Editor’s Note:

This is a concentrated version of the previous article for wider circulation. The following was posted as a comment on this Texas Monthy Article. It was swiftly rejected as spam (maybe becuase I put this website address on it, I’ll try again later without that external link). If you have any suggested locations where these border dispute articles could meaningfully be posted, let me know in the comments or spread them around yourself. It is an opportunity for some ‘good trouble’ as John Lewis would say.

Report on the Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico

April 4, 2026 - 9:54 PM (Mountain Time)

Over the past several days, while Texas and New Mexico continue their increasingly unserious border flirtations, I have found myself in intermittent and imaginary contact with a man from the western edge of the state who has now advanced what he insists is the only truly intelligent solution.

His name is Billy ‘the Snake’ Schytte.

Billy, who appears to have appointed himself Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico, has been following this border dispute closely and has concluded that both Texas and New Mexico are thinking too small.

His position is that if people are finally willing to admit that West Texas is not really Texas-Texas in the cultural, geographic, temporal, climatic, cinematic, or metaphysical sense, then there is no reason to merely redraw a county line here or there. His proposal is to take the entire western vertical slice of Texas, run it all the way south to the Mexican border, and establish a new sovereign desert republic to be known as New Texico.

He insists this is not secessionist extremism but administrative clarification.

Billy’s argument, in brief, is annoyingly coherent.

He points out that much of West Texas already:

• operates on Mountain Time in spirit,

• looks like New Mexico in film,

• shares more in common with sparse-country borderland culture than with Houston or Dallas,

• and has spent decades being governed by people too far away to smell the weather.

He also notes, not incorrectly, that Texas itself often speaks of “West Texas” as though it were already a separate country requiring special handling, atmospheric interpretation, and occasional pity.

His feeling is that if everyone already knows it’s different, then the polite thing to do is formalize the situation.

Among Billy’s early policy planks are:

• correcting the time zone injustice

• aligning government with actual geography

• reducing Texas’s southern border burden by shifting a substantial section of it to the new republic

• and, perhaps most ambitiously, building what he calls the Big Bend Maritime Corridor, a canal system intended to give New Texico future access to the Gulf while simultaneously solving several border, economic, and beachfront deficiencies.

When I pointed out that the Gulf is not especially close, Billy responded:

“That’s quitter talk. We got all this sand. The oceans are risin’ so, in the future, we’ll meet them half way. That’s beachfront property just waitin’ on the water.”

Suggesting he appears to be planning for long-range climate instability and seems to believe that when enough of the lower Gulf Coast and Florida become untenable, New Texico will be well-positioned to absorb displaced populations, provided they are willing to respect local timing, sparse-country values, and constitutional seriousness.

Billy comes from what he describes as “railroad people”, drives a red 1955 Chevy pickup, carries his grandfather’s working gold Swiss pocket watch, and holds strong views on the decline of modern machinery, federal overreach, and why no one should trust a system that can’t be repaired with ordinary tools in ordinary daylight.

He is also, somehow, very persuasive.

Among his better recent observations:

“Government ain’t nothin’ but organizing shit with stationery.”

And:

“Bad government is finally getting your shit together and then forgetting where you put it.”

And perhaps most importantly:

“When shit hits the fan, it won’t be Billy Schytte.”

At this stage, New Texico remains unrecognized by both Austin and Washington, though Billy appears to regard this as a temporary administrative lag.

I am not yet prepared to endorse the Republic of New Texico as a fully actionable statecraft initiative. But I will say this: the more Texas talks about annexing pieces of New Mexico, the more likely it becomes that someone like Billy the Snake Schytte will decide Texas itself needs to be partitioned for its own good.

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You may recall the earlier post Why West Texas Should be a Part of New Mexico

But wait, that's not all.

In my imagination and google satellite images I started traveling down to the designated part of west Texas concerning my border proposal to get a bird’s eye view and ended up wandering around in Wink, Texas and befriended a new charactor by the name of Billy 'the Snake' Schytte, a native of Wink and he was telling me he has a completely different take on things.

What follows is the beginning of an occasional series documenting the statements and proposals of Billy “the Snake” Schytte.

According to Billy, he has, in recent weeks, positioned himself as the acting Presidential Governor of what he describes as the Provisional Republic of New Texico.

While the existence of such a republic remains, at present, unconfirmed, Billy’s commentary on the ongoing Texas-New Mexico border tussle has proven difficult to ignore. As Billy says;

“There’s thought, speech and action. I’m currently in the speech phase.”

These entries are offered as a matter of record.

Who Is Billy ‘the Snake’ Schytte?

Journal Entry: April 2, 2026 - 12:57 PM (Mountain Time)

There are men who arrive in public life by way of law school, donor networks, polished shoes, and the kind of smile that suggests a committee taught it to them.

And then there is Billy the Snake Schytte.

At present, Billy tells me that he serves as Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico, a position he assumed, by his own account, not out of vanity but out of what he describes as “insuring continuity of governance in an uncertain time while there is a shortage of serious-minded alternatives.” Whether New Texico is to become a fully sovereign desert republic or eventually enter the Union as a U.S. state later, if they act right, Billy maintains that his title has been designed with sufficient constitutional flexibility to accommodate either outcome. As President if he can gain enough support to become an independant republic or as Governor of the 51st state should that become an option.

But in the meantime, to advocate for his West Texas community depending on how things play out between Texas and New Mexico.

Those who know him, or claim to, say this is typical of Billy’s civic minded nature.

Billy was born Wilhelm Schytte, a name inherited from the old family line and worn down over time by weather, labor, and local practicality. In childhood it became Willim, and for a period in his younger years he was known as Wolf, either because of a solitary disposition, a habit of watching before speaking, or some other event no one now tells in the same way twice. The name Billy came later, during his years working on a crew in West Texas. Billy insists this was because his coworkers recognized early that he was the GOAT at what he did and began calling him Billy Goat accordingly. Surviving witnesses may remember the matter differently.

The title “the Snake” came after, and in Billy’s own carefully repeated phrasing, “after an incident I consider resolved.”

Pressed beyond that point, he has occasionally offered a more philosophical explanation.

“I have come to think the Snake part is less about the incident and more about how my mind works. I tend to slither around through ideas, lookin’ for what’s hidin’ under things, takin’ ’em in whole and digestin’ ’em till I come up with my solutions. That’s what I’m good at.”

This may be the clearest available summary of Billy’s governing style.

He is not, by any conventional measure, an ideologue. He appears to hold a broad distrust of centralized authority in nearly all forms, including but not limited to Austin, Washington, most large urban planning initiatives, and anyone who says the phrase stakeholder engagement without visible embarrassment. His politics, if one can call them that, seem to emerge less from theory than from prolonged exposure to:

• distance,

• weather,

• labor,

• machinery,

• and what he once referred to as “the accumulated stupidifications of people in office.”

Billy comes from what appears to be a long line of Schyttes, a family whose self-understanding is both specific and expansive. Billy has often repeated the family doctrine that the Schytte name is so particular that anyone carrying it is kin. This has not, to date, been formally verified by any genealogical authority, but it possesses a rough internal plausibility, especially given the rarity of the name and the tendency of sparse-country families to maintain a stronger sense of bloodline than paperwork.

The Schyttes, by all available signs, were never much drawn to crowded places.

They appear to have been, in origin, a Danish / Scandinavian people, perhaps carrying with them whatever old northern instincts survive migration:

• weather sense,

• route sense,

• practical intelligence,

• a certain dry fatalism,

• and a preference for places where there was still enough room left for thinking.

One branch of the family, Billy maintains, is distantly related to the Danish composer Ludvig Schytte, whom he refers to simply as “the European branch.” While no documentation has yet been produced to settle the matter, Billy cites the connection whenever questions of refinement, structure, or inherited cultural range arise.

The family appears to have drifted southward and westward through the American interior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, likely through Colorado and eventually into the rougher reaches of West Texas / southeastern New Mexico country, where one branch secured and held onto a modest stretch of dry family land known simply as the Schytte place.

It is not a grand ranch in the modern aspirational sense.

It is something older and more useful than that:

• a piece of held ground,

• a fallback position,

• a family argument,

• and a point of return.

The Schyttes seem to have worked, across generations, in the practical sparse-country professions:

• railroad work,

• land routes,

• surveying-adjacent labor,

• transportation,

• and the broad family of occupations involving timing, territory, movement, and survival.

Billy’s great-grandfather, according to family memory, may have worked in some relation to the railroad, possibly in land acquisition, route judgment, or rights-of-way, helping determine where lines would pass through difficult country. His grandfather is said to have worked as a conductor or rail man in rough country and, according to one durable family legend, was once caught up in a train robbery during which his pocket watch was taken - an event Billy still speaks of as though it were not merely theft but an assault on order itself.

Whether all of these details can be fully verified is perhaps beside the point.

They are true in the way family structures are true.

Billy’s father appears to have belonged to that next familiar generation of desert-edge men whose work touched land, machinery, movement, and practical systems - oilfield work, road work, lease work, or surveying in one form or another - while keeping some connection to the family place alive.

That pattern passed directly into Billy.

He is most often seen in a red 1955 Chevrolet pickup, equipped with a 261 straight-six, which he appears to regard as both transportation and moral argument. The truck is not a polished collector’s object so much as a lovingly maintained working artifact - the kind of machine that continues to justify itself. This, Billy seems to feel, is the proper standard for both vehicles and republics.

He is also rarely without his working gold Swiss pocket watch from the 1920s, marked Touchon & Co., which he says belonged to his grandfather and which he appears to trust more than nearly any modern timekeeping system. The watch is not ornamental. He winds it. He checks it. He consults it. He carries it with the seriousness of a man who believes that if you no longer know what time it really is, then you are already in the early stages of civilizational drift.

As Billy has observed:

“A watch like that don’t run on sentiment. It runs on discipline.”

And elsewhere:

“The only time you’ve got is the time you keep and you gotta keep a watchful eye on what matters at that time.”

This may be the nearest thing he has to a political theology.

To Billy, a thing worth trusting ought to be:

• understandable,

• maintainable,

• durable,

• and built to last.

He has little patience for systems designed:

• to drift invisibly,

• fail quietly,

• become unfixable,

• and then require replacement by somebody else’s authority.

This appears to explain:

• his affection for old trucks,

• his suspicion of bad government,

• his views on time zones,

• and his growing insistence that West Texas, southeastern New Mexico, and the Big Bend region ought to be governed according to actual lived geography rather than inherited clerical laziness.

It is in this context that Billy has become the leading public advocate for the creation of New Texico, a proposed sovereign republic encompassing the western reaches of Texas and the adjacent borderlands, to be established initially as an independent desert nation and potentially considered for U.S. statehood later, that is, ‘if the federal government demonstrates sufficient maturity’.

His major policy initiatives include:

• time zone realignment

• straightened borders

• desert self-rule

• strategic alien discretion

• future climate migration planning

• and the construction of the Big Bend Maritime Corridor, a vast canal project intended to provide New Texico with maritime access, border security, economic development, and what Billy has repeatedly described as “all the beachfront property this sand’s been waitin’ on.”

Critics have called these proposals impossible, delusional, and geologically unserious.

Billy considers this encouraging.

He is known to speak in:

• rough aphorisms,

• unexpectedly memorable slogans,

• and the kind of vulgar civic wisdom that sounds ridiculous until one notices it has somehow explained the situation better than the governor.

Among his better-known lines are the following:

“Government ain’t nothin’ but organizing shit with stationery.”

“Bad government is finally getting your shit together and then forgetting where you put it.”

“When shit hits the fan, it won’t be Billy Schytte.”

