Once Upon a Dark Time…
The night was indeed dark,
…not because it was typically night, but because something was draining the Sun’s golden light and the Moon’s witnessing reflection. It was actually day, yet night, because the imagination had been taken, absorbed, possessed, not by heart but by power!
All the animals had grown silent, the wind had stopped its playful swooshes, the clouds had swirled into a harsh hurricane-eye with an insisted-upon wall! Storming-hurled rain-missiles struck down everywhere without compassion, exchanging and replacing the once-sacred Silence with this now fear-spreading absence, this ominous lack-of-soul silence mushrooming all around...except for the mimicking, machine-gunning, cold staccato sound of the lacerating whips of raindrop-licks! All and everyone fled and huddled and hid behind petrified rockiness and stone-walling deafness. This acid rain, searing soul-skins and eroding this once-wonderous human nature into the raping of natural resources, pooled as mutating hate, only fed an unquenchable thirst of mass-mindedness coagulating invisibly, concretely, as one immeasurable, creeping, growing cancer mass…
A rough beast was growing with lusting greed, blunt-force polarizing, and inhuman intention, a goat-like beast, a knowing master of scapegoating! He was not as any one person, no, but as a gluttonous, conglomerating, flesh-and-blood-eating demon-virus chewing up humans, eating through humanity, transgressing human limits, devouring any individuality while simultaneously injecting into individual cells to take them from inside their very own inner precincts: each once-harmonious cell changed to "sell," then again into a "sellfish" that fast-loses its ability to ambulate and recognize itself, in spite of so many selfies, by further devolution via progressive iterations, and crawling back into the swirling depths of the primordial muck of unconsciousness. Through faster and faster and shorter and shorter word-spells, leaving so many texting "OMG! Where u at?" and lost without a context, more and more bereft of poetry-magic, literary-images, and soul-piety; the spell-binding rough beast twittered up on laborious, heavy and stunted wings. He was self-made beyond the human...and now thoroughly devoid of love.
And yet when its gaping, rot-toothed mouth snarled wide to speak, the poor, dumbfounded soul-deaf and the sadly-blind of heart, having been amputated of their sacred eyes and ears—especially their third-ones!—by anonymous zombie word-servants of the slithering rough beast impermeable to the collective storm-cesspool he generated, suddenly heard one magnificently seductive, supposedly salvational word: “ME!”
Depending on where they were hiding, or being beaten, or swirling in the torrential current of both drowning-water and present time, this one narrow-minding word sparkled and swelled, sometimes inflaming them with lip-smacking desire for absolute Me-power, sometimes becoming “He” in the I-sickle-made frozen-reflecting of the shrewdly-stupid, now capitalized and capitalizing Rough Beast slouching towards Bethlehem after "He" quietly erased the memory of Yeat’s poet-being catching this ugly ancient one at the start of his ever-increasing sinister act.
Meanwhile, in the deeply-feeling weather-beaten Bahama-heart-islands of humanity, all that housed hearts were torn away! And all the spiritual and beloved palm trees—ever-pointing upwards towards the incarnating trinity of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness shimmering in heavenly blueness above all this darkness of clouded-thought charged by such unconscious power—were wrenched out of the very ground of decency, of compassion, of wisdom, and of reverence! The wide sweeping floodwaters of unconscious mass emotion rushed through with unspeakable devastation and destruction filling the void where imagination once had been.
Underground, soothsayers George Orwell and Aldous Huxley rotisserie-turned in their hell-fiery-heart-aching-yet-compassionate eternal-stillness as they saw individuals and sheep being spliced into sheople, whose wool strangely pulled so naturally now over the eyes and absorbed the rising tides just enough to float them along with untethered conviction and inflated-lung pride pumped up through hot air combusted in the incessant groaning and slurring-sound of “ME!!!!!”
But above the terrible roar of the Rough Beast’s Mighty Mythmaking-Sellfee, far away from this literal happening and the reification of manipulating, convincing facts turning into slippery scales on the back of this monster being formed out of eaten numbers of now-faceless persons, into the selfsame-scales also in their hearts that can no longer weigh the difference between what’s gold to the soul and what’s green paper-weight tied to the bottom-line of the greedy, and in a place within the heart so tiny and apparently insignificant that everyone never thinks or stops to notice...here comes a man! A truly-human man!
And he’s a-smilin’! He’s a-whistling! A song he’s a-humming! A guitar he’s-a-carryin’ and its strings he’s a-strummin’!
