CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ARTIST ARRESTED

Root Chakra

CHAPTER NINE:  THE BLACK HOLE

   Peter liked meditating early in the morning when other people in his family were still asleep or just beginning to stir. In addition to feeling the security of having his family nearby, unbiased in their sleep by the beliefs that they had established about him, his dreams were still fresh, and he was not in danger of falling asleep. Often he would lie still for over an hour before he got out of bed.
   As he meditated, he intuited that the minds of many people were focused on the black cross. Some, of course, were giving up their sin and regret and suffering, but Peter also sensed others who were supporting the cross with their emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. Jesus was not the only one taking in negative feelings and thoughts in order to cleanse humanity. Many other people and spiritual entities were helping. Suddenly Peter had the feeling that he could help too. He wasn’t sure how, but he began to focus his energy in such as way as to take some of the blackness into himself, as if he were part of a large effort to cleanse the excess dark energy from the world.
   Just as he was filling himself with light to cleanse the blackness from his soul, he heard some commotion in the courtyard. He peeked out the bedroom window and saw the police dragging away the artist who lived in a second story apartment across the way. They were pushing him and nudging him with rifle butts. Once Peter had shown the artist some of his own work, and the artist had been full of praise and encouragement. Then the artist had shown Peter a work in progress: on a huge canvas one person in thirty different poses in three rows on a bright red background. Though the poses were not contorted, when Peter stepped away from the painting, the figures appeared to be writhing in torment, possibly due to the red background.
   The police also brought out the artist’s nine-year-old son, who watched his father get into the police car. The artist just sat in the police car looking straight ahead.
   "Hey, what are you doing?" Peter yelled through the window. People from all over the complex were gathering in the complex, but nobody responded, so Peter ran outside in his pajamas. He found Cashing in the crowd.
   "Apparently they believe your artist friend robbed a 7-11 last night. Looks like people around here are really starting to get desperate," Cashing said.
   "What will they do with his son?" Peter asked.
   "They’ll probably take him to his mother, if they can find her. I’ve heard that she’s a drug addict who just got out of jail. If they can’t find her, the boy will probably just go into foster care."
   They watched silently as the police escorted the boy to another police car.
   "Can we do anything?" Peter asked as the police drove away.
   "I don’t think our meditations can help him much," Cashing mumbled, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder. "I wish there was something we could do.  I just finished an article on Archangels, which probably won't do any good anyway. Maybe you'd like to read it?"
   "I want to deal with this. Can’t we bail him out, or something?" Peter said loudly.
   "No one here has that kind of money."
   "What if everyone here gave a little money to bail him out?" Peter was no longer just talking to Cashing, but to what was left of the crowd.
   People just started walking away, shaking their heads and mumbling.
   Peter followed Cashing into his apartment. "You don’t believe that we’re doing any good?" Peter asked.
   "A famous man once said that the more you know, the more you want to crawl into a black hole and die, or something like that. I like your ideas. Really I do. I think they’re very beautiful. Maybe some ideas are just too beautiful for this world."
   Peter stared at the floor.
   "Look, I found out something else, and you’re not going to like it," Cashing said. "Our friend the landlord owns the place where we meditated the other day. He bought it a year ago from an old lady who doesn’t have any family in the area. Apparently he wants to build a subdivision on that land, an upscale housing project with a golf course."
   "Oh, no, how can that be? You’ve got to be kidding. This is too much of a freaking coincidence!"
   'Too much of a coincidence? I thought so too, so I checked it out to make sure. I told you this guy practically owns this town. I’m not kidding you."
   "Can’t we do something to stop it?" Peter asked.
   "How do you think I ended up in this hole in the first place?" Cashing blurted out. "By fighting people like him--that’s how. The next stop after this is the street, my friend. Hell, he’s probably already planning to evict me. How many fronts do you think I can fight on, anyway?"
   "I just think that we shouldn’t give up so easily. There’s got to be something we can do," Peter mumbled.
   "Like what? This might sound cliched, my friend, but money talks and losers walk. He can buy off the archeologist who surveys the land for Native American artifacts. He can buy off the county planning commission and the board of supervisors. He can even buy off the judges who preside over the lawsuits. I’ve seen it happen before, more than once. Just the promise of financial support is enough to buy the loyalty of the people who make the decisions around here."
   "Okay, okay, but I’m not going to crawl in some black hole and die," Peter blurted out. "I still think we can do something."
   Peter slammed the door and ran home.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE ANCIENT VILLAGE

Pounding Stone After a Rain

CHAPTER EIGHT: 

