Dream d184-s: The Ceremony Begins Here

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the threshold had changed since I last stood at it.

Not physically. The same place where the impossible geometry of the Gardens gave way to ordinary shadow-logic, the same quality of light that was almost-outside without being outside yet. But the air had a different pressure. Something had been added to it - a formality, the way a room feels different when something important is about to happen in it.

Lano felt it immediately. He stood very straight, which he did not usually do, and turned to face back into the Gardens.

From the interior, at some distance, the Owl approached. Flying low, deliberately, with the measured wingbeats of something that has decided to make an entrance. He landed on a branch at the exact height that placed his eyes level with mine. This had never happened before.

"Phase," he said. Then stopped. Then: "From the Greek phasis. An appearance. A showing. What becomes visible as things turn." He looked at me steadily. "You have turned. Something new is becoming visible."

I felt the truth of that as a warmth in the sternum, specific and located.

"Ceremonia," Lano said softly. Not alarmed. Witnessing.

The Owl's head moved at the word. "Ceremony. From the Latin caerimonia. Reverence. The form that reverence takes when it becomes action." He paused for a long time. Long enough to hear the bioluminescent edges of the flora behind us pulse once, twice. "A ceremony marks a threshold. It says: what comes after is not continuous with what came before. Something has ended. Something has not yet begun. You are standing in the between."

The light at the threshold was doing something it had not done before. On the Gardens side, the temperature-shifting color-warmth that had characterized everything here. On the other side, a steadier light - not brighter, but consistent, the kind of light that stays. And at the exact line between them, where my feet stood, both qualities simultaneously, the way a chord is both notes at once.

I held the Owl's feather in my jacket pocket. I felt it there.

"The Wireman's Ceremony," the Owl said, somewhat to himself, as if naming something he had seen before and was glad to see again. "The work of connecting what was learned to where it will be used. Wires carry. They do not generate. The ceremony is in the carrying."

Lano came to stand beside me, shoulder at my calf.

I did not step through yet. There was something the threshold wanted me to do first, and I understood it was to simply stand in the between with full attention, to let the transition be a transition rather than rushing it into an arrival.

The Owl watched. The two lights occupied my feet simultaneously.

I wrote at the boundary, the last thing I would write with Gardens air still in my lungs: