The Diamond Island

I finished the Shiva message bracelet and rang that sucker in the sacred woods. The crown-grove with all the humongous trees that go all the way up.

It’s taken a long time for me to settle in to the fact that I’m whole, that I’m myself again. I really never expected this. I was resigned to doing the best I had with what I had left, because somehow I had found a trail within myself.

I think about my past self, and if he could only know what I’m feeling now. What I’m seeing. All I can do is send him encouragement and dreams to strengthen his being. I bless him with all my heart and soul, his desperate muddled seeking to understand and find himself whole.

What’s the blood of the dragon taste like? It’s like a heavy metal concert where you’re both audience and performer at the same time. You taste your own shadow and realize you’re only deceiving yourself if you think that by chasing an image of yourself that you can escape what you are. This is, in a strange way, a relief.

I’d thought the Shiva message bracelet was something you rang when you were done and then you got a message, but now it occurs to me that it’s more about sending a message—that I’m done with the quest. I’m letting good ol’ Shiva know that I’ve completed the assignment.

Now I’m sitting here, letting the change sink in.

Got a message on the backdoor answering machine at the root of my brainstem the other night.

There are times when I’m not in the mood to sleep at night. I’m of a willful disposition needing to be up late enjoying the night state of consciousness.

Coyotes are out in the treehouse ravine a-howling. They’re letting me know they found another snack to tide them over this strange and meager winter.

After a long series of sleepless nights I decide to answer the damn message. While the Dark Goddess can reach me anywhere and anytime, I remember I’m back in the stomping grounds of old. That place where my state of mind first opened up to her interests and my deepest longing to see what her interests were about.

All I have to do is touch the curve of her hip and ideas spring into being. She shows me how to form them into expression. My passion thrills and seizes me with an ecstasy I can scarce describe.

I dial her up to see what’s going on. Maybe there’s something she needs me to know about. It’s like having a super-powered hero hotline; except I never feel any heroic confidence and faking it feels like ripping off the audience, or the world. Maybe that’s how super-powered heroes really feel?

We talk about how weird it is to be back in a place where I would roam the night at all hours while most people were asleep, waiting to rise from their coffins to work off their debts. Did I really walk around in a sober daze, imagining fantastical visions and destroying hostile creatures of the night like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

I hadn’t even heard of Buffy yet, much less seen her show. That would be many years into the future. Hek, the movie wasn’t even out yet.

Is that part of the reason the system curfews youngsters? To keep them from unconsciously patrolling their homes against the invaders from the unconscious? People are scared of teenagers who might harm them because they don’t have the same understanding of the rules, but maybe if these teens got to live the darkness of the night they would build up strength and discover their amazing powers to serve our deep need for help.

The Dark Goddess laughs.

I ask her what’s up. She says this is the greatest battle for my soul I have ever known. To protect the goddess from one’s own worst malfunctions takes enormous self-knowledge and strength. I am doing this for Shiva to help him reach a goal of being able to recognize my efforts.

She reminds me that this is where I lost my backpack. I remember when she gave it back to me. I didn’t realize this is where I left it, but this place would be the sort of environment where I would have left a thing or two of value to me. When we bail, we don’t always have time to grab everything. Things get dropped in the rout.

She whispers in my ear to follow my inner wisdom. Stay true to yourself, she says.

Her teachings come back to me from those heady days of wild passion and fearless wandering: When she showed me secrets of the body she was teaching me to pay attention. When she had me worship her beauty on my knees she was helping me know humility. When we shared thoughts and feelings I let her spirit into my flesh. I am one with her.

You can still fly, she says. I know what she means and she’s telling the truth.

That’s what she wanted to tell me, she says. Then she hangs up. That’s just how she is.

There’s been a mission in my quest station notebook for a while. That’s just how it is. Some adventures sit in the hopper for a long time. Maybe they come to fruition, maybe they don’t. They can hold you back and they can provide structure by reminding you of which inner landscape parts you aren’t choosing to regard.