THE VILLAGE IN THE WOODS

   Peter went to his room and closed the door. Fortunately his parents were running errands, and his brother was watching TV. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind. He was drifting, thoughtless, in the void when suddenly he felt a familiar touch on his face, a cross between a scratch and a tickle. Peter envisioned a ridge near Sycamore Creek where he had once found a pestle in a mortar. On that ridge a low rock formed a rough semicircle where the tribe, Peter imagined, had held rituals. Suddenly, a dirt-covered Indian with long, shaggy black hair that hid both face and chest stepped into the semi-circle. The Indian, who carried a spear, wore only a loin cloth, but Peter could not tell if the Indian was a man or a woman.
   Peter was afraid for a moment, but the Indian seemed to be ignoring him.
   "Are you my guide?" Peter mentally asked.
   The Indian stood motionless and silent for what seemed like a long time, then placed the spear on the ground, pointing toward the semi-circle of stone, which suddenly resembled horns.
   Peter opened his eyes, overwhelmed by the urge to go back to Sycamore Creek. He closed his eyes again, trying to meditate some more, but he soon fell asleep.
   When he woke up, he noticed that over an hour had passed since he had started meditating. He headed over to Cashing’s apartment to see if the meeting was over.  Cashing was just putting the final touches on a strange, dream-like story.
   "What’s that you’re working on?" Peter asked after Cashing opened the door..
   “Would you like to take a look?"
    Peter read it quickly.  “That’s pretty cool!" Peter exclaimed.
    “Would you like to read the rest? Click on this link if you’d like to read more,” Cashing responded encouragingly.
    “I’d like to, but I really came over for another reason. How did the meeting go?" 
   "This is a tough issue. There’s not a lot we can do legally. On a political level, we might stage a press conference and boycott the businesses owned by our landlord. He is a very rich man, by the way, who owns a lot of businesses here in town. There’s no reason for him to be hurting people like this."
   "Hey, you know what? When I was meditating, a spirit guide told me to go to a special place in the woods. We could meditate there, and maybe you might think of a solution to this problem. What do you think?"
   "So you have a spirit guide. I might have known. You want to go now?"
   "Sure, why not? My parents won’t miss me for awhile, at least not till it gets dark."
   "I don't want to piss off your parents again, but, on the other hand, I don’t have anything planned for today. You’re sure your parents won’t mind?"
   "They know you’re okay. Besides, they won’t even realize I’m gone. They’re out running around doing errands. Sometimes they run errands all day long."
   Cashing’s old Corolla struggled up the steep inclines, threatening to overheat, but soon they found a place to park next to an unchained gate.
   "My, my, talk about coincidence. I used to wander around on this property all the time, twenty years ago. I can probably even tell you where you’re planning to take me. Coincidence just seems to be all too common for us."
   "I’ll follow you, then, at least until you start to get us lost," Peter laughed.
   As they hiked down the trail, Justin waxed philosophical, "On one level, the modern 'magician' is a kind of shaman who not only uses symbols and archetypes to connect with invisible subtle energies, but also strives to connect with the subtle energies of visible living creatures, which requires deep cleansing of the subconscious, great empathy, and a kind of rebirth of the self. In other words, the modern shaman is reborn into kinship, relying on the ego as a survival tool but seeing beyond, through sympathetic imagination, to the deep connection he or she has with all living things, and seeing beyond also to the possibilities of indeterminacy and otherness. The shaman strives to know the element of Earth as much as any other element, to know living plants and animals as well as invisible spirits. After all, the ability to know one goes hand in hand with the ability to know the other because sympathy is required for both. The modern shaman thrives on the adventures of otherness and the creative indeterminacy of Being, which is the mercy of eternity."
   Peter just nodded his head.
   Cashing was profoundly curious but didn’t ask any questions. He wanted to see whether or not Peter had a different idea about where they should go. He led Peter down a crumbling oiled road littered by shotgun shells, dried cow patties, and buckeye seeds. Grass and milkweed were growing in the cracks created by run-off from the slopes. Finally they reached a ridge where they could hear a creek in the distance. An old trail ran parallel to the road for a few feet and then curved down toward the creek. Cashing paused.
   "So you do know this place," Peter said.
   "I know it well. Which way do you want to go?"
   "Let’s head out to the ridge," Peter pointed north.
   They crossed the faint trail, stepped over a fallen gray pine, and soon found themselves on a pounding stone overlooking the creek.
   "Notice anything?" Cashing asked.
   "You mean the house pits?" Peter pointed to five circular indentations in the ground near the pounding stone.
   "Precisely. At first I thought cattle had worn those holes in the ground, but then, after I explored the area carefully, I realized that people must have made them."
   "Do you want to follow that trail down to the creek?" Peter pointed back toward the road.
   Cashing, amazed by Peter’s knowledge of the area, was tempted to tell him about an experience that had occurred years before. Cashing had first approached the area by hiking east along the creek. As he was hiking, the sun was going down and the air was cooling off, the creek gurgling and crickets scraping out a pleasant song. Cashing had suddenly experienced the sensation that he had been there before and then felt very powerful feelings of jealousy and rage that did not belong to him. He then knew that he would find something if he kept walking on the stones next to the creek. Soon he came upon a pounding stone right next to the water. He sat down and closed his eyes. He was suddenly sure that he would find a trail not far from the pounding stone. He scrambled up the slope under the low branches of an ancient oak tree and immediately found the trail, which led to where he and Peter were now standing. Cashing, who had contemplated reincarnation as a possible explanation while hiking along the trail those many years ago, had somehow known that he would find a pounding stone on a ridge, even though he had never been there before.
   Cashing began hiking down the trail. Peter followed silently behind him. Soon they were sitting on the pounding stone next to the creek. 
   "So, is this where you want to meditate?" Cashing asked.
   "This is not where my spirit guide told me to go," Peter replied. "We need to cross the creek. It’s just up there," Peter pointed to the top of the hill on the other side of the creek.
   The water was high, the rocks were unstable, but they both managed to ford the creek without getting wet. As they were scrambling up the slope, Cashing again had the sense that he had been there before. As they reached the top, Cashing stepped on a pounding stone that was almost completely covered by dirt.
   "It’s over there," Peter blurted out.
   They found the rough semicircle of stone and sat down.
   "For some reason, I feel mighty strange. This must be the place," Cashing smiled.
   "Yeah, this is it," Peter said. "Let’s just meditate for a while and see what happens. I don’t feel like thinking about that landlord right now."
   Cashing found himself sucked very quickly into the meditative state, because, it seemed, he and Peter had suddenly tuned in to the same mental frequency. After awhile, Cashing envisioned himself before a fire in the semicircle of stone. Faces of elders flickered and glowed in the firelight. Suddenly he sensed that Peter was beside him in the vision, but Peter had a different face, not just because the firelight was flickering. They were both Native Americans, but Peter was older, a young man, not a teenager. Cashing then realized that in his vision he was looking at Peter through the eyes of a woman.
   Startled, Cashing opened his eyes. Peter opened his eyes at the same time and turned to Cashing.
   "I just saw something strange," Peter exclaimed.
   "So did I," Cashing replied. "You go first."
   "I saw both of us sitting around a fire," Peter said, "but you were a woman."
   "Don’t tell me," Cashing said. "We were both Native Americans?"
   "Yes," Peter said, "and we were both right here."
   "I think we should keep trying, and this time don’t stop even if you see something really weird," Peter suggested.
   "All right, this is just another one of those things that I'm not going to be able to explain. Let’s do it," Cashing agreed.
   Again Cashing found himself very quickly in the meditative state, but for what seemed like a long time, he sat with his mind in the void, trying to keep from thinking. Then suddenly he saw the hill at sunrise. He imagined stumbling down to the creek as soldiers were sneaking up on the village from the other side of the hill. Suddenly he heard gunfire. Men, women, and children were being shot down as they dashed around the hill. Suddenly a man stepped out of his hut with a bow and arrow. He sent an arrow straight into the chest of a soldier. Just as he was aiming another arrow, a cowboy who had joined the massacre shot the Native American in the back. Then the cowboy turned around. Cashing recognized the dead Native American as Peter.
   Cashing couldn’t continue meditating. He opened his eyes again. Peter was breathing quietly, his eyes already open.
   "I think I was killed during some kind of massacre," Peter murmured.
   "And I think the person who killed you was our friend the landlord--who must have been a rancher in his past life," Cashing blurted out.