Around parts of West Texas, where reverence and mockery have long maintained a practical coexistence, Billy is known in some circles simply as Billy Shit, a fact he appears to have folded into his public identity with amusement and increasing strategic use.

He does not appear especially precious about names.

Among his Hispanic friends, he is often known as Guillermo, or Memo for short.

As he has said:

“I’ve been called all kinds of things. Most of ’em I answer to. But like I always say, Call me what you want, just don’t call me late for dinner, especially if fajitas and margaritas are involved.”

This, too, seems typical.

At present, Billy has:

• no official office,

• no recognized government,

• no formal campaign apparatus,

• and no digital presence of his own.

And yet he already carries himself with the settled confidence of a man who believes history has merely been delayed in catching up to him.

Whether Billy the Snake Schytte will one day preside over a sovereign desert republic, govern a future U.S. state, or remain what he is now - a highly articulate regional disturbance with constitutional ambitions - remains to be seen.

But one thing appears increasingly certain: he has already begun acting as though the map belongs to whoever is committed enough to go through the effort to make some improvements upon it.

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NOTE:
Here is the opening of a book project I am working on thinking of my grandson Henry. As you know, I have taken up some writing courses. In the middle of my studies I was inspired to think about the idea of Figures of Speech.

During the Renaissance, scholars meticulously enumerated and classified figures of speech. Henry Peacham, for example, in his The Garden of Eloquence (1577), enumerated 184 different figures of speech. Professor Robert DiYanni, in his book Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense." wikipedia

That was an amazing discovery. So I started thinking… Hum… How will I ever keep up with all of those figures and be able to recognise them in the ‘literary wild’ when I am reading? Then I thought, ‘What if I made up a story that identified all of these Figures of Speech and personify them into a story?’ Giving each one an assumed personality based on the kind of figure of speech they are and put them all into a town together with all of the other parts of language. So I came up with the Town of Tongues where they all eventually live together.

Talking about Personification that is a figure of speech which is when human qualities, emotions, or actions are given to non-human things:

• The wind whispered through the trees.

• Time marches on.

• The city slept beneath the fog.

It is one of the oldest and most universal figures of speech, found in myth, poetry, children’s stories, and everyday conversation.

It is closely related to (but distinct from!) anthropomorphism, which gives non-human beings the form of humans, not just qualities.

So I decided to start at the beginning and make an entire mythopoeic world for this community of figures. And off we go… Here is the beginning…

I am hoping you all will be my Beta readers* for this story as it develops and leave your comments and ideas about it in the comment section.

*Beta readers are essential, typically unpaid, test readers who review a near-finished manuscript to provide honest feedback on plot, pacing, character arcs, and overall reader enjoyment before publication. They help identify issues like plot holes and inconsistent world-building. Found through online communities or personal networks, they differ from editors by focusing on the reader experience rather than technical grammar.

Author’s Note

for The Living Lexicon – Book One: How Language Was Born

Every story begins long before its first sentence.

This book grew from a simple wondering:
What if letters had a childhood?
What if vowels learned to sing the way children learn to breathe a little deeper?
What if consonants discovered strength the same way we discover our balance?
What if words, before they knew what they meant, existed simply as little beings trying to find their place in the world?

While writing this, I kept thinking about how each of us begins:
as small sounds,
as bright attempts,
as wobbly first steps.
We grow through curiosity, play, friendship, and the quiet encouragement of those who see a little farther than we do.
Language grows the same way.

This book is the story of that growing -
from the Great Blankness of pure possibility,
into the first glowing letters,
into sounds and structures,
into rhythm and meaning,
until at last the words begin to recognize who they are becoming.

Long before children learn grammar,
they feel it.
They sense the music of vowels,
the steadiness of consonants,
the dance of syllables,
and the gentle guidance of punctuation.
These tales are meant to meet children where they already are:
in the world of imagination,
where letters can glow,
stories can breathe,
and every word has a small heart inside it.

Book One is the beginning of a longer journey.
In the next volume, The Wanderwords, the little words you meet here will step beyond the Meadow and discover the larger world of language - a world full of adventure, mystery, possibility, and the playful peril of the Great Blankness.

As with all beginnings, this book is an invitation:
to listen with curiosity,
to read with wonder,
and to remember that every word you use
was once a tiny spark of imagination
learning how to become itself.

Thank you for joining me on the first steps of this journey.

- Cecil Touchon

Before the First Word

Before anything had a name, before any sound had ever been sung, before even letters knew how to stand or dance or shine, there was only The Great Blankness.

It stretched in every direction at once, soft and endless, bright as a thought that has not yet formed. It had no beginning and no end. It did not move because there was nowhere to go, and it did not rest because it had never been busy.

Yet it was not empty.

Inside the Great Blankness lived a quiet, shimmering feeling:

A longing.

A wish.

A gentle wondering that curled like mist and whispered through its boundless expanse.

The Great Blankness wanted something to be.
It wanted something to happen.
Most of all, it wanted companions - something other than its own endless Self.

For ages beyond counting, the Great Blankness drifted in its own soft glow. But longing gathers itself over time, just as clouds gather rain. And one day - or perhaps not a day at all, for days did not yet exist - the longing grew full enough to spill over.

And when longing spills, it becomes light.

A soft brightness formed inside the vast white, like the very first firefly being imagined into a shining flicker.

Then another brightness.
And another.

Little glimmers, tiny as seeds, twinkled in the quiet. They were not yet shapes. Not yet letters. Not yet anything one could point to nor anything yet to point with.

They were simply desires - the first desires to become.

Some glimmers wished to be steady and strong.
Others wished to move, leap, swirl.
Some wanted to hold meaning like a cup.
Others wanted to sing meaning like a song.

The Great Blankness felt these glimmers and was no longer lonely.
It gathered them gently, as a sky gathers raindrops.

Each glimmer grew brighter.
Each one quivered with possibility.
Each one began to tug itself into form.

And then, like the first drops of rain falling from a cloud of pure wanting, the glimmers softened into little droplets of brightness - tiny luminous seeds of being.

The droplets stretched.
Shivered.
Straightened.
Curved.
And slowly began to take on the earliest shapes of what would someday become letters.

They did not yet know how to sound.
They did not yet know what they meant.
They did not yet know if they were nouns, or verbs, or something else entirely.

They only knew one thing:

They wanted to become something.

The Great Blankness watched them tenderly, full of wonder. It had wanted companions, and now companions were forming right inside its boundless heart.

The droplets glowed.
The shapes steadied.
Desire condensed into form.
Possibility began its long journey toward meaning.

And so, in the quiet light of longing becoming shape, the very first letters were born.

They were still soft, still shimmering, still half-dreaming - but they were no longer nothing.

They were the first beginnings of something.
The first sparks of becoming.
The first tiny sparkling lights in the endless white.

And the Great Blankness, for the first time in its existence, whispered to itself:

“Yes…
This is how a story begins.”

OK, I have been going kind of crazy. I have several new writing projects going this year as I take some courses with BookFox Academy to amp up my fictional writing skills. So I will be experimenting with all sorts of writing techniques this year.

I mentioned Tender Buttons previously. But there is also a new story I am working on based on Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph.” He wrote a 475 word sentence that was an example in the course on sentences. It was a list sentence of 32 elements that the story charactor saw in a vision. I am using the 32 elements as prompts to write a series of short stories that I am calling The Thirty-Two Stations of the Aleph and I am also working on a story called Arelune set on the Mediterranean, and one called The Hidden Hours and another called the House of the Listening Orchard set in Normandy and I just finished the Hole Company story set in Los Angeles (15,000 words) Listen to it on speechify.com here. and am working on a volume 2 called The Cornucopia House.

All of these are roughly the size of novellas - 20,000+ words. Not to mention the other ones I have been working on, the Exquistite Family Records short stories and the Commonwealth of Elsewhere, and the three volumes called On Living a Life of Art of the articles about the Creative Lifestyle I have been posting the last two years. These are compiled and in the revision stage to go though them one sentence at a time. That will take a while.

So as part of The Thirty-Two Stations of the Aleph One of my experiments was to write an extremely long sentence and I must say I am very proud of this one so I am going to share it with you. This sentence is 813 words long.

The longest sentence I know about is by Donald Barthelme, “The Sentence.” 2,569 words

Station Twenty-Six: The Drawer of Letters

“I saw a drawer of letters written in a trembling hand, obscene in their honesty, unashamed in their desire.”

I saw a drawer of letters written in a trembling hand, obscene in their honesty and unashamed in their desire, and when the drawer slid open with the soft resistance of old wood swollen by time it revealed a stack of envelopes bound with a ribbon that had once been blue but had faded into a restrained gray, the paper shifting under the weight of its own arguments as though exhaling at being found, the letters not arranged but pressed there in the haste of propriety, as one might smooth rumpled clothes after the unexpected knock of a stranger, and when I lifted the first envelope and drew out its contents the handwriting was unmistakable, slanted and urgent, each line driven into the page with the pressure of someone who possessed more vehemence than the paper could reasonably bear, the ink feathered along its strokes so that every word seemed ragged with unrest, like the fine residue of a passion burned too fiercely to remain contained, and as I unfolded it a scent rose that was neither the expected waft of perfume nor the mildew of age but something sharper, a scent of collapsing trust, and the words themselves leaned toward desire the way a dying flame starved of air reaches for its last thin thread, sentences tangling into declarations with no exit strategy, as if a wounded animal clawing at a snare meant for another, meant to capture the lover’s heart through animal guile, words written with an intimacy so unguarded it bordered on violence, a voice that revealed hunger and fear without apology and without protection, rehearsing its grievance and revisiting its regret, circling in rumination and restless self-justification, revising and rewriting the wrong remembered as though the persistence of pacing back and forth might reverse it and, as I opened another letter and then another, the pattern deepened into plea and accusation, claims of victimhood deployed to solicit pity if not sympathy, revisions that softened a sentence only to harden it again with a sharpened edge, phrases repeated so many times they ceased to function as language and became instead a repetition of prayer, until it was clear these were not love letters in the gentle sense but letters of desperation and a humbling neediness, written at the moment when longing and loss become a cruel clarity and the truth one cannot speak aloud scrawls itself onto paper instead with something bordering on fury, and beneath that urgency ran something colder, the recognition that the one addressed had already withdrawn, that every page was written into widening silence, that the pressing of pen to paper was an attempt to reopen a door that had closed long before the first envelope was sealed, and the drawer itself seemed less a piece of furniture than a narrow chamber of the heart where such relics are kept not to be displayed and never to be relinquished, held as one holds a sacrament, not because the passion was pure but because the force beneath it was irresistible, and as I read I felt the faint and unsettling tremor of recognition, for the rhythm of the repetition was not entirely foreign to me, the rehearsals of regret not all together alien, the resistance to release not wholly confined to the hand that had written these pages, and it occurred to me that the voyeur is never as distant as he believes, that to read such letters is to risk recalling one’s own revisions and retractions, one’s own inward arguments rehearsed in the quiet hours after departure, the same recursive reach for what has already receded, and in that widening recognition the drawer ceased to belong to the writer alone and became instead a reliquary common to all hearts, for who has not kept some residue of a refusal, some remembered wrong, some unrequited reaching that refused to cool into resignation, and whatever distortions had taken root in these pages they were not born of indifference but of heat, of passion, and passion even when misdirected is nearer to love than the repose of apathy, and when at last I returned the letters to their place, I did not cast them away or leave them exposed or reduce them to ash but restored them to their rough wooden chamber with a kind of reluctant reverence, acknowledging that what they contained was excessive, flawed, and unresolved, yet unmistakably alive, and as I pushed the drawer closed it released a faint regretful sigh, like something that wished to forget but was not yet finished reconciling or releasing the heartbreak remembered, still carrying the residue of a fire that had once burned bright and refused to cool into indifference, and in that closing I understood that the drawer belonged to us all, that narrow chamber the human heart keeps for what it cannot bear to relinquish, even while holding the uncontainable.

