A Strange Assignment
A whisper from the Unseen this morning: "We know it's weird, but you've been carefully designed for it."
This came to me during a daily Arabic recitation of The Prayer for Spiritual Elevation and Protection, a litany from Sufi saint Muhyiddin ibn al-Arabi. With it came a sort of, “You can do it, kid!” burst or infusion of courage and positivity.
What’s odd about my lifetime assignment (we all have one, I think), is that it’s my job to connect things that don’t usually come into contact with each other. Many writers and commentators stay in their self-assigned lanes, but my beat runs across lanes, back and forth: religion and humor, politics and mysticism, science fiction and sociology, world-consciousness and stuff from the higher planes; ecology, media, and viewpoints from the many cultural and generational states I’ve spent time with over the last 71 years.
Each has a bright, clear center where no doubt exists shading off into a more diffuse area where questions are possible. Kind of like a fried egg. But along the outer edge, there’s a place where worldviews and types of awareness can meet and mingle.
A psychic or psychologist or someone like that—heck, probably someone who was both—once told me, “You get overshadowed by archetypes.” Yes, I do. Like my protagonist, mysterious author Halycon Sage, I can enter and have entered many worlds and worldviews. There are obvious advantages to this, but one disadvantage is how it can make a person seem scattered or wishy-washy and, for people who can’t see the connections, just confused and pointless.
The job of my writing is to make these connections apparent, to dive deep into the yolks of the various eggs and then throw light upon their interactions. This can allow people who are grounded in one type of clear, honed, and developed consciousness to glimpse or encounter another that is equally valid but different.
This is the opposite of the usual dumb headbutting of, for instance ‘Red’ versus ‘Blue’ in current U.S. culture. If some of the stuff I write speaks to you powerfully and other parts seem weird and off-topic, there may still be something in those parts for you.
If any of this interests you, check out my Literary Sci-Fi Metafiction novels The Way Beyond: The Life and Times of Halycon Sage and The Book of Squidly Light; related collection Sage’s Multiverse Mini-Series; and deep-diving interfaith and intercultural explorations, all at The Sage Chronicles.
Finally: Gaza, Gaza, and again Gaza! It’s way past time for a ceasefire, an agreement, and a viable State of Palestine where the people control their own borders. Enormously difficult of course, but the alternative, what’s going on now, should be even more unthinkable. Peace Out.