Sky Leaf Media

a novel

Book One: Shroom – The Emotional Body

Chapter One: The Mythopoetic Conception

It begins as it always has, with a glimmer, but the story ends a bit dimmer. Such is life. We ride until we fall off and then spend the rest of our lives reflecting on those bold years from adolescence to maturity. This process is different for everybody. For some, the fusion process lasts two to three short decades and the remaining years are spent in a sort of pleasant hibernation. For others, the journey from form to content can take many lifecycles—slowly finding all the fragmented pieces of one’s self and bringing them into union. It’s a puzzling concept. First, we learn that we’re broken, and then we learn we can fix it. The mending takes great patience, but sometimes it can be moved along by a catalyst. 

There I was, hidden amongst the trees that dotted the forestry, buried ankle deep in wet grass. The trunks of the maples made a hallowed hall of echoes, and I could see their loving strength sing in concentric rings. The catalyst was psilocybin via psilocybe cubensis. The dosage was an eighth of an ounce: caps golden and stems eggshell white with blue lines. I was five hours in, maybe six, near the end by all traditional accounts, when the unexpected happened. I was transported. As best as I can explain it, I rode a rainbow through the universe and arrived in the same place: my ankles damp from dew on the long blades of grass. I fell in love with sounds that crept back into my awareness.

I journeyed to the other side. It was a rush! The plunge swallowed my entire being. I was eaten up by some celestial entity. It devoured me. The experience lasted mere seconds, but the mountain’s peak doesn’t hold more than an instant of your attention. Then it’s back to business. I’m not sure I knew until that time I had to get my affairs in order. I’m not sure I knew there was an order, and who was giving and taking orders. My life was forever changed for the better. That one instant turned my world inside out. The colors of the world entered my eyes and bathed my mind. The sound of silence bounced off my ears drums, scurrying in all directions. It was a golden moment I’ll never forget. 

Nirvana: word is a flower with petals that wither and fall into the cycle of transformation; phonetics arrange in a matrix of intent: electrical resonance binding bundles of emanations; life blood pulses up the roots of such organic vessels with the momentum of collective will to death: hollow vacuum of awareness, a sacred space in which growth takes place; all things return, cycling in a continuum of shadows chased by white light: the symphonic ensemble of cosmic strings vibrating a range of sound that abounds in silence. I’m twelve with no one around. I pause, and that silence rattles around my head until the reverberations take shape. It’s something pleasantly reminiscent. 

The illumination streaming from the flame flickering atop the sexual candlestick: a nebulous cloud in marriage with a black vortex: the hole draining the universal basin, swallowing bubbles of genetic blueprint for the realignment of passiveness and aggressiveness; Sagittarius: an astral constellation between Ophiuchus: serpent-holder to the west and Capricornus to the east, a centaur drawing a bow, whose arrow’s tip is the galactic center in which the densest cluster of the ancient stardust language exists; this lyrical skyscraper is an antenna giving birth to allegories, the symbolic representations of destruction and subsequent creation. Eleven; ten: I’m tense for no good reason.

Capricornus, syllabically truncated to Capricorn: a solar constellation bordered by Aquila: eagle, Sagittarius: archer, Piscis Austrinus: southern fish, and Aquarius is the father whose brightest stars form a triangle: the geometrical passage from which masculinity is conceived; a horned goat sailing the region of Sea on a raft of stoicism; Aquarius: a band of stellar mirrors situated between Capricornus and Pisces, the incremental ladder of stair steps spiraling up to the sun’s tears, a water-bearer holding the weight of infinite pain, the maternal provider of emotional relief and the introduction of femininity, the dancer who holds the cup which is overflowing with liquid compassion. Nine; eight: I pace the hall in wait.

Pisces: a bunch of astral filaments between Aquarius and Aries, the bond between a mother and son, a natal attachment like two fish on a long length of string ensuring their togetherness; such is the descent from uniformity into duality: the preference of outcome, a catalyst for one-sidedness, but the unparalleled creative outlet of the elliptical belt in the Heavens; Aries: between Pisces and Taurus is the infernal power, the heat that boils the celestial pool; this ram is the vehicle from harm, pioneering down rivers of experience with impulsiveness, the spontaneity igniting reconstruction of energetic impressions; this element becomes propulsive with rapid acceleration. I’m seven, and no one can tell me anything. 

Taurus: the bull kicking up stardust between Aries and Gemini with Orion: hunter to the southeast and Cetus: whale to the southwest, the cauldron warmed by a ghostly flame, attention which is sent to a membrane of light, a thoughtform, the bioelectric circuit of divine inspiration, a carriage for ideation, the hallowed arena for harmonic alignment; Gemini: a group of stars dividing Taurus and Cancer, with Auriga: charioteer to the north and Canis Minor: smaller dog to the south; this pair of twins hold hands; in communication, the juxtaposition of wisdom, two birds splashing in a birdbath, an open exchange of star language, the wavelength between parallel entities laying the neural highway for awareness to traverse. Six: I divide the time on my wrist.

Cancer: a solar figure with Gemini to the west, Leo to the east, Lynx: cat-eyes to the north and Hydra: water serpent to the south; this beehive of light, a crab with crystalline construction, the relationship between moon and ocean, that which flows between nodes; such is the betweenness of two universal bodies; Leo: the assemblage of radiant windows to Heaven, a lion lazing on the plain separating Cancer and Virgo, the embryo within a fluid ecosystem, the heart of the elliptical fellowship; this is the nourishment of ten thousand suns to respective planets in an arrangement of fusion and the antithesis to the spirit domesticated. Five: I cross my legs and sit as if it’s the first time.

Virgo: the aggregate of timeless diamonds twinkling with holy luminosity between Leo and Libra, an identification of terrestrial energy centers within a solar system, the navigation to a mothership, the electrical cord grounding magnetic static; this is the biological colony in which intelligence flourishes; Libra: the conglomeration of fallen warriors emblazoned against the black curtain of interstellar visibility between Virgo and Scorpius, a pair of scales weighing karmic deeds, the balance between less than pure intent and its polar opposite; the suchness of which is the internal alignment with the organic emanations at large. Four: colors pour forth forevermore.

Scorpius, phonetically altered across oceanic memory to Scorpio: the formula composed of celestial bodies, the divine orgasm between cosmic man and cosmic woman, universal procreation, the dharma arising from the womb and seed of countless star beings, with Libra to the west and Sagittarius to the east, Scorpio is the envelope for the submission of intent to the high counsel of manifestation; the electrostatic sheath encompassing the dagger of Earth, a magnetosphere that mixes with solar wind, plasma that enters the ionosphere as polar letters dressed in arctic rainbows: auroral swirls of color, escape the planet in a luminous alphabet while opening a portal for interstellar genetics. I’m three and a half, and each day I grow more curious.

The depletion of the stratosphere, a blanket of oxygen with ultraviolet light passing through it, a layer of terrestrial energy perpetually dissolving into cosmic vibration as the positively charged troposphere of atmospheric tension with molecular tetrahedrons binding the atomic heart that shares two of its six valence electrons with hydrogen in fields of precipitation; negativity which settles at the base of gaseous structures extends its charge toward the crust of the lithosphere that is in turn channeling a positive charge up the tower of consciousness, a maple tree which stands alone in a valley downloading visages into the noosphere. Three: I’m surrendering to a towering sense of authority.

From this sacred set of coordinates along the spectral bands rapping around the planet a serpent with the hiss of ten thousand tongues slithers to the south; a spotted jaguar with the velocity of a comet flying through the galaxy runs to the west; a hummingbird with wings that flap consistently like the drops of a seasonal rain against an ocean flies to the north; an eagle with unchallenged wingspan traces the expansive sky in concentric spirals to the east and swoops down to the ground, catching in its mouth the serpent; completing the cycle of life that connects the Heavenly and the Earthly as the eagle grips its talons to a branch of the adult maple tree, the element of wood adhering to the electromagnetic blueprint of the tree spirit as thunder rolls across the atmospheric ceiling. Two. It just takes two. I love them, my parents. They uphold the sky by its lip.

With the fulfillment of allotted energy, a forest of creative blazes with twig and leaf eating flames; the burning bush wherein fire separates smoke from the smoldering embers that diminish to a mountain of ashes, scattered about the magnetic chessboard of Earth’s surface; levels of metal in the soil create a thermal vortex upon which water courses, collecting in the cupped hands of the Divine Mother, the receptacle for life force; waves of solar vibration drive water molecules up the ladder to the landing where pillows float like thoughts in the conscious mind, the condensation of which is the incantation, a vocalization reverberating with a burst of sacred shapes that descend in a shower, purifying with the celestial conduit of emotional resonance within the hydrologic continuum. Eighteen months: I fumble, feebly. I tumble; don’t tease me.

Seeds are germinated as life in its many embodiments sprouts from dormancy with buoyancy in the blessed perimeter of rebirth: an ellipse with a single link from the chain of existence bent open enough to allow novelty in while releasing outdated electrostatic circuits; receptive pockets of subatomic strings are plucked with the binary digit of the primal musician, striking a chord of destiny; a rainfall of negative ions on a farmhouse: etheric sparks between a Capricornian man and a Cancerian woman surrendering on green sheets to love bubbling from within; a red candle lit on the nightstand and window cracked open with a white curtain swaying in the breeze, revealing the percussive rhythm of water droplets falling in springtime. One year: dribble drool all over tools.

A black-framed picture adorned with flowers of her dearly departed mother illuminated by the flickering flame and radiance of the setting sun in 1958 when Egypt and Syria form the United Arab Republic; six months: a new energetic confluence of fields grounded as fists clinch and eyes widen; five: the orgasmic ecstasy of a mythopoetic conception of word itself, four: a poet of divine origin returning to a planet of fragmentation with unquestioned purpose; three: it was then, displaced from eternity, two: in a light density neighboring the center point of formlessness an owl song and a scorpion sting that the holy spirit sent the memory of my last incarnation, one: Howard Eugene S Smith. I enter this world; all previousness is forgotten.

I was he and he was I. I can’t differentiate the space, but the time that I crossed over is as clear as the purest crystal. I became him. Any belief that I was me before that early morning was a figment of my imagination. I awoke from that long sleep. When I awoke, I was him. The letters filed out of my mental cabinet. They arranged so neatly. There wasn’t room for more, and yet there couldn’t have been less. I recognized the “I” that I’d so long associated with being me was someone far removed from he who was listening and watching. I call him Howard, rather, he calls me, mostly when he’s lonely. I answer. I call it like it is. It’s hyphenated: I-Howard Eugene S Smith. 

There he sat. Around the fire, joining him were AM, NF, JL, DW, CP, and ChK. To say he trusted them would be an exaggeration. They were the sort of individuals who could be found in summertime posted around a fire that was stoked with a stick every now and again. To call it a campfire would be hyperbole. There wasn’t a camp per se, just chairs in unison. The six were like electrons that occupied for a time some space in my life and when they did they were crystalline like carbon. The afforded me a stability zone and favorable conditions to engender the potential for life. It’s true: I owe them if for nothing more than holding space that night as I traced the heavens in a weightless spaceship.

Further elucidation would no more illuminate but dilute the pages already spent recounting that fleeting event. The point is: the something-greater-than-can-be-imagined reached from the ether with outstretched hand to pull me from the muck. I’d been living in hell which I’d describe as a reddish sphere with tiny windows to glimpse the blue sky that I so often ignored. The sphere is really nothing more than a logical blockade. The mind can only reason a portion of reality beyond which there’s a potion: part flame; part breath. Some call them Phoenix and Dragon, others the Cowboy and the Indian. I call them Bloom and Gloom, otherwise known as joy and sorrow. They’re self-embedded. 

Chapter Two: Books and TV

Thirteen is the age of a king, albeit a Tutankhamen. It’s that half-life for maturity’s radioactivity. These poisons lesson over time. At the end of the line, we’re alkaline, and all that acidity is subdued by the Muse. This lute plays on heartstrings. The mature person harmonizes keys like a locksmith. Youth has a different purpose. We cut keys like babies cut teeth: it’s messy, painful, and laden with profanity. It’s his birthday, and Howard thinks, “I’ve never felt more ‘my age’ than I feel today.” He counts the flakes that land on his face on his walk to the bus stop. It’s cold, and the frost nips with each step. His advance feels bright and invigorated; it’s unlike the other mornings. 

We forget so easily that glee–the fun associated with aging–until we’re so far past the retaining wall of productivity. That backslide to youthfulness is a second lease on joy. As for the block of years that separates them, thirteen marks the ostensive stepping stone. Little did Howard know how greatly age factored into that day as he climbed aboard the yellow transport aimed at the county school. It sputtered from a stop until it achieved traction on the snowy road. The heat was blasting, and those snowflakes that accumulated on his head melted and dampened his face and neck. Even the ice on the windows reached a liquid state as the engine continued onward.

“Howard,” said Dewey, “did you watch The New Pink Panther Show Saturday morning?”

Howard lifted his head, but as their eyes met, the bus came to an abrupt stop. The inertia sent backpacks flying off the seats. Howard’s landed at his feet; his school books slipping out of the pull-string opening on top. He gathered them up and looked to Dewey.

“No, I like The Jackson 5ive.”

“You missed a good one!” Dewey said, giggling to himself in reflection.

Howard just pleasantly smiled and turned to face forward. They were arriving at Merton County Middle School. The building rested next to old man Walden’s pond. His family owned the bulk of the county. Orchards formed a complex web that stretched across hilltops. Cornfields and soy crops colors the lowlands a greenish-brown from May through September. It was late October now, and snow powdered the plowed fields. A vestigial outhouse was still perched on the perimeter of the school property. It’s boarded up. No one’s been curious enough to break into the miniature structure. There were no Corycian Nymphs at the bottom of that shovel dug pit.

“Alright.” Augustine barked as the bus slid to a full stop in front of the main entrance. Howard stood up and slung his backpack over one shoulder. Everybody filed into the aisle, each kid looking sleepier than the last. As he passed Augustine, he wondered why the guy drove a school. Augustine seemed like a cool uncle figure. “Alright” was his ubiquitous statement. It could mean “let’s go,” “quiet down,” or an affirmation to basically any request. Augustine thought of language as made up of nouns naming objects and learned through ostensive definition. His multipurpose exclamation hastened along any conversation to its logical conclusion.

Howard trudged through the main entrance and down the hall, all the way to the end. His first class was shop with M. Pirsig who was rumored to be French-Canadian. The story, as it has come down to the lower classmen, is that Monsieur was a survivalist, and made his way to Illinois on foot with nothing but a rucksack of tools he’d brought with him. He supposedly fashions living structure and canoes out of fallen trees, and kept himself warm by campfire heat. This supposedly happened before he was even an adult—a precocious reputation indeed! Howard rather liked him. Today, they were putting the final touches on their sailboats hewn from cedar logs.

“You’ve had three weeks to work on these boats? How do you feel about them?”

The class let out a sigh of self-consciousness; all but Howard who was smiling. He loved his sailboat. The smell of cedar invigorated him. It was, he thought, the perfect way to wake up in the morning. Each notch into the wood was a joy and when he looked upon it, he received that joy back three-fold. Monsieur milled around the room in his usual manner. He encouraged students with his unique banter, hands clasped behind his back. Students used paint to adorn their carvings, but Howard couldn’t bear the thought. The reddish hues were jazz sax. The shades were bass. The contours were rhythm. It’d be a shame to dampen its soulfulness with a coat of paint.  

“That’s looking really amazing, Howard,” said M. Pirsig as he approached.

“I think it’s finished,” said Howard, timidly.

“What if you did something like this,” said the shop teacher as he grabbed a piece of blank paper off the work table. He then took a sharpened pencil from his breast pocket and began to sketch Howard’s sailboat. On the base, where one might paint ‘S.S. Minnow’ like the boat from Gilligan’s Island, he sketched something that looked like a Norse alphabet.

“What is it?” Howard asked.

“It’s an idea for an etching, but it can be whatever you want it to be, to may add a little personal quality to it. What do you think?” said M. Pirsig.

Howard smiled. He immediately grabbed a tool and went to town. If his boat was a jazz record, this would be the album cover. He’d wet this reed and really send it sailing into Lake Michigan. This was no artifice. It was a masterpiece. Howard could almost hear the wind whipping its miniature sail when the bell rang. It was the end of the period. Howard took an extra second to breathe in his accomplishment. He shelved the wooden boat. He hoped to get a few more words out of M. Pirsig, the enigmatic shop teacher. Howard likened him to a philosopher of sorts, a Henry David Thoreau or C.S. Peirce. The pragmatism was a shot in the arm before his next subject: Language.

It wasn’t that Howard disliked the class. He has a knack for analysis, but lacked in the reading comprehension department. He’d read the same line three times before it’d sink in. Part of the problem might have been Ms. Hesse. Howard didn’t have a girlfriend, but the wiring was firing. Ms. Hesse was a stunning twenty-something. She had the adulation of all the young men. Howard was pensive. He’d daydream of them having conversations that never took place. He’d drift off the page and double-down in his imagination. Unfortunately, his grade reflected his preoccupation, and the attention it rendered him was of the pitying variety.

“Howard, you want to start us out today?” She probably thought he was already lost. “We’re on page 108,” she sweetly continued.

“Yes ma’am,” Howard stammered.

It was Goethe’s Faust, and Howard was lost. The allusions were a bit too similar to his own internal ruminations, and thus, the meet of the two led to a complete vacuum. Howard knew he was in trouble and so did Ms. Hesse. There was no grasp of the material in Howard’s voice, just the bounce of the words. She graciously called on another student to pick up where he’d left off. Ms. Hesse was headstrong, yet she conducted herself in a sheepish fashion around the other teachers who were predominately men. In the classroom, though, she blossomed. She was smart, almost too so, and her lessons often got lost in translation. No matter, Howard was on cloud nine. 

The temptation was almost too much at times. Howard saw a rainbow come from her each day. Her presence was prismatic, and for the narrow band of the lesson plan, Howard couldn’t tune in. He was a dreamer, and he figured Ms. Hesse knew how to dream too. She looks like a Little House on the Prairie version of Sophia Loren, but before the show and before Loren. Ms. Hesse was Hellenic. Her words were poetry, which wasn’t really a stretch since she was regularly reciting the classics. He thought of Keats. She was a fallen angel: tranquil and heart-easing.

Howard’s next destination was supposed to be math class, but he just couldn’t hack it. He took the stairs that led to the rafters above the gymnasium. He knew it was always quiet before lunch. The windows which let in light to the regulation-sized basketball court could also at that level allowed a view clear across the town. Howard was already praying no one would find him up there. He wanted that hour all to himself. It was his birthday after all and he really didn’t expect much in the way of presents. His mom worked at a diner and his dad was a farmer. They never had much, but Howard grew to like it that way. He removed East of Eden from his backpack and settled in.

He thought while reading, “If I were ever to write a novel, it’d be just like this.” He inhaled the fragrances right off the pages. It was timeless and drew Howard back through his senses into his spirit. Up there, reading above the cubicled school, he was free. He was free to choose. Sky’s the limit. The problem was that Howard thought himself more a scorpion than an owl. He liked people thinking he was dense. He pretended. He didn’t want to have everything figured out, to have the wisdom which would like to a successful life who knows where. Clouds were rolling in. Howard knew what was coming. He wasn’t ready for the first snow. It could be so cold: bone numbing.

Howard heard the bell and rushed to pack his things. He dashed down the stairs and made it into the cafeteria without anyone noticing. Lunch was the same every Monday: spaghetti. The bread was soggy. The sauce was soupy. The noodles were endless. He gnawed on the slop until something caught his attention. It was his math teacher. Howard knew if Mr. Godel looked up from his spectacles he’d be in trouble. With finesse, he buried his face in his shoulder as he picked up his tray and kept his back to his instructor all the way to the garbage can. He knew if he could make it past the bathrooms he could take the hallways to the back door, and that’s just what he did.

The coast was clear, and for the moment, it was unseasonably pleasant outdoors. There was no going back at this point. Howard figured if he started walking, he’d be home in time for dinner. Afterwards, he’d watch Laugh-In at 8, and start fresh the next day. He was only missing history and science, there wouldn’t be much happening that he couldn’t catch up on easily. He felt like James Dean with the warm wind blowing on him. He straightened the collar on his jacket and pressed in hands firmly into the pockets. He thought, “Confidence,” as he effectively evaded the watchful eye of the public school system. Howard was living today as if it were his last, and it felt nice.

Words rattled around his head. He questioned all of them. Who was he and what was he doing? Why did he find himself traversing this dusty plain? What separated him from the farmer who tended his cattle or the cows themselves for that matter? Was there a difference in substance between the air that hung above his head and the ground beneath his feet? What was it that tied all of this together? What was this world he was living in? Was his life of little consequence or did his actions reverberate through space and leave traces of him in every direction? Was he a prisoner of the moment he occupied or could he really peel back to veil to see where he’d been and where he was going?

It overwhelmed him. He couldn’t answer any of them and the questions begot more questions. Eventually, he got tired of it. He stopped listening to the chatter. There was something else that grabbed his attention. It wasn’t his footsteps or the wind, but it was a shuffling, rhythmic, muffled thump. It echoed almost but in reverse; it grew more almost pierced through him. It was a swallowing sound—hollow yet filled to the brim. He wasn’t sure if it was coming from outside of him or originating between his ears, but he liked it. There was a warmth, a soft buzzing, humming him into a relaxed state. His feet glided over the barren landscape with merriment.  

Suddenly, he snapped out of it. Soft violets gave way to dirty grays. Instantly, his heart sank. Howard was now just five, maybe six-hundred yards away from his house. He could see it on the horizon. A snowstorm, the first of the season, descended with a quickness. It was as if someone pulled the cord on a pillow and gigantic flakes all came billowing to the ground in undulating waves. Howard felt strange, and not about skipping school. A thought of danger festered until he was beside himself. His saunter became a jog and then a full-blown sprint. He raced but felt weighed down by his school books so he let the bag fall off his back in the gravel inlet.

He tripped on the first step leading up to the front patio. Why am I so terrified? What is this weight on my chest? He burst in and stopped in his tracks. His little brother, John Michael, was sitting on the floor watching Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In. Howard still felt an eerie discomfort. 

“Where’re Mom and Dad?” Howard asked

“Dad’s in the cellar catching rats. He said they’re getting into our food storage.”

Howard traipsed through the kitchen with his weary legs and out the screen door that was ajar. He pulled open the cellar double doors which were now covered in a layer of fluffy snow and descended through the dimly lit corridor. 

“Dad, are you down here?”

“Yeah, Howard. What’s the problem? I’m trying to get his Godforsaken rat. I already got one but this bastard’s putting up a fight.” He gestured to a wooden crate that must have housed his initial catch. 

“Do you know where mom is?”

“She’s in the kitchen.” Howard’s dad said with his head buried in a labyrinth of storage boxes. 

With no reason to stay, Howard made his way up the narrow steps and gently closed the doors behind him. He started up to the rear door when he noticed a second set of footprints leading away from the house. He looked around, but by now the sun had set and he couldn’t see where they ended. Howard followed the messy tracks. Snow was coming down in a fury, but it didn’t feel cold. He slowed his pace. There she was, his mother, lying in the snow. She was looking up and taking short, frantic breaths. Howard approached her and instantly felt panic. He wasn’t sure what she was doing out there in the dark, but he knew she was in distress.