Before him came abounding foxes and deer and geese and lions; muscular ants in speedos and fluttering fish with hummingbird-wings and swimming birds with pink dolphin fins! Beside him walked witches and wizards and princes and princesses, frogs with feathered fedoras, one with a crown and a frown, and stately camels with fezzes! Behind him bounced tigers who traded their stripes for Lookingglass chess-squares just perfect for theater and other such fun; and then pouncing arrived the wildcats sporting purple silk capes paradoxically purr-loined yet purr-chased from Northwestern University; and, of course, stomping entered the mighty Ganesh-embodying elephants, with their gold-threaded garments, and became furry shrews who ever-help us find our way through!
And Czars and Viziers and Kings, and the Mighty Queens of Me-too; old shoemakers, poor fathers and even ingenues! Look! Now enter the rhythm-rattling, jigging-skeletons and those larger-than-life dancing-dreams and those deep, dark, and magnificently-austere shiny talking-horses who know what we don't; and also Godfather Death and his godson, the healer who must remain humble and listen to what his Godfather has planned! Here they all come along with such deliciously dramatic-and-comedic display, zigzagging up from the depths, sent up by all these ancestral dead who join us, too, when we offer a draught of our living-libation and who are now being invoked by the storyteller among us! Wait! Could it be? Yes! Now who do I see there in the poetic-wings stage-right and stage-left, but Anahit Ginosyan, James Hillman, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Thomas Moore, Robert Sardello, C.G. Jung, Marsilio Ficino, Giambattista Vico, Lee Roloff, Rives Collins, Frank Galati, David Downs, Dawn Mora, Ernie Zulia, Mary Zimmerman, Stuart Rakely, Domenic Massimi, Martha Lavey, Don Sloggy, David Caitlin, Joy Gregory, Rebecca Armstrong, Megan Wells, Drake Spaeth, Andrew Shepherd, Jackie Torrence, Gareth Higgins, the entire Order of the Rocking Chair, and so many others familiar and dear, some here, some there, yet all so soufully hear, each one waving to all whom they've met, creating and directing soul sans net! They take their places in this storying landscape of the oneiric body, become Rimers of Eldritch following the lead of Mother Hicks and one curious-looking Durwood Peach gazing upon the Landscape of the Body under this exquisite melancholy of a Minnesota Moon!
They’re all joining in this pageant full of colorful palanquins and flapping flags with the soul-stirring symbols of this astonishing Imagi-Nation, surrounded by all these minstrels and musicians merrily a-playin’, including the mice-with-long-folktails’ drum core and the just-arrived New Orleans 2nd Line Brass Band who want to remind us of who we were, who we are when we’re eternal, and who we need to be to honor every moment we’re here!
Suddenly, we are all swept up in the appearance of this man who’s merely minding his own business and just being himself! We become the very fireflies flitting all about, our soul-bodies all lit up with this summer’s joy shimmering here where night and day still take their fantastic places on this stage of your life, our lives. The plush red-velvet curtain-valves are opened and closed with the heart’s timing so we can catch a glimpse of what shines so theatrically-bright, so poetically-glowing and lyrically-spotlighting with such feeling-focus that we drink in the precious play-medicine that can even raise the dead through love! The muses leap out of the cleft made by Pegasus’ sharp hoof-kick! They sing how the mythic always joins such folk-dancing! The punted air is full of muse-ic and amuse-ment! And everyone is drunk, but not with the common-wine, but the one that mystics and Sufis have brought here as they secretly joined in!
Then I felt a gentle breathing over my shoulder, and I turned to see who is next to me: A huge and hideous furry boar-beast! I jump back, but then feel overwhelmed by such kindness. This is a wholly different type of beast, not gripped and consumed by split-off and ego-stuffed evil, but a beast deeply connected to the animal soul in harmony with divine nature! I look beyond the wild fur and see his deep-pooled eyes look at me with such warmth, such joy! He seems to know me! How can such eyes ensconced in all this coarse animal-pelt melt away all coldness, callous-covered protectiveness, and our steel-banded faithful-Henry’d heart?
He whispered into my ear so as not to disturb the festive unfolding and so that I might hear what was for the soul only: “That singin’ man, he is the storyteller! That strumming-heart of a man, he is The Storyteller!”