Executive Order No. 007

On the Right to Rest and the Sacredness of Leisure

By the authority vested in me as Queen of the Realm of Elsewhere, by the Royal Charter and the Laws of Said Realm, it is hereby ordered:

1. That Rest is hereby recognized as a sovereign right of all citizens and companions of the Realm, without distinction of occupation, ambition, or temperament. It shall not be mistaken for laziness, neglect, or indifference, but honored as a sacred function of life’s rhythm.

2. That Leisure, properly cultivated, is the soil from which imagination flowers. It is not an escape from duty but a form of communion with being itself.

3. That citizens shall be encouraged to engage in Restorative Idleness, a practice of deliberate stillness allowing the mind to wander, the heart to loosen, and the spirit to listen for what the noise of industry conceals.

4. That the Ministry of Temporal Balance shall oversee the equitable distribution of rest, ensuring that no one be enslaved to the ceaseless machinery of production, whether material or mental.

5. That any employer, institution, or ideology found guilty of equating worth with productivity shall be required to spend one lunar cycle in contemplative retreat, armed with nothing but a book of poems and a comfortable chair.

6. That the Sabbath principle - one day in seven set apart for silence, reflection, and the savoring of existence - shall be encouraged not by law, but by example and delight.

7. That all citizens are reminded: rest is not the opposite of work, but its completion. The rhythm of creation demands both pulse and pause, both breath and the moment between breaths.

8. And that every act of leisure, rightly understood, is a quiet act of devotion—a way of honoring the Great Artist whose masterpiece we inhabit.

General Provisions

(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
 (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
 (ii) the functions of the Office of Self-Governance (OSG) relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) Contracting outside the Royal Government to circumvent the intent of this order is prohibited.

(d) This order does not prohibit making reallocations or reassignments to meet the highest priority needs, maintain essential services, and protect public peace and safety.

(e) This order shall not adversely impact anything.

(f) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the Realm of Elsewhere, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

(g) If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its provisions to any other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

(h) The costs for publication of this order shall be borne by the Office of Self-Governance (OSG).

HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN OF ELSEWHERE
THE QUEEN’S SUMMER PALACE
February 20, 2026

The Queen’s Manual of Self-Governance

Part II: The Practice of Sovereignty
Selections from her private reflections and court addresses

I. On Skepticism and Seeing Clearly
“When being skeptical, one must take great care to see with clarity. Let neither delight nor disappointment cloud the view. Do not gaze upon things through the lens of expectation, for expectation is the fog that obscures truth.
The sovereign mind must remain neutral and curious, open as the morning air. To govern one’s own thought is to let perception ripen without haste, until insight appears of its own accord.”

II. The Inner Court
“In the chambers of one’s being dwell many voices: the heralds of pride, the jesters of distraction, the ministers of fear. The Queen summons each to council, listens, and then decides. She rules her inner court not by decree but by discernment.”

III. On the Company of the Naysayers
“Critics are necessary to a kingdom. They are the whetstones that sharpen the blade of wisdom. Welcome them with grace, but do not dine too long at their table. For skepticism without love becomes cynicism, and cynicism corrodes the soul of governance.”

IV. The Practice of Presence
“To be present is to arrive fully where one already is. A Queen does not wander in thought when her people speak. She listens not for agreement but for understanding, for it is in hearing the truth of another that her own truth gains dimension.”

V. The Balance of the Scepter
“Authority and humility are the twin ends of the scepter. Hold it too tightly, and you become a tyrant. Hold it too loosely, and the realm falls to disarray. Balance is not achieved once, but maintained through endless small corrections.”

VI. The Weather of the Heart
“The moods of the heart are like weather upon the mountain. The wise ruler does not command the clouds to part but learns to wait for the clearing. In time, all storms pass, and the air becomes clear enough to see eternity again.”

VII. On the Quiet Rule of the Soul
“The soul rules in silence. The world may know the Queen by her gestures, her words, her decrees. But only she knows the invisible hand that guides them. Its power lies not in dominance but in devotion - to the good, the true, and the beautiful.”

(Signed and witnessed by hand and seal)
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN
Commonwealth of Elsewhere

Above is a wild AI generated video collage by my old friend Lanny Quarles.

Meanwhile, based on this wonderful reading of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons from 1914. Then I looked at the original 1914 publication.
I was inspired to do a new project. I am working on a new version of this text. I am reconstructing the whole work as a series of Cubist collage poems using the elements in her work as collage material. Here is a sample of what I am doing…

CUBIST COLLAGE #2

a harmony in hesitation.
Then came the time for discrimination
not indicated by any motion,
there is no suggestion
nothing is hidden
There never is.

all this is sudden.
more nonsense is sullen.
A letter which can wither,
a learning which can suffer
and largely, very largely.
a certainty a shade.

An eye glass,
Like a very strange
rhubarb and a tomato
Mud and water
Silk and stockings
All this makes cherries

A fact is that when the place was replaced
all was left that was stored
The time came when there was a birthday
It happened in a way that the time was perfect
there was no mistake
it did not make anything bigger littler,

Part of the work will be a series called The Tender Teachings. These are little snippets used as if they are Modernist aphorisms Below if one of these.

Silk Button — On Silence, Motion, and Spaciousness

A silence is less is indicated by a motion,
more is not indicated it is enthralled.
and so much place for a lower and an upper,
so much and yet more silence.

Aphoristic Rendering

Small silences gesture toward themselves.
Great silences do not gesture at all —
they absorb.
Lower and upper spaces both expand into them,
and the more silence there is,
the more room the world contains.

Commentary

This is one of Stein’s more delicate contemplations — a teaching on degrees of silence, the signals they give, and the spaciousness they produce.

Let’s open it phrase by phrase.

“A silence is less is indicated by a motion,”

A small silence is easily broken.
It reveals itself through twitch, shift, glance —
a visible hesitation.

This is the silence of:

• awkwardness

• uncertainty

• interruption

• momentary pause

It points to itself by the very motions it provokes.

Less silence = more signaling.

“more is not indicated it is enthralled.”

A deeper silence requires no gesture.
It is enthralled — absorbed, full, complete.

This is:

• meditative silence

• profound stillness

• the silence of attention fully given

• the silence where gesture no longer breaks the moment

Deep silence does not point to itself.
It holds itself.

More silence = less signaling.
Depth quiets motion rather than provoking it.

“and so much place for a lower and an upper,”

Silence creates space.

Lower and upper contain a subtle symbolic charge:

• lower = the humble, the grounded, the bodily

• upper = the elevated, the mind, the intangible

Silence expands both realms equally.

It gives place for:

• low thoughts and high thoughts

• body and mind

• earth and sky

• the mundane and the sublime

Silence is the architecture that makes room for both.

“so much and yet more silence,”

Silence, unlike sound, does not fill space —
it multiplies it.

The more silence there is,
the more space silence creates.

It is the paradox of contemplative life:

Silence is not absence.
Silence is spaciousness.
Silence is abundance.

The fragment also suggests that deeper silence contains layers —
one silence opening into another,
like nested rooms,
each quieter than the last.

The Tender Teaching

Small silences fidget;
great silences enthrall.
Silence gives space to everything —
the low and the high,
the humble and the exalted.
And as silence deepens,
the world grows larger.

Let me know what you think!

Leave a comment

Executive Order No. 006

On the Care of the Commons and the Stewardship of Beauty

By the authority vested in me as Queen of the Realm of Elsewhere, by the Royal Charter and the Laws of Said Realm, it is hereby ordered:

1. That the Commons - comprising all places, visible and unseen, where life and meaning are shared - shall be held sacred and inviolate. It belongs not to the few, but to the many, and to those yet unborn.

2. That Beauty, being the natural fragrance of harmony, shall be treated not as luxury but as necessity. The presence of Beauty in the public realm is as vital as air and clean water to the soul of a people.

3. That all citizens are hereby charged with the gentle labor of care: to mend what is broken, to preserve what is living, and to cultivate what is possible.

4. That acts of vandalism against the Commons - whether physical, digital, or cultural - shall be met not with punishment but with the assignment of restoration, so that the destroyer may learn the privilege of repair.

5. That no act of art, architecture, or policy shall be judged complete until its effect upon Beauty has been duly considered by the Council of Aesthetic Integrity, whose deliberations shall include poets, gardeners, and at least one child.

6. That all monuments of power shall be required to stand beside monuments of humility, so that pride may forever remember its companion virtue.

7. That littering of any kind - material, visual, or verbal - constitutes a failure of stewardship and shall be remedied by acts of quiet service to the landscape, whether of earth or of mind.

8. That the citizens of Elsewhere shall practice Aesthetic Citizenship: a daily mindfulness toward the appearance, sound, and feeling of their surroundings, that they may live as participants in beauty, not merely consumers of it.

9. And that all who live in the Realm remember: Beauty thrives where attention lingers. To care is to create, and to create is to preserve the living radiance of the world.

General Provisions

(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
 (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
 (ii) the functions of the Office of Self-Governance (OSG) relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) Contracting outside the Royal Government to circumvent the intent of this order is prohibited.

(d) This order does not prohibit making reallocations or reassignments to meet the highest priority needs, maintain essential services, and protect public peace and safety.

(e) This order shall not adversely impact anything.

(f) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the Realm of Elsewhere, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

(g) If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its provisions to any other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

(h) The costs for publication of this order shall be borne by the Office of Self-Governance (OSG).

HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN OF ELSEWHERE
THE QUEEN’S SUMMER PALACE
January 10, 2026

I have updated the introduction to the Creative Lifestyle section of the Touchonian check it out:

You may recall Agnes Whitcombe, librarian AKA Agnes Regina - Her Majesty the Queen of the Commonwealth of Elsewhere. She has been living quietly working and studying regal comportment - behaving with the dignity, grace, majesty, and propriety befitting royalty, characterized by dignified bearing, self-control, good manners, and an impressive presence, like a king or queen. Practicing the way of carrying oneself that shows respect, restraint, and noble conduct, encompassing posture, actions, and overall demeanor.

Here are a few readings from her notes.

The Queen’s Manual of Self-Governance

A Selection of Her Reflections

I. The Stature of Stillness
“In every act of rule, one must first master stillness. The world rushes about in restless noise, yet sovereignty begins in the silence that listens before it speaks. Those who sit well, stand well, and walk well - rule well.”

II. On Bearing and Breath
“The breath is the invisible scepter. With every inhalation, one receives and gathers the kingdom inward; with every exhalation, one offers the kingdom back to the world. A monarch who breathes with awareness governs without coercion.”

III. The Discipline of Regard
“To regard a thing is to endow it with existence. Therefore, be careful what you look upon and how. The gaze of a Queen blesses or burdens, and both are contagious.”

IV. The Currency of Composure
“Composure is a quiet wealth. It cannot be bought nor borrowed, only cultivated. Keep your movements measured, your gestures deliberate, and your pauses purposeful. In this, dignity becomes its own reward.”

V. Of the Heart’s Tempering
“Love is not weakness, nor restraint coldness. The sovereign heart must be tempered like steel: firm, luminous, and flexible. Sentiment clouds judgment, but clarity does not forbid compassion.”

