having a certain number of years, or having gray hair and wrinkles. It is a matter of modestly but truly learning how to live respectfully. It is my humble but sacred responsibility, as I grow older, to be worthy of the responsibilities that come with the years.

Unlike most people, I actually look forward to growing old. I find it fascinating sometimes to look at my lean hands and all the old scars on them, and remember the soft pudgy little fingers that once were there, or look at the lines in my face, the grey in my hair, or into the deep roots of the wisdom I carry, into the peace and love within my heart. No, I don’t look forward to even more aches and pains than I have now, to more frequent spottiness in my memory, to greater difficulty seeing and hearing, but I know that when we give goodness or accept difficulty without complaint, we receive abundantly. So I look forward to the greater understanding, the breadth of perspective, the scope of time, the lightness of psychological burdens that will come in my last years. This lodge my spirit prays in is slowly getting rent and tattered, and it’s full of pain, sweat, and tears. After not that many more winters it will be time to let this lodge, this robe, go. But spring will return. The eagles will return, and the morning flowers – and me.

There is no death, only a change of worlds. No life once given can ever be lost or destroyed.

I am not afraid of dying, only of dying before I complete the tasks Creator has given me to do, and before I’ve learned the lessons Creator expects me to learn. I hope and pray that Creator gives me a long life – not because I am afraid of death and not because I am worthy of such a blessing; rather, I ask humbly because I have learned and accomplished so little of what I am meant to. And, when I die, I hope and pray that it will be outdoors, in or near woods and mountains and flowing water, facing the setting Sun, with the ones I love near me at least in spirit – especially my beloved, my siblings, my children, and my grandchildren – the concentric circles around me of the eldest to the youngest. And, after I die, I hope and pray that my body is placed in the ground in a way that allows it to nourish other lives, and that good traditional songs are sung. I hope and pray that those I love will look to the vault of Heaven in the night and know that one of those twinkling stars is me, on my way to worlds I cannot even imagine now, surrounded by all my ancestors, happy and at peace. I hope and pray that, as Skaniadario (Handsome Lake) taught, those I love will not weep long but look with bright shining faces to the dawn Sun and remember me with gladness and know I love them still and remain with them, guiding and protecting them. “Weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” I hope and pray that they look in the faces of my children’s children’s children and see not just resemblance to me, but me, and teach those children just as I have taught them. I hope and pray that all Creation will know such love as I have been loved with, and to be as grateful as I am. There is no death, only a change of worlds. Lo, I am with you always.

  Rats Live on no Evil Star

This is from an unpublished novel. This work is protected by common law copyright, and therefore cannot be copied or distributed in any form for any reason without direct and specific permission from the copyright holder (me).

From "Rats Live on no Evil Star"

This material is protected by common law copyright – not for circulation, distribution, or publication, except with the express written consent of the author. All rights in this work are the property of James David Audlin.

Nobody seems to know what he is talking about when he asks if a woman who used to live here has recently returned to town. He says the name around the village, Raphaela Tsosi, and just gets stares. It may be that they don’t want to confide in this stranger who calls himself Fremder who’s all of a sudden residing among them, villagers who haven’t seen anyone actually come and want to live in Forestville for decades. Or it may be that they recognize his face and know he’s really the boy Huw Mendelez who ran away many years ago with the very girl whose name he’s going around town asking about, and they became famous skaters, and it’s pretty unlikely that one famous skater would come back here asking for the other unless something strange were going on, and these villagers don’t want to say anything until they know what he has to say.