And I said, “I know! I met him when I was a young man! I was a somewhat experienced magician then, but I had never seen the miraculous trick where one person’s heart-sack of stories could make appear and multiply so many other heart-sacks of stories, each one made just right for each heart, each bag becoming a bottomless heart of story and song which could warm every-body in the whole wide world with eyes to hear and ears to see!”
This beast, warm and instinctually wise, wild but not rough like that other cruel and slouching one, put his arm over my shoulder, and we took it all in, laughing with the full-shake of our intuitive gut-bellies! It was then that it occurred!
Everything, all of it, seemed to turn somehow inside out! Everyone, too! Stories were released from within each and every one present, now appearing like rising paper lanterns not lit up with literal flame but by all these Sacred Hearts burning and radiating Love!
In their flickering and disclosing light, I saw that the one next to me was now human, handsome, and truly royal; that I, too, took on a haloed sheen next to him; indeed, all of us could see our unique selves reflected in her enormous, stunning, open-pupiled eyes! Who, you say? Why Her, Beauty, she who gives us all such genuine feeling, meaning, and value!
She was blessing us with an invisible feeling! I knew somehow, we all somehow knew that this was the very same feeling-shimmer that set the three magi out on their precarious journey to adoration of the unknown baby-sacred who had entered the world, still does if you squint your third-eye and look all around you!
She floated on grace! Invisible angels of grace were appearing and rising under her feet with each step. Some large and wise, with stretching peacock wings; others tiny, plump and huggable just-born orbs of translucent light and Renaissance paint playfully testing their down-covered ones. Around her gathered fairies throwing effervescent fairy-dust like wedding rice all around and over her. Beside the entire procession following the storyteller were gnomes and elves with their mining picks swinging so fast human eyes could not see anything but the dirt flying and the twinkling flash-appearance of rubies, emeralds, and diamonds jumping out of the generously-giving ground tossing radiant kaleidoscopic patterns of rainbow light across all our faces!
Then—for what story would be without these!—the darker ones turbulently traipsed in: the storied evil-doers, the arrogant ones, the hungry ones, the shut-down ones, the faceless ones serving without question the Rough Beast that began this story, and following them…in rusty, enormous, and horribly-heavy chains…came the lowing sheople! They knew not what they do, what they are doing, though we all saw how here and there young and solitary sheepersons would leap up and cry out, seeking to break the chains and become unique but not noticing the puppet-strings tied to their arms, their legs, their heads, and most of all, their hearts. These same-strings, cut off from their once-feeling hearts and shorn from the once-known connection between their hearts and the heavenly, now had been twisted tortuously around their hands and inescapably tied to their gripped guns as the guns now gripped their entire being! We shuddered as we saw these leaping, lurching sheople—now not just young ones but older ones, too!—realize their arms, doused in hate, soaked in having not been truly witnessed, had been set on fire! Anger burned them as their fire-arms were now moving with a singular intention beyond them. We paused, the entire procession stopped and turned in horror and aching compassion to witness the tragedy as once-magnificent story-bulls of such great courage and endurance suddenly became opaque, piercing, and unblinking bulls-eyed bullets targeting all that is, who is, most precious around them; and, with struck-blind and sacrificial ram-paging rage, shooting all that was most unique and noble, even in themselves!
As this story-soil became sorrowfully-moist with all our tears and our torn-open hearts, the Luciferian Beast and his servants cared not one whit, having not even noticed that all those once-loved people, those once heart-warming, wool-covered, humble manger-attending animals, were now being dragged lifeless amidst those clockwork orange-colored marching others who had no idea of what was happening to them except for the nameless panic that was coursing through their veins as a new-normal blood…
Stories, beyond the Rough Beast’s technique of selling lies as concrete truths, tell truth hidden in imagination unchained from the literal, and the soul-steeped-in-the-wisdom-of-stories is the only skeleton-key that unlocks that Beast’s locks. Stories made out of life and death experiences are known when the soul, initiated, learns that death is not final, and life is not infinite at the same time! The lock unlatches, the treasure chest’s ribs hinge open, and…about what we find there we must remain silent. There in that untold mystery, love knows and is known…
Or so I heard from Beauty who was whispering into my ear as she leaned in so close, I could feel her breath against my cheek although I turned and could find her not! We all saw her continuing nowhere near us and going towards the shaggy-bearded, wonderfully-wild storyteller up ahead!
The Storyteller, lowering his guitar-now-piping-soulflute in a way that made us all kneel, every last one of us, extended his hand and…Beauty placed hers in his, fingers embracing through the touch only registered in the love-infused soul, adequately prepared…and called.