Mainly I haven’t dealt with it because it’s such a high level I’m unsure whether I could handle the responsibility. I have a difficult enough time with reliably undertaking the basic levels of compassion and maturity as it is. Higher degrees of consciousness are mostly ideals I aspire to in a very caveman gazing at the numen sort of way.

Well, since I’ve broached the initial exploration of communications leader Jessica it figures that the Shiva Message mission started flashing with bright green lights. Green means time to go! Except when it means cool it down.

Actually, cooling down Shiva is part of the worship maneuvers one performs when showing devotion to this divinity. Yeah, Shiva, the cosmic dancer who destroys and blesses. The outsider who knows all the inside pathways of existence. This dude is serious business and doesn’t mess around.

Time to bring out a bunch of old devotional manuscripts from 1994 and examine them again. Get to figuring out where this quest station entry even is anymore. The map goes way back to when I was studying the goddess Kali, the Black Mother, as part of my hanging out with the Dark Goddess. She had jackloads of stuff to show me back in those days.

I had a small art project I was hoping to do–a Shiva message bracelet with bells, semi-precious stones, and various miscellaneous charms. It had to do with a dream I had during my studies, suggesting in a vague way that this is how I would communicate with this divinity. Ring the bracelet when it was done, and boom a message would arrive.

Except that I never finished the project. I gathered all the materials, but stored them away and gradually became distracted. How many video games are like that? You gather up all the plot coupons, only to burn out just before the end of the story and never return.

Now that I read back on my descriptions of those devotions, meditations, and imaginational explorations I realize I was in a very rare state of ecstasy and suffering. Did I really experience these waking dreams, disassociated states, and multi-party conversations with myself?

It is said that even to speak Shiva’s name is to deliver you from ignorance and guarantee salvation. I have to ask ignorance of and salvation from what? My own pitiful state of existence? A lot of Hindu worship seems this way to me—if you can understand then this is great, but if you can’t it’s enough to have the intention. This is tremendous blessing.

All this time I’ve been waiting for the message, but I’d already received it. This seems to be a common theme for me: Getting the message but not seeing it until the time is right. Looks like Shiva did send me a message. I have it written down in one of my meditations:

You will be permitted to find and know what you are seeking—but you must know that if you cannot handle the responsibility of what you seek, you will be destroyed. Good luck Paul.

Oh, crap.

For a long time I’ve had a roster of crewmembers who populate the internal main bridge of my psyche. You might say that the Star Trek organizational scheme provides a ready archetype for my thoughts and feelings to constellate around.

Handling the communications console is a personality named Jessica. I’m pretty sure she was meant to be the female companion who accompanies Logan in the 1976 film Logan’s Run. I had a childhood crush on the actress Jenny Aguetter who played Jessica in the movie.

At that age I thought Jessica the character was the real person and Jenny was just her name in our reality. So creating a character based on her in my own mind to accompany me on my journey of imagination, or just general life influenced by a personal inner world, seemed like a good idea.

The crew of the Starship Snipe still carries the internal psychic organizations I’ve given them to this day. However, I’ve never explored them in detail—they all embody personal connections with characters from books, movies and TV that I enjoyed growing up with.

With the UFO becoming the central organizing principle in my psychic voyage, it may be time to reexamine my crew and the starship model. Ultimately, Star Trek and the characters I’ve borrowed are someone else’s experience that has become collectivized.

Such communal models are easy to access and use. They have value to our survival. However, they can only be launch pads for our personal explorations. The human dimension of wholeness requires that we make a personal journey to inner space to align ourselves with the actual organic connectivity of people.

I need to strike out on my own and identify the processes and elements behind my image. What if I’m oppressing or harming some aspect of myself by relating to it through a simplified model of consciousness?

So here we go. Using my power of imagination to inquire about Jessica as an internal personality and psychological adaptation.

The name Jessica comes up in my dictionary as having a Hebrew origin—Yiskah and Iscah which means “shut up” or “confined”. There’s a Greek and a Latin version, Ieskha and Jesca respectively. Unfortunately there’s no cultural context to go on, I’ll have to beam in the Internet connection.

Which, as it so happens, is Jessica’s job on the starship. She’s helping me along with this, naturally. Maybe this is a search for identity episode, a character building moment where I finally gain enough understanding to grasp a concept of her personality.