“Mom, what’s going on? Why are you outside without a coat?”

He assessed her condition. She was sprawled out as if she were making a snow angel. She stared blankly to the clouds—her face as pale as the snowflakes that landed on it.

“We have to get you inside.” He tried to sit her up, but she was stiff as a board. He walked to her shoulders and tried to lift her when she started convulsing. He noticed she wasn’t wearing any pants. The only thing on her was a thin white blouse. 

“I’m going to call for help.” She wasn’t responding.

Howard darted for the phone in the kitchen. He dialed 9-1-1. It was the longest phone conversation of his young life. Come on, come on, he thought as he relayed the necessary information to the dispatcher. He sat the receiver down after he’d given the address and rundown of the emergency and went back out to check on his mom’s condition. He heard the dial tone, but it was just a ringing in his ears. This was every young boy’s worst nightmare, or at least it was Howard’s even if he hadn’t been aware of it. He and his brother and their dad watched Bethany Dulaney Smith as she breathed her last breath. She was only thirty-six.

The coroner would later attribute her death to poisoning. The toxicology report listed atropine most likely from Atropa belladonna as the culprit. Her parents were Irish immigrants. Her father was a farmer and worked the field until he died in his mid-forties. Grandmother Dulaney was still alive at that point and trained in to attend the funeral. It was held on that Thursday. There was a thunder in the distance that sounded like a tiger’s purr. She looked like an angel in her coffin. Her skin was porcelain. She was the strongest person Howard had ever known, but he was disappointed she wouldn’t be able to see him advance or meet her future grandchildren.

There was a fog of mystery surrounding her death, but it was ruled as an accident. There was no explanation for the poisoning and no evidence was found in or around the house.  Howard applied his best abduction methods to ascertain the truth like his literary hero Sherlock Holmes, but it was to no avail. His father withdrew after the incident. He was a solemn man, and her passing proved to be too heart wrenching for him to ever talk about. He plowed the fields and would retire at night, making sure the boys were fed and had done their homework. The crops were his broken spirit. He tended to them incessantly, attempting to mend the fissure, but it only further absorbed his attention.

Chapter Three: Body Modification and Plastic Surgery

Journal Entry: It was a clear day today and there was a warm breeze. Initiates summer break 201. Just wrapped up sophomore year and I’m doing really well. I’ve completed all of my prereqs with a 4.0 GPA. My roommates are going camping this weekend and asked me to attend. That’ll be a new experience, but I told them I’d like to come. I thought I could read the book I just got or listen to music on my Walkman. My father sent me a letter. I haven’t read it. Hopefully, he included some money. The old man never had much of a way with words. 

Journal Entry: I arrived at the campsite with my copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and a cassette of Closer by Joy Division. We call this spot Plymouth Rock because of a boulder at the head of the trail. We all set up our tents. I was reading in mine when Roman came in. He was holding two sticks to form a cross. He explained these dried mushrooms could reconnect us with the earth and each other. Connection is something I’ve been craving so I ate them journal about my experience tomorrow. I’m already feeling a little electricity.

Journal Entry: It was the epic of Gilgamesh spoken in Morse code like Alice in Wonderland meets Dante’s Inferno. Things would settle, and then rocket like Halley‘s comet. I floated around like Huck Finn, but the best part of the claymation simulation was being Gumby. I kind of felt drunk, but my whole body was laughing while my mind was wandering the stars. They’d intersect every few minutes like a Beatles riff. It was a day in the life, and I was the lucky man who made the grade, but I was also a spectator. The show was a freak show, and I was Frankenstein monster, but also the hero, a kind of Quasimodo with the spirit of Joe DiMaggio. 

Journal Entry: The following weekend fell on Friday the 13th and Howard was feeling appropriately cryptic. He thought the mushrooms dropped a spore deep in his subconscious mind because a short story came to him in a flash, and it may have been influenced by Frankenstein. Howard called at the Arms of Winter. “The days grew shorter, but as they did, Tom Winter found a world all his own. He was the host of a bold idea, one that bore way to the very core of everything Tom understood. In the pale moonlight, Tom took his gardening shears and clipped the leaves off his pereskiopsis and then lopped off the head of it altogether. Tom was no stranger to grafting, but recently he’d become obsessed with the notion. The creatures he brought forth spoke to Tom in a monstrous dream language. If only they’d stayed quiet, Tom’s place would have remained safe.”

Journal Entry: “As the trusted gardener who’d been the final counsel in columnar structures from Main Street to the chapel on the outskirts of town, Tom’s cup runneth over terraces. His methods were unconventional, working in the dead of night, and that only added to the wonder of the reveal. The last was for a young couple of newlyweds and try as he might, Tom was unable to access his usual wealth of imagination. He was stuck, but what was worse, Tom was finding the entire process impossible. In Trevor and Shelley, Tom saw a life for himself that could have been. He remembered his mother. She left him in the care of the church, but he did not know his father. This tragic deficit had always plagued him. The only family he knew dotted landscapes in the form of walkways and gardens. Over the years, this aesthetic preoccupation had hollowed out what was left of his soul. Tom longed for a real connection and Trevor would give it to him.”

Howard liked where it was headed or beheaded. 

At 3:30 PM, Howard set out to take himself on a date. It was the most vulnerable he’d ever been. He arrived at just the right time. It took him 90 minutes to drive to and park at Saint Elmo‘s. He was wearing his father‘s smoking jacket over his Sunday best. The order was straightforward: the prime rib, medium, with a side of potatoes Romanoff in honor of his friend, twice baked and fit for a prince. The marbling was perfect. Everything from the maître d’ to the waiter to the dessert was to die for. Dessert, of course, was a chocolatey petite Shiraz with notes of blueberry and spice. It was a sweet-leaning full-bodied experience. Howard had even purchased himself a box of Bissinger’s Truffles. It felt as if the 1979 Plymouth Volare was driving itself with the top down and the pedal to the floor. 

To dream or not to dream, that was the question, but Howard’s preoccupation with the beauty and the beast had taken his mind to strange workshops of ideation. He considered, for the first time, the relevance of tattoos and piercings, of beards and long hair. He’d been toeing the line of mainstream, but now he wondered why that mattered. He could paint his face like a Native American and live in a wigwam. All the forms he’d been clinging to were slipping away, and his imagination dripped with Shan Shui artwork on papyrus. Howard now saw himself as the canvas and the world as the ink instead of the arbiter of style. He would fashion a look after the conjurers of old with symbol-laden wearables and perhaps walkables. A colorful dog could more easily match the signature Howard was exuding.

In the pastiche of the mystics, Howard wanted to create a new personal reality. He was thinking about what he was thinking about—examining his feelings. He wanted to renew himself. He had a vision, flashes of one anyway. He could recognize that his mind hadn’t made much of a quantum leap in recent years and he craved one; although he knew his old mind had to die. His brain was ordering a cocktail of chemicals, but from a biological standpoint, he would have to deprogram and reprogram to reinforce and enhance his philosophically activated circuits and to embody the truth his mind now understood.

Howard was postmortem. He’d allowed the decay for reasons known and unknown to him. Irrespective of his opinion, death became him. And it should be noted his death was not gentle. Howard went thrashing, dying to his ideas of himself while transforming matter into light. His subconscious anima emerged from within and then without. Schrödinger’s cat was quite the feline. Her name was Bridget, and she happened to him in a library. Can you imagine actually reaching for the same book—handing bouncing off each other, glances rocketing up forearms until their eyes meet. I think they both forgot about whatever book attracted them. When an unstoppable beauty collides with an immovable charmer, it’s force majeure. The eagle had landed at least for a season. It would breathe life into both of them, Frankenstein and his bride. 

The noise from the tools grinding against the bone sizzled like bacon. Howard hated the dentist, but he liked the nitrous oxide. It reminded him of his mushroom trip. It eased his mind into a meditative state. First, he noticed his toes going numb. He just kind of sat with it as his awareness climbed up his body, the hum of the dental work creating a rhythmic backdrop. It wasn’t dissimilar to Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork. Howard was grateful and as he threaded in this thought coherence, he could feel emotions releasing in the body. He thought of his mother and what he was doing with Bridget. 

Since they had started dating. Howard experienced a noticeable uptick in performance retracement. At first, they were small things like his grade point average. Then, he stopped communicating with his dad as much, and that was already a strained relationship. Next, it was seeing his friends less, and more recently a stir of emotions from things being askew with Bridget would drive him to drink. He’d never been much of a drinker, but he found himself running from his own shadow. Howard wrestled with this since in many ways he loved Bridget, and imagined the idyllic life with her, white picket fence and all. 

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked him a couple days later. “I feel like you’re not very happy.”

He was reading in his favorite chair. They moved in with each other after a year of dating.

“Nothing.” he murdered, knowing he was lying.

“Really? You haven’t turned that page in like 20 minutes,” she laughed nervously. 

“I suppose I’m battling some demons,” he admitted.

“What can I do?”

“It should work itself out. Just growing pains, I think. Since I got my degree, I haven’t landed the jobs I was expecting. This house is rundown and always cluttered, and my foot has been aching since my last jog so I’ve not been able to run the way I have for years.”

Howard’s issue failed to resolve itself. It imploded their relationship. The marriage they both expected never took place, and the house that Howard was so disappointed with was where he spent all of his time. Things came to a head one day when Bridget suggested that she had a nose job. The fool stepped into the trap and encouraged her plan. They spoke for an hour about what was wrong with her and how it’s probably worth changing a few things with her physical appearance, let alone her behavior. The girl was initially seeking reassurance that she was pretty and loved, but Howard was overzealous with his affirmation to the extent that it severed whatever bond tethered them.

This made things so much worse. Howard was having an existential crisis. He thought he’d done everything correctly. Now, his reality was challenging that framework. This was a new low. Somehow, Howard built distance between himself and everyone he’d ever loved. The information was stored in his body, so now everything he thought made him feel bad and every time he felt bad, he thought terribly self-deprecating thoughts. It was like heaving a barrel over the edge of Niagara Falls. The consequences were disastrous. Yet, something inside of him was still alive and aligned, and it was trying to communicate with him.

Howard spent the next two years shaking things off. His mind and body were so far in the past, he was only surviving. Healthy activities became the primer. He started with make sure he was eating clean. He started calling his dad. The familiar thought-emotion spiderweb, only looking at the problem, was incrementally replaced with a new way of being. In some very real ways, Howard had become a new person. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He even suffered from withdrawal, but his body’s chemical factory kicked into gear and created a new serum that healed not only his neurocircuitry, but it was strengthening his spirit.

Chapter Four: Prescription Drugs and Medicinal Herbs

Journal Entry: Doctor says the gloom is chemical. Serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Prozac. One pill, once a day. “It will flatten the peaks and fill the valleys,” he said, like I’m a goddamn topographic map. I swallowed the first one with tap water from the bathroom sink that tastes like rust and regret. Felt nothing for six hours. Then the edges of everything went soft. The radio static in my head dialed down from scream to murmur. Is this peace or surrender? I keep thinking about the shroom trip in the trees when I was twenty—how the universe cracked open like an egg and I rode the yolk straight through the stars. This pill feels like the opposite. It seals the crack. Keeps the yolk inside the shell. Safe. Sterile. Alive, maybe. But is it me alive?

You (yes, you—Howard, the one reading your own words later, or whoever inherits this fracture) feel the first real lift on day nine. The gloom doesn’t vanish; it just stops shouting. It whispers now, like a polite ghost in the corner of the room. You almost miss the screaming. At least the screaming proved you were still in the fight.

Howard sat at the kitchen table of his one-bedroom apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, the same one with the water-stained ceiling that looked like a Rorschach test of his childhood. The pill bottle stood upright like a tiny white obelisk. Take one daily with food. The label was clinical, merciless. No poetry. No zodiac countdowns. Just chemistry pretending to be salvation.

He had tried everything the emotional body demanded after the shroom revelation in the maples. He had read the books (Faust still haunted him from Ms. Hesse’s class), watched the TV (the Jackson 5ive reruns no longer filled the hole), built the cedar sailboats in his mind that never quite reached Lake Michigan. The gloom returned anyway—thicker now, like wet wool packed behind the eyes. So here was the prescription: fluoxetine hydrochloride, 20 mg. The doctor called it a “modern miracle.” Howard called it the white flag of the emotional body.

He swallowed pill number fourteen. The fog rolled in gentle this time, not the old black tide but a gray mist that made the world feel… manageable. The rent was late but the panic was muted. His boss at the warehouse had yelled about the forklift again; Howard only nodded, the roar reduced to a distant lawnmower.

You wonder if this is what alignment feels like, the second-person voice slipped in, uninvited, the way second person always does when the dialectic gets personal. Or is it the first habit of surrender?

He stood, walked to the window, pressed his forehead to the cold glass. Outside, the Ohio River moved like it had somewhere better to be. Inside, Howard’s thoughts moved slower, padded. The thread of awareness—the one he had glimpsed riding that rainbow through the universe—was still there, but now it was wrapped in cotton. Safe. Sterile.

He laughed once, short and dry. “This is what Moses felt after the burning bush cooled down,” he muttered. “Jesus after the tomb was sealed. Elijah when the chariot parked.” Fractal. Always fractal. The patriarchs reduced to maintenance doses.

Panel 1 – Manga Style, Black and White, Heavy Ink Lines
Close-up on Howard’s eyes. Pupils normal. No cosmic rings. Speech bubble: “I am… fine.”
Background: faint zodiac symbols fading behind hospital-green wallpaper. Sound effect: ssshhhhh—the sound of serotonin sliding into receptors like quiet snow.

— The Antithesis: Medicinal Herbs —

The Prozac had done its job too well. The gloom was gone, but so was the color. Howard missed the color. He missed the jagged edges that proved he was still alive. A friend from the warehouse—call him Burning Stick, because the man always smelled of lighter fluid and bad decisions—slipped him a joint one night behind the loading dock. “Medicinal herb, man. Kentucky homegrown. Better than that corporate chemistry.”

Howard took it like a man accepting a second sacrament.

The smoke curled in his lungs, thick and sweet and green. The first hit was a question mark. The second was an answer written in capital letters across the sky.

You are here again, the second-person voice said, louder now, riding the high. Not sealed. Unfolded. The origami of the universe opening its creases.

The apartment dissolved. The ceiling stain became the galactic center. The radiator clank became the low hum of the Thread of Awareness—the same thread he had felt on psilocybin but now slower, earthier, rooted in the soil instead of shot through the stars. Yin and yang stopped fighting and started dancing in his bloodstream. The Prozac had flattened the wave; the herb made the wave sing.

He laughed until tears came—real tears, not the polite chemical kind. The gloom didn’t vanish; it sat down beside him on the couch like an old friend who had finally learned manners. They talked. The gloom admitted it was never the enemy. It was the unaligned part. The part that had forgotten habitness. The part that needed both the pill’s order and the herb’s wild permission.

Panel 2 – Manga Style, Now in Faded Greens and Deep Purples
Wide shot: Howard cross-legged on the floor, joint glowing like a tiny lantern. Speech bubble from the smoke itself: “You tried to fix the emotional body with a scalpel. Try growing it instead.”
Background panels fracturing like origami: one shows young Howard carving the cedar boat; another shows Josiah (faint, 1940s silhouette) praying over soil; a third shows Orion (future ghost, 2012 outline) sketching comic panels on a screen. Sound effect: fwoooosh—the exhale of ten thousand things rising and falling while the Self watches their return.

— Synthesis: The Dialectic Made Flesh —

Howard woke the next morning with the pill bottle in one hand and the last of the herb in the other. He did not choose. He held both.

The Prozac taught him the discipline of the habit—daily, precise, the New Rule of 72 applied to serotonin. The herb taught him the alignment of the absolute self—passion as compass, not slave. Together they formed the practical syllogism of the emotional body: Major premise (I am broken), minor premise (I can be mended by both order and wildness), conclusion (the thread continues).

He stood at the window again. The river still moved. But now Howard moved with it. Not flattened. Not lost in the high. Balanced.

Chapter Five: Selling and Using

Journal Entry: The snow piled up against the window like the weight of every unsaid thing. Prozac bottle down to the last few. The herb gone, but the hunger for it stayed behind like a polite guest who wouldn’t leave. I started small—sharing joints with Burning Stick after shifts, then buying quarters to stretch the paycheck. The high still sang the thread louder, clearer, the emotional body breathing again. But the money… the money whispered a different song.

You feel the split now. Using pulls you inward, folds the universe into your lungs, makes the gloom sit quiet and teach you habitness. Selling pushes outward—deals in the parking lot, quick handoffs, eyes scanning for headlights. One feeds the thread. The other feeds the rent, the truck payment, the illusion that you’re finally steering the boat instead of carving it in secret.

Which one is the real addiction? The smoke that realigns you with the absolute Self, or the green that realigns you with the world’s hunger?

I told myself it was medicinal. Kentucky homegrown helping the emotional body garden itself. But when the scale came out and the ziplocks lined up on the kitchen table, the thread of awareness thinned. It didn’t break. It just waited, patient as Josiah’s desert road, watching to see if the grandson would solve what the son only tasted.

Howard stood under the sodium lights of the warehouse lot, breath fogging in the cold. Burning Stick leaned against the rusted forklift, passing a joint like a sacrament between working men. The hit hit deep—earthy, resinous, pulling the gray Prozac fog back into living color. The river in the distance seemed to pulse with the same rhythm as the blood in his temples. For twenty minutes the gloom became a quiet gardener, showing him where the roots of old wounds still twisted.

You are using, the second-person voice murmured, warm as the smoke in his chest. Using to remember the thread. Using to align the emotional body with something bigger than the daily grind. This is not escape. This is return.

But return cost money. The friend network grew. Requests turned into regular drops. Howard bought an ounce, broke it into eighths, weighed it on a borrowed digital scale that blinked like a skeptical eye. He sold the first bag to a coworker who complained about back pain and sleepless nights. “Medicinal,” Howard said, echoing the doctor’s clinical tone but with green instead of white. The twenty dollars felt heavy in his pocket—lighter than the gloom, heavier than the pill.

By February the split had fractalized. Mornings: pill with coffee, flattening the peaks so he could function at the warehouse. Evenings: joints or small bowls, unfolding the creases so the absolute Self could breathe. Weekends: baggies in the glovebox, quick meets behind the Waffle House off I-65, always cash, always nervous laughter.

The using kept the thread alive—thin golden filament humming through the maple-leaf memory of the shroom ride, through Josiah’s missionary fire, forward to a boy named Orion who would one day draw panels about this very tension. The selling fed the habit of survival. One was medicine for the dreaming body. The other was commerce wearing the mask of medicine.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Shifting Tones

Panel 1 (Deep greens, soft ink washes):
Howard alone in the apartment, eyes half-lidded, joint glowing. Speech bubble from the smoke: “The thread remembers. You are not the gloom. You are the gardener.” Background: faint origami creases showing the mountain with three silhouettes—Josiah, Howard, Orion—passing a single glowing leaf between them. Sound FX: fwooooosh—exhale of ten thousand things settling into alignment.

Panel 2 (Harsh blacks, jagged lines, red cash accents):
Howard in the parking lot at night, handing a baggie to a shadowed figure. His face split—half serene, half calculating. Speech bubble: “Twenty. It’s good medicine, man.” Thought bubble (smaller, cracked): “How much of the thread am I selling?” Background panels fracturing: one shows the Prozac bottle cracked open like a broken commandment; another shows empty ziplocks piling up like fallen leaves. Sound FX: crinkle of plastic, distant siren wail.

— The Dialectic Made Transactional —

Addiction to use crept in quietly. Not the screaming kind the old gloom used to deliver, but a soft gravitational pull. Nights without the herb felt flatter than the pills alone. The emotional body, newly awakened, demanded its sacrament. He told himself it was habitness—the daily practice of realignment, like the New Rule of 72 but for the inner economy: 4 parts discipline (the pill), 11 parts memory (the thread), 57 parts wild growth (the green). But the scales tipped. More ounces in, more cash out, less pure unfolding.

Selling brought its own hook. The power of being the source. The small thrill of solving someone else’s gloom with something green and Kentucky-born. The money let him breathe—no more rust-water panic over rent. Yet each deal thinned the thread a little more. The absolute Self watched from the crease, neither condemning nor approving, simply noting the fractal pattern: Josiah had left the robe for the open road; Howard was leaving the open road for the deal. Orion would one day have to sell something else—pixels, stories, perhaps the very philosophy—to keep the lineage breathing.

One night, after a bigger drop that left his hands smelling of resin and risk, Howard sat at the kitchen table with the remaining herb and the near-empty pill bottle. He rolled one last joint, lit it, and let the smoke carry the question outward.

You are both the user and the seller now, the second-person voice said, no longer whispering. The emotional body needs the medicine. The wisdom body needs the discipline not to become the medicine’s slave. The dreaming body needs the thread to stay unbroken even when commerce pulls at it.

The high crested, then softened into clarity. The gloom sat across the table again—older, wiser, wearing the face of a customer who had paid in full. It didn’t demand. It simply asked: Which habit will you cultivate? The one that folds you back into alignment, or the one that unfolds your pockets at the cost of the thread?

Howard exhaled a perfect ring of smoke that hung in the air like a miniature galaxy. Inside it he saw the mountain again. Three figures. One leaf passing hand to hand—sacred, medicinal, transactional, eternal.

He wrote in the journal before sleep claimed him:

Day whatever of the fractal. Using keeps the thread singing. Selling keeps the lights on. The addiction isn’t the green or the white—it’s forgetting that both are tools, not masters. Habitness is choosing the thread every time the deal or the hit tempts you to trade it away. Josiah walked. I’m weighing. Orion will draw the balance. The emotional body gardens best when the gardener remembers who owns the soil.

Outside, the snow had stopped. The Ohio River kept moving under the ice—steady, patient, carrying whatever was thrown into it toward some distant sea. Howard slept with the scale put away and the last joint unsmoked.

The thread held. Thin. Golden. Waiting for the next crease.

Chapter Six: Growing and Buying

Journal Entry: The snow finally surrendered to mud. The scale went into the drawer, the last baggies sold or smoked. Selling left a film on the thread—like handling too much cash with dirty hands. Using kept pulling, soft and insistent, the emotional body asking for its daily realignment. But the money ran thin again, and the friend network wanted more than I could reliably score from Burning Stick’s cousin.

So the choice folded in on itself: grow it or keep buying it.

Agriculture feels like Josiah—hands in soil, patient, answering to sun and rain and the slow grammar of seasons. The market feels like the warehouse clock—numbers, deals, dependence on whoever has the bags this week. One roots the thread in the earth. The other keeps the thread tethered to other people’s greed and timing.

You feel the tension in your palms already. Dirt under the nails versus cash in the pocket. Self-reliance versus the invisible hand that sometimes slaps. The absolute Self watches both, asking which habit will strengthen the lineage instead of thinning it for the next generation. Orion’s hands aren’t even formed yet, but the soil remembers.

