He comes to me as far back as I can remember myself. And I remember myself eternally, only the details of life in lives have frayed and merged into one whole. The word itself — comes — is not quite precise, because the man simply is, exists. And appears when some greater wisdom requires it. Not always does it seem to me that the time is exactly right. And often I call for him, yearn for his presence, and just as if wandering in a dark room — I know that he, the Silent Wind, is there, but I cannot reach him, it seems as though the partition between the time-spaces is too thick.

I tend to quietly repeat — Skennen, Skennen. In the ancient language it means peace, a peace in which the desire for the storm to end has disappeared. A peace that allows everything to be. Often from my whispering it is not he himself who comes, but his name resounds through the field like a charm, like a shaman’s drum. And acceptance comes by itself, without visions and revelations, just so.

That night — the night before the arrival of seven quite different words — the Silent Wind came again. He sat in that particular darkness that breathes after the last glowing coal has died in the hearth and dawn is still only a dream. The Silent One gazed into me for a long time. I had learned, by now I had learned, to find the difference between waiting that is squandered and waiting that is meaningful — I sat down and found peace. I knew that sometimes counting helps. 333, 332, 331, two, one, deep, deep peace. Deep peace. When I had touched the very edge of the dream, the visitor began his story again from the beginning — like an unceasing circle that turns out to be a spiral, turning as if in the same place, yet each time expanding to another level of understanding and revelation.

In the beginning, he said, there were only sky and water. There was no earth. The animals lived on the great water and the birds moved in the air above it. Higher up — much higher than the birds could rise — there was another place. Karonhiá:ke. The Sky World. And at its centre grew a tree. Not like those the human eye knows, but one from which all trees remember their origin. Its roots curved and stretched through the edge of the sky world. Its flowers glowed. In the Sky World there dwelt a woman. Some say that curiosity crackled in her. Others say she saw a dream that it was her time to go. Yet another says that there, in the Sky, someone pushed her, fearing what she was beginning to become. And — here she goes — through a hole in the tree’s roots, she fell downward.

Falling, the woman tried to hold on to the edge of the Sky World and grasped what she could — seeds, roots, a fistful of what was alive there. The living hid behind her nail-moons, this and that settled into clenched fists. She fell for a long time. Long enough to understand that the way back would be long, if not eternal. The birds saw her falling. Something made them quickly rise and between the Sky and Earth form a pattern of wings. With their bodies they wove a great blanket stitch by stitch, and when at last the woman nearly, nearly touched the Great Waters — gently, as only birds can, they caught the woman. The birds tried to carry her, lift her back up — up there, but the woman was too heavy — falling she had grown heavier, because she had taken on the weight of what she carried. And so, for this reason alone, the birds gently held her very close to the water’s surface. As much as they could.

Just then from the depths arose a huge turtle, rising, because the birds’ wings were already tiring and the winged lattice was beginning to dissolve from the weight like a spider’s silk thread. The woman landed on the hard, primordially ancient undersea back. Around spread only water. Above — only sky. And in her hands — seeds.

Around there was more life — small water creatures. They made circles and tried to do something comprehensible only to themselves. But it was part of the shared story, as if this world had always known the woman would come. One by one the living creatures dove to the sea’s depths, as if trying to bring something to the surface from the very bottom. In the end one of them dove very deep. And remained there for a very long time — underwater. For a moment everything thought the brave one had died, was finished. But then, when the world had nearly ceased waiting, it surfaced, half-dead, without strength. And brought — a fistful of mud. Almost nothing. Just enough to be called a fistful.

The woman seized the handful of mud. Placed it on the turtle’s back. And then began to dance. The woman danced over the little wet lump of mud and her feet flattened it down and down. As she swayed, from the folds of her clothing, from the black fingernails, from the tangled hair, seeds fell into the black lump. And began to sprout, green shoots appeared. Then something strange happened — as the world grew on the turtle’s back, its shell also expanded. As one grew, so did the other. Now the birds had a place to land and rest. And the animals a corner to curl up and sleep for the first time. And the world had a place to be, and it was created.

