Twin Sisters Joy and Sorrow

Two sisters, Joy and Sorrow, lived on a grassy hill outside Dublin. They lived on that hill since they were born, which was the beginning of time itself. Joy and Sorrow did not get along very well. Sorrow was always wailing and sitting with her head in her hands, and Joy was always dancing and singing and playing the flute really loud.

They didn’t understand each other. One day, when the rains came, as they always did in the springtime, Sorrow went inside the little hut where they kept their food stores. Joy, on the other hand, stretched out her arms and drank in the raindrops as if they were drops of nectar from the gods.

Inside the hut, Sorrow decided that she’d had enough of living with Joy. She began to dig a cave in the mud floor of the hut, so that she could live apart from her dear sister. It took her seven days and seven nights – exactly the length of time that Joy spent dancing in the rain and drinking it like nectar.

When Sorrow’s cave was big enough to sleep in, she got some shafts of wheat from the little hut, and spread them out on the mud floor and went to sleep. She slept for a long time. Perhaps it was seven days, or it could have been seven years or even seven centuries. During that time, she had many dreams.

She saw Joy, her sister, dancing in the rays of the sun, wrapping the rays around and around herself, until they became an exquisite golden blanket. She saw Joy spread the blanket out on the ground and lay under the starlit sky. She saw Joy spinning moonlight with her finger, until it became a silver glass goblet, and the goblet collected dew all night long for Joy’s morning tea.

Then her dreams went blank, and she slept dreamlessly until the stars shifted their positions in the sky, and in the waking world, Joy became aware that something fundamental had changed.

When Sorrow began to dream again, she saw Joy weeping. She’d never seen Joy weeping. She seemed to be preparing for a funeral. She was wrapping a body delicately in the golden blanket. She strained to see who it was, though she could not. She saw Joy dipping her fingers into the silver goblet and spreading oil on the body’s head.

With this last dream, Sorrow woke up. And yet everything was so strange. She was not sure if she had woken up in a dream or if she had woken up to her life on the grassy hill. The blanket was her first clue. The golden blanket of sunlight she had seen in her dream was wrapped around her, and she was very warm and snug, when she remembered the cave being cold and damp. When she saw the silver moon goblet by her head, she turned quickly to look for Joy, and there she was, bending toward Sorrow from where she sat by her side, tears pouring down her face like rain from an April cloudburst.

She bent down and held Sorrow’s face in her hands, and with the touch of Joy’s hands, Sorrow felt a surge of energy within her. It felt odd, as if her heart was turning into bubbles and coming up into her throat. What came out was a laugh, so hearty that Joy, too, began to laugh through her tears. At that moment, Sorrow saw that Joy had been weeping for her – that it was Sorrow’s funeral she was preparing. This moved her so deeply that she also began to weep, though she was still laughing at the same time.

From that day forward, the sisters didn’t know which one of them was Joy and which was Sorrow. They knew they were the same.

And this is why when people laugh a good long time, they sometimes begin to cry. And this is why when people cry a good long time, they sometimes begin to laugh.

The Song of Creation

When Yehowah crawled out of the darkness, he was dripping with shadow and formlessness. The light that emerged from his throat was a song he could not help singing. It was the song of formlessness coming into form. The song was from Yehowah and created Yehowah, both simultaneously. And the song was pure light itself, so terrible in its intensity that Yehowah gasped. And in that gasp, the formlessness that had been Yehowah took shape, and Earth was born. This is why, when the song of creation is sung -- the song that brings formlessness into form -- there is always a gasp. In this gasp, new realities are formed. We call this inspiration.

Emerging from darkness, I am light birthing that which is Unspeakable. And I sing the song of creation, because it is the only song that can ever be sung.

The Girl Who Believed in Everything

Once, in a land far away, there was a girl who believed in Everything. In her world, mice could talk and fairies floated over her bed at night, whispering secrets to her in her sleep. In her dreams, she flew with them, gliding from rooftop to rooftop. No one in her family knew it, but her dreams took her to far away places where magical streams ran through meadows, carrying healing powers in their waters.

The girl knew nothing else, and cared for little else, until one day, she woke up, and the fairies were gone. She could feel their absence, like a cold wind through leaky windows. In their place was an unknown fear. She was left alone. She was sure of it. She could do nothing for days but lie in bed and weep.

What the girl didn’t know was that the fairies had been involved in a game of hide and seek, and the girl, whose name was Sophia, happened to wake up just as all of the fairies were hiding. The one who was not hiding and was it had turned her back and was counting.

But because the girl did not know this, and believed that the fairies were gone – or worse, were just a figment of her imagination to begin with – she stopped flying in her dreams at night. She not longer traveled to far away places or to the magical stream or to the meadow. She lived in the world that she saw by day and came to believe that this was all that there was.

Sophia grew up. She married, had a family, and did some semi-meaningful work. She longed for something more, but what it was that she longed for was vague and, she felt, out of reach.

Then, one day, walking to school with her son, an elf appeared. Just like that. They were walking down their usual route through the neighborhood, and Charles stopped in his tracks.