VI. The Art of Listening
“To listen is to extend one’s reign beyond one’s own thought. When the Queen listens, the realm expands. When she ceases to listen, the realm contracts into shadow.”

VII. The Mirror and the Mantle
“The crown is only a mirror of the conduct beneath it. Let not adornment deceive you. The true mantle of majesty is woven of patience, presence, and poise.”

Some Things the Queen Said

“In my studies of self-governance and the cultivation of a regal demeanor, I have found that one must continually practice control over the heart, the mind, and the body.

To rule oneself is to keep the mind in quietude, the heart in clarity, and the body in disciplined rhythm.

Move at a stately pace, never hurried.
Breathe as though the breath itself were a ceremony.
Be present in all you do.

Extend respect to all you touch.
Treat each thing as precious.
Allot importance to whatever comes before you.

Thus is sovereignty not a crown, but a way of being.”

The Singing River Goddess

I woke on a moving train, though it was unclear whether I had boarded or simply awakened there. The rhythm beneath me was metallic and alive. The carriage swayed through mist, and across from me sat the singer, half-asleep, her hair in wild disarray, a half-smile still clinging to her lips as if she were dreaming herself.

She had an agent, somewhere in the next car, always whispering into a phone, trying to keep her on schedule and her legend from swallowing her whole. It seemed that I was meant to watch over her. Protector, admirer, shadow - none of those words were quite right, but it seemed that I was something like all three. She enthralled me.

Outside the window, stations blurred past. People stood waiting for her, each holding out something - a contract, a rose, a knife - it was hard to tell in the misty atmosphere. She laughed softly in her sleep, murmuring about the thrill of danger, how she liked the dark parts of life best. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to live inside her own mythology, but the train only answered in thunder.

Then the dream changed: the train became a large sleek boat cutting through a raging river under a bruised sky. The same people followed in smaller boats, their engines whining. The agent shouted orders from the bridge, but she only leaned over the stern, her hair whipping in the salt wind, singing to the waves like she was daring them to take her.

I thought I was no one - just a passerby on the edge of her story. She was the deva, the untamable one, born of stage lights and appetite. Every gesture she made carried the weight of music, as though the world itself had tuned itself to her pulse. I remember thinking that I was out of my element, a pedestrian swept into a myth that did not belong to me.

The boat was not small; it had corridors and chambers, polished railings, mirrors that trembled with our reflections. Outside, the river raged like an artery through the dark body of the world. Inside, everything gleamed with feverish life.

She clung to me from behind, her arms draped over my shoulders and around my neck, her laughter flickering like lightning against my ears. Though she was scantly clothed, her butt cheeks were exposed, and someone was slapping them like a drum. I felt her laughter against my skin - wild, unabashed, divine - and I realized I had mistaken my adulation as understanding. I understood nothing.

The atmosphere was both sacred and perilous, like standing too near a god. Others moved around us in a slow procession - attendants or devotees, perhaps - enacting gestures that blurred the boundaries between ritual and desire. It was all one current: erotic, luminous, and ungovernable.

I was not her lover. I was not her protector. I was the one who stumbled into her orbit, a pedestrian carried downstream. Yet for a moment I could feel the river through her touch - the weightless surrender of the world to its own momentum.

Then, the dream shifted, I saw another form of her, across the world, in a tropical open-air market where fruits and vegetables gleamed under a mountain canopy. The air smelled of sap and rain and herbs. She moved among mountains and vast fig trees, surrounded by colors too rich to describe. Mangoes split open like suns, papayas bled gold, and the people there bowed slightly as she passed, unaware of why. The agent followed her through the stalls, voice tight with business, like a clerk attending a goddess but she was radiant, untethered, stopping to taste everything - mango, lychee, starfruit – as if each bite was a gracious recognition and approval of those who served her.

I watched from a distance again, the fruits, fragments of being, reflections of desires ruled by hunger, sated with song. She existed wherever the world’s hunger for beauty overflowed its banks. I knew I had seen the soul of longing itself, wrapped in human form, vanishing down the current of her own singing.

The dream then took me back to the highlands, where mist wound itself around the pines like smoke from an unseen offering. The river that had once carried her song now ran far below, threading through gorges like a vein of living silver.

I was aboard a train that wound through these mountains, its carriages swaying as though caught in the rhythm of a vast, unseen dance. Inside was a party - if that word can contain such delirium. Lights flashed in time with a drumbeat, musicians played fragments of melodies that melted into laughter. The floor trembled. Glasses clinked. The air smelled of wine, cardamom, and rain-soaked fabric.

I didn’t know where the train was going accelerating through tunnels and over narrow bridges that spanned ravines deep enough to swallow dreams whole.

And there she was again.
She moved through the crowded passages like a singer taking the world stage. Wherever she passed, the light bent toward her. The people around her cheered, some, overwhelmed, wept.

Outside, the train curved along a ledge of impossible height. Below, waterfalls cascaded from the clouds, vanishing into green valleys. I could feel the whole mountain tremble, remembering the river that once carved its heart.

Inside, the rhythm grew wild. People danced in the narrow aisles, their shadows flickering on the walls like the ghosts of past celebrations. The windows rattled. The tunnel walls glowed. Her song was echo carried into the mountains, transformed into fire and longing.

The Ancient History of the Root-Tongue

(As remembered in the ash-circle gatherings of the moss-lineages. Recorded, not authored.)

In the time before speech, there was still understanding. Before tribes and treaties, before alphabets and argument, before gods were carved and prayers spoken aloud, the world communicated in subtler ways. There was no need for words, because everything was already in conversation.

The wind braided messages into the hair of animals. Water etched its thoughts into stone. Mushrooms passed news through roots. Fire danced with air only when there was something urgent to say. This was the era of the First Listening.

When humans arrived, they did not yet speak with tongues. They absorbed. They mirrored. They knew how to feel what the sky meant by its silence. They knew how to bow to a tree, as response before the idea of worship had been invented.

The first people did not “use” the Root-Tongue. They were raised inside it, like children carried in a current. Their gestures held migrations. Their breath carried weather. Their tears salted the agreements between generations. They did not yet need the word “I,” for the whole was never questioned.

The Root-Tongue was communion. It flowed not only through humans, but through everything with rhythm: heartbeats, tides, birdsong, the split of seed from shell.

But something shifted.

Over long cycles—too many to number—humans began to speak over the world rather than with it. They made symbols for things, then forgot the things. They made gods and forgot the mountain stream and the sea. They made boundaries and forgot the breath that connects all places.

The Root-Tongue did not vanish. It withdrew. Not as punishment, but in protection. Like a deer stepping back into the forest. Like a scent that lingers only when it is not chased. It sank beneath the surface of human life, curling into dreams, art, grief, and the deeper silences.

Yet it left echoes.

And these echoes became the keepers.

They were not priests, though some wore ash upon their faces. They were not kings, though animals trusted them. They wandered. They listened. They spoke little. They became known in whispers: the Listeners, the Rooted Ones, the Smoke-Breathers, the Memory Carriers.

Their lineage was never official, but it was never broken. It moved through forgotten hermits, unlettered weavers, children who spoke to insects, elders whose eyes went far away in the rain.

Even as the world grew louder, even as machines were built and nations declared and satellites hurled into the sky, the Root-Tongue remained untouched. Because it cannot be destroyed. It is not a technology. It is a tuning. A vibration always waiting under the noise. A language of reciprocity, too quiet to be heard until one forgets what one was trying to say.

Some say the Root-Tongue precedes creation and will outlive all other languages. That it is the Earth speaking to itself, using us as breath. That it is the seed of every tongue, and the only language we remember when we die.

How to find it again?

Listen for what speaks when nothing is said. Follow what softens you. Let stillness translate the world. Speak as if the moss is listening.

You will not need to remember the words. Only the rhythm. Only the way your body begins to lean toward something you cannot name, but once knew completely.

You will remember. You are made of it.

Executive Order No. 003

On the Proper Care and Feeding of Truth

By the authority vested in me as Queen of the Realm of Elsewhere, by the Royal Charter and the Laws of Said Realm, it is hereby ordered:

1. That Truth, being a delicate and easily startled creature, shall henceforth be treated as a living being rather than an instrument of convenience.

2. That no citizen shall attempt to domesticate Truth by forcing it into slogans, cages, or televised debates. It must be allowed to roam freely through all provinces of thought, gathering its own nourishment.

3. That Truth shall not be overfed with opinion nor starved by silence. A balanced diet of evidence, reflection, and direct experience is to be maintained at all times.

4. That those who speak in the name of Truth must first wash their tongues in humility and refrain from seasoning their words with arrogance or self-interest.

5. That public officials, commentators, and all who claim possession of Truth must present proof of regular exercise in doubt, irony, and contemplation, to prevent ideological obesity.

6. That any distortion of Truth for profit, vanity, or partisan sport shall be considered an act of cruelty and subject to rehabilitation through service in the Ministry of Listening, where offenders shall spend one lunar cycle hearing the views of others without interruption.

7. That all citizens are reminded: Truth is not a pet to be paraded, but a wild grace to be approached with reverence. It does not serve, it reveals. It does not flatter, it frees.

General Provisions

(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
 (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
 (ii) the functions of the Office of Self-Governance (OSG) relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) Contracting outside the Royal Government to circumvent the intent of this order is prohibited.

(d) This order does not prohibit making reallocations or reassignments to meet the highest priority needs, maintain essential services, and protect public peace and safety.

(e) This order shall not adversely impact anything.

(f) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the Realm of Elsewhere, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

(g) If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its provisions to any other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

(h) The costs for publication of this order shall be borne by the Office of Self-Governance (OSG).

HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN OF ELSEWHERE
THE QUEEN’S SUMMER PALACE
October 30, 2025

In the Last of Those Days

Journal Entry: Tuesday, November 11, 2025 – 5:46am

There was a bright star shining, though perhaps it was not a star but the remnant of a thought that refused to fade. It trembled there with the brilliance of a long-anticipated event, the heavens themselves had awaited this moment for centuries. It hung in the deep-blue sky, a picture of splendor that rivaled the dream cities we once spoke of in hushed tones - cities of marble and vapor, where every street turned toward delight.

The world shimmered like crystal, cities made of dreams, streets spiraling inward toward themselves, towers of sighs and fountains of absence. Everything gleamed with the epicurean delight of paradise - tasted once and never again. The air was thick with mellow light.

I basked in the sunshine, content without reason, until life began to crystallize into a thousand ambitions like morning dew on blades of grass. I could see through each one, bright, transparent, impossible. How fragile they all seemed, gleaming like beads before the morning light. It was impossible ever again - that world we had known - in the last of those days when an enchantingly wavering attitude still passed for grace, and an intellectual romancing that made even sorrows luminous.

There was a melodious voice then, drifting from somewhere, exquisitely modulated to tremble when I listened closely. It spoke of loyalty and loss, that blood was thicker than broth, yet thinner than moonlight, of inheritances both tender and absurd. The voice carried a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through strength, like the fissured hum of a bell that still rings true. It said, Tenderness is a strength; a doorway through which the heart enters its own house. The words turned to vapor as I reached to grasp them.

Moons whirled and swayed above, pale lamps reflecting the other’s trembling. Beneath their silver pull, the sea rose with the straining, glorious heroism of plunging and crashing, beating back the tide as if it could resist the pale pearls’ powerful yearning. From afar we heard the rolling of thunder - like a memory rehearsing its entrance.