And he was gone.

I woke before dawn. The words reverberated in the body as the important things do — not settling in the mind where they can be split and evaluated, but lower, much lower, where lives that which cannot be argued with.

I lay motionless and let the dream finish its work. That was not at all easy, my mind of course immediately set to work — scrubbing and scrabbling the dream’s bones until the joints became raw. The fall was the task. Yes, I see, this is obviously about... — but I gathered all my strength and pressed the mind’s mouth shut. Not yet. Let the body steep a little longer in what was experienced. For many things, if not all, that exist in this world, the body is a much better vessel than the head.

Skennen’s words made me recall my own prayer.

What you seek never stopped seeking you.

My words, the words of a supplication, first uttered through some ancient eastern poet’s mouth, now come through mine — I had released them to the winds, hoping that someday what I sought, my closest, would find me.

And then someone unexpectedly replied — prosaically, as befits our times, replied in the Internet’s dark corridors. Just as to a signal sent into the Universe centuries ago that searches for signs of life. No one waits any more, the waiting has become a faint shimmer somewhere in underground passages. And the answer is so hoped-for yet unhoped-for that it makes you momentarily forget nearly everything you have ever learned about this reality.

What you seek is within you.

Seven words, an answer-signal, a key-ring that turns the Universe upside down. This is all I remember, because what followed was such a powerful eruption that for me, as a human being, there was nothing left but to participate, to pull the reins, to whip — there was no possibility of pushing the waters back across the overflowing river. No, it was not even desired.

The words I had written, attached to an image where only the outlines of my face could be guessed at, received an answer.

Click. Precise, surgically masterful.

And the floods that followed the words, as I said, were mighty. Beautiful in their ugliness and repulsive in their beauty. It was not a peaceful opening of me, as a woman. At least not of a woman who has integrated her spiritual teachings and can receive love — subtly. Graciously. Elegantly. The turning was enormous, indecent and seemingly without my permission. Filled with power I had suppressed, guided and held within myself. Through loneliness, that particular solitude that belongs to someone who moves at a frequency most people cannot hear and endure.

After the seven exchanged words, Click! He sent me his diary, or so he said, that it was his lived experience. Even now feeling reverence, a universal human reverence, I will not share the letters and experiences written there. They told of someone who seemed to have touched reality — what I knew within myself as reality. Visions of light and dissolution. States of consciousness that cut open the surface world of everyday experience. Encounters with what he called the divine. I recognised every page, because I had wandered in these dimensions and fields myself. I read his written words the way one reads a letter written in one’s own handwriting, yet which one does not remember writing. I recognised, recognised, it was knowledge that moves through the body like a current. And being in the middle of the overwhelming feelings, experiencing the lightning of recognition — new life arose in me. Here it was — a person who had touched the sacred, and therefore could live sacredly.

I was convinced I was standing at a door and he was the one in whose hands was the golden key. I rose and rose and rose, upward, upward within me, in the euphoria of life, creation and beauty. In an endless sense of spiritual bliss. The eyes were half-closed at that moment, it was hard to keep them open. When I finally managed to open my eyelids, I was suddenly in a room full of mirrors. For a brief moment I tried to find where my door to the depth, to the slowness, to the fulfilment whose lock I had sought for so long. But I dissolved into the crystal mirrors that showed me my own dizziness, scent, joy, most intimate secrets, irritation and excitement — and all this in different curves, shapes, larger, longer, wider, subtler. It was my own inner reality, but reduced, expanded — distorted. I searched for where he was — my met key-holder, but the mirrors were glittering too brightly, the lamps burning, the carousels spinning. I had grown dizzy from myself, but at the same moment it seemed I was growing dizzy from him, who held the mirrors. I had been invited into the labyrinth of his reflections, everything happened so fast, so bodily, so burningly that I had no other word for it. And I thought it was bliss, sacred happiness.

