glowing golden-white

This morning, I had a dream within a dream. In the first dream, I was meditating within a massively small white space, my seven spinal chakras showing. They had black rims that contained their appropriate colors and Sanskrit symbols. A potent and well-defined figure hovered in the aether above my head, his gaze mellow, wide-reaching, and fixed elsewhere. As I focused more clearly on this figure, I saw he was wearing dark blue clothing (made of a shiny substance similar to leather) and a wide-brimmed hat.

Sensing perhaps my attention, he looked at me; I shrunk from the strength of his piercing eyes. His presence and power brought fear welling up inside me, whereupon I awoke from that deeper dream into a different one.

Sitting with me atop a unknowably large blanket of clouds under an azure sky, on my left-hand side, was a woman glowing golden-white. My fear of the previous visitor instantly vanished. I felt comfortable and at ease in the woman’s presence, as if she were my mother. At her 10th chakra pulsed a burning heart of pure gold from which slender, halcyon tendrils of loving energy flowed. Although I was enveloped within it, the bulk of her vast and immutable power was not fully directed at me, most of it flowing outward into the howling white non-space behind her.


She spoke to me, saying this about the hovering figure: “He is the devil.” My remaining sense-memory of him from the previous dream changed, his clothes turning red, his face becoming bearded and twisted into an angry rictus. He suddenly bore down upon me from on high, at which point I started to defend him, telling the glowing woman that he was not the devil but something else, a powerful figment perhaps. The landscape began to move quickly, a great rush of movement that overwhelmed my ability to keep track of my sense of self in space and time.

Whereupon I returned to the waking world of human consciousness.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑

Liberty shines anew

Under the vigilant eye of the country's leading metallurgic and molecular chemists, and funded primarily by generous financial contributions from average Grigovian citizens, a small army of technicians has started to apply layers of non-toxic chemicals to the exterior of Liberty Enlightening the World. The American government had sold her to Grigovia after de-funding its Park ​Service, and since then the statue has been carefully resurrected on Free Spit (formerly Mad Spit, for the insane asylum once located there), an island that rises from the Yalung River in the heart of cosmopolitan Grig. “All we need now is a good hard rain,” said Dr. Fiyennd Gharszt, who designed the witch's brew being applied to Liberty's copper panels. Once activated by water, the chemicals will turn her golden once more, a flashing shining goddess for all the world to see. “The water-activated compounds bind to any piece of oxidized copper, loosening it from the substrate at the molecular level and allowing it to run down the supple folds of our lady's flowing robes, where it will collect in catchment basins at her feet,” said Eleinna Hyourst-Rahdt, a former molecular biologist and current volunteer who manages a portion of the donated funds. While it is inevitable that some of the runoff will enter the sparkling Yalung River, Dr. Gharszt was adamant that it posed a threat to neither flora nor fauna and that it would in no way negatively impact farms or wildlife downstream. “We have been testing these compounds for months,” he said, “and in every scenario, the bits of oxidized copper separated from the molecules to which they were bound shortly after the bonding took place, whereupon they settled to the ground and were absorbed into the sediment without a noticeable impact on river grass or fishes. As it meanders through the moraine field north of Grig the Yalung naturally picks up its of tin, gold, and copper; our meager contribution will hardly matter.” Renovations to Liberty Enlightening the World are scheduled to be completed in time for the second the Glorious Republic of Grigovia's yearly independence ceremonies, on November 20th, during which it commemorates its self-liberation from Persian rule in 250 B.C.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