Imhotep and the Mysterious White Dot; Sedona, Arizona, 1999 (Pt. 1)

When the psychic told me she would not allow me to record our session for legal reasons, I should’ve twigged that something wasn’t right. Put it up to over-credulity, perhaps – I’d like to think I’m a little wiser now, thirteen years later (I hope to God that I am, at least a little) – or perhaps to the willing suspension of disbelief that a certain kind of story requires, and sometimes, deserves. And I’d been in her chair before, once, one year previous, when I and my friends had found her while on our vacation; my first time in Sedona, Arizona, and her little house at the end of town with the glass globes arranged all about the garden outside and the big sign, says PSYCHIC, and something about it – maybe it was the glass globes – just appealed to me: the seeker in me, the sucker in me. It was on that first visit that she’d told me she could teach me to channel, but that the time wasn’t right, I should come back in a year. Okay, I thought. I don’t remember much else of the particulars of that first visit, other than the chair she’d put me into was an assemblage of copper tubes, having a pyramid on top, and she placed coins and amulets over my arms and wrists, told me that for health reasons I should drink my own urine, or, as an alternative (which I took her up on) allow myself to be shuttled over to her colleague’s office for the most expensive emergency massage I’ve ever had. (One of my two friends I’d come with, who also had a session with this woman, got exactly the same advice re: the necessary consumption of bodily waste. I don’t know how she resolved the issue. My other friend politely declined any services whatever.)*

So when I returned a year later, it was for the express purposes of learning how to channel. The psychic did not remember me. She did not tell me to drink my own urine. She put me into the chair with the pyramid on top and once again balanced coins and amulets onto my forearms so that I couldn’t move without them falling off me, and as before, I remember little of the actual session, other than it involved how I would be able to use sound as a healing technology (which still seems to me like a good idea), and in the end I was given some practical instruction in how to channel. It was a very different sort of reading from the one previous, in that there were no histrionics, no attempt to scare or upsell me, perhaps because the massage practitioner had by then moved on.

I won’t describe the specifics of the instruction, other than it involved a manner of meditation, and it was something that I was eager to start out on. The psychic told me that I should go to one of the several famed power spots in the area, most of which I was already familiar with, and spend some time trying the exercises. I decided to go into nearby Boynton Canyon, as that would involve a decent hike in, and offer some seclusion as well.

As an aside, it was year or two later, having dinner with a friend of my now ex-wife’s, a German woman, a no-bullshit character employed in a medical supervisory post, when she told us the story of how she had hiked this same canyon several years earlier, alone, just shortly after the construction of the high-end (and reputedly cursed) resort positioned just at its mouth. She’d come upon the splayed remains, some distance up a ridge, of a coyote that had, to all appearances, been ritually sacrificed, and she felt thereafter, for the remainder of her stay in the region, as if eyes were following her everywhere she went. In a nearby mountain town some forty miles away, the people she passed as she strolled along the street all seemed to watch her knowingly, aware that she’d found their secret. This was a woman not given to flights of imagination or paranoia, not normally. But then these were not normal circumstances, at least for her.

Now, for me, later, in the springtime of 1999, sitting on a rock at the terminus of the canyon trail revealed nothing in particular except a feeling, though it was not one I could easily describe. Later, with more work with the exercise, this feeling would resolve into something more specific and pronounced. I would feel myself being flooded by a peculiar intensity to the back of the inside of my head, the sensation of a presence of something very big, to which I attached the name IMHOTEP (like that, in caps), not knowing at first who this represented historically, or what, mythologically. That I would research and learn more about in time. But at first, I only had the name and the strange intensity of feeling – though in this initial attempt, I didn’t even have that much: only a vague sensation, a hopeful tingle, and also, I found, a vast and lasting anxiety that would carry me through the whole of the next week.

[To be continued.]