The air was thick and exotic with intrigue. Unseen orchestras played waltzes in half-forgotten gardens. Violins swelled and quavered on their last notes confessing something fragile and forbidden. Cellos sighed to the moon, their sound like blue velvet. We knew then the dream was ending, drenched as we were in silver moonlight, drifting far into the crisp autumnal twilight, where all that ever mattered folded quietly into silence. The air shimmered with adventure, with the perfume of endings disguised as beginnings.

It was the hour of wonder. The waltzes slowed, and the light of the moons, swollen with tenderness, began to thin. I found myself walking through a garden that was both ruin and revelation. Petals trembled on their stems, each one glowing with the afterthought of color, each one holding tenuously to its branch as if life hesitated to loose its grasp.

The star above had softened, it too understood the futility of shining forever. Its light no longer pierced the world; it gently embraced. The sky rippled like silk across a dying fire. All shimmered with an ache particular to beauty when it begins to fray.

I heard laughter in the distance, familiar voices fading like songs overheard from another lifetime. The dream cities were still there, but their marble towers had begun to lean inward, gently, toward Hypnos. Windows glowed with farewell. Bridges hummed with the quiet footsteps of ghosts crossing back into oblivion. I thought, So, this is how endings begin.

The voice returned, fainter now, as if speaking through water. You will forget, but what fades is not lost. I wanted to believe that. I wanted to gather every falling petal and place them one by one into the Book of Relics of what had once been beautiful. But the wind did not agree.

All at once, the garden became a whirlwind of motion, leaves and stars and fragments of melody, each circling and descending, mingling into the slow drift of dissolution. I felt myself among them, crumbling with exquisite precision.

And yet, in the act of falling apart, everything seemed to shine more brightly. The bloom of the world had opened beyond reason, past perfection, into its last and fullest display. Creation wavered, radiant and trembling, on the edge of its own disappearance.

The violins whispered one final phrase, too delicate to name. The cellos bowed into silence. Moonlight and shadow settled over the ruins like forgiveness. I stood in awe, knowing that even decay was an act of devotion, that the petals would feed the roots of dreams yet unimagined.

Somewhere, beneath the horizon of consciousness, the bright star winked once more, a farewell or perhaps a promise, before vanishing into the soft and holy dark.

The dream unraveled, thread by luminous thread. Its colors dimmed and dulled, its sounds receded into that strange stillness where memory becomes nothing more than a sensation of lost wholeness. The orchestras folded their wings, and the star, once so vivid, so impossibly alive, slipped beneath the horizon of the mind.

I felt it fading, as shadows reached into the night, where all images go to rest. What remained was only the faint scent of moonlight, the echo of violins quivering through the hollows. An exquisite sorrow touched me then, quiet and unresisting, like the melancholy of a garden seen in bloom for the last time.

I opened my eyes. The first light of the sun like a hallo over the serrated edge of the high desert mountains. The world, newly born and impossibly ordinary, stood before me, scrub brush and stone and the drift of a hawk’s wings in the sky.

For a moment I could not tell if I had awakened or merely passed into another dream. The bed beneath me felt both real and dissolving. I recalled the bright star and the music and the falling petals in the garden and wondered whether the dream had been the truer world and this, with its coarse daylight and gravity, the illusion.

I sat up slowly, the sheets warm against my skin, and listened to the silence as if it were about to speak or sing. Perhaps, I thought, there is no border between dreaming and waking, only the shifting of light upon the same vast fabric. Perhaps both realms breathe each other’s air, trading shapes in the eternal rhythm of creation rising into crescendos of vivid beauty then falling into forgetfulness.

Outside, the morning unfolded like a rose at the very edge of its perfection. The clouds luminous pinks and oranges against the deep blue. And as the sun crested the mountain, I felt that strange union of grief and gratitude, the ache of being alive in a world forever passing away and forever beginning anew.

Letter IV: The Solar Throne

(This letter was found inscribed in concentric spirals on a sheet of waxed linen, stained with sweat and something like pollen. It was accompanied by a note: “Written while recovering from fever. Or revelation. Unsure.”)

I had been out hiking for several days. It had been rainy the last two days. I was feeling tired and aching and felt that I had a fever. I came upon an old stone building with a sign that said; ‘Pilgrims’ Rest’. I stepped inside. I set down my wet pack. There was some firewood next to the stone fireplace that some previous hiker had left as a kindness so I started a little fire.

I found the letter by accident.

It was wedged between stones in the southern wall of the pilgrims’ rest, where the roof leaks slightly and the moss grows in the cracks like whispering fingers. I was looking for nothing, really - just looking around the space as I settled in for the night.

I don’t know what moved me more: the words, or the silence between them.

I was here.
I went in.
I came back.

That night, I sat cross-legged on the packed earth floor and breathed.

In through the nose.
Down to the solar plexus.
Out again, like tide.
No imagery. No mantra.
Just the breath.
Just the sun behind the ribs.

At some point I lost track of time- was it minutes, hours? - the breath seemed to turn inward. I no longer breathed air. I breathed light. Thick, amber light. Not from the lungs, but from something deeper, something round, radiant, humming behind the bone.

Then came the shift.

I was no longer seated.

I was inside.

Not in a metaphorical way but rather viscerally. I had become a cell in my own body. A single living unit, pulsing with membrane and motive, drifting through what I slowly realized was my own bloodstream.

But it was not peaceful.

The world around me surged with turmoil. Cells of all kinds streamed past - immune cells, red ones, malformed fragments, strange crystalline intruders. There were flashes of what I can only call violence - antibody storms, membrane ruptures, biochemical screams.

A war was being waged inside me.

Then - they saw me. Or sensed me. A cluster of cells slowed, then formed a ring around me, trembling with urgency. They shimmered with recognition.

“He has returned,” one said, though not in language.
“The one from the center. The general.”
“The silent king.”

They pressed close, forming a kind protective chamber of parliament.

I was flooded with information - in pulses, in currents of color and rhythm. They showed me the state of the system: inflamed corridors, corrupted transmissions, sectors overrun by self-attacking systems. They showed me the memory of traumas - old wounds unhealed, false alliances formed in haste, organs under siege by mistaken identity.

“You left us,” one said,
“We did our best. But we are scattered. We need coherence. We need rhythm. We need instruction.”

I tried to speak, but I had no mouth. Only will. Only pulse.

So I focused on the breath again - but from the inside. I began to pulse in steady rhythm, a radiant drumbeat from the solar center. I sent out a pattern of peace - not stillness, but harmonious movement. Like the sway of tall grasses. Like the wave returning to itself.

And they followed it.

The chaos didn’t vanish, but it listened. The rogue cells hesitated. Some rejoined. Others dissolved. The fever broke.

The system began to remember itself.

I don’t recall leaving. I only know I returned, lying flat on the floor of the pilgrim house, soaked in sweat, with a faint echo of marching feet and distant song still vibrating in my spine.

I have not spoken of this until now.

But I leave this letter for the next who follows the breath downward.

Know this:
You are not alone, even in yourself.
You are not silent, even when still.
There is a kingdom inside you that remembers your face.

Sit.
Breathe.
Listen.
Lead gently.

- S.
Formerly singular

Letter V: The Kingdom Within the Veil

(This letter was found several miles from Pilgrims’ Rest etched in concentric rings on the inside of a tortoise shell, which had been left in the center of a stone circle. The shell was lined with a soft mineral dust that released the scent of rain.)

It is not a body.

That is the first mistake we make.

It is not a body, not a thing - not a single entity but a multitude, a cathedral of collaborations, a spiraling republic of beings, all working in delicate alliance to sustain what we casually call “myself.”

We are trillions.

Within this so-called body, there are over thirty trillion cells that bear our own genetic signature, and at least thirty-nine trillion more that do not - bacteria, fungi, viruses, symbionts, freeloaders, ancient guests – undocumented migrants you might say. Together, we form a mobile ecology, a collective nation. Or perhaps a galaxy.

Each cell is a citizen. Each has a job. Some are farmers. Some are soldiers. Some are sanitation workers, librarians, architects, engineers of exquisite precision. Some carry oxygen. Some carry messages. Some guard the borders. Some remove the dead with reverence.

None know your name.

None have even heard of you.

And yet, every second, they serve.

They beat your heart with perfect timing.
They rebuild your skin in quiet layers.
They monitor wounds, traffic hormones, store calcium in your bones like scrolls in an archive.

They dream you into being with no applause, no reward, no belief in an “I.”

And if you were to turn your attention inward to descend as I did into the scale of their world, you would find not chaos, but choreography. Not blind chemistry, but a living order more ancient and cooperative than any human society.

Imagine a city where every citizen is both autonomous and utterly aligned with the whole. Where traffic moves without signals. Where danger is responded to without debate. Where memory is stored in the very shape of the architecture.

Now multiply that by a thousand. Then by a thousand more.

That is your liver.

Your gut is a rainforest.
Your blood is a river system with its own tides.
Your bones are the scaffolding of a living cathedral under perpetual renovation.
Your brain - a parliament of signals, emotions, myths, and impulses - conducts itself like weather over a mountainous terrain.

And over all of this, somehow, floats the illusion that you are one.

That “I” exists as a solid thing. That there is a sovereign self, seated like a monarch, atop this intricate empire. But go looking for it, and it slips through your fingers. It cannot be found in the heart, nor the brain, nor the breath.

You are not the king.
You are not the body.
You are the witness of their harmony.

A name the system has given itself.

A story you tell yourself when it is quiet.

What a holy fiction.
What a radiant impossibility.

And yet - somehow - it holds. This whole thing moves through the world as if it were one. It makes choices. It dreams. It falls in love. It seeks the root.

Who are we, then? What are we? Where are we?

We are a myth.
We are a temporary agreement.
We are the echo of trillions deciding, for a time, to move together, like a vast caravan, in one direction.

So when you say “I am tired,”
it is not you who is tired,
but the nation.

When you say “I want to change,”
it is not the ego commanding the body,
but the body awakening to its own complexity.

Let this make you humble.
Let it make you generous.
Let it make you quiet.

And above all -
Let it make you curious.

For within you is not a person.
Within you is a world of many trillions.

- The Cell That Remembered
Now resting, under the solar throne

A Journey Kept in Fragments

Here begins the record of a journey kept in fragments, said to be drawn from the memory of one who strayed into the borderlands of creation. These words are not their own, for their tongue faltered, and much of what they saw could not be spoken. Yet their gestures, silences, and the broken utterances left behind were gathered by those who tend the Root Tongue lore, and from them this account has been arranged.

It is to be read as a remembrance of an encounter with the world in its unfinished state. What follows is testimony, set down by those who preserve it, as faithfully as it could be kept, though always with the knowledge that translations into the common vernacular trail behind the living truth like footprints in sand.

Before we knew what was happening, a shroud was removed from our sight, and the ordered sense of the world was broken. Nothing was one way nor the other, but wavering, as though creation itself had not yet chosen its form but lived in a continuous swirling state of becoming. We were shaken, as if woken from a dream by a hand both stern and tender. The uncertainty struck like a painful, rude awakening as all that we had known or thought we knew collapsed. Yet poetry, older than any word, stirred within us, whispering from the hidden chambers of the soul. It was a memory of song uttered before the first dawn, of myths still forming in secret.

We walked then into a realm where shadow and light contend, and we saw how the radiance did not conquer the dark but threaded into it, weaving a secret correspondence. For all things call to their likeness across time, and the dark echo answers. The air pressed about us, sweeping and restless, filled with the same striving that has labored since the earth’s beginnings.

We looked, and the world seemed unfinished, trembling as a work left half-made upon the anvil. The night stretched out into forever, long and heavy, starless and without moon, and we despaired of morning. Yet far to the east a seam of pale fire appeared, no more than a sliver, and our heart stirred, for the smallest glimmer of dawn is enough to summon a wanderer forward.

