By Dalur (Also known as Dale Presly)

NOTES FROM A JOURNEYER

A Journeyer never returns to where they start.

I read the words, and place Notes From A Journeyer on the table beside me. Familiar objects come into view as the sun’s early light fills the room. Everything is in place, including me. I close my eyes and recall the beginning.

Silence. Silence is the beginning. No word from the story tellers, yet we are here, feeling our way into forms that crawl, fly and swim. I’m drawn to the water bodies, sleek creatures that allow my silent entry. The boundary of flesh and bone is a tight fit for a free spirit, and it takes several attempts to gather myself in. The sea creatures introduce me to a liquid world that eases the effect of gravity, though I feel pressure when we dive followed by a strange new sensation—the urge to breathe. Moments later we shoot to the surface, leaping into the air. They use senses to locate themselves but what fascinates me is that the sea creatures communicate. Each one knows where the others are.

I take a breath. I’m aware of my body sitting in a chair, a dog barks in the distance as boundaries blur and human stories drift away. I’m floating in a sea of geometric forms that words cannot describe.

I learn to infuse myself into living form but even though the bodies don’t belong to me, I notice that it’s becoming hard to leave. Each time I entered one of those sleek creatures I stayed a little longer until eventually I forgot what being outside of a body felt like. For the first time I feel separation.

Tagging along in animal forms had its limits. The animals came in all manner of shapes and sizes which made communication almost impossible. There’s a suggestion, from a few clever ones, that every body adopt a standard form.

Standardized bodies facilitate communities but for a community to interact, every body had to perceive the world in a similar way. The mind required an upgrade.

Without going into detail, the mind was altered in such a way that soon every body is on the same page, an appropriate metaphor because now we are ready to tell stories. At first the stories are simple but it’s not long before they are layered and intertwined. It never occurred to anyone that stories had gravity, a pull that bound us so tightly that not even death released the story teller. Like the others, I became lost in human stories, unable to remember who I was before the Journey began.

The sun had moved around the room to touch the chair I sat in when it occurred to me that if I could infuse myself into a body, then I could use the body to go beyond human stories. I opened my eyes. I recalled the beginning of the story but not how it ended. There’s no template for how to end human stories. Death was put into the human experience as an exit from the story, but few humans released the story upon the death of the body. Story fragments went into the other realms which eventually pulled us back into a body and another story.

I had read enough novels to know that the best ended with the death of the lead character. Now I was that character, and I didn’t want to experience death the way I had in past lives. The final story needed a twist, a surprise ending that called for a radical shift of perspective. This time I would release the story prior to death, allowing the story to end while I would continue to live.

I leaned over and reached for Notes. There it was on page one, the twist to the story that I hadn’t understood until now—a Journeyer never returns to where they start. I can look back, but I can’t go back because my perception has shifted. There really are no beginnings or endings, only shifts in perspective. I look around the room. Nothing had moved. Everything is in place, except for me.

I continued reading Notes.

BeginningandendingarerelativetermsbutareveryrealwhentheJourneyeris pulled into a cycle of repeating stories. A Journeyer eventually discovers where they are in the arc of the human experience and brings the stories to wisdom. ThequestionfortheJourneyeratthatpointiswhethertostayembodiedorexit the Earth realm entirely.

Light filled the room. I wonder if sea creatures feel the body age. At least they didn’t have to contend with the gravity of a thousand stories as I did. It was a paradox, I didn’t feel old, but my body seemed to carry bits and pieces of every story I had ever lived. Suppose I could bring my stories to wisdom AND stay in the body? One thing was certain: to extend my stay in this realm I needed a lighter version of the body I had now.

What did Notes have to say about the challenge of staying embodied without a story? I turned the page and began to read.

Thechoicetobringthehumanexperiencetoaclose,yetremainembodiedinthe Earth realm, is a unique path for the Journeyer. The details of such a post-story life are unknown because few humans come this way. What is known is that the post-story life has benefits for the body that ultimately alter the trajectory of death. The Journeyer is free to choose how and when they exit the Earth realm, taking what will become the light body, with them.

Tobias calls this a point of separation and I was at that point now. I knew where I was in the arc of my human stories, but the wild card was always death. As modern humans, we’ve never fully understood the relationship between death and life. We became adept at creating stories but never understand how they affected the energy patterns in a body. Though the body is designed to improve with age, repeating cycles of stories aged the body and frequently brought in dis-ease. What began with diving into a body took me deep into the human experience. Now I had come to the surface.

I look out the window. The final chapter, if it could be called that, has an unscripted, dream-like quality that’s impossible to describe. It feels like I’m on a stage, not an actor but a solitary figure on a bench, observing the swirling stories around me, unsure of where they begin or where they end.