I think of the Teen Titans comic issue #38—”Who Is Donna Troy?”—where a detective investigation leads to the truth of Wonder Girl’s parents.

A strange smell of sanctity runs past my nose. That Holy Ghost effect that I know Lucerna would find compelling evidence I am on the correct trail.

The first recorded use of Jessica comes from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and refers to the daughter of Shylock, who is of Hebrew origin in the story. I also dig up numerous baby name sites that give variations of the meaning as having to do with either God seeing, watching and beholding, or referring to gifts and wealth.

I let this trail of synchro-mysticism go off into the woods for now. Next up is the position itself.

The communications officer in Star Trek has often been criticized as being little more than a switchboard operator, with Lieutenant Uhura’s role minimized many times to the point of uselessness. I agree with this assessment, mainly because the position is actually critical to the operation of the ship. It requires someone who operates at a high degree of ability to perform properly.

Think about it. The communications officer has to direct the flow of information all over the ship. Repair crews, medical teams, and security details all rely on this officer’s leadership to act efficiently. If a crewmember notices something amiss the communications officer will likely be the first to hear of it and be able to warn the captain or relevant department head.

Depending on how you interpret the technology and schematics of a starship, the communications officer also needs a high degree of technical knowledge to operate the subspace radio and long range sensors that go along with that. I could see skills in computer programming and electronics as being necessary.

Maintaining a selection of diplomatic strategies and tactics is a huge order. Languages, linguistics and translation all need a lot of theoretical as well as practical knowledge. The person in the position has to be adaptive, flexible, and open-minded as well as intelligent and highly trained.

There’s an element of espionage implied in this function too—ciphers, jamming enemy transmissions and releasing ship wide alerts. I can see why the Next Generation Star Trek world merged communications with security.

Needless to say, you see some hints of these roles with Uhura in the TV show, but it almost entirely disappears by the time of the movies. Space battles don’t require anything other than making sure the shields and weapons work. If they don’t speak English then shoot to kill. It’s profoundly anti-specialist, anti-technology, and anti-science.

Need to transmit or receive data or messages? Maintain channels of information in-ship? Jessica has done all this and more. I only vaguely comprehended it—mainly I fell into the trap of casting the girl on my ship into the role of social interaction mediator. See how powerfully influential role models can be?

The point of communication is to share, divide out, impart, inform, join, unite, and participate in. In other words, “to make common.” Such an important task! And yet, Star Trek has subsumed this role into something else after decades of making it a minor position.

No! Boo!

Well I’m bringing chat back, yo. Or at least recognizing what has always been there all along: Communications leader Jessica doing an incredibly difficult, complex, important job without recognition or respect from me. The collective reckoning needs to evolve; it’s way behind the times and has been fifty years ago.

At this point I have to start questioning my own assumptions. Is Jessica even her name? Is it a nickname based on a projection? Is Jessica really female, as a kid would grok it, or a human being from earth? I might be overreacting; it might just be the dialogue has been so limited as to include only basic details.

I’m usually not so good with practical questions. The time has come to face the difficulty and start asking, to open up a hailing frequency with my own communications officer.

Jessica, I’m listening!

The other day UFO Girl delivered a pizza to my brainpan, compliments of the Naughty Louse. Wait, who? Might that be another name for my Bad Ronald?

I know he’s been out there in the world, breathing the fresh air and squinting at the sunlight. By owning up to my own problems and breaking free, I got him outside to a new dimension of life.

I guess he has UFO Girl’s pizza delivery number, and maybe even a coupon. Come to think of it, a redeemable coupon or token for UFO Girl delivery must be a highly unusual contrivance.

In any case, this information extravaganza inside my brainstem calls up all the necessary ingredients for moving along to the next step in the building of the karavos, this UFO I am participating in.

In order to fly a UFO it may be necessary to adopt a control panel or command module of some kind. Consciousness works by directing disparate and in-conflict parts unified by a tendency towards out-of-chaos-into-dance using the twin beasts of the chariot to carry us home.