And then a field of dazzling brilliance opened before us, as if a veil were torn aside. We then went down into deepening waters, each step carrying us farther from what we had known. There the voice of nature rose to meet us, clear and solemn as the world itself speaking. It told us we were not alone nor apart from its making but entwined within it, strand among endless strands.

Together we entered the infinite vastness of the universe, and felt the trembling of the heavens pass through. The hidden stars stirred, the vault above seemed to breathe, and a wonder came upon us sharp as lightning, bright as joy, filled with awe. And we knew then that the world’s tale was not yet complete, nor was ours, for both were threads of a single tapestry still being woven warp by weft.

In that place we learned that gesture precedes the word. Our body moved before thought, and in the movement dwelt a meaning older than speech. A lifted hand, a turning of the head, the measure of a step—all spoke with a depth more complex, layered, and profound than language could bear.

And in returning to such gestures, we found they never ended in themselves. Each one pointed beyond itself, like an arrow that vanishes into the night sky. They summoned us into a field of intentionality, where every motion was gathered into relation. Nothing stood apart: each breath, each shift of weight, each stirring of air was woven together in an inseparable bond.

Yet all was porous, spacious, elusive. Meanings slipped through the mind as swiftly as they formed, a continuous slippage that would not hold still. What was shown to us was irreducible, unreadable, unspeakable, yet no less true for that.

We felt pressed into a journey toward the extreme margins, where language breaks and cannot follow, where forms arise as vapers and dissolve into mists. There the world unfolded in a rhizomatic architecture, sprouting here, collapsing there, without center or crown. Each gesture became a spontaneous act, uncodified, unbidden, as if creation itself were forever beginning again.

The terrain lay between construction and collapse, forever trembling. Ambiguity clothed it like a mantle, heavy and thick yet alive. And as we moved within it, we knew this was no error or confusion: it was the very nature of things. For the world has always been uncontainable, always spilling beyond what words can hold. And its first speech is gesture, pointing always to what lies beyond - unutterable - trailing off like crystalline echoes into the infinite.

Here is a children’s story to read your early grade schoolers while they draw and paint and write stories and poems and songs in the big sketchbook you got for them. Encourage imagination!

The Girl Who Collected Moonlight

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didn’t always know what to do. Sometimes she wiggled and wavered when things were hard. She tried her best, but she felt a little weak inside. When she didn’t know what to say she would start talking to anybody about the sun, the moon and the stars. Still, her voice was soft and kind, and people liked to listen to her talk.

One night she saw a bright star shining in the dark-blue sky. It was so white and beautiful that it looked like a light from a dream. The girl looked up and felt the star calling her name.

She followed the light into a magical place. The air smelled sweet, and she could hear violins and cellos playing soft music. The moonlight touched her hair and made it shine. She danced and twirled and laughed as the music played.

In the forest, she met fairies and little nymphs who played pipes. They smiled and said, “Run into the light!” So she did, running and singing, happy and free.

She tried new things every day. Sometimes she forgot what she was doing, and the fairies giggled. “That’s okay,” they said. “You’re learning.”

After a while, the girl wanted to remember her adventures. She started to keep little books full of notes and drawings. She tied them with string and stacked them neatly. She loved the sound of the paper and the look of her doodles.

When people came to visit, she showed them her papers and said,
“These are my stories. They are doors to other worlds.”

The people listened to her with amusement and often said, “That sounds very interesting!”

Then she smiled, closed her books, and went outside to dance again in the moonlight.

And every night, the star shone brighter, happy to see her shining too.

The Girl Who Collected Moonlight (Part Two - The Rainbow Bridge)

One morning, the girl woke up and saw tiny sparkles all over her window. The star had left a trail of light, like crumbs of magic, showing her where to go next. She packed a small bag with her favorite pencil, a little book tied with string, and one shiny silver spoon she liked to use for eating fruit.

She tiptoed outside. The air was quiet, like it was waiting. “I think the world wants me to listen,” she whispered. So she did.

She walked past the garden, where the flowers nodded hello. She crossed a stream that giggled over the rocks. Then she came to a bridge that wasn’t really a bridge - it was a rainbow folded in half. She stepped on it, careful not to slip, and it lifted her high into the sky.

On the other side was a land made of soft colors and slow music. The clouds drifted low, and each one hummed a different tune. “Welcome, moonlight girl,” said a small bird wearing a vest. “This is the Land of Remembering.”

“What do people do here?” the girl asked.

“They keep safe all the things others forget,” said the bird. “Songs, dreams, even lost giggles.”

The girl looked around. There were shelves made of clouds, filled with tiny glowing bottles. Each bottle held a memory. Some twinkled like stars, some flickered like candles, some just waited quietly.

The girl took out her book. “May I write them down?” she asked.

“That’s what the moonlight sent you for,” said the bird. “To keep stories safe.”

So she wrote: about the flowers that waved, the bridge that sang, the star that whispered, the gaggles of giggles that wandered around laughing to each other. She drew pictures too - of the fairies and the nymphs and the way the moon looked when it smiled.

When she was done, the bird said, “You can come back anytime. There will always be new memories to keep.”

The girl smiled. “Then I’ll need more string,” she said.

And off she went, back down the rainbow bridge, her little silver spoon clinking in her bag, ready to scoop up more moonlight for her next story.

The Girl Who Collected Moonlight (Part Three: The Star Library)

Years passed, but the girl never stopped collecting moonlight. She filled book after book with drawings, songs, and stories. Some were happy, some were quiet, some were shaped like questions she didn’t yet know how to answer.

One night, the bright star that had once called her name came closer than ever before. It shimmered above her house and whispered, “It’s time.”

“Time for what?” asked the girl.

“For your stories to find their home,” said the star.

The next morning, she followed a silver path of starlight through the woods. It led her to a wide hill covered in soft moss. At the top stood a round building made of glass and moonstone. Its doors opened with a sound like a sigh.

Inside were shelves - so many shelves! They stretched up to the stars themselves, filled with glowing books that hummed softly, like they were breathing.

A voice spoke from the light: “This is the Star Library. Every story ever told lives here, even the ones still being written.”

The girl’s eyes grew wide. “Can I stay?” she asked.

“You already do,” said the voice gently. “You’ve been writing your way here all along.”

So she began to work there, not as a visitor, but as the Keeper of the Star Library. Each night, she placed new stories on the shelves. When a book was lonely, she read to it until it sparkled again. When a dream wandered in looking lost, she found the right shelf to keep it safe.

Sometimes, children would dream their way into the library. The girl - now a little older and taller - would smile and hand them tiny glass jars. “Catch some light,” she’d say. “You’ll need it when you go back.”

They would laugh and chase the floating bits of brightness until they had a jar full. Then they’d thank her and drift away, their hearts glowing like lanterns.

And so the girl who once followed a star became the one who kept them. She wrote, and read, and remembered. The moonlight still danced on her hair, and sometimes, when she was very still, she could hear her first star whisper,

“Well done, little Keeper. The stories are shining.”

The Girl Who Collected Moonlight (Part Four: The Return of the Dream Child)

A long, long time later, one of the children who had once visited the Star Library grew up. His name was Henry and he was no longer small, but he still kept the little glass jar of light by his bed. It glowed faintly every night, even when he forgot to believe in magic.

Henry had become a man who built things - bridges, boats, and birdhouses - but he often felt something missing, like a song he couldn’t quite remember. One cloudy evening, he took the jar from his shelf and whispered, “I wish I could find that library again.”

The light inside the jar flickered once, twice, then grew brighter. Before Henry could blink, the glow surrounded him, and he was carried upward, past the rooftops, past the clouds, until he landed gently on a hill covered in soft moss.

The Star Library stood before him, shining as it always had.

Inside, everything was quiet except for the humming of the books. He looked around, not sure if she would still be there. Then he saw her - older now, her hair silver like moonlight, her eyes kind and full of remembering.

“Do you still collect stories?” he asked softly.

The Keeper smiled. “Every day,” she said. “And you - did you keep your light safe?”

He held up the little jar. “It’s smaller than before,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s because you are big now and you’ve been using it, not because it’s gotten smaller.”

She took his hand and led him through the glowing shelves. “Each light that leaves here finds its way back in another form,” she said. “Some become songs. Some become bridges. Some, even, become kindness.”

He looked at her and realized: all the things he had built, all the people he had helped, came from that one bit of moonlight she had given him as a boy.

“Can I help now?” he asked.

She smiled and pointed to a small table with blank pages and a pen. “You already are. Write what you’ve seen.”

So Henry stayed awhile, writing his stories beside hers. And sometimes, when the night grew still, they would walk together along the shelves, placing new books where they belonged.

Outside, the stars shone brighter than ever. And far below, children everywhere began to dream of bridges made of light.

For the Keeper and her new friend Henry had written it to be so.

The Girl Who Collected Moonlight (Part Five: The Book That Fell to Earth)

Far below the stars, in a small town by the sea, a new child was walking home from school one afternoon. The wind was soft, and the waves sparkled like tiny diamonds. As she walked along the shore, something shiny caught her eye.

There, under a big oak tree, lay a small book with a silver cover. It glowed just a little, the way seashells glow when you hold them to your ear.

She picked it up carefully. On the first page, written in gentle, looping letters, were the words:

“To whoever finds this - keep it safe. It carries moonlight inside.”

The girl gasped. “Moonlight? Inside a book?” she whispered. She opened it wide, and a warm, silvery glow spilled out, lighting her face.

That night, she read by its light. The book told stories of a girl who danced with fairies, who kept notes tied with string, who built a library of stars. It spoke of a friend who returned when he grew up, of bridges of light and dreams that never fade.

Each word shimmered as if it were alive. When she turned the last page, she saw a tiny mirror on the inside of the back cover. She looked into it - and for a moment, just a blink - she saw the Keeper smiling at her through the reflection.

“Hello,” said the Keeper’s soft voice. “Will you take care of this light?”

“Yes,” said the little girl, her heart glowing brighter than her lamp.

The next morning, she went to the sea with the book in her hands. The waves whispered around her feet. She noticed that the light from the book made the water sparkle even more.

“Maybe stories never really end,” she said aloud. “Maybe they just keep walking along the shore of imagination.”

She decided to start her own little book that day, writing down things she saw and felt:
the sound of gulls, the smell of rain, the way sunlight looked reflected on silver spoons.

She didn’t know it yet, but the Star Library was already watching. The Keeper and her friend Henry looked down from their glowing shelves and smiled.

“She’s begun,” whispered the Keeper.

“Another collector of moonlight,” said Henry.

And somewhere far below, the child kept writing and drawing - her words bright as stars, her pages of drawings shining softly through the night.

A Blessing for the Overzealous

How to End a Theological Ambush with Poise, Poetry, and Purgatorial Flair

(Journal Entry: November 7, 2025, midafternoon light slanting through the kitchen window)

It began, as many domestic dramas do, with a rebuke disguised as concern.

My daughter came home from an afternoon gathering, unusually quiet, carrying that delicate silence that only children of mixed theological neighborhoods know.

“Dad,” she said carefully, “the other kids said you probably will be going to hell.”

“Oh?” I asked, keeping my tone neutral. “How did they come to that conclusion?”

She shook her head. “They said you don’t go to the right kind of church.”

Ah, yes. The missionary impulse of the freshly sanctified. I remember it well. The certainty, the brightness, the trembling thrill of being chosen to rescue others from their own doomed ignorance. There’s something almost heroic in it, if you overlook how exhausting it is for everyone else.