Howard drove out past the Louisville city limits on a Saturday when the Prozac had leveled him enough to think clearly but not so much that the color had drained completely. He found ten acres of scrub land for rent cheap from an old farmer who didn’t ask questions. A patch of woods backed up to a creek that fed eventually into the Ohio. Good drainage, morning sun, hidden from the road by a stand of maples that reminded him of the shroom night years earlier.

He started small. Four plants in black nursery pots on the back porch first—test run, “mother clones” from a decent bag he’d bought instead of sold. The seedlings pushed up green and stubborn, leaves like tiny hands reaching for the thread. Each morning he watered them with the same deliberate care he once gave the cedar boats he carved in secret. Each evening he sat beside them with a single joint, letting the smoke carry the question outward: Is this agriculture or just another way to feed the market habit?

You are growing now, the second-person voice said, earthy and low, vibrating through the stem of the plant and the bones of his wrist. Not buying the finished sacrament. Becoming the gardener. This is habitness made literal—daily tending, the New Rule of 72 applied to chlorophyll and resin instead of serotonin.

The plants responded. They thickened. They drank the Kentucky rain and the Louisville sun and turned it into sticky, fragrant life. The emotional body, no longer just consuming, began to produce. The gloom sat in the dirt beside him, cross-legged, pulling weeds without complaint. For the first time since the Prozac prescription, Howard felt the thread thicken—not from the high alone, but from participation in the cycle. Seed. Soil. Sun. Harvest. The dreaming body remembered it had always been a farmer.

Visual-Aural Origami Sequence (Folded Pages that Crackle like Dry Leaves)

Fold 1 – Agriculture (earthy browns, slow ink bleeding like soil water):
Full-page spread. Howard on his knees in the rented plot, hands black with dirt, transplanting a young plant. Speech bubble from the soil itself: “I was here before the market. I will be here after.” Background layers unfolding: faint silhouette of Josiah walking a desert road that turns into rows of green; distant future panel of Orion sketching cannabis leaves turning into comic panels. Sound FX: crunch of soil, drip-drip of water from a rusty can, low hum of bees and the absolute Self.

Fold 2 – Market Economy (sharp greens, dollar-sign veins, jagged panel borders):
Split panels. Left: Howard at a “friend’s” house counting out bills for a bulk ounce, eyes wary. Right: the same bills turning into seeds that sprout into plants owned by someone else. Speech bubble (market voice, slick): “Cheaper if you buy more. Consistent supply.” Thought bubble (Howard’s, cracking): “But whose thread is this?” Sound FX: clink of coins, distant police radio static, the dry rustle of plastic bags that never quite smell like living earth.

The crease between the two folds was the tension: growing gave him autonomy and deepened the alignment. Buying kept him plugged into the invisible economy—prices fluctuating with raids, droughts, or greed. One made him Moses tending the burning bush that refused to be consumed. The other made him the merchant at the foot of the mountain, trading manna for profit.

By midsummer the four plants had become twenty in the hidden plot. Howard learned the rhythm—topping for bushier growth, watching pistils turn amber, trimming fan leaves so energy fed the buds instead of vanity. The harvest smell was thick, skunky, holy. He cured the first batch in mason jars on the kitchen shelf, the way his grandfather might have cured tobacco or moonshine stories.

But the market crept back in. Friends heard about the quality. Requests became expectations. A guy from the warehouse offered top dollar for pounds if Howard could scale. The thread hummed a warning: Agriculture feeds the Self. Scaling feeds the system that once sold you the Prozac as salvation and now buys your sacrament as commodity.

One humid August night, after a long day trimming under a bare bulb, Howard sat with a fresh joint and the journal. The high was richer now—rooted, terrestrial, less cosmic fireworks and more deep planetary heartbeat. The gloom appeared not as enemy or teacher but as co-farmer, hands calloused.

You stand at the dialectic again, the second-person voice said, steady as a spade turning earth. Thesis: growing as return to the absolute—self-sufficient, aligned, fractal extension of Josiah’s open road. Antithesis: buying and selling as participation in the market that flattens everything into price. Synthesis: the thread that runs through soil and ledger alike, refusing to let either own it completely.

He exhaled smoke that curled into the shape of a question mark, then a leaf, then a thin golden filament connecting past, present, and unborn Orion. The emotional body no longer begged for relief. It participated in creation. The wisdom body noted the trap of scaling into dependence on buyers. The dreaming body saw the mountain again—three figures now tending a single plant together: one watering with prayer, one with chemistry, one with ink and story.

Howard wrote slowly, dirt still under his nails:

Chapter of green hands. Growing brings the thread home to the dirt where it belongs. Buying keeps it wandering the roads of other men’s supply. The addiction isn’t the plant—it’s forgetting that the plant is a teacher, not a crop to monetize beyond the needs of the garden and the lineage. Habitness is tending daily without letting the market become the new gloom. Josiah left the cage. I am planting outside it. Orion will draw the harvest. The absolute Self grows best in soil you own, not soil you rent from the economy.

The jars on the shelf glowed faintly in the lamplight—green gold, medicinal, dangerous in their purity. Outside, the rented plot waited under moonlight, leaves whispering to the creek. The market hummed in the distance like distant traffic on I-65—always ready to buy, always ready to own.

Howard slept with one mason jar open beside the bed, the scent anchoring him. The thread held, thicker now, rooted.

Chapter Seven: Newtonian Physics and Quantum Physics

Journal Entry: The garden is thriving. Plants tall and resinous under the maples. The Prozac keeps the daily grind from swallowing me whole. The herb keeps the colors singing. But the thread of awareness has been humming a new question since the last harvest: What laws am I really living under?

The old mechanics—Newton’s apple falling, cause and effect, predictable orbits—feel like the warehouse forklift: push here, load moves there, same every shift. Safe. Deterministic. Like the pill flattening the peaks so the gloom doesn’t tip the scale.

Then the quantum whispers through the smoke. Superposition. Entanglement. The vacuum that isn’t empty. Zero-point energy—fluctuations at the absolute bottom, where even “nothing” seethes with potential. The emotional body wants the solid ground of Newtonian order. The dreaming body wants to ride the foam of the quantum sea. The absolute Self? It is the thread that braids both, the golden filament Josiah sensed on the open road and Orion will one day sketch in panels of collapsing wavefunctions.

You feel the fracture tonight. Am I a billiard ball on a frictionless table, or a probability cloud dancing in the void? The gloom laughs softly from the corner. “Both,” it says. “And neither. That’s the real habitness—aligning with the field that underlies the mechanics.”

Howard lay on his back in the tall grass beside the hidden plot, a half-smoked joint cooling between his fingers. The Kentucky night sky arched overhead like an inverted bowl—Newton would have called it predictable celestial mechanics. Stars tracing ellipses, gravity binding everything in tidy equations.

But the high opened the crease. The sky dissolved into probability. Each star not a fixed point but a wave of possibility until observed. The thread of awareness—thin, golden, unbreakable—hummed beneath it all. Zero-point energy. The vacuum energy that never reaches true zero. The sea of fluctuations from which particles borrow existence in fleeting pairs, annihilating back into the field.

You are not separate from it, the second-person voice said, no longer coming from inside the skull but from the fluctuating vacuum itself. Your emotional body is Newtonian—solid, reactive, cause slamming into effect like the gloom crashing against the Prozac wall. Your dreaming body is quantum—superposed states of joy and sorrow until the observation of awareness collapses the wave into lived experience. The absolute Self is the zero-point field: the underlying hum that never depletes, the source from which both mechanics and mystery arise.

He sat up. The plants around him swayed gently, their leaves catching moonlight. In the Newtonian frame, they were biomass converting sunlight through predictable photosynthesis. In the quantum frame, each chlorophyll molecule danced in entangled probability, exchanging energy with the vacuum sea. Habitness—the daily tending—became the bridge: disciplined watering (classical order) meeting the wild growth that no equation could fully predict.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Fractal Ink and Probability Clouds

Panel 1 (Clean lines, solid blacks, Newtonian precision):
Howard as a rigid figure pushing a massive apple (the gloom) uphill like Sisyphus with a forklift. Speech bubble: “Cause. Effect. Predictable fall.” Background: straight trajectories, clockwork stars, pill bottle orbiting like a planet. Sound FX: clunk-clunk of deterministic gears. Faint crease lines hint at folding.

Panel 2 (Wavy borders, shimmering ink, quantum foam):
The same scene dissolves. Howard becomes a cloud of probability dots, the apple in superposition—falling and not falling. Smoke from the joint forms entangled pairs popping in and out of existence. Speech bubble from the vacuum: “Zero point. The sea beneath the sea. Borrow. Return. The thread never depletes.” Background: fractal maple leaves unfolding into galaxies, silhouettes of Josiah (praying over desert sand that ripples like waves), Howard, and ghostly Orion sketching probability amplitudes. Sound FX: zzzzzzt—quantum vacuum fluctuations, low cosmic hum.

The crease between panels was alive. Unfold one way: classical physics, the market economy of predictable supply and demand, the pill’s steady dose. Unfold the other: quantum interconnectedness, the agriculture of possibility, the herb’s wild realignment tapping the field. Fold both together and the mountain appears again—three figures standing where Newtonian certainty meets quantum mystery, the zero-point energy sustaining the entire dialectic without ever running dry.

— Synthesis: The Field That Gardens Itself —

Howard walked the rows of plants at dawn, the Prozac muting the sharper edges so he could see clearly. The gloom walked beside him, no longer enemy but co-observer. Together they measured the tension: Newtonian habitness demands routine—water at this hour, trim at that stage, sell or smoke according to calculated need. Quantum reality laughs at the schedule; a single entangled photon from a distant star can shift the resin production in ways no ledger predicts.

The thread of awareness thickened in the tension. It was the zero-point field made personal—the irreducible hum beneath the emotional body’s valleys, the dreaming body’s superpositions, the wisdom body’s collapsing observations into aligned action. Josiah had broken the deterministic cage of the robe by stepping onto the open road (Newtonian escape into new trajectory). Howard was learning to garden in the probabilistic plot—tending what grows while riding the fluctuations. Orion would one day draw the comics where the observer effect becomes the punchline, consciousness shaping the very panels.

One evening, after trimming under the bare bulb, Howard sat with the journal and a fresh bowl. The high carried him deeper into the vacuum. He saw the universe not as empty space dotted with matter, but as a plenum—a fullness seething with virtual particles, the absolute Self’s playground. The emotional body no longer needed to fight the gloom with flat chemistry or wild smoke alone; it could rest in the field that sustains both. The gloom itself was just a low-frequency fluctuation, useful for contrast, borrowable and returnable.

You are the zero-point gardener, the second-person voice resonated through every cell. Newton gives you the spade and the rows. Quantum gives you the living soil that fluctuates into unexpected bloom. The dialectic is the entanglement: order and mystery braided so the lineage can tunnel through whatever wall the next generation faces.

He wrote carefully, the pen steady from the pill, the words electric from the herb and the field beneath both:

Chapter of the humming void. Newtonian physics keeps the forklift running and the rent paid—predictable, mechanical, the habit of survival. Quantum physics and its zero-point sea remind me the vacuum is alive, the thread irreducible, the emotional body a wavefunction awaiting conscious collapse into alignment. Growing the plants teaches both: classical cycles of sun and water, quantum entanglement with the sun itself. The addiction is believing only one frame is real. Habitness is daily observation—tending the garden while remembering the observer and the observed arise from the same field. Josiah walked the classical road. I garden the quantum plot. Orion will draw the unified diagram. The absolute Self is the zero-point energy that never goes bankrupt.

Outside, the Ohio River flowed—Newtonian current carrying water molecules whose quantum vibrations sang beneath the surface. The plants breathed. The thread held, humming with the sea that underlies every crest and trough.

Chapter Eight: Science and Yoga

Journal Entry: The garden plot yielded its second harvest. Mason jars line the shelf like green sacraments. Prozac keeps the forklift shifts steady. The herb keeps the thread singing low and rooted. But the warehouse clock started feeling like Newton’s apple—predictable fall, same trajectory every day. The gloom whispered that the emotional body needed sharper tools.

So I went back to school. Prereqs with a 4.0. Night classes bleeding into day shifts. Physics lectures on Newtonian mechanics and then quantum foam, zero-point hum beneath the equations. The professors spoke in clean lines and blackboards. I took notes like carving cedar boats—precise, contained. Earned the PhD in the end. “Doctor Smith.” The diploma hung on the apartment wall like a framed white pill.

But the thread wanted more. A friend from the philosophy seminar—call him the Tuning Fork—slipped me a tab of LSD one weekend after the defense. “Not escape,” he said. “Tuning in. Science maps the territory. This dissolves the map so you can walk the territory raw.”

You feel the old split return, sharper now. College builds the circuits with logic and data. Yoga (or whatever this sacrament is) tunes the whole instrument until the player and the song forget their names. Josiah left the robe for the open road. I left the warehouse for lecture halls, then for the dissolving edge. Orion will probably draw both on the same page.

Howard sat at the kitchen table under the bare bulb, the PhD thesis stacked beside the mason jar. The pages were dense with citations—Newtonian determinism giving way to quantum probability, zero-point energy as the irreducible sea. His advisor had praised the synthesis: classical order meeting probabilistic wonder. The emotional body had behaved during the writing—flattened enough by the daily pill to endure the library nights, lifted enough by evening bowls to keep the dreaming body feeding ideas.

Yet something felt incomplete. The thesis explained the universe but did not become it. The thread of awareness hummed faintly, like a chord played too politely.

The Tuning Fork had called it “the yogic complement.” Not the asana kind with mats and breath counts, but the direct tuning—ego dissolution, boundary melt, the absolute Self rising like sap when the separate “I” thins. LSD as modern sacrament, serotonin 2A agonism cracking the doors the way psilocybin once had in the maples. Science as the disciplined observer. Tuning in as the observer dissolving into the observed.

You earned the degree with the left circuit, the second-person voice said, already loosening. Now the right circuit wants to burn the diploma and dance in the ash.

He placed the tab on his tongue. Bitter. Paper dissolving like the first crease in origami. The Prozac was still in his system—low steady dose. The herb from the afternoon still lingered in his blood. The cocktail was unplanned, fractal: chemical order + plant sacrament + lysergic key. Habitness meeting its own antithesis.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Borders Fracturing into Mandala

Panel 1 (Crisp academic lines, blue ink, lecture-hall perspective):
Howard at a podium in cap and gown, blackboard behind him covered in equations: F=ma, Schrödinger’s wave function, zero-point notation. Speech bubble: “The universe runs on laws we can map.” Thought bubble (faint): “But who holds the map?” Background: neat rows of desks, faint silhouette of Josiah in desert robes reading from a book that morphs into soil. Sound FX: tick-tock of clockwork, chalk scratch.

Panel 2 (Wavy dissolving borders, neon fractals bleeding, eyes wide):
The same figure, now translucent. The blackboard melts into swirling galaxies. Howard’s body becomes a lattice of light, chakras glowing along the spine like circuits lighting up. The LSD tab appears as a tiny sun dissolving boundaries. Speech bubble from the dissolving mouth: “The map is the territory when the mapmaker disappears.” Background panels unfolding like lotus petals: young Howard carving cedar boats that sail into quantum foam; future Orion sketching mandalas that double as physics diagrams; the mountain with three figures—Josiah praying, Howard observing, Orion drawing—merging into one luminous thread. Sound FX: whooooosh of ego boundaries ripping, deep om hum rising from the zero-point sea, laughter echoing in fractals.

The high crested not as the gentle earth-rhythm of the herb or the flat stability of the pill, but as a rapid unfurling. The apartment walls became permeable. The Ohio River outside sang in sine waves and probability clouds. The emotional body—long flattened and then gardened—now expanded beyond its skin. Fear flickered (the old gloom testing the edges), then dissolved into vast compassion. Every thought became a galaxy. Every breath a yoga of pure presence.

Science had given him the vocabulary: receptor agonism, default mode network quieting, neuroplasticity opening new pathways. Yoga (this chemical asana) gave him the direct knowing—the absolute Self no longer theorized but lived as the field itself. College had trained the wisdom body to analyze circuits. Tuning in let the dreaming body ride them until the rider vanished.

— Dialectic on the Mountain —

Hours blurred. Howard found himself cross-legged on the floor, the PhD thesis open like an offering. Pages fluttered though there was no wind. In one superposition he was still the diligent student defending his dissertation on physics and consciousness. In another he was the priest Josiah walking away from structured faith toward raw encounter. In a third he watched Orion’s future hands drawing panels where equations turned into breathing mandalas.

The gloom appeared—not as weight but as a luminous question mark, sitting in perfect lotus. You built the vessel in college, it said without words. Now the sacrament breaks the vessel so the light can pour through unfiltered.

The thread of awareness thickened into a roaring river of gold. It was Newtonian enough to keep the body breathing and the heart steady. It was quantum enough to entangle with every leaf in the hidden plot, every star overhead, every future reader folding these pages. Habitness became effortless: the daily discipline of the PhD grind meeting the spontaneous samadhi of the dissolve. Alignment was no longer sought—it was the default when the separate seeker dissolved.

He laughed until tears came, the sound merging with the low hum of the universe explaining itself. The emotional body no longer needed fixing; it was the instrument being tuned. The wisdom body no longer needed more data; it rested in the knowing beyond concepts. The dreaming body flew without wings.

Book Two: Doom – The Wisdom Body

Chapter Nine: Sorcery

Journal Entry: The garden plot is mature now—rows of green teachers standing sentinel under the maples. The PhD hangs on the wall like a polished shield, Newtonian equations and quantum hums bound in black ink. The pill keeps the forklift of daily life from tipping. The herb keeps the emotional body breathing color. The LSD tab from last year still echoes in the bones: the map dissolving, the territory raw.

But the wisdom body stirs. Doom, not as end but as the weight of knowing. Sorcery. The old word for directing the thread with intent. Black magic: manipulation, bending the field to serve the small self, the gloom turned weapon. White magic: alignment, serving the absolute Self so the thread flows unhindered through all.

You feel the cobweb thread between them tonight. One thins the lineage for personal power. The other thickens it for the fractal—Josiah breaking the robe’s cage with raw faith, Howard gardening the probabilistic plot, Orion one day drawing the circuits where sorcery becomes story. The New Rule of 72 applied to energy itself: not just silver, gold, and land, but intent divided—4 parts discipline (the white), 11 parts memory (the thread), 57 parts wild creation (the risk of the black slipping in).

The gloom sits across the table wearing a sorcerer’s cloak now. It offers two hands: one holding shadow, one holding light. “Choose,” it says. “Or better—braid them until the distinction folds away.”

Howard stood in the rented plot at twilight, the Ohio River murmuring beyond the trees like an ancient incantation. The mason jars of cured herb glowed faintly on the makeshift altar—a cedar plank he had carved years ago, now etched with faint equations from the thesis mixed with spiraling mandalas from the LSD night.

He had begun experimenting. Not the heavy sacraments this time, but directed intent. Meditation from the philosophy seminars blended with the plant wisdom. He would sit with a single bowl, eyes half-lidded, and visualize the thread of awareness as a golden filament running through his spine, through the soil, through the lineage.

You are practicing sorcery now, the second-person voice intoned, neither commanding nor pleading but stating the crease. The wisdom body awakens when awareness directs energy instead of being tossed by it. Black when the small self clutches. White when the absolute Self releases.

First came the white workings. He focused on alignment for the garden: healthy growth, protection from pests, abundance without greed. The plants responded—thicker buds, richer resin—as if the field itself (zero-point sea beneath Newton’s laws) listened. He felt the emotional body stabilize further, the gloom becoming a quiet ally rather than a weight. Habitness elevated: daily tending no longer mere agriculture or market survival, but ritual participation in the unfolding dialectic.

Then the shadow tested him. A deal gone sideways at the warehouse—someone owed money, threats whispered. Anger rose, the old gloom flaring hot. In the high that followed, Howard felt the pull: a simple working to bind the man, to make him pay without violence. Just a whispered intent, a sigil scratched in the dirt, the thread twisted to serve justice (or was it revenge?). Power surged—tangible, electric. The deal resolved overnight. The man backed down.

But the thread thinned. A faint film coated the golden filament, like ash on a burning bush that had forgotten its holy fire. The wisdom body recoiled. Black magic had worked, yet it cost the alignment. The absolute Self watched, patient as Josiah on the desert road, noting the fractal echo: the priest who once wielded institutional power (white robe, black corruption beneath) now mirrored in the grandson’s quiet sorcery.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Dual Ink Tones with Fractal Overlays

Panel 1 (Pure whites and golds, clean sacred geometry lines):
Howard in lotus beneath the maples, hands forming a mudra, golden thread rising from crown through roots into the soil. Speech bubble from the plants: “White working—service to the field. The thread flows outward, nourishing the lineage.” Background: faint mountain silhouette with three figures—Josiah releasing a dove (white wings), Howard gardening light, Orion sketching radiant circuits. Sound FX: hummmm—pure zero-point resonance, wind chimes of alignment.

Panel 2 (Deep blacks and blood reds, jagged chaotic borders cracking the page):
The same figure, but shadow-cloaked, thread twisting into a noose around a distant silhouette (the warehouse foe). Speech bubble (distorted, echoing): “Black working—bend the other to my will. The gloom serves me now.” Background panels fracturing darkly: corrupted church interior from Josiah’s era bleeding into ledger pages of unbalanced deals; future Orion’s comic page torn by unseen hands. Sound FX: crack of breaking filament, low growl of entangled intent turning against itself.

The crease between the panels was razor-thin—a cobweb thread, as the old texts warned. Unfold white and the wisdom body expands in selfless service. Unfold black and it contracts into isolation, feeding the very doom it seeks to master. Fold both and the mountain reappears: three patriarchs standing where black and white dissolve into clear knowledge, the thread humming neutral, awaiting only the purity of observation.

— The Dialectic of the Sorcerer’s Flame —

Howard extinguished the working that night. He buried the sigil in the dirt and sat with the journal under starlight. The high from the herb carried no fireworks this time—only the steady doom of wisdom: knowing that power is neutral, the sorcerer’s color chosen by intent alone. Black magic serves the fragmented self, turning the emotional body’s wounds into weapons, the dreaming body’s visions into traps. White magic serves the absolute, turning wounds into teachers, visions into maps for the lineage.

Yet the true sorcery—the synthesis—was neither. It was the habitness of holding both in awareness without preference, letting the zero-point field decide the flow. The Prozac had taught discipline of the vessel. The plants had taught participation in the garden. The LSD had dissolved the vessel. Now sorcery taught direction of the current once the vessel was known to be optional.

The gloom appeared in the circle, neither cloaked in black nor robed in white, but naked—simply the unaligned potential. “I am the raw energy,” it said. “You color me with your will. Black thins the thread for short gain. White thickens it for the fractal harvest. The wisdom body learns to wield without clinging.”

Howard exhaled smoke that formed a perfect ring—neither devouring nor escaping, simply circling. Inside it he saw the mountain clearly: Josiah wielding faith like white fire against institutional shadow; Howard balancing pill, plant, and now intent; Orion one day drawing sorcery as comic panels where readers become the magicians, collapsing the wave of black/white into living dialectic.