CHAPTER SIX: CASHING'S PAST

Ancient Trail in Inundation Zone of Proposed Dam

CHAPTER SEVEN: ACTIVIST AND TEACHER

    As soon as Peter stepped through the door, he discovered his mother talking on the phone.
   "Uh-oh," he thought as he rushed to his room.
   "Peter," she called, "I want to talk to you." She opened his door and peered in.
   "Yeah?"
   "I just got a call from our minister. He said that you were there with that man--that man I told you not to talk to anymore."
   "What? I’m not allowed to pray anymore?"
   She stepped into his room. "That’s not the point, and you know it. I told you not to talk to that man, and the first thing you do is go talk to him. Is he some kind of religious fanatic, or something? Is that why you like him?"
   "I like him because he’s helping me to develop spiritually, mentally and emotionally, if that’s what you mean," Peter retorted.
   "Look, I know that you’re more spiritually inclined than most of us. I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions, but you have to be so careful these days. I would be happy to invite him over for dinner. Would you like that?"
   Peter suddenly imagined how his father and brother might act at dinner. "No," he whispered.
   As though understanding Peter’s thoughts, she asked, "Then what can I do? How do I know that I can trust him?"
   "We’re just trying to think of different ways to help people. Can’t you at least trust me?" Peter asked.
   "Oh, all right. I just want you to tell me if anything strange happens. I want to know more about him. I’m only watching out for you, you know."
   "Yeah, I know. Thanks, Mom."
   Peter ran straight to Cashing’s apartment after pulling his pack of Tarot cards out of the garbage can. He decided to keep the pack with him wherever he went.    When Peter got to Cashing’s apartment, he blurted out, "That minister actually called my Mom. Can you believe that?"
   "Here’s to the few who don’t care what you do!" Cashing laughed, raising a glass. Cashing had just put the finishing touches on the illustrations for a children's story he had written:

THE GREAT FAIRY PRINCESS

Swallowtail Fairy

While Mommy was making dinner

for the fairies--honey dew and nectar

and cotton candy spider webs--

Daddy made a spell to help Claire 

sprout her fairy wings.  Then Claire

stepped into the garden, calling all

the fairy folk to dinner, and one

in the guise of a swallowtail

flitted near red and yellow roses,

but then it flew away, laughing.

"Come back and play with me!" 

Claire demanded, but it kept 

flitting here and there, deeper 

and deeper into the forest.

Gnome with Tiger Lilies

Mommy had warned her not to follow 

the path into the woods, but Claire wanted so

to be with her fairy friends that she galloped 

down the path after the swallowtail fairy.

Suddenly a little man with a funny hat 

appeared on the trunk of a fallen tree. 

"Your mommy told you not to go this far. 

Watch out for the bad fairies!" he sighed.

The Bad Fairy

Soon the bad fairies came, and one of them 

waved a wand over Claire's head. Suddenly 

she lifted off the ground and drifted over 

to a flower. The bad fairies giggled 

and flitted deeper into the forest. They growled 

and screeched and made a terrible ruckus.

The Winged Tiger

The bad fairies turned into strange, fierce animals. 

Then Claire turned into a winged tiger that roared 

and bared its teeth and waved its terrible claws 

this way and that. The gnome was not very happy!

Queen of the Fairies

Suddenly, Claire saw the Queen of the Fairies

standing by a stream.  The Queen turned to Claire 

and declared, "You are not a terrible animal. 

You are a princess, and you shall rule with me."

The Banquet

Claire took her place on the throne.

Then Claire commanded the bad fairies, 

"Stop! Now join me in the feast!" 

The bad fairies gazed in wonder 

at the golden plates and cups 

on the pure, white tablecloth.

The Fairy Princess

Soon the bad fairies fell asleep. 

The Queen was suddenly 

nowhere in sight.  Claire felt lonely 

and missed her garden. She wanted 

to give her Mommy and Daddy a hug.

The Good Fairies

So she took off her crown 

and her wings and found a path. 

The good fairies helped her 

find her way.  She plodded along 

in the dusk, hearing distant music 

and smelling good things to eat

from far away in another land.

Peek-a-Boo

Just as it was getting dark, 

she found the garden 

and her Mommy and Daddy, 

and they gave her a big hug.


THE END

    Peter blurted out, "I convinced my Mom that you’re okay. I can actually talk to you now."
   "Hallelujah! Come on in then," Cashing smiled.
   Peter, who was still upset, ignored Cashing's work and stated, "My mom wants to know more about you, though. What can I tell her?"
   Cashing looked a little anxious. "Well, you don’t want to hear my life story, do you?"
   "Only the good stuff."
   "Your mom probably wants to know how I ended up in this dump. Well, believe it or not, I used to be a teacher. For many years, I taught several classes a semester at a community college. I was what they call an adjunct professor. In other words, I only taught part-time. The college relies heavily on part-time teachers in order to avoid paying benefits or salaries. So I also worked as a substitute teacher. With those two jobs, I managed to scrape by."
   "Doesn’t sound too bad," Peter said.
   "Well, it wasn’t, actually. My schedule was flexible. I could write stories and music and be an activist. I actually decided that I didn’t want to teach full time."
   "What happened?"
   "I mentioned that I was an activist. Well, I wrote an opinion piece for the newspaper. It was one of many opinion pieces that I’ve published, but this was the first one that happened to mention that I was a teacher at that particular community college. I didn’t discover until two days before the next semester began that I had not been rehired. After twelve years of excellent evaluations by students and administrators, I suddenly discovered they didn’t want me to teach anymore. They didn’t even bother to tell me--I had to call to find out why my name wasn’t mentioned in the schedule of courses. The irony is that I was at the top of my game as a teacher. In all modesty, I had never even imagined when I began that I could teach so effectively."

Inundation Zone of Proposed Dam:
Read about the Exploitation

   "That sucks. Are you still a substitute?"
   "That’s the thing. I never obtained a teaching credential. I only had a master’s degree, so strangely enough the public school district wouldn’t hire me even though I had over a decade of experience teaching at a community college. Since I was never going to be hired full-time, I finally just decided to throw in the towel. I’m now living on a rapidly diminishing retirement fund, and I'll probably need to start subbing again pretty soon. This thirty percent raise in rent is certainly not helping any."
   "God, I know. My family is freakin’ out. Everyone’s been in a really bad mood lately. My mom keeps saying that you can’t trust anyone. My dad keeps pointing out that you can’t be weak in this world, and my brother keeps calling me gay. It’s depressing."
   "Maybe we should do that little meditation ritual for our landlord," Cashing laughed.
   "Couldn’t hoit," Peter said with an affected accent.
   "Oh, but you know what? I just remembered. I’m going to a meeting on the rent increase in a few minutes. We’ll have to do our little ritual later. You’re welcome to join us. It’s just me and a couple of others."
   "Naw. I’m not really political," Peter smiled.
   "Everything is political, my friend."
   "I thought everything was sacred."
   "Okay, everything is political and sacred. We just have a landlord who believes that one thing is more sacred than others."