I had grown up through eight years of private Catholic parochial school - “the very best and finest form of education,” as we were always told. I even served as an altar boy and, as I later learned, was regarded by some of the nuns as a bit of a goody two-shoes (a term I suspect was not meant kindly). This reputation may have stemmed from my occasional habit of pointing out small flaws in their logic or asking inconvenient theological questions - such as what became of the poor souls who had committed the mortal sin of eating meat the previous Friday, just before the Pope changed the rule. Would they now be released from Hell?

I had raised my kids to not be subjected to religious doctrinal assimilation at too young of an age before they could discern for themselves what to believe in. A child’s imagination is both fragile and fertile. To me it seems criminal to plant such potent institutional seeds into a child’s mind too early and allow them to grow untended.

So that evening, after supper, I decided to equip my daughter with a gentler weapon - one forged not of argument, but of magnificent confusion.

Lesson One: The Art of the Counter-Blessing

“Sweetheart,” I said, “when someone insists on saving your soul, don’t debate. Just bless them. But not a polite, everyday blessing - a grand one, the kind the nuns at school used to wield like wands of holy authority.”

Her eyes lit up. “Like a spell?”

“Almost,” I said. “But with Latin undertones and moral smoke and mirrors.”

Then, with my best parochial solemnity, I began:

“May you be saved from the everlasting torment of the eternally burning fire and brimstone of hell, over which we are all, each and every one of us, dangling by the thinnest gossamer thread - but by the mercy and grace of God. Amen”

She frowned slightly. “What’s a gossamer thread?”

“Ah,” I said, glad she asked, “it’s the finest kind of spider silk - delicate, almost invisible, but strong enough to hold a dew drop, a unsuspecting bug, or, apparently, the fate of the human soul.”

She smiled, imagining it. “So… most kids won’t know what that means.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And they’ll be too afraid to ask. Which is what makes it the perfect blessing.”

Lesson Two: Practice and Deployment

We rehearsed it.

I played the role of the earnest young evangelist.

“Have you accepted Jesus as your personal—”

“May you be saved,” she intoned, eyes raised heavenward, “from the everlasting torment of the eternally burning fire and brimstone of hell, over which we are all, each and every one of us, dangling by the thinnest gossamer thread - but by the mercy and grace of God. Amen”

I gasped theatrically. “Mercy, child, I’m converted already. Now try it again but hold up your right hand over the head of the person you are blessing, that will add a hint of authority.”

Lesson Three: Historical Context

This, I explained, was no mere sarcasm. It was deep heritage. The Roman Catholic Church is the original Christian church that traces its beginnings to Jesus himself when he bestowed the keys to the Kingdom of God on Peter.

Jesus said: “And I tell you, you are Peter [Greek: Petros], and on this rock [Greek: petra] I will build my church” Matthew 16:18

The nuns who trained my childhood imagination could summon the entire metaphysical bureaucratic infrastructure of the afterlife with a flick of chalk and a wave of their oak yardstick. Purgatory was a halfway house for good intentions. Limbo was childcare for the unbaptized. And Hell was always close enough to make you sit up strait in your seat and ensuring that you always ate fish on Fridays.

It was both terrifying and operatic.
And oddly – beautiful in its own frightful kind of way.

Because beneath the brimstone was imagination. The sense that the cosmos itself was a living drama in which one’s behavior might alter the ending for all eternity - which they say - is a very long time. That reality, however fearsome, was storied.

That’s what I wanted to pass on. Not fear, but imaginative scope.

Lesson Four: Advanced Variations

Once she mastered the basic blessing, we practiced regional addendums:

Southern Revival Tent Variation:

“May the Lord reinforce your thread with triple-braided gospel silk, and may your guardian angel stay awake at their post, even during the sermon.”

Medieval Monastic Variation:

“May the heavenly record-keepers misfile your sins in the archive of minor mischief and forward your virtues straight to the Department of Eternal Comfort.”

Monty Python Codicil:

“And should the infernal auditors ever take attendance, may you raise your hand and say, ‘Oh terribly sorry, wrong address,’ before strolling off whistling something irreverently cheerful.”

She laughed so hard she fell sideways on the couch. “They’ll never know what hit them!”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’s a mercy disguised as theater.”

Field Report

Weeks later, she came home from school with the air of someone who had survived a small but glorious crusade.

“Well?” I asked.

“Oh, I used it,” she said, nonchalantly. “They just stood there blinking. Then one kid said, ‘That’s not in the Bible,’ and I said, ‘Maybe not in the short version.’”

And just like that, peace returned to the realm.

A Father’s Closing Benediction

So this, dear reader, is how I chose to arm my child for the world’s pious confrontations - not with sharper arguments, but with sweeter absurdity.

Because sometimes, the kindest defense of the soul is laughter.

May we all be saved, in whatever sense that word can hold,
from the torment of our own certainty.
May the gossamer thread of our being tremble lightly in the breeze of wonder.
And may the next time someone tries to rescue your eternal soul,
you offer them a blessing so radiant, so ornate,
that even the angels pause mid-flight to take notes.

Amen. And Amen.
Or, as my daughter prefers: Ta-da.

Editor’s Footnote

On the Strategic Use of Archaic Vocabulary in Theological Defense Mechanisms

Recent field observations suggest that the well-timed deployment of archaic terminology (“gossamer thread,” “fire and brimstone”, “everlasting,” “torment,” etc.) functions as an effective deterrent against unsolicited evangelism, particularly among the under-catechized. When delivered with solemn diction and sustained eye contact, such phrases trigger a form of reverential paralysis in the interlocutor, often accompanied by a faint sense of déjà vu and the sudden urge to check their memory verses.

This linguistic strategy, hereafter referred to as Orthodox Lexical Counteroffense, capitalizes on three key effects:

1. Semantic Elevation:
   By invoking seldom used theological language, the speaker elevates the conversation beyond the range of immediate comprehension, thereby reclaiming metaphysical high ground without resorting to argument.

2. Cognitive Fogging:
   The introduction of unfamiliar terms (e.g., “gossamer”) produces a momentary cognitive lag during which the zealot’s scriptural reflexes falter. This brief window allows the practitioner to exit the conversation gracefully while appearing profoundly devout.

3. Aesthetic Supremacy:
   Ornate syntax and baroque phrasing appeal to the latent awe circuitry of the human psyche, producing in the hearer a mixture of admiration and mild fear. In test cases, subjects reported sensations of “uncertain holiness” and “the smell of incense for no reason.”

Preliminary data indicate that a single well-crafted blessing of this type can neutralize up to three fundamentalists under the age of fifteen, four if delivered in Latin.

Our Editorial and Research Team at Chatwick & Co. therefore endorses the continued research and responsible use of Archaic Vocabulary as Non-Lethal Theological Defense, especially in mixed-denominational environments such as playgrounds, family reunions at Thanksgiving, and Christmas pageants.

Further studies are underway. Results to be published, Deo volente, pending peer review and divine approval.

This post - based more or less on actual events - is dedicated to my daughter Noor-un-nisa whose 31st birthday is today.

Zamorsk: Beyond the Sea

There is a fishing village, hidden between the cliffs and the edge of the inland sea, where the wind moves like a dragon over the waters and the days slip past like transparent smoke. The locals call it Zamorsk, though maps have long ceased to label it. Some say the name means “beyond the sea,” others claim it refers to something older, untranslatable, a word inherited from a forgotten tongue. The mountains behind it rise like sleeping giants, their ridges bluish with distance and eons of silence.

Zamorsk is beloved by those born there, though none can say quite why other than it is home. Children grow up barefoot in the summers, with pockets full of sea glass and nettle leaves, their skin weathered by salt air before adolescence. The old people—stooped, careful, reverent - speak in low tones and pause often, as if listening for something long gone that might still return. At sunset, the town takes on a strange glow: raspberry light tangling in the blue smoke from kitchen stoves, the scent of fish and firewood mixing with the sharper breath of mountain herbs. No one speaks during that hour if they can help it. It’s known as the hour of remembering.

In autumn, the maples rustle with whispering voices, and those who walk the forest paths swear they hear names spoken - not by wind, but by the trees themselves. Near the cemetery lies a wasteland of stones and rusted metal, remnants of some earlier time, maybe a war, a foreign occupation, maybe something stranger. Children are warned not to linger there, yet inevitably they do. All who live in Zamorsk carry some mark of the place: a habit of staring too long into fog, a tendency to dream vivid and wordless dreams, a soft ache in the chest that is never quite pain.

It is said that nothing ever happens in Zamorsk. And yet, those who stay long enough know this is untrue. The village holds a quiet kind of unfolding. Dreams are taken seriously here. If one dreams of a white fish or a burning book, the elders must be consulted. If a child speaks of someone who "walks without feet," the priest lights a candle, and the baker leaves bread at the cemetery gate.

The town remembers. Not just events, but the shape of thoughts, the weather of forgotten centuries. Here, one can feel time folding back on itself. The ruins don’t crumble. The air is thick with stories never told aloud. People live as though watched over by some unspoken force they regard with solemnity.

Many arrive hoping to leave. Most do. A few don’t. Those who stay are the ones who begin to dream the town's dreams, to walk its ancient rhythms, and to say, without irony or regret: No matter these empty dreams. What I dream will be.

In Zamorsk, the past is not behind. It is beside. In that place, the sea speaks in its sleep, and the wind smells of salt, of wild herbs crushed underfoot, of something eternal that only the soul remembers. Time slips past like a ghost; the present feels like memory, and memory feels like an ancient prophecy. There are rustling leaves in autumn, and the rustling is a kind of speech. I would sit for hours listening, doing nothing, saying nothing, yet hearing everything.

There was a man there who used to write, or try to. Every evening at his desk, raspberry jam and tea cooling beside a dish of oysters over ice and horseradish, he would wait for the Muse, who sometimes came, and more often did not. But he still waited, silently, with unspoken words filling the room like smoke. He stopped writing letters years ago. No Indian ink could hold what he wanted to say.

He wandered too. To the wasteland beyond the cemetery, to the wind-battered cliffs. He said he was looking for keys, though no one knew to what. Perhaps to some old gate that had long since rusted shut. He believed there was a boundary - one that could not be drawn, only crossed. The chime of distant bells guided him sometimes or misled him. He didn’t mind, knowing that each step landed exactly where it must.

People called him mad, but kindly. In that town, madness is a form of reverence. We are all a bit mad there. Luminous, too. Fire in the heart, yes - but a quiet fire, one that doesn’t consume. It warms the solitude.

He always said he’d leave, but he never did. He was always pensive yet quietly patient as if waiting for some distant call. It was hard to part with the peace, hard to let go of a place that understood you without asking you to explain. The town, too, was patient. It didn’t need to be remembered to go on existing.

And then one morning - dawn, sharp and beautiful - he stood still as if listening for some last instruction. The wind rose suddenly, wrapping around him like a final thought. And he said, quietly, “Now, I am going home.”

And whether he meant another place or that same town, no one knows. But we understood. We all understood.

They say he vanished that morning - not in the grand, theatrical way of novels, but simply stepped off the path near the cliffs and was never seen again. There were no signs of struggle, no trace of departure, only the soft indentations of his boots in the wet earth, ending at a place where the trail curved sharply and the mist began. And even those prints faded by noon.

Some claimed he walked into the sea. Others whispered he had crossed to “the other side” - not death exactly, but something adjacent to it. The librarian, a woman who never spoke above a whisper and always wore velvet gloves, said she found a page on her desk that morning, still damp with salt air. It wasn’t signed, but the handwriting was his. Only four words: “Shore reached. Keys found.”

