11
There was no song and dance routine by the firelight of the full moon, real conversation spiraled into intimate connection, which spiraled into tears and fears and dreams and regrets, they were one feather shy of a good old fashioned hippie talking circle.
Once everyone’s emotions were sufficiently spent, and tobacco added to the flickering embers, the conference dismissed, only the stragglers remained for one final toke.
“Hey Miles?” her gentlest voice searched. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
Considering the last few hours of soul diving, he was a little concerned about what unexplored department of his psyche this was headed for.
“Sure.”
“It’s just that... well...” she held the dramatic pause in her fingertips. “I was thinking...” again with the suspense. “Race ya to the secret spot,” as she disappeared down the darkened alleyway of the mooncapped mountain.
Bamboozled again.
He hopscotched down the trail as he laughed about his current predicament, layers of it, then he prayed that he wouldn’t break his ankle.
“What’dya do, get lost out there?”
In fact he had, but just for a moment, took a right one piñon too early. “Hey, I’m here now, ain’t I? And I heard somewhere that now is all that matters.”
“Ah young grasshopper, the student surpasses the teacher, must be this moon bringing it out of you.”
“Well, I’m not the one who prancercizes around like a woodland creature.”
“Ooh, mister big scary werewolf, are you gonna come blow my house down?”
He wanted to.
“Well fooled you, I sleep outside. And I’m not even scared of creatures in the night, because I am the creature in the night.”
She leapt at him with a roar, and while the maneuver may have landed them perilously close to the cliff’s edge, it also landed her in his arms for the split second it took to land a near death kiss on his cheek.
She scuttled to her favorite seat on the rock, a rain worn contour that cupped her body as she dangled her feet into oblivion. He couldn’t compute the kiss, cheeks were for friends, right? And grandmas. But what about star-crossed lovers whose paths merged at the same full moon lookout?
“Just look at her,” she pointed with her eyes.
He was.
“So big and beautiful, the Worm Moon they call this one, me and her are connected in a big way.”
She ever so slightly began to sing whispers of her lunar occupation.
“The moon, the moon, the moon, the moon,
she dances ov’r da sea,
she watches over us,
the moon, the moon, the moon.”
“Good one,” Miles said softly, a seemingly slang expression of approval he’d picked up from the travelers.
“Itn’t?” she smiled. “Oh, and you said good one,” she smiled harder. “Good one.”
They marinated in the endorphins of the moment.
“Some really close sisters of mine wrote that one, little ones, it’s way prettier when they sing it.”
“I couldn’t imagine that,” blurted Miles, the first brave thing he’d said all night. “I mean, I thought yours was really pretty.”
“My what?” she shot back. “Just kidding. Ooh, look over there, it’s the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters, even if there’s actually nine of them, and even if the Lakota knew it long before Hubbell was around.”
He tried to find the star cluster hiding behind the moonlit sky, “Over where?”
She grabbed his hand and directed to the heavens, “Over there, that group of stars in Taurus. Just follow Orion’s Belt to that big orange star, that’s Aldebaran, then a bit farther and you’ve found your way home.”
Her fingers lingered longer than was necessary for the astral navigation, her soft touch warmed the air, he wanted to connect the dots of her freckled constellations.
“You know, the ancestors of this place had such a strong relationship with the sky, they held a deep understanding of sacred star knowledge, you even hear elders talk about the Star People coming down to help along humankind.”
“So... like aliens?”
“Maybe,” she allowed. “Or gods. Or interdimensional energy beings. Or maybe it’s about the astrological influence of their gravitational pull on our little pea brains, seems to be possible with most mythologies of celestial interference.”
“Sounds kinda like the Egyptians and the Anunnaki. Big tall space gods that jumpstarted a technological revolution.”
“Yeah, kinda, and there are ancient cities all over the world that fit the same mold, but most seem to be the earliest adopters of what is fundamentally broken about today’s way of life.”
“Like slavery, huh.”
“Yep. And class divided hierarchy, and patriarchal oppression of women, and destroying a functioning ecosystem to inefficiently feed a broken one.”
“And then they all eventually collapsed.”
“Most, yeah, as far as we can guess anyway. But it’s a mockery to assume that our narrow view of science, could ever figure out a way of life rooted in an Earth energy that we don’t believe exists.”
“That vibration Spaz was talking about?”
“I guess that’s a part of it, a tangible energy that our machines know how to measure, but there’s a lot more to it beyond our comprehension. And we’re a part of it all. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to objectively interpret a system that we’re only a miniscule fragment of. The natives seemed to have a pretty good grasp of things though.”
“Like how do you mean?”
“Well, so everyone seems to know that they lived in harmony with the natural world, which suggests an alignment of vibrational resonance, but the narrative has become so skewed by the dehumanizing campaign of colonial occupation, that we only see a cartoon satire of unevolved heathens scraping by on nuts and berries. That’s what you were taught, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“But the reality is that indigenous food systems were highly complex. What the first European explorers described as the Garden of Eden, with its naturally manicured abundance, was no untouched wilderness. The wild was tended as it was held sacred, the continent was covered with food forests that allowed all of life to flourish.
Over a hundred million natives lived here, not the handful of strays they’d have you believe. And they maintained the garden, and ate of the abundance, and lived in large scale communities with minimal footprint. That’s their proof that they were an inferior breed. When a concrete civilization looks for concrete evidence of civilization, and all they find is trees and dirt, it’s easy to decide that whoever lived here was unworthy of the empire’s newfound blank slate, even if they had been forward thinking caretakers who thrived for hundreds of generations.”