In these mirrors I both saw and did not see myself. All the world’s volcanoes dwelt there, storms, blossoming apple trees and crocuses, born exactly like this — from a beautiful dream, from vibration and excitement. Flowers in me burst open, everything pulsed ever faster. This was what I had once experienced in one of the ceremonies in the jungle.

Diary against diary, one reflection-shard basks in the other.

And the words seemed to be fulfilling themselves, illuminated by the crooked mirrors. I was reflected and in all that also Click! — the key-jangler, the one whose name was Chaski — he too showed a face of beauty, not allowing me to distinguish any more where I ended, where he began, who was who.

Yet to that, somewhere in the depths, gathered one more weak, barely noticeable feeling — like anxiety, like despair. Something in me somehow knew. The euphoria carried me, yet already then a desperate struggle began, the desire to touch and find where he was, what he was — the key-holder Click!, the human being Chaski. But the mirrors were blinking so fast, the blood flowing so swiftly that however hard I tried, I still could not find the centre in the labyrinth — him himself. This served as a promise that the ecstasy would never end. As an even greater impulse and obsession — to do anything and everything, to merge with what was behind the shimmer.

But at that moment I could not yet find it and simply loved very much. For that I will weep the most. Until I discover that one may also love just so, without wronging oneself. Because love has never been anywhere else but within me and I myself. The world only served as a key-ring that rattling unlocked those doors for it. I loved, love and will love. This story is about that, and about all the others.

Yet at that moment I still knew nothing of what would come and what lay hidden beneath the shimmer-veils. In my hands was his diary. I understood only that the gates were open. A prayer, a signal sent into the Universe, which I had breathed day by day, night after night, had returned.

The answer was yes.

Come.

And I went.

Not in a ceremony, not in a dream.

Like the Silent Wind, she came in the hour before dawn, when the body still rests in defenceless trust and the mind has not yet taken on the role of guardian. In the naked hour between blind darkness and the first hint of sun. In the time when the doors between worlds are half-open and all that remains is to believe and trust that you are protected, that you protect yourself.

Mušītu stood in the farthest corner of the room, the sky draped over her shoulders. She had no particular need to gaze at me or announce her presence. The very appearing was already a message. Once I had been afraid of her, I felt uncomfortable, especially if the body entered that freezing state that wise modern-day scholars call sleep paralysis. Yet over time I grew accustomed to her and even began slowly to accept her telling, that she was my oldest and most future self, the one who existed before this life and will persist beyond it.

And, just like Skennen, Mušītu appeared and disappeared in my consciousness, but there was not a single moment in lives when I did not deeply know she was near. I once gave her the name myself, because reading some ancient Akkadian text I came across a goddess whom the people called the veiled bride or what is called the Night of Night — not the absence of light or light’s non-presence. About the hour when everything has already closed, but nothing has visibly begun yet.

Three days before seven words fell into my postbox, Mušītu silently opened her palms — there rested a white flower with a yellow centre, a narcissus flower. Part of me wrinkled its nose — even being a medicine woman, I had never paid the narcissus much attention, at least not the kind it deserved. Yet, taught to trust Mušītu’s messages, in the morning, still under the dream’s influence, I quietly sipped coffee and leafed through my plant books and manuscripts. Three days before the words came, I discovered to my surprise how narcissus shoots grew before the temples of Ancient Greece, full of poison from stem to petal. How alongside the naively white flowers, beside beauty, insensitivity seeps in, vomiting, dizziness — from the scent alone, after being too long in a room filled with narcissus blossoms. Precisely from the narcissus came the word — narcotics. From the overly pure, bright whiteness with a golden crown in the middle. My goddess, my Mušītu, in her palms was opening and showing how numbness, addiction and the grey nothing most often dresses itself in the brightest and most sacred priestly robes. I felt ashamed that I had not known this, saddened by my own preconceptions, formed by an environment and life in a place where narcissus was only the spring’s naive and prejudice-burdened herald.