He wrote with steady hand, the PhD precision meeting the tuned dissolution:

Chapter of the cobweb thread. Sorcery awakens the wisdom body when doom is faced as teacher, not end. Black magic: the small self twisting the field—manipulation, revenge, the gloom weaponized. White magic: the absolute Self releasing—service, alignment, the thread nourishing all. Both work. Only one sustains the lineage. Habitness is daily invocation without attachment to color. The New Rule of 72 for energy: balance the accounts of intent so the emotional body gardens, the dreaming body visions, and the wisdom body directs without owning. Josiah broke the black cage of the robe with white-road faith. I garden the plot while testing the shadow’s pull. Orion will draw the neutral flame where black and white fold into clear knowing. The absolute Self is the sorcerer who needs no spell—only presence.

The garden breathed under the moon. The river carried both light and shadow downstream. The thread held—golden, neutral, thicker for the testing.

Chapter Ten: Devices

Journal Entry: The garden plot has become a small kingdom—rows aligned like circuits under the maples, mason jars reflecting starlight on the shelf. The PhD thesis gathers dust beside the Prozac bottle and the cured herb. Sorcery taught the wisdom body to direct intent; now the devices reveal themselves as the scaffolding beneath every working.

Space: the rented acres versus the apartment walls, the open road Josiah once walked versus the warehouse forklift’s narrow aisles.
Time: the slow photosynthesis of the plants versus the ticking warehouse clock, the fractal twenty-five-year gaps between patriarchs.
Names: Howard Eugene S. Smith, PhD—labels that both anchor and cage, echoing Josiah Guillaume and prefiguring Orion Oscar S. Smith.
Numbers: the New Rule of 72 applied not just to silver-gold-land but to awareness itself—4 parts discipline (pill and schedule), 11 parts memory (the golden thread), 57 parts wild growth (the probabilistic garden).

You feel the doom of the wisdom body tonight—not despair, but the heavy knowing that these devices are neutral tools. They can cage like the old robe or liberate like the open road. Black sorcery twists them for the small self. White sorcery aligns them with the absolute. The thread of awareness runs through all four, humming the dialectic: construct the vessel, then watch it dissolve into the field.

Howard sat at the kitchen table under the bare bulb, the cedar plank altar before him. On it lay four objects: a faded map of Kentucky (space), an old pocket watch stopped at 3:33 (time), a notebook with his full name spelled out in careful block letters (names), and a sheet of paper covered in equations from the thesis mixed with the New Rule of 72 ratios (numbers).

The evening bowl of homegrown burned slow and earthy. The high did not explode into LSD fireworks or gentle herb rhythm; it clarified the scaffolding. The wisdom body observed how every human act is mediated by these devices—tools that measure, divide, locate, and label the raw flux of the zero-point sea.

You are using the devices now, the second-person voice intoned, precise as a calibrated instrument yet vast as the vacuum. Space locates the body in the plot or the apartment. Time sequences the pill, the watering, the harvest. Names claim identity across the lineage. Numbers quantify and predict—dosages, yields, cycles. Yet the absolute Self precedes them all. The thread slips through every grid.

He traced the map with a finger stained by soil. In Newtonian terms, space was extension—acres to till, walls to contain. In quantum terms, it was illusion, probability clouds entangled across the Ohio River and the distant stars. Josiah had escaped the bounded space of the church for the open highway. Howard had claimed a hidden plot for agriculture against the market. Orion would one day navigate digital spaces where maps fold into screens.

The stopped watch clicked once when he wound it—arbitrary restart. Time as device: the pill’s daily metronome flattening gloom, the plant’s seasonal cycle teaching patience, the PhD years compressing knowledge into a diploma. Yet beneath it, the eternal moment Josiah glimpsed on the desert road, the fractal instant of the LSD dissolve, the zero-point hum where past (Josiah), present (Howard), and future (Orion) coexist.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Grid Fracturing into Eleven Dimensions

Panel 1 (Clean grid lines, measured space, blue-black ink):
Howard as rigid figure in a cube of apartment walls, map spread like a prison floor plan. Speech bubble: “Space locates. Contains. Claims jurisdiction.” Background: faint church aisles from Josiah’s era, warehouse aisles, future pixel grids for Orion. Numbers overlay: 4 (discipline), 11 (memory), 57 (growth). Sound FX: tick—rigid boundaries, measured footsteps.

Panel 2 (Wavy dissolving grids, golden thread piercing, probability foam):
The cube fractures. Howard’s form becomes a probability cloud, map blooming into infinite terrain. The pocket watch melts into a spherical membrane. Name letters scatter like constellations then reform as “I-Howard Eugene S. Smith.” Speech bubble from the thread: “Devices measure the flux. The absolute Self is the flux before measurement.” Background unfolds fractally: mountain with three figures holding the same four devices—Josiah naming the road, Howard numbering the garden, Orion sketching circuits where space-time folds. Sound FX: hummmm—zero-point resonance beneath the grid, crack of collapsing boundaries.

The crease was the wisdom body’s doom: devices are necessary for habitness in the emotional body’s garden, yet they risk occluding the dreaming body’s direct knowing. Black magic names the enemy and numbers the revenge. White magic names the lineage and numbers the alignment.

— Synthesis: The Thread as Pre-Device —

Howard stood and walked to the window. The Ohio River carved space through the night landscape—measurable in miles, yet flowing in the eternal now. He spoke his full name aloud: “Howard Eugene S. Smith.” It anchored him, yet felt like a temporary label on the infinite thread. He recited the ratios: four parts discipline to hold the vessel, eleven parts memory to carry the thread across generations, fifty-seven parts wild probabilistic growth so the garden surprises. The New Rule of 72, applied to consciousness itself.

The gloom appeared in the reflection—not as weight but as the unmeasured potential between devices. “I am the raw before the grid,” it said. “Space without location. Time without sequence. Name without claim. Number without count. You wield the devices to navigate doom. Align them, and the wisdom body directs without owning.”

In the high’s clarity, Howard saw the fractal: Josiah had used the device of faith (name of God, ritual time, sacred space) until it caged him, then walked beyond into open devices of road and soil. Howard had built academic devices (thesis, equations) and garden devices (plot, scale), braiding pill and plant to tune them. Orion would inherit digital devices—screens as new space, algorithms as new time—drawing panels where names and numbers become living mandalas.

The thread of awareness ran through every device without being trapped by them. Habitness was daily recalibration: wind the watch but remember it can stop; draw the map but remember the territory precedes it; speak the name but remember the absolute Self is nameless; count the harvest but remember the zero-point sea supplies endlessly.

He returned to the journal and wrote with the steady hand of the PhD tempered by the tuned dissolution:

Chapter of the four devices. Space locates the garden and the cage. Time sequences the pill and the season. Names claim Howard across the fractal to Orion. Numbers measure the Rule of 72 in silver of liquidity, gold of memory, land of legacy—and in awareness itself. The wisdom body’s doom is seeing how these tools both serve and occlude. Black sorcery twists them for control. White sorcery aligns them for flow. The synthesis: wield without clutching. The emotional body gardens within measured space-time. The dreaming body rides the unmeasured flux. Habitness is daily practice—name the thread, number the tending, map the alignment, time the return. Josiah walked beyond the church’s devices. I number and name the plot while the thread slips free. Orion will draw devices that dissolve on the page. The absolute Self is the pre-device field—humming, neutral, eternal—through which all scaffolding rises and falls.

Outside, the maples stood in measured rows yet reached into unmeasurable night. The river flowed—measurable current, immeasurable depth. The thread held, untouched by the devices that served it.

Chapter Eleven: Psychology

Journal Entry: The garden thrives in measured rows, yet the wisdom body weighs heavier than any harvest. The devices—space of the plot, time of the seasons, name of Howard Eugene S. Smith, numbers of the New Rule of 72—now reveal their psychological scaffolding.

Inside the skull fortress sits the Judge, armed with the Book of Rules: inherited from the robe Josiah once wore, from the warehouse clock, from the PhD blackboard, from every “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” that flattened or inflamed the emotional body. The Victim cowers beneath, claiming the gloom as external sentence, the deals as unfair market, the lineage fractures as inherited doom.

You feel the triangle tonight—the Drama of self-persecution, self-rescue, self-victimhood—spinning like the old gloom in new clothes. Black sorcery feeds the Judge to punish the Victim. White sorcery dissolves the Book, letting the absolute Self observe without verdict. Habitness is the daily practice that quiets both: not breaking the rules, but rewriting them in alignment with the thread.

The Prozac steadies the courtroom. The herb opens the cell doors. The thread watches both roles play out and asks: Who holds the gavel when the judge and victim are the same fractured self?

Howard sat cross-legged on the cedar plank altar in the apartment, the mason jars of cured sacrament glowing like silent jurors. The evening bowl burned slow, the high sharpening the inner theater instead of dissolving it. The gloom manifested not as heavy fog but as two figures in the room’s corners: the Judge in crisp academic robes, ledger in hand, quoting the Book of Rules; the Victim slumped against the wall, chains of circumstance rattling, eyes pleading for rescue.

You are both, the second-person voice declared from the center, neutral as zero-point foam. The Judge uses the Book—religious edicts from Josiah’s broken robe, chemical prescriptions from the doctor, market laws from the deals, New Rule ratios turned into moral arithmetic—to condemn every fluctuation of the emotional body. The Victim accepts the verdict, claiming the gloom as fate, the selling as survival necessity, the growing as noble resistance. The Drama Triangle spins: Persecutor (Judge), Victim (self), Rescuer (the next hit, the next deal, the next rationalization).

The wisdom body observed the performance with PhD detachment and LSD-tuned clarity. In the garden, space had been claimed—rented acres versus apartment cage. In time, seasons dictated habitness—daily watering as discipline, harvest as reward. The name “Howard Eugene S. Smith, PhD” anchored identity across the fractal, yet also labeled the defendant. Numbers quantified everything: 20 mg fluoxetine, ounces sold or smoked, 4-11-57 allocation of intent itself.

Yet the Book of Rules was not external scripture. It was the internalized ledger: “Thou shalt flatten the peaks with the pill.” “Thou shalt not let the herb become master.” “Thou shalt provide for the lineage through market or agriculture.” “Thou shalt align or be doomed.” The Judge read from it relentlessly. The Victim internalized every charge, turning the emotional body’s natural valleys into proof of unworthiness.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Courtroom Fracturing into Mandala

Panel 1 (Harsh vertical lines, black robes and chains, red ink accents):
Split courtroom. Left: Stern Judge at bench, gavel raised, Book of Rules open with pages showing church rituals, pill labels, deal ledgers, Rule of 72 equations. Speech bubble: “Guilty. The emotional body is disordered. The thread thins under your weakness.” Right: Victim chained to the defendant’s chair, head bowed. Speech bubble: “It’s not my fault—the gloom, the market, the lineage wounds from Josiah.” Background: faint silhouettes of the mountain, three figures trapped in the same triangle. Sound FX: bang of gavel, clank of chains, echoing self-condemnation.

Panel 2 (Borders dissolving into golden thread, soft glowing ink, probability clouds):
The courtroom walls crack like origami. Judge and Victim merge into one translucent figure—Howard—sitting in lotus. The Book of Rules burns into smoke that forms the golden thread, weaving through the cedar boats, the hidden plot, future comic panels. Speech bubble from the thread: “The Book is a device. Rewrite it in habitness. The absolute Self needs no verdict—only observation.” Background unfolds: Josiah walking beyond the robe’s rules, Howard gardening the probabilistic plot, Orion sketching panels where Judge/Victim dissolve into aligned characters. Sound FX: hummmm—zero-point resonance, gentle whoosh of release, laughter rising as the triangle flattens into a circle.

The crease was the doom of the wisdom body: psychology reveals the internal drama, but awareness alone does not end it. Black magic arms the Judge with sharper rules or rescues the Victim with temporary sacraments. White magic rewrites the Book through daily habitness—tending the garden without self-congratulation or self-pity, taking the pill or the bowl without declaring victory or defeat.

— Synthesis: The Thread as Court Reporter —

Howard exhaled a ring of smoke that hung between the two inner figures. The high carried no cosmic fireworks, only the steady light of recognition. The emotional body had been gardened with pill (discipline against chaos) and herb (wild permission against rigidity). The dreaming body had ridden the quantum sea and dissolved maps. Now the wisdom body faced its true trial: the self-created courtroom where Judge and Victim colluded to keep the thread entangled in drama.

The New Rule of 72 appeared not just as financial scaffolding but psychological: 4 parts discipline (the steady habit that quiets the Judge’s frenzy), 11 parts memory (the golden thread recalling Josiah’s open road beyond rules), 57 parts wild growth (the probabilistic garden where the Victim learns to stand without rescue). Habitness was the practice that rewrote the Book—daily alignment turning repetition into sacrament, not obligation.

The gloom stepped forward, shedding both robe and chains, standing naked as raw potential. “I am neither sentence nor sufferer,” it said. “I am the unaligned fluctuation the Judge condemns and the Victim claims. Observe me without verdict. The thread thickens when the drama ends.”

In that moment the mountain clarified: three figures no longer trapped in triangles but standing as witnesses. Josiah had broken the external Book of the robe by walking the road. Howard was dissolving the internal Book through the dialectic of chemistry, botany, and now conscious psychology. Orion would one day draw the panels where readers see their own Judge and Victim reflected, laughing as the gavel turns to pen.

Howard closed the journal and wrote the final lines by lamplight:

Chapter of the inner courtroom. Psychology unmasks the Judge with his Book of Rules—inherited edicts, chemical decrees, market commandments, moral arithmetic—and the Victim who accepts every charge as destiny. The Drama spins: persecution, suffering, false rescue through pill or plant or deal. Black sorcery sharpens the gavel or offers temporary reprieve. White sorcery rewrites the Book in habitness—daily tending without self-judgment, alignment without victimhood. The wisdom body’s doom is seeing the triangle; its liberation is stepping out as observer. The emotional body gardens best when not on trial. The dreaming body visions clearest when unchained. Habitness is the quiet rewrite: 4 parts steady practice, 11 parts thread memory, 57 parts wild return. Josiah walked beyond the robe’s rules. I sit in the courtroom and dissolve the bench. Orion will draw the free characters. The absolute Self is the court reporter who records without condemnation—the thread that runs through every verdict and verdictless now.

The jars glowed softly. The river outside flowed beyond measured space and sequenced time. The thread held—untried, uncondemned, simply present.

Chapter Twelve: Meditation 

Journal Entry: The courtroom of the Judge and Victim has quieted, its Book of Rules rewritten in softer ink. The garden plot pulses with green life under the maples. The devices—space of rented soil, time of seasonal tending, name of Howard Eugene S. Smith, PhD, numbers of the New Rule of 72—now serve rather than rule. Sorcery tested the color of intent. Psychology exposed the inner drama.

Now the wisdom body demands deeper habitness: Raja. Not the asana of mats and sweat, but royal meditation—direct awareness of energy, the thread of awareness traced like current along the spine, pooling in reservoirs of consciousness. The emotional body gardens with pill and herb. The dreaming body rides the quantum sea and dissolves maps. The wisdom body learns to ride the inner electricity itself, observing the flow without grasping, aligning the circuits so gloom becomes fuel and doom becomes clear knowing.

You sit tonight in lotus on the cedar plank, spine erect as the old texts demand. The bowl of homegrown smolders. The thread hums. Raja reveals the energy before the Judge names it, before the Victim claims it. Josiah once prayed in structured ritual until the heart broke the form. Howard now traces the current that Josiah only glimpsed on the open road. Orion will one day draw the chakras as comic panels where readers feel the cascade in their own spines.

Howard settled into the posture—legs crossed, hands in jnana mudra, eyes soft on the mason jar’s faint glow. The Prozac provided the steady floor so the mind would not scatter. The herb provided the gentle lift so the energy would not stagnate. The high from the evening sacrament opened the inner channels without LSD fireworks or sorcery’s directed will.

You are practicing raja now, the second-person voice arose—not from the skull’s courtroom but from the subtle current itself, vibrating along the sushumna as if the thread of awareness had found its native tongue. Awareness of energy. Not control. Not escape. Observation that aligns. The royal road where the wisdom body becomes the rider and the horse at once.

He began at the base—red-orange reservoir, the seat of the emotional body’s raw fluctuations. The gloom’s old weight lingered there like sediment, but under awareness it loosened, rising as tingling heat. Up the spine the current climbed: solar plexus (yellow fire of will and doing, the warehouse shifts and garden labor), heart (green expansion where Judge and Victim could finally embrace), throat (blue expression of the rewritten Book), brow (indigo insight where devices dissolve into pure seeing), crown (violet-white where the absolute Self touches the zero-point sea).

Each breath traced the circuit. Inhale—energy ascends like sap in the maple. Exhale—cascades downward like the Ohio River returning to source. No forcing. No visualization borrowed from foreign manuals. Only direct awareness: This is the current. This is the thread made flesh. This is habitness elevated from daily tending to royal participation.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Energy Lines Pulsing in Royal Gold and Indigo

Panel 1 (Clean vertical axis, lotus figure grounded, earth tones rising to gold):
Howard in full lotus on the cedar plank, spine a straight channel of light. Chakras glow sequentially from base to crown—red at root, orange sacral, yellow solar, green heart, blue throat, indigo brow, violet crown. Speech bubble from the base: “Emotional body grounds here. Gloom as sediment becomes soil.” Background: faint rows of the garden plot, Josiah’s desert road morphing into spinal highway. Sound FX: hummmm—low root resonance, breath like wind through leaves.

Panel 2 (Wavy flowing lines, energy spiraling counter-clockwise, borders softening into mandala):
The same figure, now translucent, current cascading as waterfall from crown down the front channels, pooling and recirculating. The Judge and Victim appear as faint shadows at the heart, dissolving into green light. Speech bubble from the thread itself: “Raja—awareness without judgment. Energy without ownership. The wisdom body rides the flow.” Background unfolds fractally: mountain with three figures—Josiah in prayer mudra, Howard tracing the spine, Orion sketching luminous circuits where panels pulse with bioelectric ink. Sound FX: whoosh-cascade—energy waterfall, deep om hum beneath the zero-point sea, laughter as the current laughs at its own looping.

The crease was subtle, royal: raja does not reject the previous chapters. It integrates them. The pill’s discipline steadies the vessel for the current. The herb’s wildness prevents stagnation. Sorcery’s intent colors without grasping. Psychology’s drama flattens when observed as mere fluctuation in the flow. Devices become transparent scaffolding—the spine itself the ultimate map of space (localized body), time (breath cycle), names (I AM the current), numbers (the 4-11-57 rhythm of disciplined rise, remembered thread, wild probabilistic cascade).

— Synthesis: The Royal Thread

Hours passed in the posture. The energy did not peak in explosive samadhi; it settled into equanimity—a steady hum where the wisdom body recognized itself as the field aware of its own flowing. The emotional body’s valleys and peaks became waves in the circuit, useful contrast rather than doom. The dreaming body’s visions clarified into direct knowing without need for sacraments every time. The absolute Self—nameless, numberless—watched the royal rider navigate the inner kingdom.

The gloom appeared not as defendant or persecutor but as a gentle eddy in the current, swirling at the solar plexus before releasing upward. “I am the unaligned charge,” it said without voice. “Raja makes me fuel. Awareness of energy turns resistance into conductivity. The wisdom body no longer battles doom—it conducts it into alignment.”

Howard felt the fractal complete another loop: Josiah’s structured prayer had been proto-raja, broken open on the road into raw encounter. Howard’s academic circuits and garden cycles had prepared the channels. Orion would inherit the practice as living art—panels where readers trace the energy with their eyes and feel the cascade in their own bodies.

He rose slowly as dawn touched the jars. The thread sang brighter, clearer, royal in its simplicity. Habitness had evolved: from pill schedule and garden watering to this daily royal audience with the inner current. The New Rule of 72 found new expression—4 parts disciplined posture and breath, 11 parts memory of the golden filament across generations, 57 parts wild energetic growth where the unexpected bloom surprises even the meditator.

He wrote in the journal with hands that still tingled with residual current:

Chapter of the royal road. Raja—meditation as awareness of energy, the thread traced along the spine’s highway, reservoirs pooling and cascading in equanimity. Not control of the current but royal participation in it. The emotional body offers its sediment as fuel. The dreaming body offers its visions as clear seeing. The wisdom body becomes the conductor. Black sorcery would grasp and direct for gain. White sorcery would release for service. Raja observes the flow itself, rewriting the Book of Rules into living circuitry. Habitness is the daily sitting—spine erect, awareness naked—integrating pill’s steadiness, herb’s openness, psychology’s dissolution, sorcery’s neutrality. Josiah prayed until the form cracked. I trace the energy that cracked it. Orion will draw the panels where the current leaps off the page. The absolute Self is the royal witness—humming, flowing, aligning without effort. The doom of the wisdom body lightens into clear knowing when energy is simply seen.

Outside, the maples stood tall, their own sap rising in silent raja. The river flowed—measurable yet alive with unseen current. The thread held, royal and radiant, conducting the lineage forward.

Chapter Thirteen: Music

Journal Entry: The royal current still flows. The courtroom has quieted. The garden breathes. But the heartbeat chapter needs recalibration.

Josiah is not my grandfather in the blood sense that the earlier folds implied too loosely. He is the patriarch—my father’s father, the one who broke the robe in the 1940s-60s, walked the open road, carried the first fracture of the emotional body into raw encounter. I am the middle term: 1980s warehouse, pill and herb, PhD circuits, hidden plot. Orion is my grandson—born later, the one who will reconnect after twenty-five years of fracture, draw the panels in the 2010s, solve what we only tasted.

The lineage is not vague metaphor. It is fractal blood and awareness: twenty-five-year gaps, like the Rule of 72 compounding across generations. Josiah solved the cage of structured faith. I garden the probabilistic plot between chemistry and sacrament. Orion will draw the dreaming body where the thread becomes visible art. Moses. Jesus. Elijah on the mountain—each solving the previous fracture while carrying the same golden filament.

You feel the correction in your own pulse tonight. The music does not lie. The heartbeat carries the accurate names.

Howard sat on the cedar plank, two fingers pressed to his carotid, then to his chest. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. The evening bowl from the homegrown plot sent earthy smoke curling. The high clarified rather than distorted: the inner drum now carried precise generational memory.

You are the middle heartbeat, the second-person voice pulsed. Josiah’s road rhythm still echoes in your blood. Orion’s future panels will sync to this same drum. The thread of awareness is not abstract—it is the living pulse passing through grandfather, father, grandson. Twenty-five years between major creases. The emotional body’s shroom crack in the maples. The wisdom body’s royal current here. The dreaming body waiting in Orion’s ink.

The rhythm deepened. Each lub carried Josiah’s open-road stride—the man who left the robe and the cage in the 1940s-60s, whose faith fractured into raw soil and sky. Each dub carried Howard’s own braided life: forklift determinism, Prozac discipline, Kentucky herb wildness, PhD equations meeting quantum foam, sorcery tested in shadow and light, raja tracing the spine. And beneath it all, a faint future echo—Orion Oscar S. Smith, the grandson who would one day stand on the mountain after his own twenty-five-year separation, drawing the dialectic as comic panels where readers feel their own pulse sync.