And they smiled, the very same smile that overcomes and became The Storyteller’s entire face, becomes now Buddha’s face smiling; now Sophia’s consorting-smile; now Rumi’s smiling and whirling face; now Kwan Yin’s hearing, answering, and comforting smile; now Mary’s sorrowful, compassionate smile that sees all that’s happening and stays standing! He, she, they all intercede for us so that our suffering stories may be blessed and transfigured! His smile, her smile, their smile now become our smile, and the whole cosmos lights up with Love shining just like all these stars, and galaxies, and nebulae, and stardust and fairy dust, and dwarfs and quarks, and fireflies and hearts, shining in matter, in all that matters!
And this Smile is now piercing everything, this Laughter, heart-felt, is infusing everything! That terrible Beast of such roughnesss and those unconscious servants and that lust for power and that inhumanity and we sheople and we storytellers and we animals and fairies and gnomes and dwarfs and places and things and mysteries hidden everywhere: everything is revealing itself, themselves, and Love is burning away all the unreal, the false, the dead, the manipulated, the gripped and possessed and the controlling, the hating and insatiable, the evil and the happenings that are incomprehensible and beyond us, and what is left after such love-burning is done?
Lumps of coal. Lumps of those who were seen with the eyes that do not close but glow bright with Baba Yaga's flame-sight and did not survive such wrathful compassion, such full and complete witnessing, discerning, and loving! And then Vasilisa the Beautiful buried them in the watered, now-fertile ground and a rose bush silently but suddenly arose.
Everything else, everyone else, that, WHO, was still standing, not now smoted and sooted fossil-fuel remains, was so beautiful that no words can describe, no eyes could see, and no ears could hear how beautiful they all were!
She gave me permission to make a small bouquet of roses she handpicked from that blooming and ember-burning bush so that I could offer them from her to you, The Storyteller in all of us, eternally with us, always appearing at the right time which is always once upon a time! As I left, she ran out of her humble house once more, holding the most beautiful silk shirt, shimmering and technicolored like Joseph’s once scapegoat-stained dreamcoat, one she said she had kept, not consciously knowing why, in a closet her dear friend Clarissa had built for her, a shirt masterfully-sewn with such finely-spun-from-hay gold-thread, and offering it to me tenderly folded and held in a red silk ribbon and crowned with a happily-abundant and gloriously-pretty bow (just like that one the old peddler once gave to the little girl because it would look better in her hair than at the bottom of his burlap-bag!), saying that you deserved to have one just like the shirt she had made which had caught the Prince’s eye and which she knew was leading her to another, greater story of her life…and of ours!
Just then, I remembered the cake! I wanted to bring you and all of us a splendid storytelling cake, which is like a birthday cake because it is made of the life we’ve baked up, adorned with the frosted joy and delicious beauty we have experienced, and topped with waxen memories that light us up! And when we are before such a cake, like a birthday cake, when the candles of our vulnerable yet courageous conscious loving are ignited and burning, we quietly gather and compose our fervent and prayerful wishes for the future, and then transfigure these inflamed petitions with our holy and spirited breath, sending them out of the seen and into the invisible realm behind the scenes, into the theater wings of the imagination where they move as unnoticed angels towards those in need of witnessing, blessing, and affirmation!
Ah, but this whole cake ritual isn’t a casual act, for we must acknowledge the casualties in our lives and world! We must weep and grieve and let our compassionate, big-hearted, and full-throated keening sorrow flow through us, sing us—turning the thunderstruck, grief-stricken singeing into singing by such a soul-song sung into Flamenco-feeling depths at births, birthdays, and, with the knowing, initiated heart, even at death, whenever death and endings are present—over to new stages and new shores! Such a storytelling cake, which is brought with courage and love to beginnings and endings, requires us to face death, bake our faces and lives with the soul-leaven of the reality of death! As we face death, Death gives us our true, essential faces, the ones that rise, display, and see our lives through the eyes of the eternal, the ever-after, through Death’s infinite, tender, receptive eyes, for Death is always gloriously, radiantly peeking through our living moments. Death’s eyes, Life’s eyes, our eyes, the world’s many eyes, and the Divine’s eyes: do you see? These are all the very same eyes! These are all the eyes of the soul! And these, our storytelling, storylistening, and storyseeing eyes, these sensing and imagining and discerning and ever learning pupils paradoxically teach us, initiate us, into the embodied depths of the great mysteries and lessons of being!