Here, out of the past, from a child’s hand in a different sector of space and time, an adult calls forth the preserved image of a kind of desired control panel interface. Touch, and the universe responds with your intent. This, the Dark Goddess has shown me.

Drawing upon the active imagination of movement from one form to another, one might advance the shy and hesitant emergence of a beautiful treasure from the unconscious, adapt it with the ability to breathe air and switch modes of existence.

I use the small and slightly more mature tools of thought at my disposal to render another version of the control panel. Connected to the previous version, yet also individual. An eye opens, an eye blinks, and a moment passes. In the gutter of that moment is revealed another image.

For you see, in order for this to be a navigation tool to fly with, from which other panels might spring from, you need to know what reality you are in. One must take a reading, so to speak, of where one is in psychic existence in order to know your non-existence parameters.

Remember, nothing is where it calls from!

I mean…err…comes from. You will explore more fully the abyss seeking where the unknown is likely to be. And again, a map arises out of the wondrous imagination of a child’s natural witnessing of what is all around and within. This is the baseline from which springs the core of a UFO’s wanderings at play.

This is a dangerous proposition to consider. To generate a star chart of this comprehensive a manner requires a spirit of adventure, but it also requires a readiness to be changed by what you encounter. As Doctor Who would say, “Travel broadens the mind”, yet behind that one must also realize that to embark on a venture seeking new ideas is to be exposed to risk if those ideas are to be fresh.

The spoor and tracks of the supernal super-predator mean business, yo.

Since this is a newly emergent ancient UFO, the display panel from the adult perspective is blank for now. Anything and everything might emerge upon this nothingness. The fool’s zero begins our journey with a bronx cheer.

All that remains now is to materialize a starting point with which to begin our journey of the UFO. In this case, the input of another person is useful in suggesting that which we might ourselves be blind to, or lack the courage to tackle ourselves. A true companion is a great assistance in regarding those things we might lack the resources to reckon with fully.

Home is a good place to decide upon as a reference point. Departure, return is a cycle that matches the lifeforce of the universe. Breathe in, breathe out. Eye open, blink. Time and space appears in the vast indescribable eternity that runs with us wherever we are or aren’t.

A form, an interface, an occupant, a journey. All pieces are now complete.

The pizza has been delivered.

I want to thank Birdman for taking over hosting duties for a while. As it turns out, I’ve been consciously occupied with outside events of personal importance that have allowed for very little in the way of inward journeys. So, thank you Birdman, you have been a true friend in keeping this haven for me while I was away.

What happened?

K and I moved to the Pacific Northwest. This is something we have been wanting to do for a long time.

I quit my job, we donated or recycled a bunch of our belongings, and declined to renew our lease. We packed up Gamera with some luggage and a pair of cat carriers (one medium and one small), and then anything that didn’t fit in Gamera went inside a huge POD.

Loading the POD and emptying out ten years of stuff from a three story townhouse was a supreme ordeal. You need mad Tetris skills and nerves of steel from having studied several episodes of the TV show “Hoarders.” It took 38 hours, 27 of which was straight-on-till-morning, without sleep.

After making sure the PODzilla transport arrived (they had tried to call us to confirm, but our phone was already disconnected), we loaded the three cats Michael, Frankie, and Blink into their carriers. K and I made sure they had plenty of water, litter, food, and comfy blankees to sleep or throw up on.

With star charts in the crevices of the seats and jammed to the gills with food, bedding, clothes and computers we left Reston Virginia behind and embarked on our galactic voyage across the country. We still hadn’t had any sleep, but we were determined to reach our first stop in Toledo, Ohio.

Sometimes a heroic effort is necessary to break free of the octopus of the past.

We got stuck in traffic. The DC Foundry has a strong gravity well that can be formidable—in this case we spent an hour going 2 miles before we managed to escape. The temperature was brutally hot, but the AC held and the cats managed not to freak out until we were actually out of the jam.

Blink needed some calming medicine and the others a little petting. This was an adventure they had never encountered before! Then we were off again.

I don’t know where I got the strength and the will to go on, but I drove through the night until we reached our goal.  Despite the hotel directions being incomprehensible we found the place.