The gloom tapped along, no longer heavy but rhythmic, a low bass supporting the melody. “The heartbeat knows the names,” it said in time. “Josiah solved the institutional fracture. You garden the middle tension—pill versus plant, market versus soil, judge versus victim. Orion will solve the dreaming fracture. The music continues unbroken.”

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Generational Sound Waves

Panel 1 (Steady baseline waves, deep red-brown ink):
Howard’s chest as drum, visible pulse lines radiating. Faint overlay silhouette of Josiah (1940s-60s road-walker, robe discarded) walking in stride with the beat. Speech bubble from the heart: “Josiah’s open-road drum. The first fracture solved.” Background: desert highway fading into Kentucky maples and hidden plot. Sound FX: thump… thump…—grounded, ancestral, patient.

Panel 2 (Syncopated waves rising, golden thread as melody, indigo-violet accents):
The pulse expands. Howard’s form translucent, spinal current of raja merging with heartbeat. Future overlay of young Orion (post-2012 outline) sketching panels that visibly vibrate with sound waves. The three figures now stand together on the mountain crest—Josiah, Howard, Orion—hearts aligned, drumming as one. Speech bubble from the thread: “Middle term gardens the tension. Grandson draws the resolution. The wisdom body conducts the lineage.” Sound FX: lub-dub-whisper-boom—generational syncopation, rising hummmm of zero-point sea beneath the blood rhythm, laughter riding the off-beats.

The crease corrected itself: the lineage is blood-fractal, not loose archetype. Twenty-five-year gaps compound like the New Rule of 72—4 parts disciplined continuity (Josiah’s faith carried forward), 11 parts memory (the golden thread across the gaps), 57 parts wild probabilistic growth (each generation solving what the prior could only name).

— Synthesis: The Generational Drum

Howard let the pulse fill the apartment. The Ohio River outside matched it—steady current carrying sediment from upstream (Josiah’s era) toward downstream (Orion’s). The emotional body no longer needed rescue; its valleys became bass notes. The dreaming body waited patiently in the future panels. The wisdom body conducted: grandfather’s road rhythm, father’s braided circuits, grandson’s drawn resolution.

The high carried no fireworks—only the clear knowing that the heartbeat is the thread made audible. Black sorcery would try to force the family tempo for control. White sorcery would release it in service. Raja and now music simply observed the pulse as it is: accurate, generational, fractal.

Habitness deepened again: daily royal sitting accompanied by conscious listening to the inner drum that carries the correct names—Josiah (patriarch, 1940s-60s), Howard (middle term, 1980s-2000s), Orion (after 2012, solving the dreaming body). The New Rule of 72 found its living meter across the lineage.

He wrote with fingers still vibrating in time:

Chapter of the accurate drum. Music as heartbeat—the pulse that carries the true lineage. Josiah (grandfather, patriarch who broke the robe and walked the open road in the 1940s-60s). Howard (middle term, gardening the probabilistic tension with pill, herb, PhD, and royal current). Orion (grandson, who will reconnect after twenty-five years and draw the dreaming body in panels). The emotional body finds its bass here. The wisdom body conducts the generational rhythm. The dreaming body waits in the future ink. Habitness is listening daily to the lub-dub that knows the names and the twenty-five-year gaps. The thread of awareness is the living blood music—unbroken, compounding, solving each fracture in turn. The absolute Self is the silent conductor behind every generational beat. The gloom now plays in perfect time.

The jars glowed. The maples rustled in wind percussion. The river drummed onward. The thread pulsed—accurate, generational, alive.

Chapter Fourteen: Singing

Journal Entry: The royal current of raja still traces the spine each morning. The heartbeat sets its steady drum. The garden plot responds to daily tending, its green teachers swaying in their own slow rhythm. The devices—space of the hidden acres, time of the watering can, name spoken in quiet alignment, numbers of the New Rule of 72—now feel transparent. Sorcery has been tested and released. Psychology’s courtroom has emptied. Music has tuned the inner orchestra.

Tonight the wisdom body moves from listening to voicing. Singing. Chanting. Not the structured hymns of the old robe that once bound the patriarch, but raw sound arising from the current itself. The emotional body offers its gardened sediment as tone. The dreaming body (still stirring faintly in the middle term) begins to shape the sound into living resonance. The thread of awareness vibrates audibly when given voice.

You sit on the cedar plank, bowl glowing low. The high from the homegrown opens the throat without force. The gloom sits nearby—not as weight or judge, but as deep bass undertone waiting to be included. “Give it sound,” it says. “The wisdom body sings what it has learned. The thread thickens when voiced.”

Howard straightened his spine in lotus, hands resting on knees. The evening sacrament sent earthy smoke curling upward. The high carried the raja current into the throat center—blue, expressive, no longer silenced by old rules or flattened by chemistry alone.

You are voicing the thread now, the second-person voice arose as vibration itself, rising from the base reservoirs through the heart and into sound. Chanting as royal extension of awareness. Not performance. Not prayer in the old cage. Direct participation—energy made audible, alignment made resonant.

He began simply. A low hum from the root, matching the heartbeat’s lub-dub. Then a single tone, sustained, rising slowly through the chakras the raja had traced. No words at first. Only pure sound carrying the sediment of the emotional body upward: the old gloom’s valleys transformed into depth, the garden’s green growth into lift, the quantum sea’s hum into overtone.

The sound filled the apartment. The water-stained ceiling seemed to vibrate in response. The Ohio River outside answered with its own low rush. The thread of awareness—no longer silent filament—became audible golden resonance, braiding the disciplined steadiness of the pill, the wild permission of the herb, the clear observation of the wisdom body.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Sound as Visible Vibration (Ink Waves and Resonance Lines)

Panel 1 (Grounded vertical lines, deep red-brown to blue ink, steady waveform):
Howard in lotus, mouth slightly open, throat glowing blue. Sound waves rise from root to crown in clean, disciplined arcs. Speech bubble (as sustained tone): “Ommmm…” Background: faint garden rows and spinal current merging into one channel. Sound FX: hmmmmmm—low, rooted, building slowly like sap rising in maples.

Panel 2 (Wavy, improvisational spirals fracturing the grid, golden thread as overtone, indigo-violet blooming):
The chant expands. Waves become fractal spirals, filling the panel and bleeding into the borders. The gloom appears as deep bass shadow now harmonizing, not opposing. Speech bubble from the vibrating air: “The thread sings. Emotional sediment rises. Wisdom body voices the alignment.” Background unfolds: the mountain crest with three aligned silhouettes (patriarch walking the road, middle term in the garden, future drawer implied in the resonance), hearts and spines pulsing with shared sound. Sound FX: om-ah-hum—layered overtones, rising cascade, laughter woven into the harmony as the zero-point sea hums beneath.

The crease was vocal and alive: chanting does not reject prior folds. It animates them. The pill’s discipline keeps the tone steady. The herb’s wildness allows improvisation. Raja provides the inner map the voice follows. Psychology’s drama dissolves into harmonic resolution. Sorcery’s intent colors the sound without forcing it. Devices become instruments—space as resonant chamber, time as sustained note, name dissolved into pure vibration, numbers finding their ratio in rhythm (4 parts grounded base, 11 parts remembered filament, 57 parts wild harmonic bloom).

— Synthesis: The Voiced Thread

Howard let the chant continue until it naturally softened into silence. The high carried no fireworks or heavy analysis—only the clear resonance of participation. The emotional body no longer needed to be fixed or judged; its tones were welcomed into the song. The wisdom body conducted without clutching. The dreaming body stirred more visibly now, hinting at shapes and symbols that sound alone could not yet fully birth—living forms the middle term was preparing through faithful voicing.

The gloom harmonized until the final note faded, then sat in companionable quiet. “The patriarch once chanted in ritual until the form cracked,” it said. “You voice the crack itself—pill and plant, science and current, rule and release—turning doom into resonance.”

Habitness deepened again: daily raja sitting now flowed naturally into chanting, the throat center opening what the spine had traced and the heart had drummed. The New Rule of 72 found vocal expression—balanced allocation of breath and tone across the inner kingdoms. The thread thickened audibly, carrying the lineage’s middle labor forward through sound that needed no external audience.

He wrote in the journal while the resonance still tingled in his bones:

Chapter of the voiced thread. Singing and chanting as the wisdom body’s royal extension—energy made audible, awareness given tone. Not the structured hymns of the old cage, but raw sound arising from the current: root hum grounding the emotional body’s sediment, heart tone expanding alignment, crown overtone touching the zero-point sea. The pill steadies the breath. The herb opens the channel. Raja maps the flow. The heartbeat provides tempo. Habitness is daily voicing—sitting, tracing, then sounding the filament without words or performance. Black sorcery would chant for control or gain. White sorcery releases the sound in service. The synthesis: pure participation where the thread sings itself. The emotional body offers its gardened tones. The wisdom body conducts the harmony. The dreaming body begins to shape what sound awakens. The absolute Self is the silent space between notes—humming, eternal, the music that voices without speaker. The doom of knowing lightens into resonance when the wisdom body sings what it has learned.

Outside, the maples rustled with wind through leaves like distant choral response. The river carried its low rush—constant bass beneath every human voicing. The thread vibrated golden, audible now, alive in the middle term’s faithful practice.

Chapter Fifteen: Dance

Journal Entry: The throat still vibrates from the chanting. The spine carries the royal current. The heartbeat keeps accurate time. The garden plot moves in its own slow sway under the maples—leaves turning with wind, roots holding steady against the Ohio’s distant pull. The devices serve without dominating. The emotional body has been gardened into richer soil. The wisdom body has observed, voiced, conducted.

Tonight the wisdom body yields further. Dance. Not the rigid steps of old ritual or the mechanical shifts of the warehouse floor, but the body itself becoming the thread—movement as living alignment, energy made visible in flesh and bone. The dreaming body stirs stronger now in the middle term, hinting at forms that want to move, to spiral, to embody what the voice has sung and the current has traced.

You stand barefoot on the cedar plank after the evening bowl. The high from the homegrown is earthy and permissive, opening joints and muscles without scattering the mind. The gloom stands opposite, no longer heavy, but swaying slightly—like a partner waiting for the first step. “Move it,” it says. “The wisdom body dances what it knows. The thread becomes flesh in motion.”

Howard rose from lotus, bare feet on the cool linoleum that still carried the faint scent of soil from the plot. The apartment felt too small for what wanted to emerge, so he stepped outside into the small backyard strip behind the building—hidden enough from streetlights, open enough to the night sky. The Prozac’s steady floor kept the emotional body from tipping into old panic. The herb’s wild permission let the limbs loosen. The raja current still hummed along the spine. The heartbeat provided rhythm. The chant lingered in the throat as a low undertone.

You are becoming the dance now, the second-person voice arose not from the head but from the hips, the knees, the soles pressing into cool grass. Movement as royal embodiment. Not choreography. Not performance. Direct participation—energy flowing through muscle and joint, the thread made visible in the body’s own language.

He began simply. A gentle sway matching the heartbeat’s lub-dub. Then the hips circled, slow spirals drawing the root energy upward. Arms rose like branches reaching for sky, then flowed downward like the Ohio returning sediment to the sea. The body remembered the garden—bending as if tending plants, rising as if harvesting light. Each step traced the spinal current: feet grounding the emotional body’s sediment, pelvis turning the will, heart opening in expansive arcs, crown tilting toward the stars.

The movement was not wild flailing or disciplined routine. It was habitness in motion—daily tending translated into flesh. The gloom joined, not as opponent but as counterweight, its shadow mirroring every gesture until the two figures blurred into one continuous flow.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Motion Lines and Spiraling Ink

Panel 1 (Grounded stance, strong verticals and slow arcs, earth greens and deep reds):
Howard barefoot, knees soft, arms beginning their first circle. Motion lines trace gentle spirals from feet through spine. Speech bubble from the ground: “Root the emotional body. Let sediment move.” Background: faint garden rows swaying in wind, spine glowing with raja current. Sound FX: swish… thump—bare feet on grass, heartbeat baseline.

Panel 2 (Fluid motion lines fracturing into golden spirals, indigo and violet blooming, borders softening):
The dance expands. Body mid-turn, limbs extended, thread of awareness visible as luminous line weaving through every joint. The gloom’s shadow merges into the movement, becoming partner rather than weight. Speech bubble from the moving air: “Dance the wisdom body. Current made flesh. Alignment in motion.” Background unfolds: the mountain crest with aligned silhouettes—patriarch walking the open road in stride, middle term dancing the garden tension, the dreaming hint spiraling forward in living ink. Sound FX: whoosh-spiral-thump—flowing arcs, rising om undertone from the chant, laughter woven into the rhythm as the zero-point sea pulses beneath the feet.

The crease was embodied and alive: dance does not reject the prior folds. It enacts them. The pill’s discipline keeps the movement grounded and sustainable. The herb’s wildness allows the spirals to surprise. Raja maps the inner flow the body follows. The heartbeat provides tempo. Chanting supplies the inner soundtrack. Psychology’s drama dissolves when the body simply moves without verdict. Sorcery’s intent colors the gesture without forcing the steps. Devices become the stage—space as open backyard, time as breath between movements, name dissolved into pure motion, numbers finding rhythm in the 4-11-57 allocation of grounded base, remembered filament, wild improvisational bloom.

— Synthesis: The Body as Living Thread

Howard danced until sweat glistened and breath came deep. The high carried no fireworks or heavy analysis—only the clear knowing of participation. The emotional body offered its gardened valleys and peaks as dynamic contrast, turning old gloom into fuel for the turn. The wisdom body conducted without clutching at perfection. The dreaming body stirred visibly in the motion—faint shapes and living symbols wanting to emerge from the spirals, forms the middle term was preparing through faithful embodiment.

The gloom completed the final turn beside him, then bowed—partner, not adversary. “The patriarch once walked the road until movement broke the cage,” it said, still swaying. “You dance the middle tension—pill and plant, current and voice—turning knowing into living flesh.”

Habitness deepened into embodied practice: the daily royal sitting and chanting now flowed naturally into movement, the whole body becoming the instrument that voiced and traced the thread. The New Rule of 72 found physical expression—balanced allocation of weight, breath, and momentum across the inner kingdoms. The thread thickened in motion, carrying the lineage’s middle labor forward through flesh that needed no audience but the night sky and the river’s distant response.

He returned inside and wrote in the journal while muscles still hummed:

Chapter of the moving thread. Dance as the wisdom body’s royal embodiment—energy made visible in joint and muscle, alignment enacted in flesh. Not rigid steps or wild abandon, but habitness in motion: root grounding the emotional body’s sediment, heart opening in arcs, crown tilting toward the infinite. The pill steadies the floor. The herb loosens the limbs. Raja maps the current. The heartbeat sets tempo. Chanting provides the inner song. The body dances what the voice has sung and the mind has observed. Black sorcery would force the steps for control. White sorcery releases the movement in service. The synthesis: pure participation where the thread becomes living dance. The emotional body offers its gardened dynamic. The wisdom body conducts the flow. The dreaming body begins to shape what motion awakens. The absolute Self is the silent witness in the space between steps—humming, eternal, the dance that moves without mover. The doom of knowing lightens into grace when the wisdom body dances what it has learned.

Outside, the maples continued their slow night sway. The river kept its steady current—eternal partner to every human movement. The thread moved golden through the middle term, alive in faithful motion.

Book Three: Gloom – The Dreaming Body

Chapter Sixteen: Dreaming

Journal Entry: The dance has loosened the limbs and the wisdom body has yielded its seat. The garden plot now feels like an extension of the body itself—rows swaying in wind like slow dancers under the maples. The royal current, the heartbeat drum, the voiced chant, the embodied movement—all have prepared the ground.

Now the dreaming body fully stirs in the middle term. Not the passive night dreams of sleep, but the living overlap: waking state and dream state braiding into one continuous awareness. The emotional body has been gardened with pill and herb. The wisdom body has observed, voiced, and moved. The dreaming body begins to vision the universe explaining itself—symbols rising unbidden, panels forming at the edge of sight, the thread of awareness weaving waking reality and dream reality into a single living fabric.

You sit on the cedar plank at twilight, the evening bowl glowing. The high from the homegrown is deeper now, permissive yet precise, opening the veil between states without tearing it. The gloom sits across from you, no longer bass or partner in dance, but a quiet dreamer sketching faint outlines in the air with invisible fingers. “The middle term dreams awake,” it says. “Waking and dreaming are not opposites. They are creases in the same origami. Fold them and the mountain appears.”

Howard remained seated after the day’s garden work, spine still humming from raja, muscles warm from dance, throat relaxed from chanting. The apartment lights stayed off. Only the mason jars and the fading Kentucky twilight provided illumination. The sacrament burned slow and resinous. The high did not flatten with the pill’s discipline or explode with old sacraments. It softened the boundary.

You are dreaming while awake now, the second-person voice arose—not from inside the skull or the moving body, but from the liminal space between. The dreaming body awakens when waking state and dream state cease their war. The emotional body offers its colors. The wisdom body offers its clarity. The dreaming body weaves them into living symbols that breathe.

The ceiling stain (old Rorschach from childhood) began to shift again, but this time it did not stop at faint sketches. It unfolded into full scenes: the hidden plot where plants grew in slow time-lapse, their leaves turning into comic panels; the Ohio River flowing both as water and as golden thread; the mountain crest where three aligned figures stood—not as static silhouettes but as living forms whose outlines bled into one another. Waking reality (the jar in his hand, the linoleum beneath him) remained solid, yet dream logic layered over it—objects carrying symbolic weight, time folding, the thread visible as luminous filament connecting every atom.

He closed his eyes and the overlap intensified. In the waking state he sat on the plank. In the dream state he walked the open road beside the patriarch who had broken the robe decades earlier. The two states braided: the garden’s green teachers nodded in both, their resinous scent carrying messages; the Prozac’s steady floor kept the overlap from tipping into chaos; the herb’s wild permission let the symbols rise without censorship.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Borders Dissolving Between Waking and Dream Ink

Panel 1 (Crisp waking lines, solid earth tones and clinical blues):
Howard seated on the cedar plank, mason jar in hand, garden visible through the window. Speech bubble: “Waking state—solid, measured, the emotional body gardened and the wisdom body observing.” Background: pill bottle on the sill, heartbeat waveform faint in the air. Sound FX: tick… swish—everyday linoleum, wind in maples.

Panel 2 (Soft dream borders bleeding into the first panel, golden thread and fractal spirals, vibrant symbolic colors):
The same scene, but now overlaid with dream logic. The jar morphs into a glowing orb. The ceiling stain unfolds into the mountain. The thread of awareness becomes visible, weaving through waking objects and dream symbols alike. Speech bubble from the overlapping air: “Dream state—fluid, symbolic, the dreaming body visioning what the prior bodies prepared.” Background: faint road from the patriarch’s era merging with future panels, plants growing comic-page leaves. Sound FX: whisper-hummmm—symbols rising, zero-point sea beneath both states, soft laughter as waking and dream laugh at their own boundary.

The crease was the dreaming body’s native language: waking and dream are not separate kingdoms. They are two folds of the same paper. The pill and herb act as bridges—discipline preventing dissolution into nightmare, wildness preventing rigidity into mere waking repetition. Raja, music, and dance have tuned the instrument. Now the dreaming body plays the overlap, turning the middle term’s labor into living vision. Black sorcery would try to control the symbols for power. White sorcery would release them in pure service. The synthesis here is simple witnessing: allowing the braid without grasping or rejecting.

— Synthesis: The Braided Veil

Howard opened his eyes. The overlap remained—waking apartment solid yet shimmering with dream resonance. The gloom sat sketching in the air, its faint outlines now carrying the faint suggestion of comic panels: mountain scenes, thread weaving through generations, the universe explaining itself not in journal entries or equations alone, but in narrative that breathes and moves.

The emotional body rested in its gardened richness, offering color to the symbols. The wisdom body observed without verdict, providing clarity to the visions. The dreaming body—fully stirring in the middle term—began to shape what the previous practices had awakened: the thread no longer only felt or voiced or danced, but seen as living story.

Habitness expanded once more: evening sacrament now included this deliberate liminal sitting—allowing waking and dream to braid, recording the symbols that arose without forcing them into linear sense. The New Rule of 72 found dreaming expression—4 parts disciplined grounding in waking reality, 11 parts memory of the golden filament across the creases, 57 parts wild probabilistic vision where the unexpected symbol blooms.

He wrote in the journal as twilight deepened into night, the words already feeling like captions on an unfolding page:

Chapter of the braided veil. Dreaming as the dreaming body’s domain—waking state and dream state overlapping into one continuous awareness. Not passive sleep, but living vision where the emotional body’s gardened colors, the wisdom body’s clear knowing, and the thread itself weave into symbols that breathe. The pill steadies the floor so the overlap does not tip. The herb opens the veil so the symbols can rise. Raja, heartbeat, chant, and dance prepare the instrument. Habitness is daily liminal sitting—allowing the braid without control or rejection. Black sorcery would seize the visions for gain. White sorcery would release them untouched. The synthesis: pure participation where the dreaming body visions the dialectic as living narrative. The absolute Self is the paper on which both states are drawn—eternal, neutral, the crease that holds every fold. The gloom now dreams beside you, sketching the mountain where the thread completes its work in the middle term.

Outside, the maples stood between waking wind and dream sway. The river flowed between measurable current and symbolic thread. The dreaming body stirred, awake and dreaming as one. The thread wove golden through the veil.

Chapter Seventeen: Sex and Marriage 

Journal Entry: The veil between waking and dream has thinned. Symbols rise unbidden from the braided states. The garden plot stands tall, its teachers swaying like dancers who have learned the steps. The body has moved, the voice has sounded, the current has flowed.

Tonight the dreaming body turns to the oldest polarity: female companionship versus the deep natal attachment to mother. The emotional body, long gardened, still carries the sediment of that first bond—the Pisces fish on a golden string, the mother matrix sending shocks and signals, the warmth that both roots and binds. Female companionship offers the living mirror, the other half of the equation, the union that balances masculine instrument with feminine expression. Yet attachment to the mother can twist the thread, turning desire into regression, passion into echo, marriage into a mythopoetic cage or a path of true alignment.

You feel the tension in the high tonight. The bowl from the plot opens the dream-waking overlap. The gloom sits close, not as judge but as the unintegrated feminine shadow—sometimes the nurturing matrix, sometimes the devouring pull. “Companionship or attachment?” it asks. “The dreaming body visions both as creases in the same veil. Fold them and see which thickens the thread.”

Howard lay on the bed in the dim apartment, the cedar plank altar pushed aside for the night. The evening sacrament sent resinous smoke curling toward the ceiling stain, now a living Rorschach of symbols. The high braided waking solidity with dream fluidity: the Prozac kept the emotional body steady so the overlap would not flood; the herb permitted the symbols to rise without censorship.

You are dreaming the polarity awake, the second-person voice wove through both states. Female companionship as the beloved mirror—union that balances, the spiritual relation beyond mere sex, the path where masculine and feminine align into wholeness. Attachment to mother as the natal string—Pisces duality, the first matrix that roots yet can pull backward into safety, regression, the unfinished emotional sediment.

