Each day after school, and on many off days, I walked to my father's shop and took a fresh loaf of light-brown clay from the back-room. My father uses clay to record accounting information but he always had enough to spare for my needs. After dinner, while the clay was still warm and moist and malleable, I cut a slice about the thickness of my wrist and then kneaded it with a marble roller until I fashioned it into a roughly rectangular tablet the thickness of half my pinky finger and the width and length of a man's face. Sweat rolled down my brow for it was hard work but it was a work of love. I then worked quickly with the stylus to etch my thoughts on the tablet before it hardens.

A thin tablet of clay loses its moisture and malleability much quicker than a thick loaf. That is why I only fashioned another thin tablet after I had finished etching my thoughts on the previous one. Most evenings three tablets sufficed but during rare times I could not find inspiration and I stared with futility at the clay loaf and all I could see was its monolithic lifelessness and inertness.

On other rare evenings I became a geyser erupting with inspiration and I could no longer see an inert loaf of clay in front of me but instead, I could only see it as infinite forms superimposed one on the other and forming its body, and I then cut a slice from its effervescent body and I inhaled deeply from its pungency and consummated our relationship.

I adore the pungent aroma of fresh clay. I have come to associate it with a work of passion in progress. But I also adore, with equal measure, the subtle aroma of clay tablets after they've been sun-baked into a permanent hardness. Each day, before I departed for school, I laid the previous night's tablets on a table in my room and let the sun's searing light, through my west-facing window bare and bright, bake my tablets and give my thoughts permanence. It was during that fateful night, when I let in the moon's milky-white through that same window, that the whispers emanated from within the recesses of the soul. But it is the sun's strong light that baked these eternal whispers onto my clay tablets.

I was born in the shadow of an old paradigm.
But I always could see the light.
I was born seeing new horizons,
As others have before me.
And like those others,
I am at best tolerated,
And at worst cast aside.
But I am defiant.
I stand on the shoulders of giants.

When I stepped out of the shadow,
I became intoxicated.
I felt shivers running up and down my being.
I felt a freedom that bows to no tradition.
And only serves the divine.
I realized I could heartily drink from this overflowing cup of Truth.
I realized I could break the chains that bind me.

Ever since I was a child I've listened to the whispers,
Those whispers reverberating within me.
And I've submitted to those whispers during timeless moments of
my life.
And I became a citizen of the Eternal Realm.

And during my forays in the Eternal Kingdom,
I saw a new age soon to dawn upon humanity.
It is the age prophesied so long ago by all religions.
It is the Age Of Aquarius.
It is the Age of Messiah.
It is the the Second Coming for those who believe there was a first.
It is the age I call the Third.

And I saw Jerusalem,
The shining city of Zion atop a hill.
But in the Eternal Kingdom it is not a city of brick and mortar,
It is a city of the spirit's yearning and of effervescent light.
And the whispers lingered within me.
And they proclaimed, with the final trumpeting of a ram's horn,
The coming Third Age,
When all of the Earth will become the city of Zion,
A Jerusalem spread from pole to pole,
And around the great circles of our world.

But before the Third Age can dawn,
Jerusalem, that shining city of Zion atop a hill,
must be gifted to the world,
So that no one nation shall exercise dominion over it,
Only humanity's shared Soul.

Before the messianic age dawns the third temple must be rebuilt,
But all of Jerusalem is that third temple,
And the rebuilding is its gifting to the world.
In the Eternal Kingdom it is not a temple of brick and mortar,
That is just its shadow on the cave's wall.
And once that rebuild comes to pass,
Then the Third Age will explode in all directions,
From out of Jerusalem, ground zero,
And it will ripple across the lands and the waters,
And it will reach every kingdom and every nation.
It will become sharded into our shared soul,
And the Third Age will then dawn.

I am roaming the emptiness of the desert.
The moon's rotund fullness hangs in the void of the heavens,
Mid-way to the unseen horizon in the East.
The moon threatens to plummet into the desert floor,
Yet it maintains its oversight above its dominion.

The dulcet tones of the moon's milky-white soothe me,
But it is not my body they charm,
They pierce the ramparts to an unfathomable chamber in the bedrock of my soul.
And I feel a joy not confined to the borders of my flesh.
It is a joy emanating from deep within me,
And yet it belongs to us all.
And then I ask: Why is it that the sun's strong light exposes my body,
Yet the moon's milky-white exposes my soul?

I am peeking between two almost kissing cliffs.
I still my mind and then I see the snail's pace of the moon,
As it peeks at me behind the West cliff on its mission across the sky.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the moon's sliver advances past the cliff's edge,
And widens until it once more appears in all its rotund glory,
As it falls to the other side.
When the moon's edge reaches the other cliff it hides again,
Until once more I only see its thin sliver,
And then it is beyond my sight.

When the moon reveals this subtle dance to mine own eyes,
I feel an intimacy with it that no book can offer,
No teacher can teach.

On this night, the crescent moon floods the recesses of my soul with its pale milky glow,
And a mystical silence envelops the desert's void.
On other nights, in other places, the silence would be dulled by a crying baby,
while her mother sings a lullaby,
Or in the desert by the plaintive shriek of an anonymous wind,
As it hurtles across the desert floor,
To lands beyond horizon's reach.
But on this night, the silence is absolute,
And it comforts me like a blanket during this milky desert night.