The hotel staff allowed us to check in late and stay in past check out (bless their hearts) so we could get a few hours extra sleep. 44 hours is a long time to go without sleep, let alone move like a beast and then drive ten hours.

The cats rolled with it.

Then, every day the same: Get up, pack the stuff and then load the cats, check out, get breakfast, gas up, drive to the next stop. Des Moines (Iowa), Cheyenne (Wyoming), Ogden (Utah), Boise (Idaho), and then Portland (Oregon). Six days of travel and full of danger and hilarity.

I didn’t know if I could drive for such long periods of time. That was always something my father did, and did with great skill and stamina. So in a way I have made my contribution to the Drive Yourself Crazy Club of which Ferguses are said to be members.

There is something of a meditation in having to be alert and discerning for endless hours of monotony. The body adapts to the external demands that the mind serves to navigate.

If there is one insight I come away from, having been 2800 miles of distance through the United States, it is that the country is a huge resource extraction wealth grab for the rich.

Corn fields in Nebraska as far as the eye can see, making corn syrup. Beef fields in Wyoming making ground beef for the franchise wars. Refineries processing coal for energy. All connected by roads and truckstops, with a slight nod to tourism (if you can afford it). All fenced in and owned or dominated by big business, with no signs of civilization or individuality anywhere.

When the cheap oil runs out and the diesel begins to strangle the truck lines all of this will die, blow away, leaving ghost towns and blighted landscapes full of nitrates.

It’s already happening—I could hardly believe how much construction was going on with the roads. A third of the roads I drove were in a state of repair, traffic redirected to a single lane for 25 miles at a time, again and again. And the roads that were new were composites—where is the asphalt? The quality of the roads is going to cheap materials as it breaks down faster, talk about surreal.

We passed a lot of wind farms, and that’s great, but you aren’t going to be running trucks or building roads or making fertilizer out of wind power. To see this country propped up like a house of cards with all wealth going to rich institutions with no thought of what comes after is to witness the triumph of mindless evil over decent human life.

As K and I drove through this desolation of self-destruction we encountered the elements. A thundering torrential rainstorm in Iowa that would become a roaring hurricane a few days later sweeping the east coast in a fury, destroying phone and power for millions.

The smoke clouds from the south as we drove through Wyoming were the beginnings of the massive brush fires that would destroy countless homes in Colorado, of a size to stagger the imagination in its scope. We drove through areas where the fire had burned everything to one side of the highway and then gone out when it met the road.

Some fires still blazed in their enclosed firetraps. I thought we were passing through a strip mine, when I realized the black earth was cinders covering the landscape of boulders that remained after everything else had perished. This is the future—nature crushing us back into the savage garden from whence we sprang.

Just remember, global warming is only a liberal hoax!

The vision is a horrific one, and beyond my small power to affect—yet I still ask what it is for and I will to will Thy will in my transformation. I shall remember this and express my own personal potion when the time is right, for do I not also contain a small spark of fire inside me, a thunder being holding a candle alight?

Then we reached our destination. It was as if we had stepped through the protective mists of Lothlorien, where some small craft, healing, and knowledge is preserved.

We stayed at a Buddhist retreat run by one of my oldest and dearest of friends, allowing the cats to stretch their legs and us to remember a little of what it means to be human beings. Eat, drink, walk, recover—our journey done and the real work of building a new home begins.

Our apartment is small, but perfectly placed for us to begin again. Everywhere are trees, ferns, lichens, mosses, and birds. There are secret and hidden places for me to discover new ideas and form new substance in the world.

As I attended college here, I went to the reunion to witness and regard the connections to the past that still shape my life today. There are ceremonies of the soul that cannot be shared, but of which there is great sensation and emotion pouring out into one’s life.

My old life is gone, destroyed by a thunder-fire storm of psychic change. I am nothingness, out of which may come the dawn.

Just the other day I got a message from the Dark Goddess. Since I got a message from my self from the future, I needed to write one back. Even though I’m in the moment, this stuff will end up being in the past and read in the future.