FINDING THE FOUNDATION

Foundation of House, Kings River

CHAPTER SIX:  A TRIP TO CHURCH

   Cashing had no discretionary income but indulged in short trips to the foothills, where he would often trespass to explore the trails and village sites along creeks and rivers, the price of retaining his sanity, he rationalized. One day as he drove on a single lane road along the Kings River, he glanced at the floodplain and for a second glimpsed the concrete foundation of a large building below in the flood plain of the river. He experienced at that moment a twinge of remembrance but did not recall the significance of the foundation until he was falling asleep that evening, suddenly recalling a trip to the Kings River with his family when he was eleven or twelve, not long after they had moved to Fresno from Los Angeles. He and his brother had slept on the back seat as the car slowly wound its way up the hills, both of them waking as the car glided into a grassy area next to the road, “In the Ghetto” by Elvis Presley coming in clear on the radio, his Dad, before turning off the car, uncharacteristically allowing the song to reach its conclusion.
   As his Dad fished from a sandy bank, Justin gazed transfixed at a huge spider web in the foliage near the road until he located a bulbous spider in the corner of the web and jumped back, horrified. Justin's brother called from a dirt road next to the river, excitedly yelling that he had found something, then dashing off down the road and vanishing in bushes behind a tall tree. Justin sprinted after him but couldn’t find him. 
   Feeling suddenly very alone, Justin tip-toed between the bushes, expecting an ambush, until he noticed his brother off in the distance in a clearing.
   “What took you so long?” his brother sneered.
   Justin saw several large slabs of concrete. Looking closer, he recognized that the concrete formed the foundation of a large building, a fact which had initially escaped him because several trees were growing inside what used to be a house. He jumped up on the foundation and walked around on a low concrete wall until he reached a point where the concrete was broken up by the roots of the trees.
   Confused, afraid and fascinated all at once, suddenly unable to move, Justin stared at the uncountable leaves inside what was left of the house.
   “Let’s go,” his brother shouted.
   “No,” Justin responded, uncharacteristically.
   His brother squinted. “C’mon, let’s go! What’s your damn problem?”
   Justin just stared at the tumbled concrete of the foundation. His brother took off, leaving Justin alone again. He looked around carefully, disappointed, on one hand, by his inability to comprehend the feelings inspired by the foundation, and, on the other, by the fact that he would never be able to inch all the way around the house on the low, concrete wall, as if on a tight rope.
   Finally, Justin got down from the concrete, suddenly hearing a loud voice in his head, “You will be back in thirty-five years….” 
   Scared out of his wits, Justin raced back through the bushes to the dirt road, wanting to tell everyone about that voice, which he had never heard before. But when Justin crept up to his father, who was silently reeling in the line, suddenly the voice didn‘t seem real anymore.
   Thirty five years later, Justin noticed the foundation of the house as he was driving by, never before glancing down at the river bottom at exactly the right moment on any of the other trips he had taken to the Kings River.
   The next day, during the meditation portion of his daily ritual, Justin envisioned the God Horus standing on a concrete stage at one end of the foundation. That didn’t make sense to Justin because he only remembered the concrete where the walls of the different rooms had been, so he drove back to the Kings River the next week to investigate the foundation and discovered that the house did indeed have two concrete patios resembling stages at both ends--his waking vision truer than his memory of the place. When he stood next to the concrete, everything seemed to be as it had that day thirty-five years before, as if he had been gone only a few minutes, the river flowing serenely beyond a small beach of white sand, the dirt road still heading back beyond huge sycamores and oaks, the spider web gone, his father dead of a heart attack a few years after that fishing trip thirty-five years ago, his family members almost losing touch.
   During the period that he rediscovered the foundation, Justin had become an occultist, communing with Isis, Thoth, and Osiris during his personal rituals. In the process, he had experienced symbolic death several times in meditation as well as a great sense of cosmic harmony, and he recognized that the Christ is not a man but a cosmic force that the symbolic forms of savior figures such as Osiris, Dionysus, and Jesus personify, enabling the worshipper to channel the force into the heart and mind. Thoth, the heart and tongue of Ra, embodies the mighty Logos, the Word that channels the primal forces into manifestation, and Isis looms as the Mighty Mother, the root of all form in the manifested universe. Horus shines as the symbol of the higher self, the expression of Divine Will on the physical plane, conceived after Isis put Osiris back together.
   When he returned thirty-five years later to the foundation of the house, Justin imagined Horus standing on the concrete slab, which was more like an altar than a patio or a stage, and Justin's inner voice whispered that he should not give his spiritual power away to anything or anyone on the physical plane. Justin consciously became at that moment what he had tried to avoid, as if he had suddenly grown into a set of clothes that had always been waiting for him: A renegade who would go his own way no matter what. He wondered for a moment if his new-found friendship with Peter was in any way part of his path now.