“Mommy,” he said in a small voice, because he was only 6 years old. “What’s that?”

He was pointing to a hedge next to the sidewalk, only a few feet away from their neighbor’s driveway. The elf was snickering and there was no lying about what this was. She’d seen elves in her childhood dream world, and there was really no other way to explain it than by telling the truth.

“It’s an elf,” she said plainly, though she was clearly shaken.

The boy cowered behind her, and she looked around to be sure no one was watching. Thankfully, the street was empty.

“What’s your name?” The elf asked the boy. It was quite a handsome elf, with a little turned-up nose and a neat, ironed-out suit. He was a mere 6 inches tall.

“Charles,” her son answered, very properly, his mother thought to herself. For mothers are often monitoring their children’s behavior like this.

“What’s your mama’s name?” he asked, looking at the woman.

“Sophia,” she said, and the elf put his hands on his ample little belly and laughed.

“So it is you,” the elf said.

“Yes, why?” she said, looking around again but unable to squelch a rising joy that bubbled through her whole body. She thought for sure she was losing her mind, but was almost willing to do so in order to continue the conversation.

“We thought you didn’t exist anymore,” the elf said.

“We?” she asked.

“The elves and fairies,” he said.

Tears welled up in her eyes. The fairies.

The elf conveyed the whole story about the game of hide and seek and how, when the game was over, the girl was gone. At first the fairies thought that she was playing the game with them, and they sought after her for many days, because they feared she was lost. But then several months passed, and they decided something terrible must have happened and they mourned for many years.

By now, the boy’s eyes were as big as turnips, and he was looking back and forth from the elf to his mother, registering this conversation. He, of course, knew about elves. He played in the forest with them at night when he was asleep. He had only asked his mother to see if she knew, because she never spoke of them, and he thought for sure she would say they didn’t exist. But here he was wrong. She did know. How come she never told him? He wondered.

The woman told the elf to tell the fairies that when she went to sleep that night, she would pay a visit to the fairies.

The boy laughed and clapped his hands, and the elf bowed to her, promising to bring her message. And then he was gone. The woman knew this was the way of the elves, though it still surprised her, and she found herself wondering if she had just had a terrible hallucination, and she looked down to he son to be sure.

“Where did he go?” Charles asked, looking up at her and putting his little hand in hers.

“He went back to the fairies,” she said, thinking she must be mad for saying such a thing, but how else could she explain what just happened?

That night, the woman went to bed with a great sense of anticipation mixed with dread. What if she had made up this whole thing, and her son was going along with it, because he was six years old, and that’s what six year olds do.

Still, when she drifted off to sleep, she found herself in a familiar landscape. It was twinkling with light, though everything was so dim, it broke her heart. Had the fairies grown old and lost their brilliance? She couldn’t see the fairies, and she felt so alone, she sat down on a log, put her head in hear hands, and wept. Big tears fell into her hands. She cried for a hundred years.

Then, on the one hundred and first day, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and looked around. There was the most delicate little dwarf child on her shoulder. He was laughing, and she saw that when she looked into his face, he was familiar, so much like Charles that she almost cried, “Charles!” But she didn’t speak a word. She followed him to where he was motioning for her to go.

She followed him through a thick forest, where there was no light but enough twinkling fairy dust on the ground to guide them. They walked for at least an hour until they came out the other side. And there was the stream. The magical stream she had come to as a child. Still, all was confoundedly dim. The child suggested that she take a sip of the water, which she did. Immediately, she saw that the child was Charles, and that she knew that she was joining him in his dream, and that this was the landscape he visited every night, just as she had when she was young.

The realization overwhelmed her, and she lay down by the stream, overtaken by emotion and unable to move.

It was the fairies, of course, who came to her rescue. They brushed her face with their wingtips and assembled themselves on her feet and fingertips to remind her of who she was. They took droplets from the stream and dribbled them on her lips and eyelids. They sat on her earlobes as they had so many years ago and whispered ancient secrets into her ears.

The woman began to change. It was very slow, but all of the fairies and Charles, too, noticed it. They all gaped in amazement. Her face grew younger, her chest grew flat, and her whole body grew smaller and smaller until she was a girl of 12. The exact age she was when she lost the fairies.

She sat up and looked around, feeling dazed. When she saw the fairies, she laughed out loud. The sound of her own laugh startled her. She looked down at her body and realized she was a girl again. She was incredulous, and then she remembered that in dreams, weird things like this happened.

Charles hoisted himself up again onto her shoulder, and said that she should follow them back into the forest. There was a great feast being prepared for the return of Sophia. When she got up, she felt dizzy, but couldn’t wait another instant. At the bidding of Charles, the whole assemblage of fairies – which numbered some one thousand, though fairies never stay still long enough to be counted – joined the merry march to the forest festivities.

From a great hollowed out log, not too far into the woods, flute music was playing so enticingly that Sophia and her friends knew that they’d come to the right place. There assembled were dwarves, elves, and the forest creatures she had visited as a child. They all recognized her, of course, because she had not changed at all. And she recognized them for the very same reason.

