your eyes close at the heavy hand of fatigue caressing your brow. words become mountain creeks flowing through your ears, trickling into a deep nothingness, dark like rain-soaked earth. your breathing slows; your pulse becomes one with the steady chorus of insect lullabies on the outskirts of your consciousness. your eyes are able to see everything in this world and in every other world. you sink into the ground, swallowed back into Mother’s womb. your fingers let you taste the ephemeral as they twitch ever so slightly, rabbit noses brushing the slick, woven fabric of the wilderness’ dreams as you pass by, carried by voices as if you are a paper sailboat in the wind traveling down the curves of thought, winding like the body of a serpent, like your lover’s torso, like the stories in the lines on your feet. the songs you hear are breathed by guardians, by saviors: rare and sacred tales of the past, present, and future. they sing of existence and of not existing – of life, death, and the things that come before and after. although you can hear their words, it will be some time before they are understood. as the voices quiet, and you float deeper, farther, like a bright star embedded in the flesh of the night sky: a sea of inky blackness - memories launch themselves onto the movie screen before your weary, closed eyes and aching, yearning, hungry, open mind. how long each story plays is much up to you, although one can never tell which tales are drawn out longer by unseen forces, held like a note in a song, so that the meaning can be more fully absorbed within your heart.

those around you are forgotten, left behind, dissolved on the tongue of memory. you are alone on your nightly journey, even though you link hands with consciousness all the way, awaiting its soft but undeniably penetrating call, when it will ruffle your crown of woven-yarn train tracks -like sunbathed wheat sighing the breeze - and whisper, “good morning, Earth Child”, a message melding into the odyssey of sounds and silences already voyaging through your mind, yet so distinct that your eyelids flutter like wings at its brilliance.
“wake up, little one,” you will hear in a voice so gentle, it must be of dawn herself. “wake up. your journey has just begun.”