Pounding Stone, Kings River and Big Creek

   At breakfast, Peter’s mother asked, "Why are you spending so much time with that man?"
   "What man?" Peter replied.
   "The man in apartment 104."
   "Oh, you mean Justin. We just talk about stuff."
   "I bet I know why he spends so much time over there," Chuck paused. "Because he’s gay!"
   "Mom," Peter whined.
   "Does that man ever touch you?" his mom asked.
   "No! What are you talking about? We just like to hang out together."
   Chuck stepped behind his mother and mouthed the word "fairy." 
   "Where did you get these?" Peter’s mother held out his pack of Tarot cards. "Chuck found these in your top dresser drawer."
   "Tell him to stay out of my stuff!" Peter yelled.
   "Did that man give these to you?" his mom asked.
   "No, he just helps me understand what they mean."
   "And how does he know what they mean?"
   "He knows a lot of things. I don’t know. He reads a lot. He’s a philosopher," Peter replied.
   "I don’t want these cards in my house," his mother insisted. "Your father and I agree. We are a good Christian family and this sort of thing does not belong here." She threw the Tarot cards in the garbage.
   "Mom!"
   "I don’t want you wasting your money on that stuff anymore, and I don’t want you spending any more time with that man. You can’t trust anyone these days. Now go clean your room. I don’t want you to come out until that room is spotless."
   "But, Mom!"
   "Go, now!"
   Later that day, Peter sneaked out of the apartment. When Justin opened the door, Peter mumbled, "My mom found the Tarot cards. She doesn’t want me to talk to you anymore."
   "You’re kidding? Do you want me to have a chat with her?" Justin asked.
   "No, she won’t listen to anyone. She gets an idea in her head and won’t let it go. She doesn’t trust anybody."
   Justin stared at Peter. "I have an idea," Justin said. "Can you sneak out to the church down the street? We can meet there and act like we’re praying."
   "Okay, I’ll meet you there in ten minutes," Peter blurted out.
   Peter hustled back to the apartment, grabbed his bike and told his mom that he was going out for a ride. He rushed out the door before he could hear her reply.
   He was down the street in no time. Pretty soon, Cashing pulled his Corolla up and parked along the curb. They entered together and plopped down in a pew. No one else appeared to be in the church.
   "Remember how I described it, the meditation, I mean," Peter said.
   Cashing stared at the cross on the altar for a moment and then closed his eyes. As Cashing imagined the black Calvary cross, it seemed to come alive in his mind or in some other dimension, and Cashing could almost believe that black energy was floating from the old woman’s body to the cross. Then Cashing imagined her whole being filling with light, and, perhaps because of his compassion for her, Cashing had the sense that he was really helping her.
   Then Cashing suddenly felt regret for things that he had done wrong, and just as he was about to ask forgiveness for himself, he heard a voice, "Can I help you?"
   Cashing and Peter opened their eyes. The minister was hovering over them. "We’re just prayin’together," Cashing said.
   "I’m sorry. I know Peter here because he comes to youth group, but I’m afraid I don’t know you," the minister said.
   "Justin Cashing. Peter and I have recently become friends," Cashing said.
   "It’s so wonderful to have both of you here," the minister said. "It’s not easy to find men who will mentor the youth in our community. Do you go to a nearby church?"
   "I’m just getting back to my roots, so to speak. I thought I would just check out your church because Peter spoke so highly of it."
   The minister looked surprised. "Well, feel free to come by anytime," the minister smiled.
   "Thank you," Peter and Cashing chimed.
   "I think it’s time to go," Cashing mumbled.
   "Do you think we had any effect?" Peter asked.
   "I’m sure we had an effect, but I’m not sure it’s the one we wanted. How well does the minister know your parents?"
   "Pretty well."
   "Well enough to call them to ask about me?"
   "Yeah, maybe."
   "Well, maybe it’s about time you got home."
   "Okay," Peter said and quickly rode off.
   "We probably had an effect, all right," Cashing muttered.

CHAPTER FOUR: VISIONS OF ARCHETYPES

Milling

CHAPTER FIVE: THE GOOD VISIONS

   Justin woke at two-thirty in the morning, but he came very close to drifting off again by three-thirty. By then his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the streetlight casting thin bars of light on the walls seemed so bright that he began to realize that attempting to sleep was probably just an exercise in futility. At that moment, he had the sense, as perhaps most people do when approaching old age, that he hadn’t accomplished much with his life, and he knew then with regretful certainty that he wouldn’t sleep anymore, thanks to that thought. Oddly, though, Justin suspected that even if he had become emperor, he would still feel the same lack of satisfaction, a thought which, though giving him a strange and unexpected sense of liberation, did not help him get back to sleep.
   As these thoughts were whirling around in his head, Justin heard a woman screaming and cursing as if from deep inside a cave, and he believed for a moment, irrationally of course, that his thoughts had somehow caused her to despair. Like attracts like, and Justin suspected that he felt comfortable around people who cannot hide the damage that life has done to them. That was no doubt one reason that he had ended up in Sin City, a place where the damaged, one step away from homelessness or jail, came to hide or die, or in rare cases, recover. Originally known as the El Dorado District, Sin City had the highest poverty rate in the state. Celia, the drunk in Apt. 105, occasionally howled and screamed her regrets in the early morning hours until the police or an ambulance arrived, so Justin knew he wasn't dreaming. The people in his apartment complex just couldn't hide their strangeness, which was strangely comforting to him. Shirley, downstairs, a housewife, was anorexic, a living skeleton who always had a friendly smile, as if no one could see her condition. Kevin next door would take half a bottle of baby aspirin for a rush if he didn’t have any crank. Albert, who was terribly obese, had boasted that he had dodged the police once already for credit card fraud--Albert had loaded what little furniture he owned into his station wagon and disappeared one night. His rent three months over due, Jackson, a small, sickly man, loaded over twenty rifles into his van at two in the morning and drove off, never to be seen again.
   Justin shared an interest in music with his next-door neighbor Tom, the wildest-looking man Justin had ever encountered, and they jammed together occasionally in Tom’s living room--Tom's entire apartment containing only a mattress, two chairs, and a motorcycle. Justin had the urge to offer something that might help them in some way, but he was always afraid that he would look presumptuous if he tried to help, so he usually just remained polite.
   And in the early morning hours, he would sometimes hear what seemed to be a howl from one apartment which then morphed into pained, ecstatic groans from another, so that he wasn’t quite sure how to react. The voices would fade away or stop before he could tell where they were coming from. Even though they might have been coming from next door, the voices seemed far off, from another world, like the voices in his head that sometimes told him what would happen that day or decades later. Justin suddenly recalled the time he was lounging next to a remote mountain stream with a friend when he heard a man close by singing in another language. Justin exclaimed, “Wow, that’s incredible,” and ran down the stream to find the singer, leaving his friend behind. Justin couldn’t find anyone else even though the singer seemed to be right on the other side the creek, belting out one perfect song after another. A few months later, Justin mentioned the singer to his friend, and his friend looked at him and asked, “Are you crazy? What the hell are you talking about?” Justin secretly concluded that he had heard an angel, but he didn't mention it to anyone else. Other people in the apartment complex were like Justin, in a way. They weren’t sure what they were hearing, if anything at all, so they didn’t get involved, even if a stranger ran naked and screaming down the stairs in broad daylight right in front of them.
   At first light, moans and curses turned into blood-curdling screams. Justin peered out his window to see an old woman strapped down to a stretcher, clawing the air, weeping and groaning as she was wheeled out to an ambulance.
   Peter had stepped out into the courtyard to observe. Justin stepped out of the door behind Peter. "The most vulnerable are already starting to lose it. That’s what happens when the owner raises the rent thirty percent. Most people here, I suspect, are already a month or two behind."
   "May dad says she's just a crazy old drunk. Is that true?" Peter asked.
   "Yep, but that old gal has suffered a lot in her time. She was once a music teacher who lost her job after slapping an incorrigible child--at least that's the story she told me. Other people have told me that after she lost her job she started drinking heavily and neglected her own child, who was eventually taken away from her. Then she started drinking even more and resorting to prostitution. I once invited her to my apartment for dinner because she looked like she needed a decent meal. She didn’t touch a thing I served, and later she started asking me what I really wanted. I told her that I just wanted her to feel better, and she started weeping bitterly and insisted that I wanted something from her. She finally just went home."
   Peter dashed over to the woman and grabbed her hand. The old woman, who had been screaming and moaning, suddenly relaxed and closed her eyes as Peter comforted her.