*Disclaimer: I am sometimes an idiot. If I have a functioning bullshit filter at all today, it’s because I have willingly subjected myself to egregious amounts of bullshit in the past. I will probably also do so in the future. In my defense, I think it’s maybe part and parcel of being open to the weird that one also accepts, at least for a time, the stupid. Also, holding a figure such as the above-described professional psychic up for scrutinous ridicule, or ridiculous scrutiny, is about as challenging as dynamiting barrels of carp. The point here is less that this woman would appear to be patently fraudulent, at least 85% so, but that I returned to see her again. I drove 1300 miles plus, not only for that reason, but also for that reason, perhaps on the basis of that remaining 15%. Also: this does not represent a baby + bathwater = everything tossed scenario as regards the veracity of psychic- and/or mediumship as a whole, in my opinion, as I have written in the past, in admiring terms, of professional p/m Anya Briggs, who is, I believe, among others of my direct experience, a truly gifted channel and someone whose integrity proves worthy of my trust. It is a complex issue in which the quality of information received and the character of the receiver can be very different and sometimes unrelated things; i.e. the information may be worthwhile and/or it may be garbage, depending on its invisible source; and/or, the person receiving may be a clown or a sincere human, or perhaps an entirely sincere clown, pretending to be human, receiving information that is real or spurious or combinations of both, etc. Etc.

[Etc.]

A Mist or Matter [Part 2, that is, as in, more, continued…]

The period of time in which I so often saw these falling stars, since it seems defined by their frequency, is maybe a thing worth thinking about. If I’ve learned anything in the keeping of these journals, and later on, these postings, it’s that of the majority of my “encounters” – if even such a word is the word applicable here, which it isn’t – the thing seen is important in the context into which it inserts itself; that these intersections of the supranormal (even if it were often only the idea of such) are like little color-flags stuck into the pages of my life’s book at points of interest, moments in which the plot turns, the main character becomes a little more seasoned, a little less bothersome, perhaps a bit more like someone you’d want to talk to.

From 2006 until 2009, or thereabouts, it was a time of redefinition and starting over, and starting over yet again. After a disastrous marriage and failed business venture, I needed to find a new career, or at least something with a living wage attached to it, and had no idea where to go. I’d had a career in design before all of that, but it had run out – just simply run out. Then I thought I’d found my stride afterwards in filmmaking, a childhood dream, but that dead-ended also. I’d left Seattle and lived for a short while on a sailboat in Redondo, CA, trying to think of how to start looking for a new life, where it occurred to me – rocking back and forth on the waves in the marina, waiting to hear back on the slew of resumés and demo reels that I’d driven twelve hundred miles to hand-deliver, now watching some absolutely uninteresting cooking show on a portable tv – that I could go back to school (yet again) and learn to cook professionally. It was a stupid idea. I had no background, demonstrable ability, not even any particular interest in cooking at all, and what’s more, every single punter in America seemed to have come up with exactly the same idea at the same time, although I didn’t understand that yet. But a year and a half later I still had no better idea, in fact no other idea at all, so I did it, and it was in the midst of this whole process of deciding and taking action that the stars, I noticed, started falling out of the sky. I moved to Rhinebeck, New York, where the stars also fell, usually as I drove home at night after classes, and once even a fireball went shooting lazily over the highway. While on my externship in Colorado, I saw a tongue of cartoon flame form and vanish in the air beside me, like Casper the Holy Ghost. This decision, more or less an arbitrary one, but one undertaken with the inanely maniacal, single-minded fervor of a robot, more for the sake of shaking things up and making some kind of desperately-needed change than for the knowledge or skill in itself (which I could almost not care about) seemed to fray the edges of the real, to pull all this fizzy marginalia out of the sky and make me think, and look, and think again, and look, if only to wonder what was going on, or if anything truly was.

Eventually, all that stuff stopped falling. I think it stopped falling. The sky has stopped falling; I’m only here now, and I have to ask, is this what happens when I step to the side, lose the path, turn orthogonally out from the constraints of a concessionary life and run counter to sense, even to my own nature? Could I make it happen for real if I were to go truly mad, and stop only playing at it? Would that help, and I am capable of such a step? Because it seems to me as if I need other magic now; that an act of will, if absurd enough, can rewrite the facts of the person, because it has to, just as it can shake out the more arbitrary facts of the sky, as if the stars were only people once, or were people now, or if they were only people.