That night, the town changed. Something subtle shifted. The bells from the abandoned chapel, long silent, rang once near midnight though no rope had been touched. A stray cat arrived, soaked to the bone, with seaweed curled around its tail like a ribbon. The air smelled more strongly of brine, and a pale green light was seen flickering beneath the waves, far offshore.

People began to remember dreams they had dreamt as children. One woman said she saw the man again, walking through the cemetery at dusk, his coat buttoned, a wildflower behind one ear. He didn’t speak, only nodded, as if everything was in order.

And then there was the child - the one who lived near the bakery and used to speak in riddles. She took to sitting on the library steps, humming tunes no one recognized. When asked where she learned them, she shrugged and said, “From the man in the raspberry sky. He says the door is now open.”

The townspeople did not discuss these things openly, of course. That would be improper. But candles were lit more frequently. Ink bottles were restoppered more carefully. Letters were begun but never finished. And every so often, someone would wander off the marked path, following some forgotten instinct, and disappear into the mist.

The town didn’t mind. It had always known it was a place of passage, not a destination. And those who remain still say, if you listen closely, you can hear it: the faint rustle of unfinished pages, the ancient chime of far-off bells, and a voice - barely audible - repeating a phrase as old as the sea:

“Now I am going home.”

Before the silence, before the town swallowed him into its soft, breathing quiet, he was a boy - not yet a poet, not yet a mystic, just a son of fishermen who preferred notebooks to nets. It happened in late spring, when the sky was still undecided and the sea flickered between calm and storm. He had wandered out alone to the old bell tower above the cemetery, carrying a tin lunchbox, a sketchbook, and a question that had been pressing on him for days: Why do I feel homesick, even when I’m home?

He never told anyone exactly what occurred there, not in full. But over the years, fragments slipped through his poems, his letters, the edges of his speech. From these, and from the ethereal atmosphere that clung to him ever after, people pieced together a kind of account.

Inside the tower while writing, he fell asleep - or maybe slipped into another realm. The bells above him, long rusted still, began to ring - not with the vibration of sound, but of light. Thin, threadlike tones that shimmered through his body and unstitched his thoughts. Time began to unwind. The tower was no longer stone but breath, and his own self was no longer confined to one shape. He felt himself dissolve and crumble into wind, into leaves, into sea spray. The inner world opened and he saw, with unbearable clarity, that everything was only one thing: luminous, aching, and alive.

He came back from the revelatory experience changed. The townspeople said he spoke more slowly after that, as if words had become delicate, almost dangerous things. He no longer ran, only walked. And when he looked at people he looked into them - as if he could see the inner flame they were hiding. People were often afraid what he might see, that he might see their secrets being laid bare. But he never said what he saw.

For a year, he didn’t write a single word. He wandered, listened, kept silence. But when the words returned, they did so in torrents - poems written in candlelight with trembling hands, pages filled with what seemed to be fragments of dreams, visions, memories from lives not his own. He no longer questioned whether imagination was real. He knew it was the membrane through which truth filtered.

He began speaking of “the Realm Beyond the Bridge,” though no one knew what bridge he meant. He said the Muse was not a metaphor. He claimed time was porous, and that sorrow, when endured properly, was a key.

People tolerated this, mostly because he was kind, and occasionally because what he wrote was beautiful in a way that unsettled even the skeptical. He never asked anyone to understand or believe him. He only lived as though what he’d seen was real and that his words were as true as words could be true. That the truth of them was in the quiet breath between them. No one was quite sure what he meant.

And that is why, years later, when he vanished into mist without fanfare, the town did not mourn him. Not because they didn’t love him - they did - but because they understood. He had always been halfway across that bridge he spoke of. They simply hadn’t expected he would cross it so quietly, or so soon.

There were some hand written papers on his desk that included the following poem. We all agreed that it must have been the last one that he wrote…

Zamorsk

O enchanting town of enigmas!
Like transparent smoke.
Beloved from childhood,
Bewitching the heart
the hour before sunset.
Wind from the sea.
Scent of the sea, pungent, fresh,
through endless years of
Listening to rustling leaves.
Autumn, whispering in the maples
a light fragrance of mountain herbs,
I’ll not forget.

Wasteland by the cemetery.
Marks of so ancient a tale
remembers the past
as if the years have not passed.
Nothing happens here.
Here years pass silently.

I’m silent. Silent - ready to be.
My soul’s no more of this world.
Oh, there’s no reason for sighs.
Today, and tomorrow, done.

The heart,
it is made of fire.
So simple it is, so innocent.
And filled with fiery delirium.
Here, we’re all drunkards
we who are mad and luminous
under a raspberry tinted sun.
Tangles of blue smoke…

Evening hours at the desk.
On an ice bed, a dish of oysters.
And raspberry jam with tea.

Finishing my unfinished page
with my still unspoken words.
My entry by moonlight uncertain.
The most tender of murmurings…
The barely audible voice of the Muse.
I won’t be penning letters
with Indian ink.

And a quiet, guarded waiting…
No matter these empty dreams,
what I dream will be.

I used to dream of such quiet,
with unutterable wonder.
Alone at last
in my solitude.
Be certain of my peace of mind
Everywhere, and always.
I find it hard to leave this sanctuary.
I’m at peace; but please, don’t talk.

Try to reach that boundary
that isn’t on the map.
On the un-travelled track.
The ancient chime of far-off bells.
In a world that’s beyond space.
Can you bear to cross its bridge...
into the realm of shadows
searching for keys?

If we can only reach that shore,
living on a wild coastline.
And the wind sweeps round,
always new and mysterious.
That place will never be vanquished.
The one enduring and true.

From dawn I’d anticipated
the moment I’d crumble.
No longer able to utter
The moment of farewell.

Now, I am going home…

Before the Mouth: The Proto-Root

(Tradition holds this telling comes from the Cinder Memory, a line of Root-Tongue archivists who do not write, but remember by firelight. It is never told the same way twice.)

The Telling

Before there were humans,
before bones carried breath,
before vertebrae curled in the sea,
there was still a kind of listening.

And the world
was already speaking.

Not in words,
but in relationship.

Light brushed stone in a certain rhythm.
Tides pressed salt into rock, and the rock remembered.
Minerals arranged themselves into lattice prayers.
Glaciers carved syllables into the skin of time.
And lava sang as it cooled - low, molten hymns to gravity.

The Root-Tongue was there.
In crystal habit. In magnetic hum. In the spiral logic of galaxies.
In the slow shiver of a newly forming moon.

It did not speak in voice.
It spoke in coherence.

Atoms gathering.
Folding.
Becoming molecule.
Becoming cell.

Cells didn’t need to explain.
They merged.

They danced at the edge of membranes.
They pulsed in rhythm.
They traded minerals, and light, and meaning,
and this was enough.

This was the earliest syntax:
mutual becoming.

One cell became many.
Then many became more-than-many.
Then came the eukaryote - a cell that carried another cell inside it like a dream.
And they didn’t fight.
They shared breath.
And invented coexistence.

That was a sentence.
The first, perhaps.
A sentence of flame and silence.

As life deepened, the Root-Tongue expanded.

It entered coral reefs - cathedrals of calcium.
It moved in whale-song - compression waves in water dreams.
It shimmered through mycelial threads,
each fungal whisper crossing miles beneath feet not yet evolved to walk.

And when creatures emerged to crawl, to climb, to hunt -
the Root-Tongue whispered into them,
not as words,
but as orientation:

Toward the light.
Toward the sound.
Toward the warmth of others.

This was the grammar of survival,
but also the beginning of reverence.

Even insects knew it.
Birds mapped it in flight.
Trees kept it in their rings.

The Root-Tongue was not waiting to be found.
It was already the atmosphere of being.

It did not need a speaker.
Only a field to vibrate in.

And when the first hominids emerged, upright and uncertain,
they did not invent the Root-Tongue.

They simply stepped into a conversation
that had been going on
for billions of years.

And forgot.
And remembered.
And then forgot again.

Notes from the Cinder Memory:

• The Root-Tongue is older than voice.

• It is the behavior of harmony.

• It is not something you speak, but something that speaks you - when you are aligned with the great coherence.

If ever you feel alone,
touch the stone.
Wait for its response.
It may take a thousand years.
But the answer is already forming.

Curatorial Notes (Cinder Memory Lineage)

• On “not in words, but in relationship”: This phrasing is stable across almost all oral transmissions. Archivists disagree whether “relationship” here is to be taken literally (as in symbiosis) or as an early metaphor for resonance. The Cinder Memory keeps both possibilities alive.

• On “a cell carrying another cell inside it like a dream”: Later commentators in the Lichen School argue this was the first parable of hospitality, a mythic encoding of endosymbiosis told as if it were a covenant.

• On “a sentence of flame and silence”: Certain versions add that this sentence is still being spoken, and that fire and stillness are the primordial verbs.

• On “they did not invent the Root-Tongue”: The emphasis is crucial. This telling insists that humans are latecomers, not originators. This humbles the lineage and situates the Root-Tongue as prior to all human myth.

Ritual Use

When remembered around firelight, this Proto-Root telling is accompanied by long silences between phrases, so that the embers themselves seem to finish the lines. Some communities scatter salt into the flames at the phrase “tides pressed salt into rock” so that the fire speaks back with brief white sparks. Others hold stones in their hands during the recitation, regarding them as syllables older than speech.

Root-Tongue Letter: The Flower Beyond the Clouds

I do not know when the yearning began.

Perhaps it was in the scent of wood smoke carried across the rice fields at dusk, or in the hush that comes after frost first finds the grass. I only know that I felt it before I had words for it. A kind of aching direction. A place I had never seen, but which knew me completely. Sometimes it appears to me in dream as the city Chang’an, though I have never walked its streets. Other times it has no name, only a shimmer at the edge of things.

Tonight, I write by oil lamp. The flame leans when I sigh. My mat is thin. The insects outside the window sing with such precision it wounds me. I thought it was silence I wanted - but this is a silence with teeth gnawing at my heart.

Earlier, I unrolled an old poem from a forgotten drawer. The paper crumbled slightly at the edges, and a silverfish darted into the folds. It was Li Bai. His words returned to me like an echo from my own marrow.

The beautiful person is like a flower beyond the edge of the clouds...

Yes. I too have seen that flower. Not with the eye, but with something within the heart. I too have rolled back the curtain, stared at the moon, and long sighed in vain.

And still, I walk.

I have tried many names for what I seek. Some call it the True Place. Others, the Inner Guide. Some say it is the Self, others say it is the Beloved, the One Who Knows. But none of the names hold. All are empty and hollow. All fall away at the threshold. I know only this: it waits, and it calls.

Sometimes, I think the call is what makes the world.

This week, I crossed a narrow mountain path, where wind carves song from stone. I had eaten nothing but boiled roots and rainwater. My breath became shallow. Then - just before the descent - I saw it:

A flower. Just barely breaking through the frost-hardened earth. Pale. Shivering. Alive.

And I heard - no, felt - Li Bai’s line stir in the earth:

“The spirit I dream can’t get through, the mountain pass is hard...”

I did not touch the flower. I left it to bloom, or not, as it chose. But in that moment, I understood:
Sometimes the path does not lead to the destination.
Sometimes the path is the flower.
And you are what blooms.

To the next seeker who finds this letter:
If you feel that old ache rising in the chest like a broken heart - do not be afraid.
If you dream of places that shimmer and vanish - do not despair.
If you sit awake while others sleep and find yourself weeping at nothing at all - welcome.
You are walking with Li Bai now.
And the flower beyond the clouds may already be in your hand.

In longing and in flame,
- A fellow traveler, beneath the frost