In those days, breathing the scent of narcissus just brought in from the garden’s edge, I read once more, with a quite different gaze, the story of Narcissus.

Once in this world there lived a youth so beautiful that the light around him shone differently — it nestled closer and lingered longer, as if not wanting to leave him. Narcissus was infinitely beautiful, girls loved him. Nymphs called to him. Also Echo — the one whose voice was taken away and only the ability to repeat the last heard word remained — she too came to the youth and, arms flung wide, tried to tell him what she felt. Yet Narcissus left her, went away as he had gone from every one he had met. Something in Narcissus could not receive anything that the world wanted to offer him.

One day Narcissus came to a mountain stream and bent down to drink. And saw himself. And fell in love with himself.

He stayed by the stream. Day after day, night after night, trying to reach out to what he saw in the reflection. Each time he nearly, nearly touched himself, the water surged and his face disappeared. And he waited until the surface calmed. And looked again.

He died there, at the water’s edge. Where he fell — in that place a flower grew. White, with a yellow heart. The Greeks called this flower narcissus, that which numbs, stupefies, intoxicates.

Yet what the ancient myth does not tell, but I know only through Mušītu, the ancient, dark Akkadian goddess, is that one day, while Narcissus was still alive, a woman came to the mountain stream. Having wandered the world and learned to be at peace with her solitude, here she was, watching. Astonished, she observed the beautiful man crouching by the water. Drawn in by the unusual sight, the woman approached and tried to look into what the silent figure saw on the water’s surface. It took no more than a moment before suddenly the woman began to grow dizzy. The looking smelled. The way the man gazed at his own reflection with such longing dazzled. The water’s surface rippled and formed mirrors, crystal fragments here and there, which in their play, in their hide-and-seek and moments of being found again, spun brightly before the eyes and made them blind. Where the woman ached with a loneliness wound, there, shattered into the tiniest splinters, the intoxicating scent settled. In the end there was a sensation as if the road-weary, thirsty woman received — a mouthful of water. Just one mouthful, she whispered, yet the more she drank the light of the water’s reflection, the thirstier she grew. The greedier she grasped for what seemed to be the water of life, the more she grew dizzy.

Her legs wobbled, her head spun, she felt sick and so good at the same time. And now she too was very close, dangerously close to the underground stream’s edge. One more moment — and the stream would take them both.

Here Mušītu stopped, because that was her way of telling. She let me find, live through and experience my own story’s end and continuations. I confess, that maddened me.

On that day, three days before it seemed the Universe had finally answered my prayers, I sat in my home, in familiar solitude drinking coffee that never quite quenched thirst, and quietly grew dizzy from the just-picked narcissi from the garden. Somewhere in the background a historian was telling about Emperor Elagabalus, who arranged feasts for his guests, summoning them to the palace hall and at some point causing thousands of fragrant rose petals to begin raining down from the ceilings. At first the guests rejoiced in the endless beauty, softness and fragrance, but the petals from the vaulted ceilings did not stop whirling downward, filling the space, whose doors slaves had silently already locked. Up to the ankles, the waist, the shoulders, the neck, so that there was no more air to breathe. Drowning in scent, elegance, beauty, going ever deeper, suffocating on the wonder, on the marvellous view. And suffocating under the petals’ weight, choking on the roses’ enticing smell. The young, unripened emperor, whose name the shame-filled Romans for a long time tried to erase from the pages of history, had had a precise instrument built into the feast’s ceiling — sketched by himself — that at the right moment, when the guests had already settled in and laid aside the armour of anxiety and vigilance, at the right moment was released. The emperor himself allegedly sat apart, where the petal rain did not reach. The monotone radio-speaking historian mentioned that he allegedly laughed evilly. I thought, I know that was not all of it. Elagabalus was not laughing, nor not laughing. Because he felt nothing, because there was nothing inside. The historian fell silent and there remained only me. And the narcissi.

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