“And it only took us a couple hundred years to destroy it all. Were there really a hundred million of them?”
“Yep. And thousands of languages. And cultures. And prayers. And then we proudly encouraged the genocide of all but two percent, who we kidnapped, abused, and whitewashed away any trace of identity.”
She let the silence swell before continuing, “And then when they did eventually find the ruins of an ancient civilization, they got all that wrong too.
Chaco Canyon was a full-on city, complete with running water and depleted resources, but it didn’t collapse from the subpar bureaucracy of primitive government, it was abandoned as the people came to understand that their way of life was destroying the garden.
They think that the sparse scars they’ve managed to uncover, somehow translate into the complete history of pre-colonial invasion, but now we’re beginning to unearth evidence that humans have enhanced life on this continent for over a hundred thousand years.
So excuse me if I have a hard time buying the best guesses of anthropologists whose fundamental view of the world is based on the narrowest sliver of human existence.”
“So do you think all those other civilizations were abandoned before they collapsed?”
“Some probably, but I’m sure others imploded from the exponential energy required to progress the fictitious concept of human superiority, kinda like what’s happening in our own civilization now.”
He pondered the correlation, “So, if all those civilizations were bad, and the alien gods all started them, then does that mean we’re under the influence of malicious space entities? And is it even possible to have a healthy sustainable version of modern civilization?”
She thought for a moment, “I think that anything is possible, but it will take a thorough reimagination of what we consider civilization. We can’t deconstruct a fluid ecosystem and replace it with the ivory towers of privileged permanence, the Earth is meant to flow, and us with her. We can’t build to the point that our food must be outsourced, that’s the fatal flaw in the whole thing, our food should be a part of our environment, the most important part.
And as far as your alien gods go, whether they gave us knowledge and we screwed it up, or if this was their gold digging plan from the start, either way, I figure that even if they manipulated our DNA to create us in the first place, I’m still a child of the Earth, a living breathing piece of a living planet, all the way down to the DNA, so I’m gonna have to stick with my mom on this one.”
Miles had flown away on a carpet tour of the old world, and the outer world, and the inner world, having returned to find that the only world he cared about, was hers. His eyes shone a gaze of smittened adolescence, unless that was just the moon.
“That was beautiful.” She was beautiful, he wanted to say. “I like the way you talk.”
“Oh stop, I just blabber from the heart is all.”
“Must be what I like about it.”
She smiled, “So, do you want me to read your palm before we call it a night?”
He’d have agreed on much worse to keep it going. “Ah, fortune teller are we?” as he handed it over.
“Hardly, just a hobby, plus it’s less about predicting your future than understanding the present. And your palm lines change throughout your lifetime, d’ya know that? And kinda like astrology, it’s less a map of your journey and more a schematic of the ship, gives you an understanding of how this particular Earthsuit is wired to work, it’s still up to you to make the best of it on your own terms.”
She took his upturned hand in both of hers, her gentle touch running over the rough patches of dirt work. She carefully looked over his entire hand, front to back, separating each finger to inspect the architecture of its folds, meticulously bending each knuckle in unbent concentration, as thorough as a chipmunk examining a newly discovered nut.
“You see this one,” she pointed to that one. “This is your life line, and yours sweeps wide into your palm, which reveals a life full of warmth, passion, and generosity.” Her mm-hmm concurred.
“And your head line’s as long and abundant as I could have already told you,” her subtext predicted.
“And here’s your love line,” drumroll please. “Hmm, interesting...” he was interested.
“It’s deep and pronounced, that’s good. But it slopes down and touches your head line, that indicates a struggle between the two, like your head gets in the way of your heart sometimes,” sounded about right, as his brain thought she seemed to lean in.
“Oh, and right here, this little crosshatch, that signifies that one day you’ll find yourself out in the woods holding hands with a pretty girl and staring at the moon.”
Her even keel confused his smile, “Oh does it now?”
“Yep,” she admitted, as her mischievous grin escaped. “That’s how good I am at this.”
“Okay then,” he asked. “What does it say I should do next?”
Her eyes glimmered with moonlight as she looked up from his good fortune. “I think you know,” is all she offered, but the unspoken languages filled in the rest.
Hand in hand, they started the slow descent into madness, moonbeams fueling the way, inches from collision as they neared orbits, completely surrendered to the moment as the spin of the world was forgotten.
Then a big “Raaawwwrrr...” pierced the capsule.
The scream shook them, both from their intimate intoxication and from their stone cold seats.
“What was that?” she sweat.
“Mountain Lion,” he was proud to know.
“Must be yelling at the neighborhood to go to sleep. We should go.”
Nooo, he thought, we were so close. His heart raced as his breath caught up, just enough time for his conflictions to climb their way back aboard, maybe this was for the best. Maybe this was a sign from the universe. Catcall of the gods.
She tossed out some tobacco and offered an apology to the night shift, then scampered up the hill in record time, all while she hummed some kinda prayer song. Soon enough they survived the whole ordeal.
Back at the fire, or what was left of the glowing ashes, she broke the news, “Well, unfortunately, I do believe that was my signal to go to bed, it’s probably late by now, but I had a really good time out there tonight.”
She took his hand, “We’ll have to do it again sometime. Goodnight, love.”
She pecked his cheek and scurried off before he could RSVP.