Vision

   Cashing squinted, staring at Peter, and followed them over to the ambulance. Suddenly Peter beamed at Cashing. "You know, I had an idea last night. Can I tell you about it?" Peter looked over at Cashing’s apartment.
   "Sure, come on over," Cashing motioned to his apartment.
   "You see, I’ve had other visions too," Peter mentioned when they got inside.
   "I should have known! Go on."
   "Well, once I had a vision of a golden, equal-armed cross. Then I had a vision of a golden crown on my head. Another time I had a vision of a golden plate and chalice on a brilliant white tablecloth. They all seemed to go together. When I had these visions, I felt like these things were not just for me but for everybody. What do you think they mean?"
   "What do you think they mean? That’s what’s important," Cashing insisted.
   "I think they are all good things that we all have inside us," Peter said.
   "Very good things indeed," Cashing replied.
   "Why do you think everything was golden?"
   "Well, gold, because it is incorruptible, is often a symbol of the spirit. White, by the way, not only symbolizes purity--it also suggests unity since white is a combination of all the colors."
   Peter continued, "Last night I started imagining the people I know with a golden crown on their head, a golden cross in their heart, all seated at a table with a white tablecloth, covered with golden plates and chalices. I felt like I was helping them somehow."
   Cashing looked Peter in the eye, "Well, maybe you did help them in one way. It seems to me that you were seeing them all as magnificent spiritual beings with divine harmony in their hearts, seated at a banquet of spiritual abundance. Just looking at other people that way helps you to have more reverence for them."
   Peter looked seriously at Cashing. "But it seemed like more than that. Like these symbols were magical and were actually helping them. I don’t know how to explain it."
   "You mean that concentrating on these symbols was actually affecting those people somehow, as if we are all connected to each other on some level?"
   "Yeah. Let me tell you about something else," Peter paused for a moment. "I’ve had a vision of a black cross too, a real cross, the kind you see everywhere, not an equal-armed cross."
   Cashing smiled, "You mean a Calvary cross?"
   "Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, I imagined giving all of my pain and all of the bad things I’ve done to it. I could see all the blackness leaving me and going into this cross, and then I felt much better. It was like magic."
   Cashing looked surprised. "Okay, wait a second. You’re suggesting that these symbols exist in some other dimension but that we can use them here in our lives? I have to confess that I’ve never thought of using archetypes in quite that way before. In other words, the black cross exists on a different plane to take away our sin and suffering and create harmony in our lives. It would have to be the astral plane, by the way, because that is where the archetypes and symbols appear in picture form for our subconscious mind. According to our occult friends, the higher spiritual planes are formless."
   Peter looked puzzled.
   "Okay, wait a minute," Cashing blurted out. "I’ll be right back." Cashing trotted to a closet in his bedroom and came back with a book. 
   Cashing held up the book. "This is a picture of the Tree of Life, a very ancient glyph, or composite symbol. Legend has it that an angel gave it to humanity. Notice that in the center of the Tree there is a yellow sun, and in the center of the sun is a black Calvary cross. This central sphere with the cross is the Christ center, the center of equilibrium. I think I understand what you're saying--by God, the black cross is literally a magical symbol. If you’re right, savior figures have experienced the archetypal sacrifice to establish the black cross in the center of equilibrium, the sphere of balance, and it remains there for all of humanity. In other words, we can give our negative energy to the cross in order to re-establish balance and harmony in our lives. I had considered it as essentially a symbol of the transmutation of force into form, or vice versa, depending on which way you are travelling, up or down on the Tree. The sun is not only a symbol of life--it is a symbol of purification, the cross within the sun symbolizing the cleansing of the soul. Why, this is, at least, a wonderful idea!"
   "Anyway I was thinking that we could use it to help other people. I don’t mean your average person who is doing all right. I mean like that old woman who might die or go crazy or something."
   "You mean we shouldn’t try to help a person unless the person can’t help herself?"
   "Yeah, something like that. I mean maybe you only have the right to use it without asking if somebody is really in trouble. You might also have the right to use it without asking if somebody is going to harm you or a lot of other people, you know, someone like the landlord."
   "We have to respect free will, in other words? We shouldn’t interfere with someone else’s karma unless we can keep something really terrible from happening?"
   "Yeah, something like that."
   Cashing wiped his eyes. "You know, some people believe that interfering with another person's karma has bad consequences, even if you're trying to help that person, so we need to be careful. What do you propose that we do?"
   "I don't know if that's true, but there is one thing that I would like to try. Maybe we could meditate together, and we could ask the Christ force to take the blackness away from the old woman. Then we could imagine the blackness leaving her body and going into the cross and her whole being filling with light. Then maybe we could do the same for the landlord."
   "That is a beautiful idea. I’m willing to try it. Unfortunately, right now I have a few things to take care of. Can you come back in an hour or so?"
   Peter nodded.
   "Great," Cashing said. "Why not try it--you know, it couldn't hoit."