I had unsuccessfully danced with the paradoxes of Reality,
Its feet were not in lockstep with mine.
And yet I sensed they were a lesser peak in the shadow of the mountain peak above all.
I went into the forest in a state of Chaotic confusion.
It was a cold day, my wispy breath wafted in front of me.
It was a sunny day, the sun's explosive light,
Through the trees bare and bright,
Exposed my body, my soul was nigh.
I walked into the forest as far as possible,
And then completed the journey on the half-way out.
I emerged at the precipice above a sea,
Its shoreline on the other side of a narrow and meandering road.
Across the waters were the North Shore mountains.
They were snowy and rugged and hoary.
The sea was a blue-green marble sparkling by the sun's strong light.
I sat at the precipice.
In front of me my feet dangled above a void,
And behind me the Autumn leaves were dying.
I reflected on Reality's paradoxes,
On what they are truly telling me.
I stripped them of all prejudices and banalities.
I pealed away their artifices and artifacts.
I aimed to see them with a Zen state of mind,
deconstructed and bare.
How to describe a state of Zen consciousness?
Imagine looking at a painting depicting a beautiful sunset.
This painting evokes powerful emotions in you.
Emotions of serenity and your soul's longing for communion with divinity.
You ARE Zen consciousness when,
upon pondering this evocative painting,
All you can see is a coat of paint.
Zen deconstructs reality and returns you to the white-eyed womb of Creation.
Imagine descending the branches of a tall and sprawling tree,
From child to parent branch,
And then repeated like nested mirrors,
Until you reach the trunk.
You are now communing with the Source.
When you descend the Tree of Existence it is for the void,
The nothingness, the ineffable truth at the core of Existence,
That you are yearning.
And when I fell into the Zen within me I saw a grand tree.
But the world of space and time,
The implicate order imprinted by the paradoxical,
Was only one branch and not its totality.
On each branch I saw a myriad of wrestling angels - the denizens of its dream.
They perceived only the completeness of their own branch,
But not of the totality.
And then a denizen of a branch's dream soared high above the tree,
And saw its entirety.
How naive he was to think its home branch was the whole tree.
How myopic to only aspire to wrestle its home branch,
Instead of yearning to dance with the entire tree.
To this wrestler it slowly dawned, freed from prejudices and tethers,
First a release of tension due to paradox resolution and then,
like a shadow illuminated by the light,
The paradox lost its fight.
And then I snapped out of my reverie.
I witnessed a sunset with a beauty transcending sight's domain,
And which can only be parsed as the soul dancing with divinity,
Reverberating within its innermost grasp - Creation's womb.
The sky splintered into crimson shards that pierced the wispy clouds,
And then the sun's turgid red ball hung low for an Eternity,
Above the sea's furthest edge,
And then sank into the void beyond horizon's ledge.

I reminisced of a time long ago when I was only twenty years old.
I was studying English 101 at the University Of British Columbia in the summer of Eighty-Four.
It was at a summer session because I had failed English 101 two years before.
A failure due more to my citizenship in a different realm than to the failings of my intellect, aptitude or the magnanimity of my core.
“You have such a poignant and evocative writing style,” wrote my teacher on the short-story I had submitted the week before.
I had written about a lonely sojourn on a desolate beach in the pregnant moment,
When sunset injures day's abandon and grants night the freedom to roam.
I had written about the mighty North Shore mountains,
Hoary with age and reverberating with an energy ineffable to the mind,
But savored by the soul.
I remembered how exhausting of mind, but above all of the soul, writing that short-story had been.
I tried to reveal my spirit bare and exposed.
I tried to destroy the ramparts and blow open the heavy gates shielding my secretive core.
But through my exhausting efforts I had only succeeded in weakening the facade between me and the world,
Usually held at arm's length,
But through my story then, only slightly nearer yet still remote.
There is an essence within everyone hidden in a chamber far beneath the veneer that encrusts our core.
We seldom allow it expression beyond just its fractured shadows dancing on an external wall.
But if we all dig deep and reach into this secretive chamber,
We will, to our astonishment, discover we are all reaching into the same chamber,
Not a separate one for each within the all.
And then we will grasp each other's same-hand.
We all share the same soul.
I knew that in the novel of my compulsion I would have to expose this chamber,
Ramparts and heavy gates destroyed once and for all.
And my novel would then cry out from this collective chamber,
And speak for my left and for my right with one voice for all.
It would be the ineffable ground of being reaching out to humanity from the navel of Creation,
Proclaiming the dawn of a Third Age.
It would announce the sunset of the Second Age before this coming dawn.
A moment pregnant with change that will forever be remembered in the annals of the Civilization of Man.
It would herald a paradigm shift far greater than the Renaissance,
Not just an age of reason, but of reason and divinity intertwined as an inseparable whole.
I envision the Third Age to be promoting the two primordial dancers,
The abstract magical and the other its complementary whole.
To engage in the Dance and thence unshard into the Eternal Garden from whence we all came forth.
They are in Eternity entwined, but sharded into the realms of space and time.
They are shards of the divine.
Would composing such a novel be an arduous journey,
Exhausting my body and above all my core?
Would I be as a drowning man,
Gasping for breath,
Kicking and screaming while with futility grasping for shore?
But would every paragraph and page exhaust me,
Yet also leave me yearning for more?
It would I am sure.
This arduous compulsion will also uplift and invigorate me with waves of catharsis and frisson.
And I pray dearly for the same in my reader,
of soul-piercing joy.
If I fail to evoke the same in my audience then I would have failed to breach the ramparts and the gates shielding my innermost chamber,
Our collective soul.
Only within this innermost shared sanctum can I truly touch someone's soul.
And by touching one, I will be touching them all.