At the other end of the lane, a form moves toward Shariing. The form resembles Shariing in many ways, with only slight differences. The garden responds to this being with the same show of effects. The two meet in the middle of the orchids. They see into and through all there is. They probe each other for something they might be missing, but in the end they walk separate ways.
Shariing enters her study and sits on an air form, created for that need. Shariing looks intently to the empty space; a flat, hard surface; then appears the unfocused image of clean, white sheet of paper which shortly thereafter becomes matter. Shariing grunts from the throat and then out of the mouth. The paper waits. A flower appears in the center and moves to one side and toward the top of the sheet. The flower changes size until it stops. Several flowers join the first and array themselves on the sheet until the paper is full.
Shariing looks away and everything on the sheet disappears. Shariing stands and moves around the room and sits again rubbing an eye; looks at the sheet and grumbles; strange markings appear upon it, and the color changes to an off-white. Then everything disappears and Shariing walks alone into the garden and gazes at the water pools.
Shariing isn’t hungry because Shariing doesn’t eat. The words don’t even exist that could allow for it. Shariing does not eat and does not pass any waste because there is no waste, because there is really nothing. Shariing sees a reflection in the quiet pool: hands, arms, legs, torso and head; clothed in emerald rich garments, which hang, like fog from the frame that Shariing claims; the frame could be like anything. Also Shariing’s frame does not terminate eloquently: the outer edge merely blurs into an electric background, and sometimes Shariing looks like a flower. Sometimes Shariing is a flower. Many times lately, it's made no difference.
Shariing tries to think back, even though time was never the issue. Shariing is time, but since the word has not been realized, the philosophy is moot. Shariing wants something and it isn't there at this moment, so Shariing makes a different moment in order to examine it for the mystery. Instantly, time comes into being, though there is no way to describe it except through the experience of Shariing. All Shariing can see is in the garden. The garden is everything and everywhere. Anywhere you are is in the garden.
Shariing wants to see the garden from above, so Shariing flies in many different guises. Eventually, through experimentation and refinement, the butterfly and the bird come to be, though they have no names. They are, by the experience of being. Shariing changes into the bird image, and flies out into the garden. The bird image is electric with high voltage; sparks and thunder clouts bounce off its sleek form as it glides endlessly over the garden. Sometimes there is no difference between the bird image and the electric background.
Once, during the experience, Shariing saw the reflection in the quiet pool. After watching intently, it became apparent that the reflection was not in the pool, but standing in front of Shariing. The two looked at one another; the Other turned away and walked down the lane. Now when the two meet, the other has altered slightly from the original reflection; Shariing alters all the time, so this is not as confusing to Shariing as it is to the Other. They meet, experience each other and move on from each other, even though they are the same. Shariing can be many beings and forms; all if it necessary.
Shariing has never seen the entire garden because it is a garden of the mind and Shariing’s mind is vast. Shariing senses a black void outside the garden even though the garden never ends, nor ever dims. There is no day and no night because Shariing never tires. There is constant light and heat, because the mind is fully charged and ever conscious.
There is a breeze and the wind chimes make a celestial sound. It is like Shaaaaa-riiiiiing.
Shariing has no name, but feels the wind and the bell sounds. Shariing is the sound, the experience of that sound, and the emotion wrought from the senses from that sound. But still, something is missing; some gnawing at the insides, some faint whisper pulls Shariing along like a scenting dog, except there is no dog, not even in Shariing’s mind.
They meet again today after a long abstinence. They look at each other differently: something has changed in the infrastructure of what lies between mind and form. There is going to be a change, which is what Shariing is looking for.
Shariing, in whose mind there is a mist of possibility, returns to the interior.
There is feeling like no other in the experience. It is a knowing and understanding, that there is more to the experience, and the more is beyond the experience, which would be beyond Shariing who is the experience. Shariing has everything, so how can there be energy beyond?
Shariing moves out to the garden, which is full of beings enjoying the green foliage, the bright electric hues of the flower world and the endless paths and walkways. At the end of the lane is the Other. This is an affair for the Other. Beings were created to talk to except no one spoke. Others were created as a greater reflection of the original image. A compliment which Shariing passes over because Shariing suddenly realizes that the Other is also troubled and has, therefore, created others to give him perspective.