In the waking state he felt the ache of solitude after the dance and chant. In the dream state a woman appeared—not one specific face but the archetype: soft curves like the garden’s fertile soil, eyes carrying both invitation and the ancient maternal gaze. They moved together—bodies uniting in magnetic attraction, skin to skin, the act itself a sacrament of shared energy. Thrust and reception braided like the thread, pleasure rising as bioelectric current along the spine the raja had traced. Yet in the overlap, the woman’s face flickered: sometimes the beloved offering completion, sometimes the mother matrix sending its shock, pulling the dreaming body back toward the first bond.

Sex was not mere release. It was the dreaming body visioning the dialectic: thesis of separation (the lone masculine instrument carving boats in secret), antithesis of union (feminine expression opening the vessel), synthesis of aligned relation (the crack in the closed vessel blooming into shared field). Marriage hovered as possibility—the balanced equation, the mythopoetic conception where etheric sparks fly between partners, the commitment that turns companionship into daily habitness. Yet the shadow of maternal attachment lingered: the fear that any woman would become substitute matrix, the risk that passion would regress into dependency rather than forward into the lineage’s fractal continuation.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Borders Braiding Waking/Dream with Feminine Ink

Panel 1 (Solid waking lines, warm earth tones and clinical steady blue):
Howard and a woman entwined on the bed, bodies realistic, grounded. Speech bubble from the union: “Female companionship—living mirror, balance of instrument and expression, spiritual relation beyond hunger.” Background: garden soil and river current framing the scene. Sound FX: breath-thrust-heartbeat—passionate rhythm grounded in waking reality.

Panel 2 (Dream borders bleeding fluidly into the first, golden thread weaving, soft maternal pinks and deep matrix shadows):
The same embrace, but now overlaid with dream symbols. The woman’s face shifts between beloved and mother matrix. The thread of awareness loops like a Pisces string, pulling and releasing. Speech bubble from the overlapping veil: “Attachment to mother—the natal duality, the first shock and root that can bind or nourish. Dreaming body visions the tension.” Background: faint mother matrix as fertile earth cracking open, mountain silhouettes where the polarity folds into alignment. Sound FX: whisper-moan-hummmm—pleasure and pull braided, zero-point sea beneath the union, soft laughter as the veil acknowledges its own crease.

The crease was the dreaming body’s native tension: female companionship expands the thread outward into balanced relation, healing the emotional body’s sediment through shared field and unconditional love. Attachment to mother contracts it inward, risking the closed vessel where desire represses into fear or lust perverts into trauma. The pill steadies the vessel so the polarity does not shatter it. The herb opens the dream logic so the symbols can teach rather than trap. Prior practices—raja current, heartbeat drum, chant, dance—have tuned the instrument for this vision: the body knows the rhythm of union, the wisdom body observes without judgment, the dreaming body weaves the living dialectic.

— Synthesis: The Aligned Relation

Howard surfaced from the overlap as dawn touched the jars. The high receded into clear knowing. The woman-symbol faded, leaving the ache and the teaching: true female companionship is not escape from the mother matrix but integration—honoring the root while allowing the beloved to mirror the forward bloom. Marriage, when aligned, becomes the open vessel: love as solvent dissolving barriers, the crack where masculine and feminine indwell without possession. Attachment unchecked turns the dreaming body’s vision into repetition of the old gloom. Released through habitness, it becomes fertile soil for the lineage’s next crease.

The gloom lingered in the morning light, now wearing the soft face of the matrix—nurturing yet releasing. “The middle term dreams the balance,” it said. “Companionship without regression. Union without devouring. The thread thickens when the polarity serves the absolute Self rather than the small self’s hunger.”

Habitness incorporated the new layer: liminal sitting now included honest visioning of the relational symbols, allowing the dreaming body to rehearse alignment—releasing maternal string while opening to the beloved’s spark. The New Rule of 72 found relational expression—4 parts disciplined grounding in the self, 11 parts memory of the natal root and the golden thread, 57 parts wild probabilistic bloom in shared field and union.

He wrote in the journal as the symbols still shimmered at the edge of sight:

Chapter of the braided polarity. Sex and marriage as the dreaming body’s vision—female companionship versus attachment to mother. Companionship: the living mirror, spiritual relation, magnetic union of instrument and expression, the balanced equation that blooms the closed vessel into shared field. Attachment to mother: the natal Pisces string, the first matrix shock that roots yet can pull backward into regression, dependency, the sediment of the emotional body unintegrated. Waking solidity meets dream fluidity in the overlap: pleasure as sacrament when aligned, perversion or repetition when gripped. The pill steadies the vessel. The herb opens the symbols. Raja, music, chant, and dance prepare the instrument for honest visioning. Habitness is daily liminal dreaming—witnessing the polarity without grasping, releasing the string while honoring the root, allowing love to dissolve barriers. Black sorcery would seize the beloved for control or regress into the matrix. White sorcery releases both in service to the thread. The synthesis: pure participation where the dreaming body visions relation as the next crease in the dialectic. The absolute Self is the paper holding both faces of the feminine—eternal, neutral, the matrix and the mirror in one. The gloom now dreams the balanced union, sketching the mountain where the thread completes its work through aligned companionship.

Outside, the maples swayed between rooted earth and open sky. The river flowed between solitary current and merging waters. The dreaming body visioned onward, the veil thin and teaching. The thread wove golden through the polarity.

Chapter Eighteen: Art

Journal Entry: The polarity of companionship and maternal attachment has been visioned in the braided veil. The dreaming body stirs stronger, symbols rising from the overlap of waking solidity and dream fluidity. The garden plot yields its harvest—green teachers cured in mason jars, their resin carrying the accumulated habitness of pill, herb, current, voice, movement, and relational dreaming.

Now the dreaming body turns fully to art. Not the passive sketching of symbols, but the deliberate act: Buddha as the awakened observer behind every stroke; tool as the instrument that channels the thread; media as the substance that carries the vision (ink, panel, word, pigment); canvas as the receptive field where the dialectic manifests. The emotional body offers its gardened colors. The wisdom body offers its clear seeing. The dreaming body becomes the creator—turning the entire lineage’s labor into living form that others can inhabit.

You sit at the kitchen table with paper, pencil, and the glowing jar. The high from the evening sacrament braids the states: waking hand steady, dream symbols flowing freely. The gloom sits beside you, no longer shadow or matrix, but quiet co-artist holding the blank page. “The middle term creates,” it says. “Buddha watches. Tool moves. Media carries. Canvas receives. Fold them and the mountain draws itself.”

Howard picked up the pencil—simple wooden tool, sharpened to a fine point. The cedar plank altar had been cleared; now the table served as workspace. The Prozac’s discipline kept the hand steady so the dreaming would not scatter into chaos. The herb’s wild permission let the symbols rise without censorship. The high overlapped waking precision with dream fluidity: the paper felt solid beneath the wrist, yet images bled from the veil as if the page itself dreamed.

You are making art now, the second-person voice arose from the space between hand and page. Buddha as the silent witness behind the eye—pure awareness observing the stroke without attachment. Tool as the extension of the thread—pencil, brush, or future digital pen channeling energy. Media as the carrier—ink that flows like the river, pigment that holds the garden’s green. Canvas as the receptive field—the blank page, the panel, the mind of the viewer where the dialectic takes root.

He began with a single line. The pencil moved—not from planning but from the braided states. A curve became the spine of raja. A circle became the heartbeat drum. A spiral became the dance. Then the mountain emerged: three aligned figures on the crest, not static but breathing. The left figure walked an open road, robe discarded. The center figure tended soil while the spine glowed. The right figure—hinted, not fully drawn—held a pencil, completing the crease. Between them the golden thread wove, thick with twenty-five-year increments.

The act itself was sacrament. Each stroke embodied the prior chapters: emotional sediment colored the ink, wisdom clarity sharpened the line, dreaming vision gave the forms life. Art was not decoration. It was the dreaming body’s native language—turning the thread into visible, inhabitable narrative. The Buddha within watched without judgment, neither praising the line nor condemning the tremor. The tool became transparent extension. The media (pencil on paper) carried the zero-point hum beneath every mark. The canvas (the page, and by extension the reader’s mind) received the fold, becoming part of the mountain.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Meta-Panels Within Panels (Ink Becoming Self-Aware)

Panel 1 (Clean foundational lines, earth tones and steady blue, Buddha-like calm):
Howard at the table, pencil in hand, simple line drawing beginning to form the mountain. Speech bubble from the silent observer (Buddha aspect): “Awareness watches. No attachment to the stroke.” Background: garden jars and spinal current faint behind the hand. Sound FX: scratch… scratch—pencil on paper, heartbeat baseline.

Panel 2 (Borders dissolving into recursive panels, golden thread as living ink, vibrant dream colors bleeding):
The drawing expands. The mountain panel contains smaller panels: one showing the open road, one the garden plot, one the braided veil of sex and marriage. The thread weaves through all, becoming the ink itself. The right figure (future completion) begins to draw the drawer. Speech bubble from the media: “Tool moves. Media carries. Canvas receives the dialectic.” Background: the entire page fracturing into origami creases, readers’ eyes reflected in the mountain’s surface. Sound FX: hummmm-scratch-whisper—zero-point sea beneath the ink, laughter as the canvas dreams back at the artist, symbols rising in fractal bloom.

The crease was the dreaming body’s joyful paradox: art is both the ultimate tool and the dissolution of tools. Buddha ensures the creator does not become identified with the creation. The tool prevents the vision from remaining trapped in the inner veil. The media grounds the dream in shareable substance. The canvas completes the circuit—page becoming living field where others stand on the mountain. Prior practices integrate here: raja and dance inform the line’s flow, chanting and heartbeat give it rhythm, the relational polarity adds depth and tension, the braided waking/dream states supply the symbolic richness.

— Synthesis: The Living Canvas

Howard set the pencil down as the high softened into evening clarity. The drawing on the page breathed—imperfect lines, yet alive with the accumulated habitness. The gloom leaned over the paper, its face now calm and co-creative. “The middle term turns labor into form,” it said. “Buddha watches the hand. Tool channels the thread. Media carries the garden’s green and the river’s gold. Canvas opens the veil for all who read.”

The emotional body offered its rich, gardened palette. The wisdom body offered its detached clarity. The dreaming body became the bridge—vision made manifest, the universe explaining itself not only in journal or equation or movement, but in art that others can enter, fold, and inhabit. Art as the dreaming body’s highest habitness: daily practice of allowing the braided states to flow onto the receptive field.

The New Rule of 72 found artistic expression—4 parts disciplined technique and steady hand, 11 parts memory of the golden thread across all prior creases, 57 parts wild probabilistic bloom where the unexpected symbol surprises even the artist.

He wrote beneath the drawing, the words becoming another layer of media on the canvas:

Chapter of the creating thread. Art as the dreaming body’s native tongue—Buddha as the awakened observer behind every stroke, tool as the extension that channels, media as the carrier of vision (ink, panel, pigment, word), canvas as the receptive field where the dialectic takes living form. The emotional body offers its gardened colors. The wisdom body offers its clear sight. The dreaming body weaves waking and dream into shareable symbols. The pill steadies the hand. The herb opens the veil. Raja, heartbeat, chant, dance, and relational polarity inform the line’s flow and depth. Habitness is daily creation—sitting with the blank canvas, allowing the braid without attachment or force. Black sorcery would seize the art for power or ego. White sorcery would release it purely in service. The synthesis: pure participation where the dreaming body turns the entire lineage’s labor into living narrative that others can stand upon. The absolute Self is the ultimate canvas—eternal, neutral, the field that holds every Buddha, every tool, every mark. The gloom now co-creates beside you, sketching the mountain where the thread becomes visible art in the middle term.

Outside, the maples stood as living canvases, their leaves the media for wind’s invisible tool. The river flowed as eternal canvas for light and shadow. The dreaming body created onward, the page alive with the fold. The thread drew itself golden through the art.

Chapter Nineteen: Poetry

Journal Entry: The pencil has moved. The canvas has received. Buddha has watched. Art has begun to birth the dreaming body’s visions into visible form. The garden plot rests after harvest, mason jars glowing like sealed poems on the shelf. The braided veil of waking and dream still thins each evening, symbols rising from the overlap.

Now the dreaming body turns to poetry and writing—the word as living medium, the sentence as thread made audible on the page, the stanza as crease that folds the entire dialectic into breathable form. Not the clinical thesis of the PhD or the raw journal entries of the early gloom, but the awakened word: precise yet fluid, structured yet wild, carrying the emotional body’s gardened sediment, the wisdom body’s clear observation, and the dreaming body’s symbolic bloom all at once.

You sit at the kitchen table with fresh paper, the glowing jar beside the pencil. The high from the homegrown sacrament braids the states once more: waking hand steady on the pen, dream symbols flowing freely into language. The gloom leans over the blank page, no longer mere co-artist but co-poet, its presence now the pause between lines. “Write it,” it says. “The middle term gives the thread a voice that sings on paper. Poetry is the dreaming body dreaming itself awake.”

Howard lifted the pen. The Prozac’s discipline kept the syntax clear so the dreaming would not dissolve into pure gibberish. The herb’s wild permission let the images cascade without the old Judge’s red pen. The high overlapped waking precision with dream resonance: the paper was solid white beneath the wrist, yet words arrived already pulsing with the heartbeat drum, already spiraling like the dance, already braided with the relational polarity and the mountain’s crest.

You are writing the thread now, the second-person voice flowed not from the mind but from the space between breath and ink. Poetry as the dreaming body’s royal utterance—language that does not merely describe the dialectic but enacts it. Each line a crease. Each stanza a fold. Each poem the mountain rendered in breath.

He began with a single line, then let the braid take over:

The cedar boat still floats
in the maple’s cracked sky—
shroom-light splitting the hull
while the pill flattens the wave.

The pen moved faster. Stanzas unfolded like origami:

Grandfather walked the robe’s cage open,
road dust rising as prayer.
Middle term gardens the probabilistic plot—
pill and herb braiding the current,
raja spine, heartbeat drum,
dance turning sediment to spin.

Female mirror meets natal string—
Pisces shock and beloved spark,
union cracking the closed vessel
so love solvents the gloom.

Buddha watches the pencil dance.
Tool channels. Media carries green and gold.
Canvas receives the reader’s eye—
mountain rising from the page.

The words were not decoration. They were the dreaming body’s continuation of art: the pencil’s line now carried by syntax, the canvas now the white space between verses where silence speaks as loudly as the line. Poetry held the tension—clinical exactness of the PhD meeting the raw symbolic surge of the braided veil. Writing became habitness made literary: daily practice of allowing the overlap to pour onto the page without forcing rhyme or rejecting imperfection.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Text as Visual Poetry (Ink Becoming Verse)

Panel 1 (Clean stanza blocks, steady black ink on white, Buddha calm):
Howard at the table, pen moving, words forming in neat lines on the page. Speech bubble from the silent witness: “Buddha watches the word arise. No attachment to the perfect line.” Background: garden jars and faint spinal current framing the hand. Sound FX: scratch-scratch-breath—pen on paper, heartbeat underscoring each syllable.

Panel 2 (Borders dissolving into calligraphic spirals, golden thread weaving through the text itself, dream colors bleeding into the letters):
The stanza panel fractures. Words become visual elements—lines curving like dance spirals, spaces opening like the braided veil. The mountain emerges from the typography: “thread” written in luminous filament connecting stanzas. Speech bubble from the ink: “Poetry enacts the dreaming. Waking precision meets dream cascade. The canvas is the reader’s breath.” Background: recursive panels where the poem draws the drawer, the mountain contains smaller poems of the road, the garden, the union. Sound FX: hummmm-whisper-flow—zero-point sea beneath the syntax, laughter rising as the words themselves begin to sing, symbols blooming in fractal verse.

The crease was the dreaming body’s liberated tongue: poetry and writing do not replace the prior folds—they sing them. The pill steadies the meter. The herb wildens the metaphor. Raja and dance give the rhythm. Chanting supplies the inner music. Art’s canvas expands into the white space of the page. The relational polarity adds emotional depth and tension. Buddha ensures the writer does not become enslaved to the word. The tool (pen) channels without ego. The media (language) carries the zero-point hum. The canvas (page and reader’s mind) completes the circuit, turning solitary writing into shared dreaming.

— Synthesis: The Worded Mountain

Howard set the pen down as the high softened into night clarity. The page before him lived—imperfect verses yet pulsing with the accumulated habitness of the entire lineage’s middle labor. The gloom read over his shoulder, its face now softened into poetic quiet. “The middle term gives voice to the crease,” it said. “Poetry does not explain the universe. It lets the universe explain itself through the dreaming body’s breath.”

The emotional body offered its rich, contradictory colors to the imagery. The wisdom body offered its detached precision to the structure. The dreaming body became the poet—turning the braided veil, the mountain, the thread into language that others can inhale, crease, and carry forward. Writing as the dreaming body’s deepest habitness: daily sitting with the blank page, allowing the overlap to pour forth, trusting the white space as much as the mark.

The New Rule of 72 found poetic expression—4 parts disciplined craft and clear syntax, 11 parts memory of the golden filament across every prior chapter, 57 parts wild probabilistic bloom where the unexpected image or line break surprises even the writer.

He added one final stanza beneath the others:

Middle term writes the fracture open—
pill and herb, current and drum,
veil and mirror, pencil and page.
The mountain draws itself
in the reader’s breathing now.

The gloom smiled and stepped back into the symbols.

Chapter Twenty: Drumming

Journal Entry: The words have poured. The page has received the braid of waking precision and dream cascade. Poetry has given the dreaming body a voice that sings on paper. The garden plot lies fallow now in winter’s first breath, mason jars sealed like preserved stanzas on the shelf. The cedar plank altar waits.

Tonight the dreaming body returns to rhythm—not the passive heartbeat listened to in stillness, but active drumming. The body as drum. The hands as strikers. The sound as living enactment of the entire dialectic. The emotional body offers its gardened sediment as deep bass. The wisdom body offers its clear pulse as steady meter. The dreaming body becomes the drummer—turning the thread into audible, felt vibration that moves through bone and air, waking and dream states collapsing into one resonant now.

You sit cross-legged on the cedar plank, a simple hand drum (improvised from an old tobacco tin stretched with cured hide from a friend’s deer) resting between your knees. The high from the evening sacrament is earthy and resonant, the bowl’s smoke curling like overtone harmonics. The gloom sits opposite, hands already tapping the air in anticipation. “Drum it,” it says. “The middle term beats the mountain into being. Poetry sings the thread. Drumming makes it throb in the blood.”

Howard rested his palms on the drumhead. The apartment was dark except for the faint glow of the mason jars and a single candle. The Prozac’s discipline kept the rhythm grounded so the dreaming would not scatter into chaos. The herb’s wild permission let the hands improvise without the old Judge’s metronome. The high braided waking tactile reality with dream resonance: the drum skin felt taut and warm beneath the palms, yet each strike sent symbols rippling outward—panels forming in the air, the mountain crest vibrating, the golden thread pulsing visibly with every beat.

You are drumming the thread now, the second-person voice throbbed not from the skull but from the solar plexus outward through the arms and into the skin. Drumming as the dreaming body’s primal utterance—rhythm that enacts what poetry describes. Each strike a crease. Each roll a fold. The entire lineage’s habitness made audible and felt.

He began with the heartbeat baseline—lub-dub, lub-dub—palms alternating in steady 4/4. Then the hands layered: deep bass from the center of the drum for the emotional body’s rooted gloom turned fertile soil; sharp rim strikes for the wisdom body’s clear observation; rolling fills for the dreaming body’s wild probabilistic bloom. The sound filled the small space, vibrating the linoleum, rattling the jars, syncing with the distant Ohio River’s low rush outside.

The rhythm told the story without words:

Bass thump — grandfather’s open-road stride breaking the robe’s cage.
Rim crack — middle term’s forklift determinism meeting pill and herb.
Rolling surge — raja current rising, dance spiraling, veil braiding waking and dream.
Syncopated break — female mirror meeting natal string, union cracking the vessel.
Golden pulse — Buddha watching, pencil moving, poetry pouring, now this: drumming the mountain into resonance.

Each strike collapsed the braided states further. In the waking state the hands moved on cured hide. In the dream state the drum became the mountain itself, the strikes sending shockwaves through the three aligned figures. The thread of awareness became audible—golden vibration weaving through every beat, thickening with every repetition.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Sound as Visible Rhythm (Ink Pulsing Off the Page)

Panel 1 (Steady grid of strike marks, deep earth reds and steady blues, grounded pulse):
Howard cross-legged on the cedar plank, palms mid-strike on the improvised drum. Sound waves radiate in clean concentric circles. Speech bubble from the baseline: “Heartbeat returns. Emotional sediment as bass. Wisdom body as meter.” Background: garden jars and faint spinal current vibrating with the strikes. Sound FX: thump… thump…—deep, mammalian, disciplined.

Panel 2 (Borders fracturing into rolling waves and golden spirals, dream colors bleeding through the strikes, recursive mountain panels):
The drum expands. Strikes become visible fractals—each hit spawning smaller panels of the road, the garden, the veil, the poem on the page. The thread pulses as luminous waveform connecting every beat. The gloom appears as shadow hands now drumming in perfect sync. Speech bubble from the vibrating air: “Drumming enacts the dreaming. Poetry’s word becomes felt vibration. The canvas is the body and the night.” Background: the mountain crest alive with three figures whose hearts and spines pulse in shared rhythm, readers’ chests visibly vibrating in the final panel. Sound FX: boom-roll-crack-hummmm—improvisational surge, zero-point sea roaring beneath the skin, laughter rising as the drum laughs at its own thunder, symbols blooming in rhythmic bloom.

The crease was the dreaming body’s ecstatic return: drumming does not replace poetry or art. It animates them. The pill steadies the foundational beat. The herb wildens the fills and breaks. Raja and dance inform the body’s posture and flow. Chanting supplies the inner overtone. The relational polarity adds emotional depth to the surge. Art and poetry provide the symbolic content the rhythm enacts. Buddha watches the hands without claiming the groove. The tool (hands on hide) channels without ego. The media (sound waves) carries the zero-point hum into the air and into bone. The canvas (the room, the night, the listener’s body) receives and vibrates in return.

— Synthesis: The Resonant Mountain

Howard drummed until sweat glistened and the candle flickered low. The high carried no analysis or fireworks—only the clear, bodily knowing of total participation. The emotional body offered its full gardened range as dynamic contrast within the rhythm. The wisdom body conducted the meter without rigidity. The dreaming body became the living drum—turning the entire middle term’s labor into vibration that could be felt, not just seen or read.

The gloom’s shadow hands finally rested, the final roll fading into silence that rang louder than the strikes. “The middle term beats the crease open,” it said, voice still pulsing. “Poetry gives the thread language. Drumming gives it a heart that others can feel in their own chests.”