A Mist or Matter of Sharply Dropping Stars

I would have written it off as fantasy entirely if it weren’t for two things. The first was that for every time I saw one, it seemed too much like silent but emphatic punctuation, the night sky’s underscoring to whatever thought or event of the moment, with its commentary to the effect of, “Yes, now pay attention,” or “It is so, but not quite as you think,” or some such gnomic assurance, rather like a cosmic Magic 8 Ball – but one that answers always in the affirmative, and only when it wants to. I look up into the darkness just in time to notice as a point of light at that moment drops straight down, and this happens again and again. I’m driving, I’m waiting in line, when I used to smoke I’d be outside smoking… It doesn’t shoot across the sky in a great arc, leaving a trail of vapor, as would any self-respecting meteor, but simply moves in a steady progression from point A to B, and always, from my perspective, directly down. Between the years of 2006 and 2008 or 09, it was happening a lot, or I noticed it a lot. And whenever I saw this, my mind would split and run off in opposing directions.

The myth- or mothmind, the one that has wings, would say that something somewhere has just given me a message, to clue in to what I was thinking or doing at the time; that it means something, that it’s telling me that something is right or significant. It’s a sign. The other mind, the one that’s made of ice and rocks, would tell me that I’ve just watched some ice or rocks fall through the atmosphere and get themselves changed by friction into gas, and really there’s nothing more to it than that. And then what’s more, it turns back onto the mothmind and in that admonishing tone makes a point of it: There is nothing more to it than that. As if speaking to a child.

I have internalized the entire debate.

The other reason I’ve not entirely acceded to the bullying tendencies of the rock-headed side is because the other possibility, the mothmind, has by happenstance or synchronicity found a kind of validation in an unlikely context. I’d been reading again, probably for the first time in well over a decade, Whitley Strieber’s Communion, which is full of the wonder and horror and uncertainty of some really rough treatment at the hands of some really strange people. What makes Communion an unlikely context is that, amidst all of this extreme circumstance, Whitley describes the smallest and most timorous thing: exactly the same phenomenon of looking up at the sky, and finding, as if by answer to his burning question, a single point of light drop straight down. The thing that he’d been asking for at that moment was some confirmation from his visitors that their interventions, which he’d only just become aware of, were real. Needless to say, he is sharply disappointed by this display as any sort of answer. He does not say – not in the text of the book – that he might have only seen a meteor; he tacitly accepts it for what its image suggests, which is an entirely unsatisfactory response, a lame answer to a difficult and important question. What happens in this moment for me as I read this, is that my story, my own myth, is now woven retroactively into the image-substance of Strieber’s in a way that it hadn’t been already. The mothmind takes wing, circles about the fire. It has been supplied with literary metaphor deeper than its own imagining, touching now upon an idea shared. This does not make it a literal fact or facet of visitor encounter, but it does make it something.

For Strieber, this sign was soon thereafter followed by a contact experience, in full consciousness, that was quite profound. No such thing has happened to me. Not even close. Instead, I was dogged by dropping stars for nearly three years, until, after some long time, I realized that I wasn’t seeing them any more. These came often over Whidbey Island, and just as frequently over Rhinebeck, NY – at opposite ends of the country, where I lived during the time.

One happened as I waited in the ferry line, having just come from Seattle and the first public screening of my film All My Love, late in 2006, in a small theater to about twenty people, two of whom walked out an hour into its 90 minutes (which I’m still convinced was because they’d wandered into the wrong theater – easy enough to do at this venue, and as frequently happens – and were too polite to leave any sooner). The audience, I believe – though I have never met them or known their identities, nor had the producer given me any warning that this would be the case – seemed to be made up in part by benefactors of the film, the controllers of family foundations and private donors, and judging from overheard comments, they may not have been convinced their support (or perhaps only the reasons offered, though not by me, for which their support had been solicited) was well-represented. Reactions among the small audience were mixed: my friends and colleagues liked it, while others left somewhat baffled. I went home with some profoundly ambivalent feelings, but I knew at least that I had done something. I’d put a lot of work into the film, and it was the best that I could make it at the time. Waiting in the ferry queue for the next boat, I looked up toward my destination across the water, and when I saw just then a pinprick spot of light descend from directly overhead, it seemed as if it were a silent acknowledgement, telling me that yes, something worthwhile had been accomplished, something toward the fulfillment of my purpose on earth; the work itself, yes, but moreover that it had been seen.

