Eleusis.

I am unsure of myself. 

The feeling is of darkness. 

And of being swept away. 

Of walking a labyrinth, a spinning void.

To a place beyond the stars.

What had happened?

Hours earlier, as the lights came up and everyone started to leave, we stood for about ten minutes trying to exchange phone numbers - my phone refusing to do RCS - I was trying to write his number into Google Keep. 

Neither of us were thinking straight. 

We had just seen Tool.

Hours later - at 3 am, 31st of May 2024 my feelings were making even less sense. Sure, I know, a lot had happened already that day but.. But I couldn’t even tell if I was feeling my own feelings.

Wrapped and lost in the early morning darkness - I felt bereft - my skin was full of pins and needles as if I was inside a thunderstorm burning with invisible black flames. And I know why...There had been just too much left unsaid. We had an experience in common - and the enormity of it was too much. I think I heard him say something, somethings, enough to be sure that we had experienced something terrific and tyrannical - to do with psychosis, drugs, suicide. I was trying to assess where he was on the curve. On that ring around the moon. Inside my soul I didn't want to admit it, I didn't let myself feel it as we sat in row T.

But in my heart I felt that he might be the only person I've met who would get what I'd been through.. I believed that we had been to the same place. 

Could be that we had been in opposing roles - because that is how these things happen -  nothing creates 'relational depth' more than being with someone who has experienced the same but opposite experience to you.

Only they can know it, and forgive you.

None of us get it right...

Only you can know it and forgive them.

Only they know the other side

We were both therapists with a mission because of what we had experienced. But there was too little time or space enough to talk. And between my words I heard him say enough. I felt extremely protective of him. 

I felt protected by him - I had relaxed into trust. 

There was a sense of alliance, of being on the same side. And between the words there was more, more than our jobs, more than Tool, I didn't let myself think what I felt, that only he could set me free and I him. No one other than someone who has been there too, can lift the stone.

I tried to put that to one side.

I did a good job.

I know that it isn't everyone's style to set the controls for the heart of the sun, to stand in the heat and embrace the transformation of a direct encounter with the truth to gain restoration of one's own wholeness and power, that traumatic memories can bring.

Most people want to run, and forget.

As Descending played, my eyes filled with tears. 

Pride in both of us.

And for me, the first time in four years I remembered how feeling safe feels - and I hadn’t expected to feel safe at all. I hadn’t wanted to leave the house to even be there. I’d left home with a sense of dread, a sense of being about to take a trip I might not come back from. I'd felt naked, exposed and lost...

But it was OK, I felt OK, now in T-113 I felt strong and safe. I made a conscious effort to make him feel safe too, to breathe in any tension, to breathe out pure golden light. I felt that it was needed, that he had needed it, and I don’t know why….

After the gig we hugged - and he was gone.

I was alone in the bright light of the foyer, I felt winded, I felt that drop in safety as if I'd lost my shield and I was back on the battlefield. I felt as if someone had just hit me. I pushed through the doors and out into the night, alone. Now I had to fight the urge to run back against the crowd, to try to find him. But there were so many people, I was one in a sea of thousands following a long, long winding and narrow path. Bright lights in our eyes, we were shadows.

And I felt absolutely, totally and intensely alone - surrounded by silence in a sea of noise.

The path led around a lake of grey sky and through vivid splashes of light. A surge of people we flooded through neon lit subways, the walls painted with a spiralling confusion of fluorescent graffiti. Then more dark paths bordered by tall trees. 

Street lamps like captured suns.

The trees become cypresses I was no longer of this world, I thought “I am a child of Earth and Starry skies”…

ʺI am the child of Earth and starry Heaven; and I am parched with thirst and I perish; but give me quickly refreshing water to drink from the lake of Memory.ʺ

He'd said "Maynard...he is a shaman" and I’d said, “Tool - this is the Eleusinian mysteries!” which made me laugh. And I thought of how it must have been for the attendees at Eleusis 1800 years ago after the long walk from Athens, to the confusion of the glaring, brilliant lights, and then the darkness and the separation afterwards. 

What was afterwards for them so long ago?

As the kykeon wore off and the cold of the night, and the sense of separation - each person like me, walking forward - a river of people lost in a blackness lit by flashes of vivid colour, heading towards the promise - as the final breath of life ebbs away. Somewhere Dionysus dances onwards, we follow over the water into a far away beyond the grey. To endless meadows, to the rapture of gentle summertime, the bliss of a softness, enlivened with the perfume of flowers, and dreams, to bliss, an eternity of ever opening.

But the mysteries ended in 396 A.D. with the destruction of the sanctuary at Eleusis. I know this!

I want to turn around.

I have to run back.

I must to do this!

I need to shout his name into the dark and I have to find him!

I don’t do this - he will be on the train and I have to get home.

I gulp down common sense with each breath, and let despair have its way. I merge with the dark and keep walking, stay with the surge, let myself be carried forward. 

At the final neon subway the pathways open and trees are static fractals. The sky becomes bigger. The light is colourless, a shore line to a sea of ichor. Where the sky opens wide I see the high tension cables that will lead me to my car. But it isn’t over yet - the spinning sense of a starless void continues. There are no satellites above me, and I have no idea where I am in relation to home! So I just drive in the opposite direction to where I’ve been and trust that at some point the navigation systems will catch up…I miss turnings, roads become narrow.

Eventually navigation kicks in, and I get home.

Tumbling into bed - merciful sleep takes me.

I awake at 3 am…

"Synchronicities take you to the edge, but no further; the message is received but the source hidden. Beyond the uncanny crackle of the signal you have to make a leap" Erik Davis.