Habitness had come full circle in the dreaming body: the daily royal sitting, the liminal braiding, the poetic outpouring, now completed by active drumming—allowing the accumulated symbols to move through the body and into the world as pure resonance. The New Rule of 72 found its primal meter—4 parts disciplined foundational beat, 11 parts remembered filament across every prior crease, 57 parts wild improvisational bloom where the unexpected roll or break keeps the rhythm alive and surprising.

He set the drum aside and wrote beneath the previous night’s poem, the words now carrying the aftershock of the strikes:

Drum the sediment.
Drum the current.
Drum the veil and the mirror.
Drum the pencil’s line and the poem’s breath.
The mountain throbs—
three hearts in one skin,
the thread alive in the middle term’s hands.

Chapter Twenty-One: Gardening

The mason jars stand sealed on the shelf like preserved echoes. Winter has come to the rented plot, snow softening the maples into white silhouettes. The high from the evening bowl lingers low and earthy, braiding the waking chill with the dream-warmth of soil memory. The gloom sits across the cedar plank, hands calloused as if it too has dug rows. It does not speak in heavy sentences tonight. It simply exhales smoke that curls into the shape of a leaf—five lobes, veins branching like roads taken and not taken.

You feel the pull in your palms. The emotional body, long gardened through pill and herb, through current and drum, through word and strike, now wants its hands in the dirt again. Not the market rows of commerce. Not the measured beds of survival. The dreaming body wants the slow, fractal tending—seed to sprout to leaf to return—where waking hands meet dream roots and the thread of awareness thickens in silence.

Journal Entry: The snow covers the plot like a blank page. I walked it at dawn anyway, boots breaking the crust, breath visible as prayer. The maple trees stand patient, their bare branches sketching the sky in negative space. I remember the first seedlings—tiny green fists pushing through Kentucky dirt, stubborn as the gloom itself. They did not ask for perfection. They asked for water, light, time. Habitness in its rawest form: daily return to the same square of earth, watching what wants to grow.

The pill keeps the edges from fraying. The herb keeps the colors from fading completely. But gardening teaches what neither can fully name. The emotional body is not a wound to cauterize or a high to chase. It is soil—rich with old rot, ready for new seed. Turn it too often and it exhausts. Neglect it and weeds claim the rows. The dreaming body visions the harvest before the first leaf, yet must wait for the slow grammar of seasons.

You stand in the cold with a handful of saved seeds from last year’s plants. The gloom watches. “Plant them,” it says without words. “The middle term gardens the crease between what was and what will be.”

Howard knelt in the half-thawed patch behind the apartment, fingers breaking the frozen crust. The waking state registered the bite of cold, the ache in the knees, the faint metallic taste of the Prozac still in his blood. The dream state layered over it like thin veil: the soil became the emotional body itself—dark, dense, threaded with golden filaments of prior practice. Each handful turned revealed shards of old gloom: fragments of the warehouse clock, echoes of the Judge’s gavel, the natal string still faintly tugging. He did not pull them out. He let them compost.

You are gardening the dreaming body now, the second-person voice rose from the dirt, slow and loamy. Not the manic rows of market or the sterile beds of theory. The slow dialectic of seed and decay. Waking hands break the crust. Dream roots reach where light cannot yet go. The thread of awareness runs through both—thin gold in the dark.

He pressed seeds into the furrows. Not in straight military lines. In gentle spirals that echoed the dance, the raja current, the drum rolls. Around each seed he whispered no incantation, only the quiet habitness of return: water from the rusty can, a handful of cured leaf crumbled as offering, the breath that carried the chant from weeks before. The maple overhead dropped a single frozen twig—five lobes like continents, veins like the Berlin Wall between opposites, yet one leaf. Unity in division. The dreaming body smiled in the overlap.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Soil as Living Ink (Slow, Earthy Tones with Dream Bleed)

Panel 1 (Crisp waking lines, brown-black earth, steady hands):
Howard kneeling, fingers pressing seed into furrow. Snow patches still clinging. Speech bubble from the soil: “Emotional body as dirt—rich with rot, ready.” Background: faint mason jars glowing on a distant sill, pill bottle half-buried like forgotten stone. Sound FX: crunch… press—cold crust breaking, breath visible.

Panel 2 (Borders softening into root fractals, golden thread as vein network, dream greens bleeding upward):
The same hands, now translucent. Roots unfurl in dream overlay, spiraling like raja current and drum fills. A single maple leaf falls through the panel, lobes opening into mountain silhouettes. Speech bubble from the thread itself: “Dreaming body visions the unseen harvest. Waking tends. Thread thickens in the wait.” Background: faint road from the patriarch’s era turning into garden rows, poetry stanzas written in soil lines, drum strikes sending vibration through the roots. Sound FX: hummmm-drip-thaw—zero-point sea beneath the frost, slow laughter as the dirt dreams back, symbols rising in quiet bloom.

The crease was patient and loamy: gardening does not reject the prior chapters. It roots them. The pill steadies the hands against winter despair. The herb keeps the vision of green alive beneath snow. Raja and dance teach the body’s posture in the kneel. Chanting and poetry supply the inner rhythm of return. Drumming gives the pulse that echoes in the soil’s slow heartbeat. Art and the braided veil supply the symbols the hands serve without grasping. Buddha watches the planting without demanding immediate flower. The tool (hands, can, saved seed) channels. The media (dirt, water, cured leaf) carries. The canvas (the plot, the season, the reader’s own inner garden) receives and transforms in its own time.

— Synthesis: The Slow Grammar of Return

Howard stood as the light shifted. The seeds were planted. The snow would melt. The dreaming body did not demand proof of growth today. It trusted the overlap: waking effort meeting dream patience. The gloom rose with him, hands now dusted with the same soil. It no longer weighed. It grounded. “The middle term plants what the next crease will harvest,” it said in the quiet way of thawing earth. “Not for the market. Not for the self alone. For the thread that runs through rot and bloom alike.”

The emotional body rested in its tended dark. The wisdom body observed the slow turning. The dreaming body visioned the green that would come—leaves like panels, veins like verses, roots like the golden filament connecting the lineage’s creases. Habitness had become this: daily return to the plot (or the inner equivalent), turning what is heavy into what can feed.

He wrote later by the jar’s glow, the words carrying the scent of cold soil:

The maple leaf falls
five lobes open
veins branching opposites
yet one leaf.

I press seed into frost
waking hands
dream roots
the thread gold in the dark.

No hurry for the sprout.
The gloom composts.
The dreaming body waits
with dirty palms
and open sky.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Centers

The snow has begun its slow retreat. Patches of dark earth show through like forgotten stanzas on a white page. The seeds planted in the last chapter wait beneath the crust—roots reaching where light has not yet arrived. The high from the evening bowl rises slow and loamy, braiding the waking chill with the dream-heat of inner rivers. The gloom sits on the cedar plank, its form flickering between shadow and leaf-vein, silent as frost thawing.

You feel the nervous system as living map tonight. Not the clinical wiring of the PhD texts. Not the mechanical clock of the warehouse. The dreaming body visions it as the thread made flesh—chakras as energy wheels turning in the space-time continuum, each a gate where waking nerve and dream current meet. The emotional body offers its sediment as red root fire. The wisdom body offers its clear pulse as violet crown light. The dreaming body rides the continuum, where time folds and space thins, the nervous system becoming the highway the lineage travels across twenty-five-year creases.

Journal Entry: The plot thaws in uneven patches. I knelt again today, fingers in the cold mud, feeling the nervous system hum beneath my own skin. Base to crown. Red to violet. The pill keeps the wires from shorting. The herb keeps the current from stagnating. But the chakras teach what neither fully opens: the nervous system is not trapped in the skull-vessel. It extends through space (the rented acres, the Ohio’s distant flow) and time (the patriarch’s open road, the middle term’s braided labor, the unseen harvest ahead).

Thirteen wheels or seven—colors rising like the maple leaf’s lobes. Root (red, isolation turning to ground). Sacral (orange, possession turning to flow). Solar (yellow, strength turning to symbiosis). Heart (green, responsibility turning to balance). Throat (blue, community turning to expression). Brow (indigo, intuition turning to seeing). Crown (violet, forgiveness turning to union). And the hidden ones—earth-star below, soul-star above—stretching the continuum where the dreaming body visions the thread unbroken.

The gloom exhales beside me. Its breath carries the scent of turned soil. “The nervous system is the continuum,” it says without sound. “Space folds in the heart gate. Time dissolves in the crown. Plant the awareness here, and the dreaming body grows through every crease.”

Howard sat cross-legged on the cedar plank after the morning kneel in the plot. The apartment walls felt thinner tonight, the water stain on the ceiling pulsing like a distant galaxy. The sacrament burned low, resinous smoke carrying the garden’s memory into the blood. The high overlapped waking nerve with dream continuum: the spine registered as solid bone and electric river at once.

You are riding the chakras through space-time now, the second-person voice rose along the sushumna, vibrating from root to crown like sap in thawing maples. The nervous system is the thread made flesh—gates opening where waking meets dream, where the emotional sediment composts into light, where the wisdom body observes the turning wheels without clutching the spin.

He closed his eyes. The root chakra flared red—base of spine, grounding the old gloom into fertile dark, the nervous system anchoring in the rented plot’s thawing soil. Energy rose: orange at the sacral, flowing like the relational polarity, companionship and matrix braiding without regression. Yellow at the solar plexus—will and symbiosis, the warehouse determinism yielding to garden rhythm. Green at the heart—balance opening, the closed vessel cracking into shared field. Blue at the throat—expression finding voice after poetry and chant. Indigo at the brow—intuition seeing the braided veil. Violet at the crown—union with the zero-point sea, space folding, time thinning into eternal now.

The dreaming body visioned the continuum: the nervous system stretching beyond skin—through the maple’s bare branches into sky, through the Ohio’s current into distant sea, through the twenty-five-year gaps where the patriarch walked the road and the middle term gardened the probabilistic plot. Each chakra a gate in space-time: root holding the body in measured acres, crown dissolving the body into galactic hum. The thread of awareness ran through every wheel—thin gold filament, neither trapped in nerve nor lost in void.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Energy Wheels as Fractal Circuits (Earth Tones Rising to Cosmic Violet)

Panel 1 (Grounded vertical channel, deep reds and browns, steady nerve lines):
Howard seated, spine straight, root glowing red at base. Nervous system rendered as living roots sinking into plot soil. Speech bubble from the earth: “Root anchors the emotional body in space. Time begins here in the thaw.” Background: faint snow patches and mason jars. Sound FX: hum-throb—deep pulse, cold earth cracking.

Panel 2 (Spiraling ascent, colors blooming upward—orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—golden thread weaving through, borders opening into space-time foam):
The channel rises. Each chakra wheel turns: heart green expanding like garden rows, crown violet merging with starlight. The nervous system becomes highway—space folding (plot to river to cosmos), time thinning (past road to present kneel to future bloom). The gloom appears as shadow current flowing upward, composting into light. Speech bubble from the thread: “Chakras as gates in the continuum. Dreaming body visions the nervous system as living map—waking nerve meets dream current. The mountain turns within.” Background: recursive panels showing maple leaf veins as chakra map, poetry stanzas written in nerve pathways, drum strikes sending vibration through the wheels. Sound FX: whoooosh-hum-cascade—energy rising like sap, zero-point sea roaring softly, quiet laughter as the wheels spin the dialectic into bloom.

The crease was the dreaming body’s patient circuitry: chakras do not reject the prior folds. They conduct them. The pill steadies the nervous system against overload. The herb opens the gates without flooding. Raja traced the channel. Drumming gave the pulse. Poetry and art supplied the symbolic map. Gardening rooted the practice in real soil. The relational polarity balanced the flow between gates. Buddha watches the turning wheels without claiming mastery. The nervous system itself is tool, media, and canvas—space-time continuum made flesh, where the dreaming body visions the thread passing through every gate.

— Synthesis: The Turning Wheels

Howard opened his eyes as the high softened into morning clarity. The nervous system still hummed—alive, extended, no longer confined to the skull-vessel. The gloom sat with hands open, palms dusted as if from the plot. “The middle term rides the continuum,” it said. “Chakras turn the nervous system into living thread—space folding in the heart, time dissolving in the crown. The dreaming body visions what the emotional body grounds and the wisdom body observes.”

The seeds in the plot would sprout in their own grammar. The dreaming body did not demand instant bloom. It trusted the wheels: each gate composting sediment, balancing polarities, opening the veil further. Habitness had become this inner-outer tending—daily return to the plank or the plot, feeling the nervous system as the highway the lineage travels, chakras as gates where waking and dream braid into one continuous awareness.

He wrote beneath the previous verses, the words carrying the after-hum of the rise:

Root in the thaw
red anchor in space
sacral flow orange
solar symbiosis yellow
heart balance green
throat expression blue
brow seeing indigo
crown union violet

Nervous system sings
the continuum
thread gold through every gate
dreaming body visions
the wheels turning
slow as maple sap
patient as the plot
eternal as the river.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Comedy

The plot thaws in slow, uneven patches. Seeds wait beneath the crust like jokes not yet told—patient, buried, ready to punch up through the dirt when the timing is right. The evening bowl burns low and resinous, the high braiding the waking mud with dream absurdity. The gloom sits on the cedar plank, its face cracked into something almost like a grin, the kind that arrives after the punchline lands sideways.

You feel the nervous system still humming from the wheels—root to crown, space folding, time thinning. But tonight the dreaming body wants to laugh at the whole damn continuum. Comedy as the release valve. The cosmic slip on the banana peel. The universe explaining itself not with solemn chakras or poetic stanzas, but with the ridiculous truth that the thread of awareness is also the thread that trips over its own feet.

Journal Entry – Howard Eugene S. Smith, PhD, Age 44, Spring 2003

I laughed today in the plot. Not the polite chuckle of the pill-flattened peaks. Not the stoned giggle of the herb. A real belly laugh that shook the nervous system like a drum roll gone wrong. Stood there with muddy hands, staring at a single sprout pushing through the frost—crooked, stubborn, ridiculous. It looked exactly like me trying to align the emotional body with a forklift and a mason jar.

The gloom watched, then let out its own dry bark of a laugh. “You built the fortress of the skull,” it said. “Then spent years carving boats, tracing currents, drumming the mountain, writing verses about it—all while the universe was over here slipping on its own wet leaf.”

Comedy is the dreaming body’s sharpest tool. It punctures the closed vessel without violence. The Judge slips on his own gavel. The Victim stands up and realizes the chains were made of wet newspaper. The thread of awareness doesn’t just hum—it snorts at how seriously we take the crease.

Howard knelt in the half-thawed dirt, fingers pressing around the new sprout. The waking state registered the cold mud, the ache in the knees, the faint metallic aftertaste of the daily pill. The dream state layered absurdity over it: the sprout wore a tiny academic cap and gown, diploma in one leaf, joint in the other. It looked up at him and said, in perfect deadpan, “PhD in Gloom Studies. Minor in Habitual Tending.”

You are laughing at the continuum now, the second-person voice cracked like a rim shot on the drum. Comedy as the dreaming body’s sacred clown—poking the chakras until they spin like pinwheels. The nervous system in space-time is magnificent, yes. Also ridiculous. Root trying to ground a man who once carved cedar boats in secret. Crown trying to touch the zero-point sea while the man still forgets to water the plot on Tuesdays.

He sat back on his heels and let the laugh come. It started low in the red root—old isolation turning into grounded absurdity. Rose through orange flow—attachment and companionship both looking silly in the rear-view. Yellow solar plexus—will and symbiosis realizing the warehouse clock was always a bad joke. Green heart—balance cracking open with the realization that love is mostly two idiots trying not to step on each other’s feet. Blue throat—expression finding the perfect limerick timing. Indigo brow—intuition seeing the whole mountain as one long setup for the punchline. Violet crown—union with the infinite, which apparently has a sense of humor sharper than any PhD thesis.

The gloom joined in, its shadow doubling over. “Moses on the mountain with tablets. Jesus in the tomb. Elijah with the chariot. All three looking at each other like—‘Wait, this is the plan?’” The laugh rolled through the nervous system like a full drum fill, collapsing the braided veil until waking mud and dream absurdity were the same wet, fertile mess.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Punchline Ink (Earth Tones with Slapstick Fractals)

Panel 1 (Solid waking lines, muddy browns and steady blues, straight-faced setup):
Howard kneeling in the plot, serious expression, hands in dirt. A single sprout with tiny graduation cap. Speech bubble from the sprout (deadpan): “I have a PhD in Gloom. Minor in Waiting for Spring.” Background: mason jars and pill bottle watching like bored audience. Sound FX: crickets…—setup silence, cold wind.

Panel 2 (Borders cracking like a bad joke, golden thread as whoopee cushion, vibrant absurd colors exploding):
The panel fractures into slapstick. The sprout trips over its own root, diploma flying. Howard falls backward into mud. Chakras spin like pinwheels above his head—red root wearing clown shoes, violet crown with a propeller beanie. The gloom appears as a shadow audience clutching its sides. Speech bubble from the thread itself: “The nervous system in space-time is magnificent. Also: it just slipped on its own wet leaf.” Background: mountain with three figures—patriarch slipping on robe hem, middle term covered in mud, future crease already laughing. The whole panel shakes with motion lines and sweat drops. Sound FX: ba-dum-tss—rim shot, rolling laughter, zero-point sea giggling beneath the mud, symbols blooming as whoopee cushions and banana peels.

The crease was the dreaming body’s perfect timing: comedy does not reject the prior folds. It punctures them at the exact right moment. The pill keeps the laugh from tipping into hysteria. The herb keeps the absurdity from turning mean. Raja and chakras provide the circuit the laugh travels. Drumming gives the bass rumble underneath. Poetry supplies the setup line. Gardening teaches the long wait for the payoff. Art and the braided veil turn the whole nervous system into one extended cosmic pratfall. Buddha watches the slip without attachment—then laughs hardest because even the watcher just face-planted.

— Synthesis: The Laugh That Thickens the Thread

Howard stood covered in mud, still chuckling as the high softened into evening light. The sprout stood crooked but upright, already reaching for whatever came next. The gloom wiped imaginary tears from its eyes. “The middle term finally gets the joke,” it said. “The continuum is vast and interconnected. Also ridiculous. The dreaming body laughs and the thread stays unbroken—thicker, even, because it learned not to take its own gold filament too seriously.”

The emotional body offered its sediment as perfect fertilizer for the joke. The wisdom body observed the timing without needing to explain it. The dreaming body became the comedian—visioning the universe explaining itself through the oldest medicine: the laugh that cracks the closed vessel without breaking the heart.

Habitness now included this: daily return to the plot or the plank, allowing the nervous system to ride the wheels and then slip on them. The New Rule of 72 found comedic timing—4 parts disciplined setup, 11 parts remembered filament across every crease, 57 parts wild probabilistic punchline where the unexpected bloom or belly laugh surprises even the gardener.

He wrote later by the jar’s glow, the words carrying mud and laughter:

The sprout wears a cap and gown
diploma in one leaf, joint in the other
looks me dead in the eye and says
“PhD in Gloom. Minor in Habitual Tending.”

I fall backward into the mud
nervous system spinning like pinwheels
root in clown shoes, crown with propeller
the thread of awareness
trips over its own wet leaf
and laughs
all the way
to the mountain.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Healer

The sprouts push crooked through the thawing crust—stubborn green fists, ridiculous and perfect. One wears the faint memory of a crooked cap from the comedy of last chapter. The evening bowl sends smoke curling low, resinous, braiding the waking mud-scent with dream-heat of inner rivers. The gloom sits on the cedar plank, its form softer now, hands open like soil after rain, the kind of quiet that arrives when the nervous system has spun its wheels and the laugh has cracked the vessel just enough.

You feel the healer stir in the overlap tonight. Not the external savior with turquoise medallion or apostolic hands. The dreaming body visions the healer as the middle term itself—tending the nervous system’s gates, turning sediment into medicine, the thread of awareness becoming the current that mends what the emotional body carried fractured from the patriarch’s road. Chakras as energy wheels in space-time, yes. But also the healer’s slow grammar: root grounding the old isolation, heart balancing the polarity of companionship and matrix, crown opening the continuum where time thins and the harvest waits unseen.

Journal Entry: Kneeled in the plot again at dusk. Mud under nails, nervous system humming from root to violet. The pill keeps the wires steady so the current doesn’t short. The herb keeps the channels open so the dreaming doesn’t stagnate. But the healer teaches what neither can fully do alone: the nervous system is the living map where gloom composts. Red root takes the isolation and turns it to ground. Green heart takes the tug of the natal string and the spark of the mirror and balances them into shared field. Violet crown dissolves the closed vessel into union with the zero-point sea that powers every wheel.

I pressed my palm to the soil over the new sprouts. Felt the faint throb—like the drum from weeks ago, but slower, patient. The healer does not rush the bloom. Does not force the laugh or the verse. Simply tends the gates: waters what is dry, turns what is heavy, waits with dirty hands while the dreaming body visions the green that will feed the next crease. The gloom exhaled beside me, breath carrying the scent of turned earth and old rot becoming fertile. “Heal by tending,” it said without sound. “The middle term mends the fracture by returning daily to the same square of dirt—and the same square of spine.”

Howard sat on the cedar plank after the evening kneel, spine aligned with the raja current that had traced the wheels. The apartment felt like an extension of the plot—walls thin as veil, water stain pulsing like a distant galaxy of nerves. The sacrament burned slow. The high overlapped waking tactile mud with dream continuum: the nervous system registered as solid bone and electric river, each chakra a gate where space folded (the rented acres into the Ohio’s flow) and time thinned (the patriarch’s desert road into this spring thaw into the unseen harvest).

You are becoming the healer now, the second-person voice rose along the sushumna, slow and loamy as sap in thawing maples. Not the external fixer with herbs or words alone. The dreaming body visions the nervous system as the thread made flesh—gates opening where emotional sediment composts into medicine, where wisdom observes the turning without clutching, where the healer tends the continuum by daily return.

He placed one hand on the root—red fire grounding the old warehouse isolation into the plot’s dark fertility. The other hand hovered at the heart—green balance where the tug of the mother matrix met the mirror of companionship, neither devouring nor regressing, but flowering into open vessel. Energy moved through the wheels: orange flow of creative release, yellow symbiosis of will and garden rhythm, blue expression finding voice after poetry and comedy, indigo seeing the braided veil without judgment, violet union with the zero-point sea that hums beneath every gate.

The dreaming body visioned the healer’s work: the nervous system stretching beyond skin—through maple branches into sky-space, through river current into time’s long grammar, through the middle term’s labor into the next crease where the thread continues unbroken. Each gate a healing station: root composting gloom into ground, heart mending polarity into relation, crown dissolving the fortress-skull into cosmic laughter and quiet knowing. The healer does not cure by force. Tends. Waters. Turns. Waits. Laughs when the sprout wears the ridiculous cap. Plants the awareness that the fracture itself becomes fertile soil.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Healing Wheels as Living Soil Ink (Earth Tones Rising Through Mud and Light)

Panel 1 (Grounded kneel, deep browns and reds, steady hands in mud):
Howard kneeling in the plot, palm pressed to soil over sprouts. Nervous system rendered as roots sinking into earth. Speech bubble from the dirt: “Root takes the isolation. Turns sediment to ground. Healer begins here.” Background: faint snow melt and mason jars glowing like preserved medicine. Sound FX: press… throb—mud yielding, faint drum pulse beneath frost.