Shariing moves out into the garden to find how this new environment will affect the experience. The beings react to Shariing with touches and looks as Shariing moves effortlessly, like liquid mercury, past the moment and off into a more remote portion of the endless landscape. Something is happening and Shariing is responsible; therefore, something is happening to Shariing who does not altogether understand from where all this motion was originating.
Shariing turns the experience to black, so there is no light, and the garden disappears. After a few moments, realizing that the Other is also there, Shariing is gone; is in the frame of the Other. The Other is gone and Shariing is alone. And then, quite of a sudden, the Other returns and there are two instead of one.
There is blackness and the two and that is all. Shariing thinks about the garden and the garden returns with all of the beings. Shariing moves past the still pools and returnes to the patio of the dwelling; Shariing sits on the steps and watches as the other guests move in and out of the area nearest Shariing.
Something hidden, slowly coming up through Shariing, but how could it be if Shariing is all there is, if Shariing makes all? There is no conflict. How can there be? Shariing would know because Shariing would be the source, the beginning, the. . . . . . !
Shariing moves fluidly across the space of the interior and then stops; concentrating on the space directly ahead, and a mirror brings itself into focus in a suspended space. Shariing can see the reflection. Shariing can see Shariing.
The form is simple. Two arms, two legs, one neck, one head. Hands and feet act as ends to these; pure translucent skin covers the form and emerald, electric light strands weave a carpet of sheer, green, blaze covering the form.
The head has two eyes, one nose, two ears: all fully functional. Then there is the mouth, which seems a waste except that it fills the space under the nose with a form which fits into the rest of the scheme.
With the eyes, Shariing can see even though Shariing; can see without a form. Through the ears , the sounds of the garden are received. The nose, reveals the fine scents that stream through the garden like laced rapture through electric currents.
The mouth is more like a void, which nothing enters or exits. Shariing concentrates on the mouth-form; focused its energy.
Shariing’s mouth begins to twitch, to curl; to gnarl, to change into shapes; to form birds, flowers, petals, ripples and then, suddenly, slowly; the mouth forms a smile, which explodes into showers of proton and neutron currents spanning the wavelength of every color consciously possible. Fire dances; a universe of fire and color showers the interior of the dwelling and flies into the garden where the beings are laughing falling over, gut splitting laughter.
Shariing flies to the patio to see the Other laugh, with welled up eyes. Shariing and the Other approach each other to an arm’s distance. Shariing holds up one arm and grasps the Other, pulling the two forms together in a dancing embrace.
The Other reaches up slowly in a caress and passes a hand over Shariing’s head. Like the gold of a sprouting flower, hair grows in deep lustrous curls which slip off of Shariing’s face and fall languidly into the air above Shariing’s shoulders.
Shariing stops and steps back from the embrace; feels the curls of hair, changes their color, changes the texture; and, finally, settles on a softer curl, an almost straight, golden blonde flow of electric, beautiful hair. Shariing’s hands drop to the side of the form and wait. The Other reaches up and with soft, gentle motions pulls a hand across where shorter, dark hair flows out like brown honey from an ancient oak. The Other steps back and the two look on and examine each other.
Laughter and frolicking break out in the garden behind the pair, who turn to witness an entirely new group of beings. Hair of every fashion fills the garden and there is more animation, and Shariing and the Other see this. They part as former walks through the throng, onto the patio and into the dwelling.
The mirror is still suspended where it was left by Shariing, who now approaches it, smiles and, again, there is a blast of color, and Shariing laughs.
There is nothing for a moment but the symphony of laughter from the face-form of Shariing; after a moment, even the face has melted in the roaring blast furnace of laughter.
Everything is black, and deep in the blackness is Shariing, giggling. There is still black; more giggling, growing to a larger, fuller sound. Ha ha ha ha’s begin to take place. Then there is blackness still and no sound. Electric energy begins to crackle in the darkness. Voltage, amperage begin to surge into currents of this most awesome structure and then from the crackling darkness comes a single word . . . . . . . .