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

Pestle on a Pounding Stone, Kings River Watershed

CHAPTER FOUR: A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

   Parking in the dirt by a load of rubbish near Fancher Creek, Justin pulled up the parking brake: No one in the immediate vicinity. He grabbed the buck knife from the glove compartment, slid it onto his belt, then trotted across Watt's Valley Road, an oiled, single-lane road which snakes through one deserted Native American village site after another in the lower foothills. Before he jumped up on the rock and stepped over the barbed wire, however, he noticed Fresno faintly etched in the distance, so he quickly turned back and checked the car doors and lights again.
   The area safer than most city streets, he could keep hiking all the way to the Kings River if he wanted to, his path only blocked by orchards just before he got to the river. Cows might ignore him or stampede in complete terror away from him (or toward him), quail would occasionally burst out of shrubs, coyotes would pause and gaze and lope off as if hoping to be chased back to the lair. He might encounter a bobcat or a mountain lion or a rattlesnake, but with his buck knife he was ready for almost anything.
   Most of the paths on the bluffs converged in the floodplain of the creek, whose bed miles away had functioned as the Valley's first irrigation ditch for a farmer who lured the railroad, the catalyst of growth for Fresno, to the area. Justin chose a favorite path, noting all the pounding stones and pestles and house pits along the way that had apparently evaded the normal sight of the average trespasser, and perhaps of even the rancher, for over a century. After his first discoveries, Justin had trained himself to notice flat stones where he might find round holes filled with water or earth and grass and leaves, slightly tapered stones possibly used for grinding, and midden earth in oblong or circular indentations in the ground. These, along with the paths kept distinct by cattle and horses, were the only signs of a civilization that had flourished in the area for thousands of years, gone now over a century, in which time the city had grown one pop-n-fresh neighborhood after another, subdivisions leap-frogging toward the hills.
   It was hotter than he had expected. He had planned to hike for a mile or two in his work clothes, but after only about half a mile, he was hungry and thirsty and unusually tired, so he took a detour to his favorite pounding stone, where ten pestles still rested. As he approached the pounding stone he saw a bobcat in the distance stalking something in the grass, suddenly pouncing, then carrying a squirrel away in its teeth. After the bobcat skulked away, Justin found the site of the kill dotted by feces and stained by a streak of blood, far less gore than he had expected.
   A squirrel in the rocks was chirping loudly in fear or grief, or both, even though Justin was only a few feet away. Justin at first thought that he was only projecting human emotions onto the squirrel, but he had never before heard a squirrel make such a racket, even though it was still in danger because the bobcat, and Justin, were both in the vicinity. The squeals may have functioned as an alarm, but to Justin, after a minute, they began to resemble sounds of utter despair.
   Justin sat down on the pounding stone as the squirrel's cries began to taper off. He had been unable to grieve at his own father's funeral. No tears. No moans. No outward display of emotion. He leaned against a tree and closed his eyes. In his mind's eye, he saw his father's coffin in the funeral chapel, so he cleared his mind. Having a mind clear of even the woodlands was more pleasant than he had expected. After a while a few images flickered across the screen, but he cleared everything away again by focusing on blackness, going into the gap between words, between sounds.
   He imagined himself climbing a tree, the leaves wet with dew like tiny stars, and golden eagles wheeling around it. As he reached the middle of the tree, he gazed at the sky and saw, not the sun, but a bright, golden, equal-armed cross hanging, completely still, in the blue. Floating at each end of the cross was an indistinct angel, each one dressed in a colored robe, one blue, one red, one yellow, and one white. He continued to stare at the cross, hoping that each angel would become clearer, and suddenly he was bathed in a warm, golden light, which felt so good that he didn't want to move. He continued to rise, nevertheless, almost against his will, as though he were floating upward, not climbing. People and cars in the Valley below moved slowly in the distance, all utterly impermanent and insignificant, as he rose closer to a brilliant light more intense than sunlight. He looked at his hands, which were empty. His entire body was empty, only transparent, crystalline light. All was emptiness except for the light, which permeated everything. At the light's edge, his mind truly became blank for a moment. He was only a spark, a point of consciousness.

Pestles Just Removed from their Mortars

   Suddenly he heard a loud shuffling sound and with a jerk came back to himself. Only a squirrel scurrying through dry leaves. He had instinctively grabbed for his buck knife, but he couldn't pull it out because it was held in its sheath by a button. Gazing at the pounding stone, he noticed that two pestles were still in the mortars, with grass growing out at the edges. The stone was silent, communicating nothing about the people who had pounded acorns there for millinia. He stepped into one of the house pits. In his mind's eye he saw a Yokut's woman, light moving over her face and shoulders, as though he were envisioning either her image reflected in a pool, or the light from a pool of water reflected on her shoulders and face. Then, adrenalin shot through him as he recognized that the image could be like the reflection of someone in water, possibly himself in another life. He felt as if something were tugging at his ankles and shins and that he could drop in a second into another order, as though through the center of the earth out to the other side, yet he felt at the same time that he was being presented with some choice, as though he were standing in the shallows of a pool, looking out toward the deep. The Yokuts often buried their dead in the earth under their houses, and he imagined his mind somehow mingling with the mind of the Yokut's woman, as if time were an ocean, as if he were somehow part of all of the energy fields of the world throughout human history and beyond.
   And it was empty. The act of putting one foot in front of another, empty. The act of thinking, empty. The city in the distance, growing like an anthill a moment before, gone in the silence a century or a millineum. Justin gazed at a baby blue eye, no longer Justin but the eternal gazing at itself, the observer and the observed and the process of observation. He was the flower and the stone and the oaks, a point of consciousness within a tapestry of infinite consciousness, and he felt the pressure of innumerable points of consciousness communicating with him in the heat in countless messages that he couldn't understand.
   He felt a timeless, eternal emptiness, the emptiness of form. Within seconds he again separated himself mentally from his surroundings, out of habit, carrying with him both the sense of timelessness which imbues everything in the woods and the realization that he was losing the sense of oneness. As he reached his car, he regretted that he was returning home sooner than he had planned, so he headed to an old, disintegrating road, partially on private property and partially on public property, which sloped down to Sycamore Creek.
   Sliced by rivulets and broken up by roots, the road, unused for decades, sloped down half a mile to a "gauging station" by the creek, a measuring stick still cemented in the creek bed. Although it appeared that no other signs of civilization existed for miles, hidden by bushes on the other side of the creek, the remains of a stone wall still stood next to two piles of rocks, both the size of graves. A mile beyond the confluence of the two creeks, the walls of another stone house stood, the stones on top pulled down for six other piles, also the size of graves, nearby.

Pestle still in Mortar

   The first time he had trespassed, Justin knew when to stray from the old road into the grass to the pounding stone on the ridge, perhaps because the faint rushing sound in the distance pulled him from the road or because he had noticed a trail etched in the grass, but because of his excursions in the foothills he had begun to believe in retrocognition. He couldn't see the past, like a truly gifted psychic, but on occasion had known with overwhelming certainty, in places that he had never been before, where he would find trails and pounding stones. Once, sitting on a pounding stone, he actually heard the laughter of women, as if the earth and the stones were all to some degree conscious and retained the memory of all that had transpired, and he could access that memory because he could tap into the timeless consciousness in moments of profound stillness.
   Several times during a long hike, possibly because of the heat, he had felt himself, as he sat in the shade near trails thousands of years old, part of an ocean of consciousness holding all time. He was the rock, the tree, the squirrel--his consciousness not just a wave but the ocean itself. He also extrapolated that he was also one with every human being but dismissed that thought immediately. 
   When he had first started trespassing, he had dismissed the possibility of finding house pits as unlikely because at least a hundred years had passed since the tribe had occupied the area. For a long time, he had believed that resting cattle had made the indentations in the ground, but after witnessing many abandoned village sites, he finally understood, with a slight shiver, the significance of circular hollows near pounding stones.
   Obviously he could not prove that where he stood uncountable generations had loved and slept and given birth and died, not after one hundred years. He couldn't prove that settlers (probably all killed around the same time) were buried under those piles of rocks unless he wanted to dig up the bones, and he lacked both the time and the stomach for that. Showing how those settlers had taken over an ancient village site would change nothing. Proving that an ancient civilization once thrived there would not keep the area from being developed. Far worse had happened there already with the help of the government: most of the tribe had been killed or driven onto a reservation where the members succumbed to alcoholism and disease and starvation, the most recent generations growing rich from the casinos. He was quite certain of one thing after finding many abandoned village sites along the creeks in the lower foothills: after a point no mercy had been shown anyone. And history, he suspected, without a major change in the human psyche, would keep repeating itself.
   He counted the mortars in the pounding stone again and stared above the tops of the sycamores to the ridge on the other side, squinting to see a hint of the other pounding stones across the creek, his gaze finally following a slope down to another ancient village site about a half mile away on a small hill above Sycamore Creek. He tried with his binoculars to make out the trail that led on that slope to the village site near the ruins of the stone house, again without success, but he could make out without difficulty the house being built on the ridge half a mile away.
   He could still go out on a little night hike, since no one was living in the house yet, douse the wood with gasoline and light a match, and no one would know he had started the fire, in all probability. This was his window of opportunity. He decided then to hike on the trail next to the creek, past other pounding stones, climbing over barbed wire to the building site.