I’ve done this before, just didn’t really know it. Write messages to myself about my state of mind, my hopes and fears, and what I believe is going on or will go on. Reading some of these past messages can be a little embarrassing at times, and they can be pretty moving as I see how earnest I struggle to be bright.

So here goes nothing. It’s time.

Hey yo Paul Tristan Fergus, I got your message that I would make it, that I can do it, because I already have, that it will be all right.

All the stuff you showed me I have taken to heart and now know consciously. The understanding will come later. Thanks for sending this back to me. I never really realized how we’ve been supporting ourselves all this time, through time.

When I think about the last two years of absolute terror, humiliation, and defeat that followed the year of rest after the Haunted House it kind of blows my mind. I thought I would be working on my books and my workshop more, yet all I did was push the book out and move it along at a small and insignificant pace. Everything else has been emergency life support.

That must have been the proper and healthy thing to do, because all other resources went into the great change and building the UFO that you are likely experiencing now. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for you, because from where I’m standing it’s beyond my understanding. The battle of the galaxies was something I could scarcely conceive of at the time I realized it was approaching.

I noticed in the previous letter that I had grown a lot since the letter before that, when all was chaos and the sinking of my entire life. The shock of great self-destruction was so total I never realized I would survive and grow, even though that’s all I prayed for. Darkness and suffering for so long it was a real risk for me.

So now there you are, and you are doing the stuff I can only dream of right now. I’ve grieved, I’ve let go, I’ve healed, I’ve moved on. I’m fighting for my life now and I finally see what I’m to do. I know you and all the rest of us are doing our best with what we’ve got, and the nightchild is with us, is us.

I’m building what I can for you, just as I know you are sending me love and encouragement from where you are. We’re entering a new life of the kind it takes an entire lifetime to create. You know how I’m feeling for you and what you are doing right now.

And yeah, that time when we were surrounded by people we thought were glorps and we spoke from outside the light about our secret fire? I’m on it man. All the other stuff too, I’m stumbling along as best I can so you’ll be strong and true.

The awesome is so overwhelming I’m humbled. Keepin’ the Faith Initiated Bullshit while performin’ the secret sign of distress in a world of doom to the ultimate destructoid!

Be you soon,

Paul Tristan Fergus

In a previous post, I discovered instructions from UFO Girl contained within my past self-explorations.  Decoding the instructions has required I “sit on it” for a while and let the recognition sink in fully. Now there is a growing thought in my brain that I’m ready to examine what’s available for consideration.

A being transport of pure sound, conveying mobility through space and time, enabling us to experience new ways of playing. The time has come for me to hypnotize myself into understanding the plans and going about the ceremony of putting together what has been uncovered.

I imagine a number of qualities such a vehicle of the mind might require for it to be a useful conveyance for me.

• Imminence, or a sense of the ability to move one location or state of mind to another.
• Intuition, that ability to understand and reason by mysterious and irrational means.
• Integrity, which is to say both completeness and honesty as a way to “hold it together”.
• Consonance, or the ability to maintain harmony and accord.
• Epistle, that is, messages and transcripts across gaps of perception.
• Precursor, or the ability to project one’s intentions and ideas through crossings in affect.
• Organism, which simply means the awareness and maintenance of life consciousness.
• Psyence, because one always needs a new word and which represents healthy models of system.
• Constellation, that process by which disparate parts and wholes organically relate.

There was this article in a science fiction magazine I read a while back. I still have the magazine somewhere in one of my transport boxes.  The article was about this guy building his own cylon robot out of available materials.

At the time I took it literally and seriously. Could you really make a cybernetic brain using sauerkraut as a baseline ingredient? If only I could save the shef boi-ahr-dee cans and use them to build my cyclon’s armored covering!

However, there is an important lesson here in building anything out of ideas and into substance. The stimulation of the imagination and the working out in one’s own psychic make-up how such models might work is an important step.

Is the plan we have built a put-on? Might it not also be a signpost, saying “look here, in this box for the diagram of your dream.”  Sauerkraut and tin cans indeed!

Watching the glowing light in my brain, I find myself getting wide-awake-sleepy, tick-tock.

You see them at the portals of shopping establishments. Mechanisms containing candy or cheap prizes which dispense them for the price of inserting small change.