It took a bit of courage to visit the house she had grown up in, since he was afraid that her parents would blame him for taking her away from them when they were adolescents. But he needn’t have worried; Angelina is old now, old before her time, a blind whitehaired stumblebum woman, whose stumblebum husband Francis died the previous winter. The only reason she survives is because the village folks look out for her. She hardly moved when he came in and spoke to her; she seemed sunk in her own melancholy and memories. “My daughter is dead” is all she would say, in a voice more tired out than regretful, though at least she didn’t object when he asked to see her bedroom. She didn’t get up from the table and her cold caff to show him to the room, so he climbed the stairs alone.
As a boy, of course, he would never have been allowed into it, but still when he opened the door it seemed familiar, or perhaps he was just aware of the comfortable sense of Raphaela that pervaded it. What is more, the little white-painted room, with its sloping ceiling just under the roof and a narrow dormer, appeared to be still in use. Her brush was on the small funguswood dresser, with some long hairs caught in it as if she had just used it not long ago. Above the dresser was a mirror in which she must have observed herself while brushing her hair; like the windows in this old house it is tinged with green; the glass was made from the sand of Disaster and its mirror-image blue and yellow silicates. He noticed in one corner the bag that he had himself often carried for her as they were racing through spaceports to board the flight that would take them to the next show. He pulled open the closet door and saw a couple of familiar dresses neatly hung in the little closet, and obviously recently, since they were closer to the front than the girl-child pinafores; they were the gowns that he remembered very well from their years on the road, fine soft fabrics cut low to show the warm swell of her breasts and with very short hemlines to display her naked legs as she skated. He even found her most prized possession, an original Selemni made specifically for her by the designer himself. These dresses would not be here in her childhood home unless she had brought them back with her from the stars.
Then something happened, or seemed to happen, that he is looking back on now, standing in the sunlight down near the pond, and having trouble accepting. He was standing before the little dresser and looking into the mirror at his own reflection, the reflection of a tired, aging, lonely man, and then he saw her, Raphaela, standing behind the image of himself. She was wearing robes in a sunset-orange color that brushed the top of her feet. Her long hair was white, but her face, the face that he knew better than any face in the universe, having almost-kissed that face nearly every night for so many years, was as beautiful as ever. Her eyes seemed to be looking not at him but through him.
“Huw,” the reflection said. “Protect my Tree.”

He turned, but of course there was no one there.

So he left the house. Despite the rapidly increasing symptoms of panic – palpitations, shaking, and lightheadedness – he managed to express his thanks to Ms. Tsosi, though she didn’t even look up. Unable to think, not knowing where to go, he came down here near the water. It is late summer, or early fall; now that he is a man of the worlds, he is conscious of how slowly the seasons come and go on Disaster in its stately pavane around its star. Most planets go through two or even three years in the time it takes for this one to orbit once; it’s because Disaster is so much farther out from its star, which it would have to be to support terrene life, since this star is much brighter and hotter than the Sun, the star of Old Earth.

The maples are in full leaf, and the breeze rustles through them almost like whispering voices. He lets his eyes rest on the waters of the pond and tries to let his thoughts float free from the past.

But the past is so much with him. This is the spot where, how many years ago he cannot say (he never can remember the formula for converting the long years on Disaster into standard years), but this is the spot where a long time ago it had been winter and she had let snowflakes fall onto her eyes and she said she saw another world.

He walks to the chapel, possibly trying to get away from the memories, or possibly seeking them out, but the ghost follows him here too. He walks around the small white-clapboard structure, remembering when they were little and Raphaela would read to him the ancient morbid poems on the gravestones in the field behind it. He recalls the day when they were in the sanctuary kissing each other and they almost got caught by old Pastor Paulus, and smiles. The chapel looks just the same as it did when he was a kid, unless perhaps it has shrunken with the years.

He walks out to the railroad depot. This is where they began, by accident (or perhaps by a mix of plan and spontaneity on Raphaela’s part; with her he could never be sure), their voyage to fame among the stars. The station with the platform along one wall of it like a mother’s dusty skirt seems smaller to his adult eyes; his eyes have been trained by great interstellar spaceports to expect transportation hubs to be architectural masterpieces of size and grandeur, and this small barn of a structure has nothing grand about it, though it is pretty in its own simple way with its fading fraying funguswood façade.