Death’s eyes see us and our lives and then, when we blow out these candles and cut this life-made cake into pieces, we courageously play the part of Death, come to know and be acquainted with the reality and presence of Death from the inside (and in this actors’ method we rehearse this new knowing and being before the once threatening and feared actual hearse comes rolling up the driveway!), and voluntarily offer up, give away, let go our identifications with, and thereby make sacred (after all, “sacrifice” means to make sacred!) all that we have lived, all that is now being released by our ceremonial cake-cutting knife! But has all that we have lived, witnessed, made, and gone through merely ended? Why no, of course! We offer our stories and being and essence as these cut and shared pieces to all who are present, to all our friends, to all this family, so that we and they can taste, relish, delight, and more deeply know us, take us in, make us part of them! Isn’t that how we live on, how stories live on, how love conquers all, and how comfort, healing, and consolation are brought to bear on us when we are laid low, and our hearts are hurting and heavy? All that we have lived and release from our living identifications, including not only our joys but our mistakes, traumas, and sufferings, too, becomes soul blessed, forgiven, forgiving, peaceful, and harmonious. And then, and always, awe descends upon everyone…
So, as we were dearly in need of such a heartening cake as we experienced darker realities and celebrated love, friendship, and storytelling, I waved my magic-remembering hands, said a magic incantation that Merlin taught me from an untold birthday celebration he held for young Arthur long ago and always, and a tremendously tasty chocolate cake with cheesecake frosting appeared…creating another pause—a delightful one this time—in the partying parade of all these heart-friends because the just-baked smell and the sweet scent of cacao had tickled their noses’ fancy.
We all agreed then and there that we would take a suddenly conjured clown-car that was curiously parked with doors open and engine running right next to the rose bush and likely fueled by processed and liquified lumps of coal (because is it not by confronting darkness that we are ignited, started, and mobilized to greater consciousness?) to drive this spontaneous party over to your life’s doorstep. Everyone, everything, every place, every story got in and off we went, fireflies sitting on the tops of the not-yet-imagination-lit candles to keep up the excitement of the cake in the car but so as also not to start an actual fire since we were all crossing the threshold leaving all that stays ever-once Upon a Time and coming back to the passing of time and to the literal you!
But wouldn’t you know, dear Storyteller and dear reader, that on the way there, the car, heavy as it was with all this lightness of our ReJoyceing laughter, hit a very real pothole (though a gnome, grouchy because cramped with this mighty storytelling multitude of Storyteller-celebrants, and as a result of having his bulbous nose smushed up against the glass of the passenger-side window, claims that it was an actual pot with some stone-soup cooked up in it that somebody had accidentally on purpose left there!), the cake flew out of my hands (I thought I glimpsed it smiling at me, giving me a mischievous knowing wink, and swooping by eagle’s wings straight out of this sardine-can of a car!), splatted on the long and winding road where some beatles, casually crossing the street and having wearied from their loud-buzzing flight and their too-cumbersome wings and trying to somehow origami-fold said wings back under their corresponding carapaces, were heartily-doused in chocolate sumptuousness and cheesecake delight! I heard one cry out, “Is this heaven?!!!” And then another answer with a Kevin Costner-sounding voice, “No, it’s Iowa!” The rest just got lost in their sweet bug-eyed deliriousness…though there was a rather large, phosphorescent-green, eccentric one (who once flew into Jung's consulting room to make a point of synchronicity!) that just seemed, well…bugged!
Off in the distance, silhouetted by the Story-Setting Sun, walking towards me was a poor juggler heading towards Notre Dame and walking away from me was Old Joe’s carpenter, toolbox hoisted and held on his left shoulder, who stopped, turned, and waved goodbye, saying, “See you around George, I’ve got more bridges to build…”
So now, with no cake and standing alone in sudden solitude and much gratitude at this crossroad…all I have, especially during dark times, to give you…
…is this story!
-George Viney, Psy.D.
In Los Angeles, 9.3.19, approaching midnight when the veil becomes thin, during our dark times (and, most curiously, before the pandemic appeared!).
George Viney, Psy.D., MFT, is a Jungian/Archetypal therapist, magician, poet, writer, and storyteller in Los Angeles whose creative calling and endeavors are all reverently in service to the wedding of Eros and Psyche, Love and the Soul, within and without!