Children are especially susceptible to these small change bandits, with their cranking knobs and randomly released surprises.  The displays promise cool little toys or a delicious flavor experience if only you will take the plunge!

Usually what you get is predetermined—only different kinds of rubber balls or a figure from a collection—or the prize is lame.  You wanted the cheap metal skull ring and got a plastic pink smiley face instead.  The gum is good for about five seconds and then turns to sticky, tasteless wall sealant.  Sometimes, the machine doesn’t give you anything at all.

What a rip off!

Teaches a valuable lesson, however, doesn’t it? Beware of getting ripped off! All is not as it seems.

Yet we return again and again, hoping this time will be different.  Sometimes you get a halfway decent prize or experience, and then your parents are tired of waiting for you or don’t have any more change.

Oh yeah, this was like a religious observance for me. And there are many permutations of the gumball machine experience let me tell you!

One time at a Hardee’s hamburger joint, I discovered the back door so to speak.  The gumball machine only worked with tokens that you had to obtain by ordering something.

This particular gumball machine was enclosed in a kind of decoration, with the front flush to an opening where you accessed the machine.  I found that my arm was thin and wiry enough to reach up and down between the gap.

This enabled me to grab handfuls of prizes at a time!  I managed to fill my pockets before an employee noticed the crowd of kids watching me in awe and chased me out. Those prizes were some of the best I ever got too.

Then there are times when you come across a machine and everything you get is cool.  Neat stuff on a roll, and you run out of change.  When you come back the next day, however, the machine is gone!  Rip off!  But you still got some good loot, so it’s not a total rip off.

One time in Japan, in a remote mountain village I came across a gumball machine with small metal medieval weapons. Alas, I only had enough change to get three of these super cool items! Then I had to go and I couldn’t come back, due to my traveling schedule.  That’s how it goes!

In a sense, the gumball machine is a manifestation of the monstrance, that container that holds the sacred host.  It’s not unlike a dragon guarding treasure, or a form of the ordeal you face when you go on an adventure.

You pay your fare and take your chances. What is released is what you need—a tiny companion, a tool of play, a moment of sweetness—these are no small thing when one adventures in the depths of the soul! The worthless, useless thing turns out to be the most important of all.

These mechanisms may have been invented to separate children from their parent’s money in exchange for some “magic beans”, but even the charlatan may find themselves peddling rather more serious wares when destiny takes an intervening hand.

Everywhere you go, machines of meditation, teaching lessons as surely as any Kung Fu master to those who will listen. The time may come when we see how advanced these pieces of technology really are.

As a kid I did a lot of drawing. One of the things I enjoyed drawing were labyrinths with goodies at the center.  Over time these doodles evolved and began to acquire various characteristics.

At first, there was usually some treasure at the center.  Later on I began to tape paper doors over these pups so you couldn’t see what the treasure was until you got there—surprise!

Then a figure of adventure began to take shape.  Usually the figure was a girl, sometimes holding a torch.  On rare occasions it was a boy, and a few times it was a group of greedy hunters with hats—spittle spraying from their leering smiles.

The labyrinth became a maze, with dead ends and rooms with dangerous experiences.  Monsters, traps, accidents, or words saying “You didn’t find it sukkr!” or “Nope!”  These too were covered up with doors so you couldn’t know what was under them until it was too late: “Bomb, you ded!”

A map of the psyche perhaps, both for consideration of how people approach me, and how I approach myself.  We can get lost in the vastness of our own being, sometimes a map helps.

Can we find the gold in ourselves?  How much of a maze and/or labyrinth do we build around ourselves when dealing with others?  Do we let them have our gold, or do we direct them to the spear trap?

So I drew up another such map in the old style.  Without the paper doors, but I could code a table with rollover images now to adapt for the Internet.  Certainly not a difficult journey, although the hazards are still there. The path still connects the inside and outside—some people close off their paths completely, mind you.

Has the time come to perhaps re-examine my map and draw something more complex? Taking a bit of inspiration from my seriously inventive and clever insightful Hexe, I believe I shall attempt it!