(More later.)

Aerial Light: The Lost American Highway Soul

I’ve done my share of driving. It used to be along a North/South axis between my home state of Washington and points in California, Nevada and Arizona. Finally in 2007 I broke through to the East/West axis in a significant way when I moved for a time to New York. I’d first started this driving thing a decade earlier, after living for most of a year in the west of England, where my colleague and friend Karolyn told me – my being an American – about her plan to someday come to America, to rent a car and drive it across the country. This was  how I finally came to understand something about the vast spaces that the US represents to someone in the relatively compact UK, the opportunities for emptiness and landscape unavailable in a country that can be traversed in a single day. Of course I’d read On The Road and Blue Highways. The concept of a long drive was not foreign to me; I’d even taken a few road trips myself. But it was clear that I’d never quite thought of it in the right way before, much less appreciated what was freely available to me in my own home country – a place which I’d up until then thought of as more of an international embarrassment than anything else. In America, there was space, an entire continent’s width of it, a baffling sense of scale which, if you let it, could reduce the single human ego to more or less exactly what it was: one tiny point of reference, a moving dot, a thing so easily lost sight of once the perspective is opened and the scenery, even if only partially, immersed into. The prospect of this can be absolutely terrifying, and not out of weakness or undo ego-attachment, but simply from being a vulnerable human animal. One becomes so entirely lost in it. One’s life and safety depend on the functioning of the machinery, on having enough gas in the tank.

At first I made a point of taking the small, forking roads, keeping as free from the interstate as possible. This was usually far more interesting, more varied and lively. But as these personal transits became over time more functional, and as gas prices crept higher, the journey came to be about less about the journey than the straightest line as shortest distance between points A and B. I’d come to appreciate the efficiency of the toll highways of the Midwest, with their arrangements of full-service rest stops at regular intervals designed to prevent unnecessary deviations or subjections to contingencies of velocity. A singular focus upon steady movement was, under these conditions, gained, and this was something that my soul had its hunger for, though no doubt much also had been traded out along the way.

It was along one of these toll highways, running, I believe, through Indiana – it seems to be in the nature of the thing that specifics of which state or which year or even which direction are lost – and I was either returning to Washington from New York, or I was going to New York from Colorado a year earlier. This would have put it in either July of 2009, or October of 2008, respectively. It was sometime after nightfall, though it wouldn’t have been terribly late – I tend not to drive late when  traveling over a course of several days like that. What I saw was just the briefest glimpse, but it was clear enough: there was a light – I couldn’t say how big or small, just a white ball of light – and it was less than a hundred feet off the ground, above the road, a short distance ahead. I only noticed it at all, as opposed to thinking it a streetlamp, because of the sudden movement as the thing shot off, running in parallel to the freeway, heading in the same direction as me – that is, away from me – and going very fast. There wasn’t any sound from it apart from the noise of the road, which I couldn’t hear for the stereo. A helicopter that close would’ve made a lot of noise, I’m sure. It didn’t accelerate, but was just in an instant going about as fast as a jet airplane might, and vanished in the distance as quickly as it had appeared.

Like so much else of this sort that I’ve seen, or think that I have seen, there was only the briefest, tiny glimpse, as if to tantalize – a desire frustrated – the suggestion of something that anyone could explain away without much effort. This convinces no one, not even me, but I have the sense that it isn’t supposed to; in fact, that it’s supposed exactly not to. Suggestion, impression, the reading into of an active and conscious projection is the level of engagement that seems to be asked of me, and certainty or conclusion are what I will (perhaps thankfully) never be given.

But because I’m a writer and I tell stories, and more specifically because as a writer who is shaping these fragments of my life into stories, and thereby changing the very structure of my life as I’m living it, the need for an ending requires, if not the certainty of conclusions, then at least a point at which to wrap things up, a bell to ring that signifies the end, which is this: that was my soul; I lost my soul, it got away from me; look: I lost my soul while driving; I lost my soul while driving so far up and down the interstates of America, and in such a hurry, and because I was so small, and now I have to get it back; I have to chase it down; I have to chase my soul down; I have to chase my soul back down in my imagination, because where else am I going to find it? And I have to find it there because there is where it is. Okay?

