Mags MacKean is an O Books author inhabiting the borderlands
between fact and fiction...Disguised as a twinge, she has an answer for anyone who questions. She might make herself known, as she did for me, when purpose, endeavour and progress, mythologized as a stairway to heaven, no longer makes sense. I know her as Grandmother.
Restlessness was my constant companion. It trailed me wherever I went. Distraction only quelled it for so long. It wasn’t until I felt my way into it and listened hard enough to its wisdom that I discovered the nagging call of Grandmother from the hidden depths of my being.
There’s nothing exclusive about our connection, no matter how intimate it can seem. Maybe you have felt Grandmother call to you too. Sometimes I feel her as a little wing, unfurling at my shoulder blades like a tickle or as a sudden impulse to sing. Silent stalker, tender and fierce, she has chased me all my life – long, long before I had any idea I was being stalked. Even when she raged as fierce deadly storms, I was not yet awake to her reminder – the reminder that she was waiting to call me back to the place before the beginning of time, when the story of ‘me’ began – home.
My first encounter with Grandmother in a human identity, so unlike her wilder or more abstract guises, came after a long, long journey, located nowhere with a postcode. The murky waters of my daydreams sparkled with an iridescent phosphorous from the pristine depths into which I had to dive. Descending through the dark density of bone-breaking stillness, I found myself in a fathomless ocean, an unending dimension, the deepest to be found on Earth. Inside the apparently solid core, its hollow interior as vibrantly lit and abundant with life as anywhere miles above it, I was submersed deep within a dormant volcano.
The water overflowed until there was enough to float upon. I relaxed, weightless and adrift. Then, everything changed. Birdsong peeled out from clear blue skies.
A rich smell of damp grass drew me into an orchard teeming with rosy apples, a thatched cottage at one end. Grandmother was stooped beneath a tree, gathering apples to bake. Her white hair was in a bun, her dress too plain to recall. At first glance, her hands were strikingly large, but her eyes were the real giveaway – nothing was as it seemed. The eyes that captured mine hinted of deep space, enveloping me in all the warmth of an Elysian garden, home-baked wholesomeness, a sanctuary of beehives and roses, blossom and robin-red-breasts.
As I gazed into them, they filled with a sinuous carpet of swallows, pulsing along as one winged bird. “You are the fledgling,” I heard her say in the unending stillness. “You are the little wing, the songbird who dreams to soar among the giants of the winged species. All my children are birds living for the only reason there can be.”
“And what reason is that?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“All the little birds are here to sing their hearts out and remember their wings.”
I felt my heart open, as I watched Grandmother’s eyes change again. They were now galaxies, holding the mysteries of the cosmos, radiant with starlight. A comet flashed at speed until it blazed as the raging, transformative power of fire.
“You’re wondering if you’re making me up! But I ask you to consider, what isn’t story? Is something less real for being imagined? I ask you, how can any physical thing hold more credibility than a dream, when everything – every thought, sensation and whim, and awareness of those things itself – arises within the same space – a space without borders, origin or destination, without beginning and end?”
The earth felt as if it was sliding away from under my feet. The hypnotic flow of her words was seeping through me, releasing me from anything solid. Wasn’t everything Grandmother saying familiar, an echo of a distant memory?
In my mind’s eye, there was a giddying blur of movement, countless reinventions of the same old me in work and play; holding a microphone, dancing, cooking, passport controls, mountain ranges, a throng of every creed and colour; the beautiful Earth. If time had run out to live its marvels how I would yearn to live more and more! And wasn’t that the point – for all the everyday miracles, the countless reasons to be grateful, there was something not at peace – something not at rest...
“Make a friend with it,” Grandmother’s voice shattered my thoughts. “That very suffering, no manner of external love will heal. Your restlessness is your greatest ally, if you allow it to serve you.”
“It is?”
“Yes. It is guiding you back to the beginnings of the beginnings – to a whole new you. It is the doorway to the unknown. There is an opportunity, if you’re willing to take it, to begin yourself anew, to recreate your life afresh.”
“How?”
“Go to Mount Bugarach, the ‘Upside Down Mountain’. The place of fire. Of purification. Feel your way downwards into its mystery, its very heart. Let it show its true nature – less of a place than a state of being.”
It was couched as an invitation to explore the very source of turmoil I most wanted to avoid – a journey demanding courage and determination to go beyond anywhere ever imagined and beheld. I was warned that to become identified with any feelings would ensure a hellish experience in the descent ahead. To behold my prospects as just a climb up a mountain was no longer a ticket to anywhere. It would only prolong my misery. There was one place peace could be found, if compass needles could point to it. The destination, she pointed out, was deep within the molten lava fields inside the belly of the not so dormant volcano.
“Bugarach,” she repeated, with the faintest trace of a wink…
Slowly waking up to my everyday world, the faintest echo, a lingering directive, seeped into my longing. The way up is down.
Paperback - AMAZON US AMAZON UK
Categories:
0 comments on this article
Leave a comment
