Sometimes, whatever our dilemma, negotiating the Crossroads requires a sideways, Through the Looking Glass perspective.  We can be paralyzed with indecision for so very long, it starts to feel “normal.” Stuck in a room with no doors, or immobilized by writer’s block, we’re bound within our own personally-designed constructions. There are oh, so many little beliefs just below the surface that gladly lock us down. How do we discover a new perspective in a self-sealed room?  The rational brain fails us here.   

But fear not, there is a no-brainer resolution at our fingertips.  To grasp it, we begin with—yes—our hands.  We may enter an alternate space with any of our senses—-sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste… and others that lie dormant.  There’s no thought involved here, and yet our answer-seeking cerebral circuits immediately light up, querulous. “What should I focus on?  What can I grab onto?  What’s that smell?”  

Mixing childhood stories now, pay no attention to that trickster behind the curtain!  Because this is where we shift our inner vision to the more-than-human world. The Way Out is simplest through natural elements that don’t move too fast… Trees, Rocks, Plants.  If your eyesight’s steady, Birds are potent thresholds. You see the picture.  Sit on the earth, hold a stone, breathe.  You’re already shifting elsewhere.

But wait, I’m assuming you’re even interested in exploring alternate realities, shifting your walled beliefs.  Are you?  How so?  Me, I imagine it as a fairly inexpensive get-away, maybe even an educational one.  Like an Adult Ed, interplanetary cultural exploration class.  We might hang a sign on our door—”Gone to the Imaginal World.  Back next month.  Maybe.”

“Maybe,” because knowing about some wisdom does not necessarily grant us wisdom.  Well, sit with it a bit, and then read on if your curiosity is piqued.  A recent, unexpected Shift came to me on an overcast summer morning, midweek, waning moon, sitting at the kitchen table with a second cup of coffee.  A perfectly quotidian moment.

I was playing with ideas for a new online retreat to offer, musing over a cast of archetypes, the way we used to thumb through the library card catalogs, a lot of us. (If you happen to be in Tucson, or Portland, or Detroit, you can still do that same sort of thing by following your feet through miles of used books at Bookmans, Powells, or John L. Kings…)  

Anyway there I sat with my Zennish gaze, all the doors and windows wide open, a mug of French Roast in one hand, pen in the other, when my neighbor across the street boomed a garbled, guttural, three syllable YAWP! into my precious silence.  YEEAWPAHH!!!    I jumped out of my seat, spilled hot coffee and cursed the crude interruption of my morning reveries. Damn!  And then, Something Else Happened.  

          But before I tell you What, I think you need a snapshot of my neighborhood.  I’d call it a whitebread, 1970’s housing tract. Most of the residents are Hispanic, like most of Silver City’s population.  With my Sicilian genes, I blend, appreciatively.  It’s generally a quiet street with a couple cul-de-sacs—little dead-end curls.  Some tall pines (pre-subdivision) are still standing, so there’s a simulacrum of the natural world.  

I’ve been here three years and am only on a first name basis with the youngish couple next door.  Endearingly, they are both called Brady, but maybe the spelling’s different, I never asked.  She’s a nurse, he works at our city rec center—both are just naturally friendly folks.  Their shy 12-year old daughter feeds my cat when I’m away.

Every other neighbor is a stranger to me.  I certainly wouldn’t recognize their faces in the grocery store.  All these private lives, including my own, strung along this winding street, holed up in our single story, locked rooms. I find it isolating, disheartening, and yes, depressing.  And then there’s the Bellower across the way, regularly invading our stuccoed walls with his howls. 

There’s an echo of the ancient, mythic Bullroarer in his cries which, as I haven’t yet mentioned, happen on a daily basis. I’m assuming the roars rise from a pair of strong young adult male lungs, but I suppose it could be a deep-chested woman howling. I’ve never actually seen the person who is our local Disturber of the Peace. He is our own fairy tale Beast crying out for, what?

He—or she, or they—is periodically stationed on the screened front porch throughout the day where unrestrained screams are hurled.  Sometimes there’s a plaintive yearning behind them.  Other times there’s anger, frustration, joy or ecstasy.

He’s certainly not untended. It’s a busy hub, that modest house across the road.  It’s probably sheltering a mega-extended family.  I see multiple generations coming and going around the clock in a parade of cars and trucks.  Sometimes, if I happen to be out front, one of the men will wave a Hello, Neighbor hand.  The women studiously avoid eye contact.  

Now circling back to where we began, if you recall, that shift into an alternate reality… what Happened?  This morning’s primal scream jolted me sideways, instantly, wholly, into the Imaginal realm. Was it the gauzy air that lofted a crystal spear, a full-bodied lightning bolt of Aha!?  Maybe a Sagittarian centaur aiming for the heart of truth?  Because instantly I was wildly alive, vibrating at a Uranian frequency dead center of this dreary neighborhood.

I saw with keen clarity the electrified nature of this side of the street and that. We are not only not-created-equal, some of us are so differently created that to meet, we must cross a road that’s a universe wide.  Like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, our neighbors are Hobbits and Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Trolls and ‘Men.’  This diversity is neither a fantasy nor “reality.” More like, each living being whether Tree, Stone, Cat, or Human is a distinct, living portal—a portkey—to an Other Side.  A creative starfield. Chaotic, untethered, everything everywhere all at once!

So, a same old same old, whitebread address?  In this multi-verse?  Can you spot what were the myopic walls of my sealed room?  In Stephen Buhner’s impassioned book Ensouling Language, he shares this from Garcia Lorca’s In Search of Duende, that there are “black sounds, sounds whose darkness comes from the depths of the dark waters.”

These “black sounds” are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art.

The fertile mystery that separates one dimension, one household, one personage from the next and next and next, can be sliced clean through with a Subtle Knife of perception, Zip!  Slip sideways only once, and you’ve found a way through. Do it once again, and you are become a Time/Space traveler, free-sailing in the whole arc of creation. 

Yes, the universes and all the life they are—it’s one great interconnected web.  But not in the fixed ways we’ve imagined.  We may now find ourselves willing and capable of welcoming the dark, 100^th angel back into our Storied fold.  

In The Story of Gaia, cosmologist Jude Currivan concludes with this magnificent statement:

We are the youngest of Gaia’s organic children.  We embody her legacy and that of the Universoul’s evolutionary arc, and we stand together with them at the bow wave of their and our next emergent possibility.

And so I realize I must ask, what Crossroad? 

My gratitude here, to the written arts of Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), Frank Baum (Wizard of Oz), David Abram (Spell of the Sensuous), JRR Tolkien (The Hobbit), JK Rowling (Harry Potter series), Stephen Buhning (Ensouling Language), Garcia Lorca (In Search of Duende), Philip Pullman (The Subtle Knife) and Jude Currivan (HOPE, and The Story of Gaia).