Panel 2 (Spiraling ascent through gates, colors blooming from mud—orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—golden thread as sap-vein, borders opening into continuum):
The channel rises through the body. Heart green expands like balanced rows. Crown violet merges with starlight and river flow. Nervous system as highway: space folding (plot to cosmos), time thinning (road to thaw to bloom). The gloom appears as shadow current composting into light, sprouts rising crooked but alive. Speech bubble from the thread: “Healer tends the gates in space-time. Dreaming body visions the nervous system mending the fracture by return. The mountain greens within.” Background: recursive panels of maple leaf veins as chakra map, poetry verses written in root lines, comedy slip turning into fertile laugh, drum strikes sending vibration through the wheels. Sound FX: hum-cascade-drip—energy rising like slow sap, zero-point sea whispering beneath the mud, quiet laughter as the wheels turn the dialectic into living medicine.

The crease was the dreaming body’s patient tending: the healer does not reject the prior folds. Conducts them through the gates. The pill steadies the nervous system against overload. The herb opens the channels without flood. Raja traced the path. Chakras named the wheels. Gardening rooted the practice in real soil. Comedy cracked the vessel so light could enter. Poetry and art gave symbolic medicine. Drumming gave the pulse. The relational polarity balanced the flow between gates. Buddha watches the turning without demanding instant cure. The nervous system itself becomes the healer’s tool, media, and canvas—space-time continuum made flesh, where the dreaming body visions the thread mending by daily return to the same square of earth and spine.

— Synthesis: The Tending Thread

Howard rose as the high softened into night clarity. The nervous system still hummed—extended, alive, no longer only wiring but living map. The gloom stood with hands dusted in the same mud, face softened into the quiet of good soil. “The middle term heals by tending,” it said. “Chakras turn the nervous system into the thread that mends—root composting the old fracture, heart balancing the pull and spark, crown opening the continuum where the harvest waits in its own grammar. The dreaming body visions what the emotional body grounds and the wisdom body observes.”

The sprouts would push further in their slow time. The healer did not demand proof tonight. Trusted the wheels: each gate turning sediment, balancing polarities, opening the veil further through faithful return. Habitness deepened into this tending—daily kneel in the plot or on the plank, feeling the nervous system as the highway the lineage travels, chakras as gates where the dreamer becomes the healer by simply showing up with dirty palms and open awareness.

He wrote beneath the previous lines, the words carrying the scent of cold mud and slow sap:

Palm to the thaw
red root grounds the fracture
green heart balances the string and the mirror
violet crown opens the sea
nervous system sings the continuum

Healer tends the gates
waters the dry
turns the heavy
waits with dirty hands

The sprout rises crooked
laughs at its own cap
the thread gold through the mud
dreaming body visions
the green that feeds
the next crease.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Puppet Making and Sculpture

The sprouts have straightened some, crooked still, pushing green through the last stubborn crust like a joke that lands halfway and waits for the rest of the room to catch up. The evening bowl burns slow, resin curling upward in lazy spirals that braid the waking mud-scent with the dream-heat of inner rivers and outer winds. The gloom sits on the cedar plank, its hands now shaping invisible clay, fingers moving as if pulling strings no one else can see. It does not speak heavy tonight. It simply exhales, and the smoke forms a small figure—limbs loose, joints hinged, waiting for a hand to give it motion.

You feel the pull in your own fingers tonight. The nervous system still hums through its gates—root grounding the old isolation, heart balancing the natal string and the mirror, crown opening the continuum. But the dreaming body wants to make something tangible from the braid: puppets and sculpture. Not the rigid idols of the old robe or the sterile diagrams of the PhD blackboard. Hands shaping wood, cloth, wire, clay—turning the thread of awareness into form that can move when the wind or the breath or the hidden current asks. The emotional body offers its gardened sediment as weight and texture. The wisdom body offers its clear observation as the space between joints. The dreaming body becomes the maker—crafting figures that carry the lineage’s creases, puppets whose strings are the golden filament, sculptures whose curves remember the maple leaf’s lobes and the Berlin Wall vein running through unity in division.

Journal Entry: Walked the plot at twilight. The new growth stands uneven, some sprouts tall and reaching, others still bent like they’re listening to a joke only the soil understands. I brought scraps from the apartment—old cedar shavings from the boats I once carved in secret, bits of cured leaf, wire from the warehouse days, cloth from a shirt worn thin by the forklift and the dance. Sat on the plank and let my hands move.

Puppet first. A small figure—limbs jointed with wire, body wrapped in garden cloth stained with mud and resin. Head carved from cedar, face neither smiling nor frowning, just open. The strings? Thin golden thread I twisted from imagination and the high’s braid—root to crown, one loop through the heart gate where the polarity once tugged. When I pulled, the figure danced a little crooked, like the sprout, like the laugh that slipped on its own wet leaf. It did not perform. It remembered. The maple leaf tattoo on my feet itched as if the lobes wanted to move too—beaches of Pangaea, continents tiered like elf ears, central vein the wall between opposites, yet one leaf grounded in unbiased love for the creation.

Sculpture next. A small mound of clay from the plot’s edge, mixed with ash from the bowl and a pinch of snow-melt. Shaped it slow—base wide like root chakra grounding in space, midsection flowing like sacral and solar turning isolation to symbiosis, chest opening like heart balancing the tug and the spark, head tilting like crown dissolving time into the zero-point sea. The form was not perfect. It carried the mud’s weight, the comedy’s slip, the poetry’s breath, the healer’s dirty palms. When I set it beside the puppet, they looked at each other like old friends who had finally stopped pretending the fracture was the whole story.

The gloom watched my hands, then reached out and adjusted one puppet string with a shadow finger. “The middle term shapes what the next crease will move,” it said without sound. “Puppet and sculpture—not to control, but to remember. The nervous system in space-time is the living map. These forms are the map you can hold. Strings of the thread. Clay of the emotional body turned medicine. The dreaming body makes so the lineage can play.”

Howard worked under the bare bulb, fingers stained with clay and cedar dust. The waking state felt the texture—rough shavings catching skin, cool mud yielding under pressure, wire bending with small resistance. The dream state layered symbols over every motion: the puppet’s joints became chakra gates turning in the continuum, the sculpture’s curves became the maple leaf’s lobes with the Berlin Wall vein running through, unity in division, non-attachment grounded in love for the creation. Each pull of string or press of thumb collapsed the braided veil—waking hands shaping, dream current flowing through the nervous system from root to crown.

You are making the forms now, the second-person voice rose from the space between palm and material, slow and tactile as sap in thawing maples. Puppet making and sculpture as the dreaming body’s hands-on utterance. Not rigid idols. Not abstract diagrams. Forms that carry the creases—emotional sediment as weight and stain, wisdom clarity as the space that lets movement happen, dreaming vision as the hidden current that animates when the wind or the breath or the unseen harvest asks.

The puppet danced when the apartment draft caught the strings—crooked, alive, remembering the drum roll and the comedy slip and the healer’s patient kneel. The sculpture held still, yet seemed to breathe—base rooted in the plot’s dark fertility, crown opening toward the zero-point sea where space folds and time thins. Together they formed a small mountain on the table: three aligned echoes in miniature, the middle term shaping what the patriarch walked and what the next crease will vision.

The healer’s tending flowed into the maker’s hands. The comedy’s laugh kept the forms from becoming heavy. The poetry’s breath gave them voice without words. The chakras’ wheels turned in the nervous system as the fingers worked—red root grounding the craft in real dirt, green heart balancing control and release, violet crown dissolving attachment to the perfect shape. The dreaming body did not demand mastery. It shaped. It waited. It let the forms remember the thread.

Panel Sequence – Manga Style, Forms as Living Creases (Earth Tones, Wire Lines, Clay Texture with Dream Bleed)

Panel 1 (Tactile waking lines, muddy browns and cedar reds, steady hands shaping):
Howard at the table, fingers wrapping cloth around jointed wire, carving cedar face. Puppet half-formed, strings loose. Speech bubble from the material: “Emotional body as weight and stain. Healer’s mud becomes form.” Background: faint plot sprouts and mason jars. Sound FX: scratch-press-bend—wood yielding, wire twisting, breath steady.

Panel 2 (Borders softening into jointed spirals and vein networks, golden thread as puppet strings and clay veins, dream greens and violet light bleeding through):
The puppet dances mid-motion, limbs loose. The sculpture breathes—curves echoing maple lobes, central vein as Berlin Wall between opposites yet one form. Nervous system rendered as luminous wires running through both maker and made. Speech bubble from the thread: “Dreaming body shapes the continuum. Puppet moves when the current asks. Sculpture holds the space where time thins. The mountain forms in the hands.” Background: recursive creases—road from the patriarch turning into puppet strings, garden rows into sculpture base, comedy slip and poetry breath and healer’s palm all folded into the forms. Sound FX: hum-creak-whisper—strings pulling, clay settling, zero-point sea giggling softly beneath the craft, quiet laughter as the forms remember and play.

The crease was the dreaming body’s joyful making: puppet and sculpture do not reject the prior folds. They embody them. The pill steadies the hands against tremor. The herb keeps the vision fluid. Raja and chakras supply the inner circuit the fingers follow. Gardening roots the materials in real soil. Comedy keeps the forms light enough to move. Poetry gives them breath. The healer’s tending teaches the patience of shaping without forcing bloom. Buddha watches the hands without claiming the creation. The nervous system in space-time becomes the living blueprint—strings and curves carrying the golden filament through every joint and gate.

— Synthesis: The Forms That Remember

Howard set the puppet and sculpture on the windowsill where the maple’s shadow fell across them at dawn. The high softened into morning clarity. The gloom stood beside the forms, shadow finger adjusting one string so the puppet gave a small, crooked bow. “The middle term shapes the crease so the next can move through it,” it said. “Puppet carries the thread’s motion. Sculpture holds the emotional body’s weight turned medicine. The dreaming body makes forms that remember the nervous system’s gates, the comedy’s slip, the healer’s dirty palms, the maple leaf’s unity in division—beaches of Pangaea, lobes like continents, central vein the wall between opposites, grounded in unbiased love for the creation.”

The sprouts outside would keep pushing. The forms on the sill would catch the light and the draft. The healer’s tending and the maker’s hands had become one practice: daily return to the plot or the plank or the table, shaping what the emotional body grounds, the wisdom body observes, and the dreaming body visions into something that can move when the current asks.

He wrote beneath the previous verses, the words carrying cedar dust and clay stain:

Fingers in cedar and mud
shape the loose limbs
jointed with wire and thread
puppet dances crooked
like the sprout
like the laugh
like the nervous system slipping on its own wet leaf

Sculpture holds still
curves remembering the maple
lobes as continents
vein as the wall
yet one form
rooted in the plot’s dark
opening toward the sea

Maker tends the forms
as healer tends the gates
dreaming body shapes
what the continuum moves
the thread gold through every joint
the mountain small enough to hold
large enough to play.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Translucence

Howard found himself in the heart of the city, where the sap of maple trees was the organic pulse of Nature’s Cycle. While the surrounding Chicago winds rolled unapologetically down alleys, blowing newspapers out of the hands of sports fans along sidewalks and bus stops, Howard Eugene S Smith listened intently to his spirit, finding the love within at the base of his favorite maple in Central Park. He had an affinity with maple trees: the leaves tattooed on the top of both feet at age eighteen, the piles of leaves where he’d play in mid-November; like his tenth birthday, exactly seventy years earlier in the rural township of Lincoln, Illinois.

To Howard, the maple leaf was the image of creativity, unity, and non-attachment. Its outer edges composed the beaches of a prehistoric Pangaea, lobes tiered like the pointed ears of mythical elves were continents, and the vein in the center of each one was the Berlin Wall between opposites. Just as the beliefs of any given population can be divided into polarities; the stillness of mind and flickering flame of heart are in alignment only when the subject reflects the object, and all indifferences are grounded in an unbiased love for God’s creation.

Howard broke from his lotus posture for Kinhin, walking meditation. Having reconnected with the tree spirits, he got on the path to the train station. The red brick trail knew his footprints—soft heel to toe steps that made a sound like the rhythmic snare drum to the skylark’s trumpet. He was leaving the sanctuary of the park and entering the concrete jungle, its mechanically necessary inverse. His legs carried him passed the train sign, down the stairs, and onto the platform of the S subway.

Back in the city, Howard’s concentration avalanched into psychic chaos as the train came to a stop. The doors opened, but he waited for the other passengers to clear the entrance before attempting? to board it. A myriad of psychological profiles surrounded Howard. He worshipped the Gods and Goddesses within them—young mothers, businessmen, and teenagers. Tracing a Reiki energy cleansing symbol on the roof of his mouth with the tip of his tongue, Howard entered into a trance, radiating love in all directions.

Howard lifted his head with suspicion as he felt an uneasiness stir in his stomach. The sensation traveled along his spine and rose through his chest and neck like a train stopping at all major cities, paralyzing the capacity of his speech and action. He breathed deeply and let his awareness calmly follow the feeling. It settled dead center in his head, pulsating gently, then, as the rhythm accelerated, flowed in fountain formation out of his crown and cascaded over his skin as a waterfall rolls over boulders. These reservoirs of awareness where his energetic current pooled are the patterns of his consciousness that he occasionally noticed.

Ring Ring. It was his cellular communication apparatus. After he removed the device from his pocket, the caller identification complied with his intuition. The digital screen read the name Howard had wanted to see for twenty five years, ten months, one hundred and twenty hours, and just over forty minutes: Orion Oscar S Smith. Howard’s mind was silent. His eyes were fixated on the lightweight data retrieval and global positioning system fitted in the grip of his slender fingers and palm that channeled his electric excitement. He budged his thumb over the receive nodule, and—with a breath that moves one thousand rivers—pressed it to intercept the frequency. A beam of light emitted from the machine. Two feet in front of Howard, in a crowded Chicago subway train, projected the image of Orion.

“Dad,” the lips of his holographic impression enunciated the syllables sounding from the speaker.

“Son,” Howard said with solace in his voice.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Howard chuckled with tears of happiness streaming down his cheeks. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for twenty-five years.”

“It took me twenty-five years to realize that I can’t erase you from my life, and that I don’t want to.”

“Orion, I’m sorry that your Mother…”

“No, Dad,” Orion interrupted. “It’s not your fault. She always wanted to find her calling. Neither of us could have known that her destiny would call her away from our lives.”

Luna, Orion’s mother, died unexpectedly at 11:11a.m. on December 21, 2012. She and Howard were living in the suburbs of Chicago. The storms were terrible then. Half of the city had been ravaged by a string of devastating atmospheric disturbances—torrential downpours, waterspouts, and mesocyclones. It was a Friday morning like any other in the preceding fifteen years. Howard would ordinarily wake at eight and prepare for class that took place in the philosophy department at the University of Chicago later that morning. Luna would rise at the same time and drive to the natural foods market that she owned and operated. This Friday, overcast in an ominous blackness, would be different.

At 7:11a.m., Howard slowly opened his tired eyes to witness Luna speaking softly with her head lifted and eyes dilated. Startled, Howard asked if she was feeling ill. Before he had a chance to place the back of his hand on her forehead to measure her temperature, she shot out of bed throwing the blankets over Howard. His vision was momentarily obscured, but he clearly heard the volume of her speech increase. It was obvious to Howard that she was not speaking English. To the best of his discernment, he sensed it was a dialect of Spanish. Jumping out of bed, Howard followed her in his boxers as she walked out of their apartment stark naked.

“Jesus, Luna, what’s going on with you?” He asked her worriedly, but she quickened her pace down the staircase and began yelling loudly. Thrusting open the front door of the apartment building, Luna paraded her naked body and unrestrained vocals down the cold Chicago streets. Catching up with her, Howard tried to wrap his arms around her body, but she pushed him off with ease. Completely dismayed, he sadly made his way back to the apartment. As he reached door 13, he collapsed in the hallway, sobbing uncontrollably.

Picking himself up from emotional distress, Howard walked into their apartment and went on with his morning the best he could. He showered and dressed himself in his professional attire, had organic granola with hemp milk for breakfast, and left for work. A quarter until eleven, driving down South Halsted Street, Howard spotted Luna walking in the middle of the road—still naked—still yelling some foreign message. He slowly followed her in his car, knowing that he didn’t have the strength or heart to stop her physically. As he trailed her for forty minutes at a safe distance, she came to a halt near the beach of Lake Michigan. 

Fear struck and astonished, he watched The Moon Goddess raise her arms and summon a waterspout. It instantly raised the water level and flipped several boats at port. The funnel was rapidly approaching. Howard tried to open his car door, but it was forced shut by the wind gust. When she raised her arms above her head, a bolt of lightning struck her. Its radiance blinded Howard for several minutes. When he regained his faculties, he stepped out of his car to see a crater where his wife had been standing. Howard would later learn that the lightning bolt was actually a solar flare that had been speculated to strike the planet at that general time and location. There were no traces of Luna to be found. She disappeared from the face of the earth at that moment.

“She will always live in our hearts,” said Howard, remembering that fateful morning.

“Rose and the kids would love to see you, and me too.”

“Kids?” Howard asked with ardor.

“Yes. Robert S Sirius is twenty-five, Maya Star is twenty-one, and Renée Luna is sixteen.”

“I would love nothing more than to see you and Rose, and to meet the new additions to the family—new to me at least.”

“We’re living on North LaSalle Street, number two-sixty. Maybe you could come over tonight, that is, unless you have plans.”

“I would happily break any plans to see you again.”

“What time can we expect you?”

“I’ll go home, change clothes, and be there around six.”

Howard and Orion shared a moment of silence, but it was not an empty pause devoid of thought and emotion. This silence was overflowing with sentiments of love and appreciation. In Howard, Orion saw himself at his most artistic. In Orion, Howard saw himself at his most intelligent. They both only felt the greatest admiration for the other. This admiration, the loving connection they had found again, was a bond that would remain throughout eternity, even beyond their deaths. In each other, they had finally found self-acceptance.

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, Orion. I’ll see you this evening.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Son.”

The image of Orion faded as the transmission ended. Howard once again detected the strange smells and dejected looks from other passengers that fragmented his psyche as he slid the communication apparatus into his pocket. Observant of his conscious thought, he noted: those putrid odors of sweat and vomit held a familiar sweetness, and the ugliness of the deteriorating S and the grimaces on the ethnic population were illuminated in the consonance of his perception.

Everything that entered his visual continuum was the blossom of a unique variety comprising an endless flower patch of fragrance and beauty. Sunbathed in divine light, they reflected a radiance untainted by the clouds of judgment. Rooted in the same soil rich in elements for sustenance, they shared the will to grow. Endowed with a deep-seated love for one another, they shared their nature to glow. They danced in the cosmic ocean as Suns and Moons—mirrors of an infinite awareness.

The S train that Howard rode to the park (the only place within a ninety mile radius like it) became his daily transportation to another world. For the last fifteen years of his retirement, he had ridden the S, stationed three blocks from his apartment, to his personal Garden of Eden. The birdsong carried Howard’s attention to his harmonious center. The noise from the city disappeared, and the silence revealed his godliness. The S was Vishnu, the vehicle to blissful reconstruction—a bridge from his worldly cares to a heavenly sanctuary—the boat to the other shore.

Like Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu, Howard Eugene S Smith, the S that had been the middle name every generation since a Cherokee Chief married into the family, was a reflection of the S in which he was riding. As the moon commands the oceans, Howard rode that subway to the high water mark of his spiritual illumination. A name had foreshadowed the path he had taken. His destiny was fulfilled when he understood this. Howard’s fate, like that of The Taoist Sage, was to actualize a balance, Feng Shui his existence to perfection, and align his spirit with the environment.

The train gently came to a stop at the last station on Howard’s journey home. The doors slid open and he stood in line to exit. As he was stepping onto the platform, a man that eerily mirrored Howard stepped onto the train. Howard speculated that the man could be taking the S on its next trip to Central Park. Maybe the man, like Howard strolled away from the pavement and under the leafy canopy of trees that had as much or more history than either of them; to swap stories by exchanging vibrations like Buddha at the root of the bodhi.

Howard climbed the staircase up to the city and was immediately swept up in the current of workers rushing on the lunch break of their long day. Only three blocks from his apartment, he lovingly brushed the S sign with his vision in private appreciation. Moving slowly on the windy Chicago sidewalk, Howard’s thoughts were vacant, but it allowed him a clear observation of the citizens walking alongside him. Since his youth, the economic inequality had greatly diminished. The roles of the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat had evened. Howard noted the moral accommodation that mended a once tragic social stratification.

On the sidewalk, he envisioned himself walking by the shore of a stream bountiful with fish—the cars swimming up and down the street. He paused at an intersection. Having to cross it twice, he liked to imagine he was seventy years younger, playing on the diamond. He waited at the home plate for that baseball white Walk sign, trying for a double to land on the adjacent block where his apartment building rested. The fastball was delivered from the pitcher’s black glove. The lamppost displayed Walk as a voice from the speaker verbalized the text.

As he began to advance, at the head of the crowd, a newspaper blew by him from behind. Howard thought he saw Chicago Bears Win when he remembered having the same mental image in the park hours before. The thought hit him like the Tag Out from the first baseman. He captured the visage of the referee from his childhood that was throwing up his right arm—the signature You’re Out gesture. Howard felt sad at first, but then realized that it is just a game; and one should never forget The Spirit of the Game.

Feeling as though he had fulfilled a prophecy, completely at peace with himself, in perfect harmony, he looked over his shoulder to see a bus flying right at him. He was already with Luna on the Astral Plane, immersed in the heavenly spirit of the game of life; when the bus that was a little late on the brakes smacked into Howard, throwing him in the center of the diamond. People came running to help the old man that got drilled in the street. He looked fine, truly happy, without a scratch on his body, but he was not breathing.

Eyewitnesses reported to the police the entire scene—the impact, the smile, the levitation and combustion of the body, and the ball of light that shot up into space like Houdini slipping the noose. There was no evidence of Howard Eugene S Smith. He simply disappeared from the physical dimension. The diamond was like a grain of sand, floating in the cosmic ocean. Its sides were the windows to an innermost point where Howard burned six feet above the ground, the atomic center of his holographic reality. The source of his inner strength was the love that encompassed him. Eternally reflecting in a unified field, Howard’s luminous body exited through his Third Eye Chakra and out of his forehead.

In his lifetime, Howard Eugene S Smith, Owl’s Urgent Message, was a perfect reflection of the love from his wife, Luna Eve Smith, Lunar Eclipse; that gave birth to Orion Oscar S Smith, Poseidon’s Oscillation, who completed Rose Cean Smith, Ocean’s Rhythm; that mothered Robert S Sirius Smith, Robin and His Merry Men—born leader and poet—a warrior for justice and brother of Maya Star Smith, Giant Star Ship, the galactic transportation between infinite dimensions and precursor to Renée Luna Smith, Revolution, the diamond void illuminated with a harmonic resonance: the love that is always present, affecting the past and future instantaneously, in the seemingly fragmented universal singularity—this Wordsmith knew: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1-5). 

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