And then he walks out to the edge of the Suicide Flats, where they had practiced their skating. As his eyes adjust to the empty horizontality of this lifeless plain he notices something new, something he hasn’t seen before, out in the very midst of it, a dark-bright shape shimmering above the dead flatness, with its reflection shimmering too on the surface of the silica.

He begins to walk closer, curious. After a couple minutes he can see that it has a silvery trunk with the supple curves of a beautiful woman’s naked legs. It has branches reaching up to the sky like her arms. It is crowned with a glorious nimbus of rich green leaves, and even from this distance he can hear them whispering and chiming and tinkling in the ever-shifting winds of the flats.

It is a Tree. It is a fungus. Where no one would ever have expected one, in the very middle of this vast dead space – a space that has always been dead – in fact, even when humanity first arrived here and the entire world was one endless forest, even then this place was devoid of Trees.

Yes, children, you are right. He was looking at this very Tree around which we are gathered today. Today, we know its history intimately well. But on that day long ago, Huw Mendelez, also known as Arnold Fremder, cannot begin to fathom the mystery. Even when he was growing up here, the fungus forests had been all but completely hacked away. At the time I tell you about, all of the Trees of Disaster were long since chopped down and sawn up. Wakefield, the planet administrator, had shown him the pictures.

After several minutes of walking he has come to it.

Protect my Tree. That’s what her image told him, if he wasn’t hallucinating.

He is already willing to guess that this is the only living fungus Tree on the entire planet – and at that moment, the moment the thought occurs to him, he is right. The Tree is tall, but in the midst of an immense sheet of unremitting horizontality, it appears even taller. Today, children, look around, and you can see that there are many Trees growing. Some are as tall as ours here, or even taller, though none is as old or as large or as beautiful or as rich in story and wisdom or as full of love as this beautiful Tree here before us. But bear in mind that, on the day I’m telling you about, all these other Trees had not yet rooted; this was the only Tree.

It reminds him of the stand of silver poplars back on New Hokkaido on the heights behind Ikuko-san’s house, shimmering with magic when the wind played with their leaves. The faint chiming of the leaves as they strike each other in the breeze brings back the memory of the little metal chimes hung from the kamidana, her little family shrine to ancestors, which she lovingly kept in a natural niche of stone near her front door. The Tree also brings back to mind a solitary fir back on Old Earth, one of the last of its kind, standing alone in a Canadian wasteland that had been tundra before pollution and war wrecked the ecosystems worldwide.

Protect my Tree, she said.

He notices signs of disturbance. The glassy smooth surface of the flats has been broken, and not by the Tree growing through the hard silica, but by human action. The signs are very subtle, but he can tell that the shining substance has been carefully cut in the shape of a rectangle, and the shape is just about right to serve as a human grave. He gets down onto his hands and knees, momentarily smiling because anyone would think he’s a Kneewalker, and looks carefully at the edges of the rectangle, and makes out the burn marks that tell him it was done with a laser. There is no marker to say who, if anyone, is buried here, no morbid poems, nothing at all.

Yet he knows without the slightest doubt that this is a grave, and he is absolutely sure of the identity of the body buried beneath the feet of this Tree, and he feels not grief but a sense of quiet gladness, like coming home again, to know where she is. Apparently Petrashko was telling the truth. And he realizes that he did, without doubt, see her spirit in the mirror, and that she is somehow still with him, that she has forgiven him, that she still loves him.

He doesn’t know who it is who has buried her here, but it doesn’t matter – it must be someone who laid her corpse beneath the Tree at her bidding, someone who loved her too, someone who means no harm to this Tree that is nourished by her body, this Tree that in some way is her life extended, continued, metamorphosed into another form. And here, children; look: the fitful wind on this rainy day has set another leaf to chiming against this one, drawing our attention to Shakespeare’s lines:

... Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.

Protect my Tree, she said.

That he will do. That I will do. I will do it every day of my life, until I, too, die, and, if I get my wish, I am buried beneath this Tree with her, with her and him, the one whom she came to love, the one who must have buried her here.

NOTE FROM AUTHOR:

Another selection to be posted soon!

 James David Audlin