The Boy Has Maybe Got His Boundary Issues?

One year ago to the day as I write this is when the following took place. In and of itself – the original journal entry – it is a dry thing, expressed in a dry language, but what it points to is rich, verdant, confusing, a jungle in liminal twilight. What makes it into something worth telling is the context; otherwise it truly is just a nuts + bolts description, which is of little interest. Part of the wider context is an emotional recurrence of my state of one year ago. I don’t understand the significance of this yearly cycle – I mean, yes, of course, anniversaries are not an alien concept, but it seems important that I find myself returning emotionally to the conditions of that time, almost exactly and to the date, though circumstances now are different – exactly, or maybe just slightly different – still, they don’t seem to add up so that I can say this caused that and so I feel such-and-such about it. The emotive conditions are fundamental, and apparently cyclic, and the circumstances constellating around them appear almost as accidents. Or maybe I make them happen. Or maybe they don’t relate at all.

I’d set up an appointment that afternoon for a session at a later date by phone with Anya Briggs, a psychic whom I’d heard interviewed on Mike Clelland’s Hidden Experience podcast (and have subsequently heard on several others) and felt immediately drawn toward. Circumstances of my life at that time last summer had become again sufficiently confounding that a session of some sort with somebody had come to seem appropriate, and I’d been sitting on the fence for a while regarding her ­– mostly because I felt slightly intimidated about meeting someone I’d come to regard as whip-smart and walking some wild edge of the weird. The same things that drew me to her were what frightened me as well, but I’d wanted, apart from her intuitive consult, very much to understand something of the experiences she’d described of being unwillingly involved in covert operations, particularly the labyrinthine twists and counter-twists of mind control and psychic fragmentation, things which by their nature defy an objective viewpoint and stories so utterly bizarre on the face of them, but that she spoke of with the palpable sincerity of somebody in possession of a suitable compass by which to find her way and maintain her own equilibrium. The subject of military or covert human involvement in the UFO phenomenon was (and is) something that had opened in me some few years previous a wellspring of imaginative associations, dark, dizzying – and without making any particular claims for its veracity as literal fact (though I don’t doubt that it occurs as fact, whatever a ‘fact’ exactly is), it is the subject and incidental setting of the novel I’m currently writing – that is, currently re-writing from the draft I was working on at the time – The Anonymity of the Solid Ocean. I’d hoped to osmose, by association perhaps, some understanding, less of the particulars than of the difficult and complex emotional states involved, which for reasons I’ve never quite been able to put my finger to, I felt that I’d somehow and in some measure shared, in some way already knew.

So having at last found the guts to approach her (I’m such a chickenshit at heart when it comes to interpersonal stuff, however willing I am to stand at the edge of the Abyss when it comes to my safety and sanity), there was kind of a lot roiling around in my own intra-psychic headspace in anticipation of our phone conversation, scheduled for some days later. When, that evening after dark, I stood out on my back deck which overlooks the water and saw some blinking lights approach from the north, from the direction of the naval air base some twenty miles off, it didn’t at first strike me as anything so unusual – just a jet airplane with some running lights, albeit running lights in an unusual configuration, starting at the nose of the craft and flashing in sequence out, symmetrically, along the length of the wings, first center, then tip; nose, center-wing, tip, etc. A little unusual, it caught my eye. Then I realized that it was not nearly so far away, nor as high in the sky as it seemed – I’d judged it higher, assuming it to be larger and further away, when in fact it was perhaps less than three miles off when I’d first noticed it, and now seemed to be coming, from an altitude less than a thousand feet, directly at me. Again, this is not in itself so unusual, as the house where I live is along the flight path of a practice landing strip used by jet fighter pilots in training, and they will typically fly over my house at a few hundred feet – one crucial difference being that these aircraft make so much noise as to entirely pulverize a human nervous system, whereas this thing – as it approached, its boxy, nose-forward cockpit stood out sharply in vivid red, interior light, defying my astigmatic-blurred distance vision with its sharp clarity – this craft was completely silent. It flew low and slowly, and it didn’t make a sound, and as it passed directly overhead, it revealed a dark, triangle shape with no surface detail visible to it at all. The only sound was of a small, single-engine aircraft passing nearby in the transverse direction, not visible, but by its engine noise moving from east to west, while the triangle went north to south, although both sounds converged directly over my head (which struck me as curious, and still does).

