The Day the Earth Stood Still

Richard Arrowsmith at Black Dog Star has recently shared his Contact Device moment, and there were certain similarities to my own, so I thought I'd try to share, though words are poor tools for this kind of thing. I can see why the prophets relied on parable and myth to share their visions. You can't talk about it without sounding fairly nuts.

My Contact Horizon opened in 2004, after particularly difficult personal times. I won't go into the details, but let it suffice that the gravity of the situation overtook the cultural myths that sustained me, and like Icarus, I fell to earth. The movie house had shut down, the Wurlitzer had ground to a halt, Elvis had left the building.

I was in a particularly vulnerable frame of mind, and I went seeking. I found my prophet straight away - advertising in the local alternative rag - The Stranger. This prophet was Jeff Fairhall, Local Seattle organic bakery entrepreneur by day, Fly Agaric sucking shaman by night. Jeff had gone 'round the bend', buying full page ads to proclaim the End of the World, and his own Messiahship. My kinda guy! I immediately met him, struck up a friendship, and we had a short-lived and tumultuous relationship/love affair of the guru/student variety. It was Platonic (are you reading Var?) but that doesn't mean the relationship lacked passion. Far from it.

Jeff was definitely Linked In to the Right Brain, and he told me outrageous things that I somehow knew to be true, deep down. He showed me how to view current events in mythic context, with modern actors playing the parts of mythic archetypes, and he showed me not to fear making my own interpretations - to hold the consensus reality construct highly suspect. In a way, Jeff opened another dimension in my tesseract brain, as if it went from a flat, 2D view to glorious 3D! Jeff was also barking at the moon mad, and I eventually left. But his moonshine had left its mark, and I was forever changed. I was bitten.

So one beautiful morning in the fall of 2004, I went walking in the wood with Oliver, the Oztralian terrier. We weren't drinking or on drugs, so bare with me. But as we entered the woodland glade, something changed. I felt a presence, and a vibration. Like pins and needles. Something was happening. WTF?

I was like... bathing. In an energy of such refined frequency I can't even describe. It was raining down, and so I looked up, and I saw... everything. And it was Good. I mean, really good. Like your best fantasy of the best universe... ever. Who also is your lover. My cock responded to the vibration, and was soon standing at attention. Like some kind of "divining" rod!?

I could see inside the trees. I could see inside the cells and I could see something more... the tree was made of some kind of sentient matter - at some basic level deeper even than the atomic structure, the tree was made of... seed. Everything was made of this "matter". A matter that holds consciousness within it. Everything and everyone, "matters".

I'll just stop now, because I've gone way past the ridiculous already. I'll just sum up by saying that this little ten minute or so event changed my life, and yet... nothing has changed, except I decided to blog about it. Go figure.