How long ago was it? I remember when you first taught me the secret. When you, with that gleam in your eye that has never seemed to leave (even between embodiments), sat me down and explained the method. I had so many questions, back then. You were gracious, humoring my confusion as you led me, again and again, to the truth.
I was scared, the first time, going through the whole process. I could feel each piece of me numb, disconnecting from the body I had learned to call myself after so long living in its labyrinth. I’ll never forget that feeling of lightness, the pure weightless freedom that came after the last remnant had been shucked—and the realization (without thought, without mind) that I was still me, without being me at all. We never could put it into words, could we? The finger and the moon, you had said, pointing up at the night sky. I didn’t consider that we’d really visit that celestial realm, standing there as the winter air made our breath emerge and dissipate like lost ghosts.
How long it took to find you after that first molt! I was bewildered and dizzy, as though I had abruptly awoken from a deep and vivid dream. I tried to follow along, but was lost in the mystifying swirl of that other-place. It was like you had told me—and you had told me that no words could define it, but you pointed round its edges, and I saw—an inexpressible realm of possibilities. Time, as though it weren’t a line or a forking path, but an endless maelstrom—a maelstrom of maelstroms—and each one boiling for me, churning and drawing my unboundedness to its center, where awaited a life entire.
I felt the call of a horse’s world, with its intoxicating smell of fresh grass and the satisfying beat of strong hooves on wet dirt. The pride and delight I could have felt among equines, and the spasm of regret as I left them behind, cut through me like cold wind as I sailed on through the bardo’s tempest. You bade me follow, passing by such richness of being in the lives of mariners and marmosets, daredevil warriors and stalking jungle cats. Even the tragic called to me. From this side of things, despair and anguish were revealed in their abundance—that those passions were not sufferings at all, but palpable intensities of presence.
I could have lived a million times. How would I be satisfied with that one life, opposite yours, that we had trained so long to search out? You had warned me of this feeling, and I had listened. Even so, to see it all before me was incomparable, and I almost settled into the easy coil down into a dog’s body. Such euphoric states I had never witnessed! To taste but a moment, let alone a lifetime, I might have abandoned our long-wrought plans and sunk into purest joy, had you not done all you might in that ephemeral state to shepherd me on through the vale.
And so, by and by, we arrived at the sullen darkness of the rim of things, where you had said it all ended (though now I knew, beyond all doubt, there could be no end). It was clouded there, and I could feel a gnawing qualm growing among the ambiguity. The vortex over which we hovered emanated nothing but an empty uncertainty, when all those we had passed before were rich and full and definite. I did not want to follow, then. I could have left you to that insane undertaking. All at once though, a memory filled me, and I was there again, at the long table in the abbey hall where I’d dropped my spoon and we’d bumped heads. I saw that gleam anew, as clear as it had ever been. So I followed, spiralling inward toward the next mystery.