I did not at the time think that I’d seen anything all that exotic, or beyond human origin. What this struck me as was something military, only that it was a little in advance of anything I’d ever seen before. It’s overall size and what I could see of its shape suggested a B2 stealth bomber, except that I have seen those up close and in the air, and while relatively quiet, they make real noise. This thing, to characterize it, to give it a sense of intention – and I am perfectly aware that these are connections that I am making, that may exist no further than my own skull-space – seemed to make a point of the fact that it was silent. It also seemed to want to cast doubt in my mind, using the small-aircraft engine sound (coming from another direction) to confuse the issue of its silence. But most of all what I thought, what I imagined, was that this aerial somebody was telling me they had noticed now and their eye on me. This seemed like something straight out of Anya’s story, not mine.

Rhinebeck, NY – Late Autumn, 2007

Returning from an evening’s course of class sessions, early in my studies at the Culinary Institute in upstate New York, I was driving my old Mazda truck, heading north along Route 9, which follows the Hudson River, from Hyde Park to my tiny home, a detached mother-in-law apartment in a converted house’s backyard in Rhinebeck. It was a new and transitional time in my life: I’d just some few months earlier driven this same (and something less than reliable) truck across country from Washington State and made a radical break from anything I’d ever tried before. I didn’t know if food school was a good idea, just that it was the only idea I had that was halfway coherent, and I badly needed to shake things up personally and professionally, to get out of a deep, deep rut.

The night was dark; it was sometime between 9 and 10 p.m. and either late in the autumn of 2007 or early that winter, and the road along that ten mile stretch was almost entirely unlit. Some few miles south from Rhinebeck still, I looked up to see a ball of fire arching across the highway directly overhead, heading West towards the river. It wasn’t especially high up – maybe three hundred, perhaps as far as six hundred feet above – and as I passed underneath it, I could vividly see the twinning trails of orange flame that ribboned from either side of the object and the lingering suggestion of smoke left behind it in the near-to-black sky. It seemed to have, or at least to show, no structure, no form besides that of an amorphous ball of flame. It didn’t look at all like an airplane, or any recognizable shape whatever. I had the feeling it could have been a chunk of rock, like a meteor, though I suspect it was moving too slowly for something that had fallen from outside the atmosphere; its pace through the low sky seemed almost leisurely.

The next day at school, while on break in the smoking area, I told a classmate about what I’d seen. She listened without comment, not seeming to have any response to this one way or another, but I noticed after I’d told the story that two other people standing nearby, other students whom I didn’t know, had overheard what I’d said and were looking at me with curiously intent expressions. Later on that same day I told another classmate about what happened – a woman closer to my own age than most of the other students and a longtime resident of that exact area where this had happened. “The Aerodrome is right there,” she said matter-of-factly. “You never know what you might see.” This was true enough – the Rhinebeck Aerodrome was close by. It could have been some kind of practice stunt. But for as clearly as I’d seen it, there was no aircraft there at all.

Also – and this may be more, or maybe less, to the point, as it was ultimately one of the reasons that I chose to move to that area in the first place – the specific location of my sighting is just to the other side of the Hudson from the point on the map labeled Accord, the nearest town to where Whitley Strieber had his infamous cabin in the woods, and the locus of his Communion experiences.

Knowing the Alien as Myself, Part 2

[As has been the case with other postings, yet is more specifically in evidence here, the following was originally written one year ago, in this case one year and one month, and is particularly bittersweet to read over now – less for its particular content than for the moment at which it was written. I had then just moved to a small Island in the San Juan chain of Washington State, not far from my usual locus of Whidbey, but remote enough that for the new job I’d just taken, the relocation was necessary. It seemed like a new and hopeful start. Within a week of writing this however, and for no good reason that I could see, I’d lost the job and had to pick up and move again. It meant breaking my lease and loosing a lot of money, and pissing off the owners, whom up till then I’d really liked. I’d risked a lot to do this thing and lost pretty much everything, and not for the first time. I’d kind of, after that, really just had it.]

