The Honey Witch

Chapter XXI

As tender as the grasses grow,

Green Lady sweeps soft and low.

Such delight no man shall know,

but he, her love, her secret bestow.

~Old Wives Rhyme~





As in the wistful kaleidoscopes that stir the tides of sleep, she billowed in diaphanous layers of altering shades of green above my head. Her skin was no longer the burgeoning flesh color of ivory to golden grain, but had transformed anew to a luminous, velvety emerald. Her long and languid hair swam in the invisible whirlwind in palettes of jade and aquamarine, affixed with strings of pearls and shining baubles from the sea; vines and berries from hidden garden corridors. The perfume of the earth surrounded her: the ferns and the wild roses, the spice and the musk, the salt water and the desert sand.

But beyond the impossible phantasm of even this, it was the certain profundity of infinity stretching like multiple mirrors inside the glistening orbs of her eyes, that caused the surge of panic to seize my every limb.

“Holy Christ, what are you?” I demanded, backing away.

She reached out her slender hand. “I am your desire,” she smiled with a quiet reassurance. “I am nothing, if not your Ana. Come, my love.”

If her intent was to cause clinical insanity, she was succeeding. I covered my ears in an attempt to suppress a threatened delirium.

“Ethan…” she whispered.

An increasing pressure swelled inside my head. I felt overheated and contrastingly freezing at the same moment.

“Come,” she beckoned.

I dropped to my knees on the ground, recognizing that any man who was witness to such a tremendous vision was doomed to isolation, an asylum or death. There would be no tale to be believed and hence, a man would walk alone in unacknowledged memory of its having occurred, which might be more a curse than believing oneself to be truly insane.

She descended downward through the ether until the veils of her airy garments fluttered against my cheek bones. I slid back against the spongy ground in an effort to regain my footing, to run, but she dipped forward and reached her hand once more, preventing any retreat. Under impetus of the blinding flash of a single bolt of light, I felt a force ripping from my body. Between my ears, I heard the roar of oceanic waves crashing against the boulders of a merciless precipice.

And then, the enveloping serenity of a profound and primordial silence.

The sweeping filaments of her gown twisted against the fleshless sensation of a spirit form I became clearly aware of as being my own. I could sense no separation between our bodies or the tendrils of her bejeweled hair weaving with mine in the floating airs. The sense of intangibility increased as I clung to her shoulder and she to mine. I felt the wispy silk of her leg reach around and clasp my waist, and the sense of actual physical attachment increased. I became as a limb to her sturdy center form.

“Is this Death?” I wondered aloud, but I could not hear the voice of my own inquiry.

“You are alive for the first time,” came the mellifluous echo of her reply.

The limp shape of a spiritless body below grew dimmer as we rose higher into the predawn darkness, enfolded in each other’s embrace. With the speed of a meteor, we descended toward the base of an aged white oak.

Entering the earth, an ever-soaring vapor among the moving organisms dwelling beneath, we slipped through the breathing corridors of wet roots and spiraled upward through the rushing pulse of the living tree. Against my eardrums, the rhythmic pounds of heart and breath; before my eyes, the swimming of myriad microorganisms.

Together, we erupted through the veins of the leaves, only then to break apart and explode into a billion points of scattered light. Then, the particles again merged in the climactic embrace of the hidden Feminine and the heated Masculine.

Together, we swirled beneath the moldering leaves of the forest floor, the domain of the salamander and toad.

Together, we dove and submerged into the springs and caverns that eventually led to the open sea; there to listen to the choir of living waters and the slippery creatures whose kingdom resided beneath the surface.

Together, we sailed instantaneously over desert mounds and glimpsed the fiery nebulae in celestial gardens above the sands.

As a single, pulsating wisp of light, we floated over mountains of ice, under the polar umbrella of constellations stretching out from horizons north to south, east to west. We received the story of the vigilant owl in full winged flight, and attended the spider furthering her web of dew at moonrise. Under the final shades of night, we absorbed the rhythmic tones of all that, which yet dreamed, and the hushed sigh of all that, which dreamt no more.

And the earth, itself, became not a mere panorama of existence within the confines of measured cycles, but an ever-spiraling cascade of breath and movement, a living design from the invisible atom to the tallest mountain peak. All was conscious and in that very consciousness came the interconnection. All that which affected the most seemingly insignificant affected the whole. What seemed an end, was only a beginning, life upon life upon life in an ever-evolving circle.

Against the rise and fall of the misted, respiring hills, the imperceptible shift between the dark and the light yielded to a watercolor of coral and magenta along the horizons. I rested within the arms of Ana Lagori, a cloud between the glistening treetops and the daybreak, and ceased to wonder if I, myself, only dreamed.

But then, like Icarus from the sky, I felt myself falling.

Whirling and tumbling.

Flaming and crashing.

And all faded to nothingness.





~*~