Pestles Uncovered from Moss and Leaves

   Standing on a slope overlooking the creek, the house was less than a mile from a hub of ancient Native American trails where a rancher had dropped blocks of salt. On a forty acre lot, the house was ostentatious, commanding a view of a large territory he had explored for years, with only cattle witnessing his intrusions. In that area alone he had found a pestle collection and three pounding stones with pestles still in the mortars. Two of the trails led over a hill down to a huge abandoned Yokuts village next to another creek several miles away. For sale signs had popped up all along the road advertisizing other forty acre lots, with wells and utilities.
   Each time he had trespassed in the hills, photographing the artifacts and the rare or threatened species, he had imagined himself spearheading an effort to preserve the lower foothills, pressuring government officials to buy up development rights along a fifteen mile stretch where ancient village sites were still connected by a network of continuous trails thousands of years old. The ranchers obviously did not go beyond their own land. No one else seemed aware of the sigficance of the trails or the mortars or the pestles. (He estimated that about one out of eight pounding stones he had discovered still, unbelievably, had pestles on or near them.) A freeway extension was being constructed in the valley just over ten miles away from the main village site at the base of the hill, but along the creeks, little had changed for over one hundred years except for that house.
   He sat down on a pile of wood and pulled out a box of matches from his backpack. He struck the match and let it burn down to his fingers. The house where he had grown up was still at the end of its street, nondescript, occupied by another family for many years. This mansion was being built for elites, promising seclusion and happiness for the family that would live there. Justin's family, on the other hand, had been a failed experiment. Justin was seventeen when his father died, and Justin discovered that his family members harbored little sympathy for each other. They couldn't grieve together, and soon the family dispersed. They still saw each other occasionally at Christmas.
   The thought occurred to him that he was in a fire of illusion, which made him chuckle for a second as he lit another match. Little was left of what had been his family, a family that he had considered normal and well-adjusted before the day his father died. After ten or twenty or thirty thousand years of occupying the area, the tribe was totally gone. He had failed to hold most of his relationships together. He had failed to hold a job for more than five years (though that was not entirely his fault given the nature of capitalism--he was expendable like everyone else.)
   He wanted his life to matter, so he would have to be careful about losing himself too much in the timelessness of the woods. He let the match singe his fingertips. This mansion was the first sign of urban sprawl that in the next twenty or thirty years was going to engulf the foothills. The last traces of a whole race would be wiped out in the process, conveniently eliminating all signs of genocide committed by a system spreading into the far corners of the earth, ecocide the logical partner of genocide.
   He held up the flame, hearing woodpeckers cackle and the peeps of bushtits, the air growing cool. Being an activist in the Central Valley was like stepping with a bow and arrow into a mine field to face the tanks of a well-equiped army; he would have to continue by fighting an anonymous, covert war alone until they caught up with him. He, for instance, was stuck in stupid jobs, working as a substitute teacher and also as a part-time instructor at a rural community college for fifteen years (without benefits). The vast majority of the teachers he subbed for could not write a one-page lesson plan free of grammar or punctuation errors, yet he suspected he would never be hired as a full-time teacher even if he went back to school for a credential. Anyone who attacked the system, he'd noticed, was sooner or later slapped down (usually sooner, if effective) and they were not forgotten by those in power, only by the public. A few had lost jobs, professionals had been slandered with impunity, organizations had closed down because of bogus lawsuits, one activist, a teacher, was fined and bankrupted for using his democratic right to sue the government for higher review of a local land use decision (perhaps the judge had neglected to read the constitution). He had witnessed activists threatened and blackballed by developers and government officials alike. 
   He felt spaced out, a little unsteady on his feet, unable to belch, with pain in his joints, all symptoms of his allergies. He had indulged in several pieces of toast (which contained gluten and corn) at breakfast and was suffering the consequences. If he ate any more gluten or corn, he would risk feeling severe muscle and joint pain, fatigue, and depression; he might have difficulty functioning at his job the next day. If he continued eating it despite the warning signs he would begin to believe he had cancer or some other terminal illness, and would feel hopeless. He would be unable to function in jail. He felt at peace in the woods; he even felt a kinship with the rocks, a kinship that he had felt with only a few human beings.
   He indulged again in self pity, which at least kept him from losing himself completely in the stillness. Even though the cause of his sickness was the chemical contamination of food and air and water, no one could avoid the fact that he was often fatigued, depressed, nauseated, aching, nearly always, therefore, without much energy, except sometimes in the woods where he could breath fresh air. Relationships and jobs had ended because he couldn't hold it together, not knowing from one moment to the next if he would feel too sick suddenly to function, for no reason apparent to anyone else. He sat still. His life was significant now in relation to what surrounded him, no more and no less significant than the tribe members before him, no more and no less than the buckeyes and sycamores and oaks, the bluebirds and the juncos, the rosinweed and blue curl.
   Wouldn't it be nice to burn up this entire sorry civilization, he thought for just a second, every last bit of it. He should feel anger like a clean flame (he chuckled), not self-pity or even mercy, and he should let it burn out all the corrupted places, cauterizing as much of the cancer as possible, not just a little bit.
   He was making a speech again in his head. Sighing, he put the box of matches away and sat extinguished in the growing darkness. He envisioned a white flame at the crown of his head,the flame forming a crown at the supernal centers of his being, the centers of the spirit, the flame stretching down to his heart, then down to his groin and feet. He was on fire while everything around him was swirling, transient, empty.
   Bats looped silently overhead, the sun kindling the bare branches of the oaks in the distance. The moss-covered stone, cold in the light, now seemed almost as warm as an animal in the cooling air. The buckeyes and sycamores smelled dusty and wet at the same time, the creek still gurgling, making more sense than he could ever understand and no sense at all. The first lights were appearing in the valley and the sky, one constellation on the ground for a moment appearing to reflect another in the sky. He stood up with a groan and hiked back on the trail toward his car.