Yesterday [i.e., a year and a month ago yesterday] more or less out of idle curiosity I looked at a website of recent crop circles in England, and found there an arrangement in barley near Avebury from the 28th of May of this year [i.e., 2011]. It’s a linear progression, containing an element similar to the crop circle-inspired design that I’ve drawn and had tattooed onto my right inner forearm. Central to the crop formation is what looks like a mirrored graphic much the same as the “beehive” signs posted all throughout Utah, the Beehive State*. Now, I can look at this and find a message that is very personal, if I want to, because at the time of its creation, I had recently moved back to Washington from Utah, where I had spent my second winter season (beehive twice), and was only days away from moving to my new, current location, a transition that was much on my mind, in part because it likely precludes my return to Utah for a third, consecutive season, and I’m rather sorry that this is the case.**

This is a connection that I am making between myself, my circumstances, and a phenomenon of ambiguous origins. The circles can be denied as man-made, as meaningless and myself as narcissistic and fantasy-prone. Or then again, the phenomenon could be something genuinely inexplicable. Taken to another level, it may contain a message that is specifically directed at me. At the same time, it may contain messages, both personal and transpersonal, directed simultaneously toward any number of people, myself among them, and it could be reaching them in a degree as or more profound as it has seemed to speak to me. If the circles were a dream image, my process of association would be the sort of amplification encouraged by psychoanalysis. So I think it is perfectly valid to approach such symbols, whatever their literal origins, and their interpretation as such, balancing their non-literalness against the imaginable spectrum of possible origins and meanings; that is, to reject no possibility out of hand, but neither to wholly accept any single possibility without a compelling reason to do so.

In a similar regard, I’d some years ago followed a course of guided meditations posted as a series of podcasts on Whitley and Anne Strieber’s website Unknowncountry.com. The meditations were intended to provoke a state of mind that could invite contact with visitors (or whatever they are) and while following this course myself, I found that I was imagining a large, metallic sphere, cold and vast, that was both incredibly intelligent and seemed entirely other than me, with which I was in some kind of communication. I made regular, if brief connection to this image in my subsequent meditations until, finally, it no longer seemed to be there. Sure, I could still imagine a ball of metal, but something was lost, the spontaneity of it was gone; the living presence of the thing had seemed to have left me. Within weeks of this change, and again with the Strieber’s website and associated podcast as the source of information, I heard a news report of Linda Howe’s regarding a police officer in some Midwestern state who had spotted a gigantic sphere in the sky, having a surface the same as my image, like dull, matted aluminum. The shape had left my imaginal space*** and become something objective, and in so doing, it had relayed a very subtle communication. Not only had it manifested in a physical way and been sighted, but that sighting had been reported to an investigator to whom I had a personal connection (I’d met her once at a conference), and she’d broadcast this to a wide audience. Many people could conceivably have received a similar message, which to each of them could have a very private significance, as it did for me, and all the entity in question had to do was show up, in effect to say, “I’m here.” That “simple” act, of being first inside and then outside of somebody’s mind, has reverberations that reach deep into one’s being. For me, it served as the inspiration for my last novel, New People of the Flat Earth, and was the touchstone for a creative work, nearly 190,000 words long, the process of its writing and subsequent rewriting taking exactly four years. The event had triggered something in me, and through trying to express the nature of this communication, with something so other but at the same time deep within myself, both as image and as touchstone to the imagination, it had sprung me into a major and sustained effort, which I only hope to God will someday see publication (Hello? Like, nudge?).

*The beehive symbol emblematic to Mormonism and pretty flatly just straight-up appropriated from Freemasonry.

**As it turned out, that was not the case.

***And so here I’m just going for it and won’t, for the sake of argument, bother with all the other possibilities, despite all my just-previous intellectualization regarding relative meaning and non-literalizing. This is the one in this case that lit up all over the place and made my head, like, sing, okay?