When Orin, the great father of the fairies, appeared, Sophia ran to him and kissed his feet. When she looked up and saw his face, she froze in place. It was the face of Charles as an old man. She quickly looked around for the dwarf child on her shoulder, but he was gone. Orin began to laugh.

“When humans become lost in the thicket of the earthly plane,” he said, “I find a way to bring them back home.”

He looked at her with the most kindly eyes. When she later tried to describe it, she could only think of the eyes of a great lioness considering her cubs, though she knew there were no words and no metaphor equal to it.

She looked into his eyes, until the sound of the party fell away, and she became Light itself.

When she awoke the next morning, Sophia ran to Charles’ room, expecting him to be gone. But there he was, in a sweet sleep, his covers pulled under his chin, his hair crumpled around his exposed ear.

“Thank you, Orin,” she whispered, close enough to his ear so that her words would be audible only to him – and to the fairies, should they be listening.

She thought she saw the corner of his lip lift ever so slightly, but she couldn’t be sure because at that moment, his eyelids opened, and she saw in his eyes all that she had ever dreamed possible, and beyond that a depth that contained all of the secrets the fairies had been telling her all along as well as other secrets she had never been told.

Charles saw it, too, and in that moment of seeing, there was no age, no sorrow, no separation, only the vast space of Love itself.

Sophia kissed him on the cheek, winked, and slipped away to the kitchen to make them breakfast.

Jan's Tea Party

In the morning, I awoke, and there was Yehowah, kneeling. He said to me, “I am your maker, your preserver and destroyer. Come, let’s have tea.”

And Yehowah made tea.

Then he disappeared.

There, the two teacups sat, one for me and one for Yehowah.

And I didn’t know: should I drink my tea? Would he come back? And if he didn’t, should I drink his tea?

If he didn’t come back, and I drank his tea, would he punish me? Would I be destroyed for drinking a cup of tea that he had left behind?

I sat, and the tea grew cold.

And then I heard a voice. “Thou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and voice.”

I knew that I should drink the tea. But I was afraid.

I took one sip. It was very good tea. I took many little sips, until my cup was empty. By now it was late in the day. Yehowah’s tea stood there, waiting.

I knew that he would not return. And I knew that if I drank his tea, something wild was going to happen. So I told myself: I will drink one sip only.

So I did. Nothing happened. And I took another sip. Still nothing.

Then I opened my throat and guzzled the whole cup of tea.

Nothing happened.

What is this, a trick? I asked. Yehowah pours us cups of tea, disappears, leaves me sitting here, for what? For fun?

And then I heard Yehowah laughing. Big belly laughs that kicked up a hurricane and blew a tree down in my back yard.

“That was my favorite tree,” I said.

Yehowah laughed some more, and one of my windowpanes cracked.

Soon, my whole house fell down from his laughter.

I wasn’t laughing.

That’s my house, I said.

“Yes,” Yehowah answered. “That was my tea.”

Yes, I said, but…

“There is no way but the Way.”

Oh, I said, confused.

“There is no way but the Way.”

Yes, I said, trying to sound like I got it.

“Yehowah is the giver of all gifts. Stay close to me and you will know what tea to drink and what tea to leave standing.”

Yes, I said, remembering that it was he who left, but I didn’t say anything.

“I left to get some sugar,” he said.

I thought that was preposterous. Yehowah can produce the tea but not the sugar?

“Now I have ten pounds of sugar and no tea.”

I told him that I would make him tea. I would make it every morning and put it out for him. If he didn’t come, I would drink it all with great delight.

Yehowah said, “No, that won’t be necessary. Go to the cupboard and get out a rock.”

I told him that my house was now flat, and that I had no cupboard.

He said, “Go to the stream and get a rock.”

So I went and got a rock.

I held it out to him, and it burst into a million little pieces in my hand.

“This is your soul,” he said. “You have burst into a million pieces. The time for sitting for tea is coming to a close. The tea cups are gone, anyway,” he said, looking at my house.

But you – I started, and then I stopped. He was the one who poured the tea, I was going to say. But then, looking at my house, I thought the better of it.

“It’s like this story,” he said. “You don’t know where it’s going to end.”

“It is time to become that which you desire. The love you seek is a seed in your heart, and its shell is bursting. Let it burst, let it spread out and grow like a vine wrapping the entire cosmos.

“For that seed is the very breath of the cosmos, resting in your heart. You have only to let it exhale, through every bone in your body, beyond you and into everything that is.”

Where will I live, I asked.

Yehowah laughed. “The Temple doesn’t ask, ‘where do I live?’ The Temple opens its doors, and the world rushes in. Keep falling into my arms, and you will be wrapped in gold. There is no house but the House of the Lord. There is no Temple but the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

“Let your body be my dwelling place. It is I who am looking for a home. It is I who am wandering around with ten pounds of sugar, waiting for you to call me home.”

Can I have some of the sugar, I asked, not sure of what to say next.

So he handed the bag to me, and we made a house out of sugar crystals.

And that is where I now live.