LIGHT
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AND SUDDENLY THE CURRENT HITS THE VISUAL LIGHTBAND AND WAVES OF LIGHT EXPLODE INTO CURRENTS OF COLOR AND STREAM IN AND AROUND THE MOUTH OF SHARIING.
Light, and from light is born the word. Light is the word, and its incantation changes the structure of the Universe. Light in a single word produces the possibility of endless, eternal forms through a verbal structure, which challenges the mind with more images than just images themselves; a form of communication, for there is another to use the form with.
The mouth undertakes a more important duty than that of hole-filler below the nose. This is not a form which receives sound, but produces it. The word is instantly powerful; the word adds variance to form; draws a vivider picture with greater variety. The word introduces the possibility of difference, and difference is the divergent waterfall which claims all life as it makes its way down the endless drop through nonexistent time.
The word is a new mastery of unstated possibilities. As the word grows so does the dense Universe of understanding; and this Universe, which has always existed, is the darkness beyond the garden that Shariing has always felt but could not enact until the mystery of the word were solved.
Shariing feels joy at the possibilities of future namings and findings; discussions of opinions.
Shariing moves to the garden to begin the process, but the process has already been started by the Other; and, consequently the garden is full of beings with talking to with limited subject matter because even a scratch into what the possibility of the future would be with words had not taken place in this vast garden of experience about to happen.
They talk about trees and colors; birds and pools and reflections; and, of course, they talk about hair. But then someone began to ask questions, because words allowed them to do that. What are we? What is death? What is love?
An overabundance of knowledge is, even in the beginning of the beginning, a dangerous thing. Words are not benign. Words will eventually come to mean conflict, and from conflict life erupts full swing in a matched game, leg to leg with destiny.
Shariing, in the dwelling, looks at the mirror; changes the texture of Shariing's hair, over and over; moves away from the empty mirror and steps into the garden, which is empty. Shariing has never worn hair before but that's not the matter. Shariing has worn feathers, Shariing has been butterfly wings, tree bark and leaves, and many things past, and in different combinations.
Hair is different. There is a kind of power in hair that does not come from Shariing, which is troubling because Shariing is really the only thing, that is, along with the Other. Suddenly, thinking of the Other, the Other appears before Sharring.
Next to a wonderful pool of blue azure sits the Other; both stop for a moment, then Shariing says “Hi,” but then comes to realize, as does the Other, that there is more than just words to this sort of interaction.
Returning her greeting in kind, the conversation seems, to the other, to lose some majesty, grace; some discipline through which each of the words had a meaning. Now it’s coming clear, slowly, as the two move around one another; as the two make a touch gesture toward each other; that there was a quality lacking in the early dance , and it was the quality of experience.
Shariing has been forever, and now that the word is with Shariing, Shariing can see that as a fact of experience. The fact, which is most shattering, is that, since that beginning so long ago there had been no experience, experience needing a mirror to lend form to the experience. Shariing journeys long, back through the circuits of a mind trail; sees trees and leaves; ferns and giant redwoods with tropical forests; with pools of virgin water, clear, past the intense blue green of their native reflection, but there is no experience. There is perfect memory, but no emotion; no tactical sense beyond simple memory.
In the dwelling, at the other end of the lane, sits the Other. There is a slow, burning transformation as the Other sits gaping into the garden.
The Other stands and moves swiftly, off the steps, to the edge of a perfect hedge which runs back and forth; twisted, maze like, into perfect geometric formations.
The Other concentrates energy toward the hedge as it shifts in a magenta splendor, sparking and cracking electricity from the ground, through the air. The garden shifts and groans; pulls at itself as the Other pulls. Trees are uprooted, ferns cast in wreckage as other plants and plant forms grow up into the electric space.
The lane between the two grows greater in distance; bent now so there is no straight line between the two. The garden expands and tumbles in showers of pain and violence at the first vagaries of a paradise where time was born, from the struggle of mind and form, where life was born from the figment to the fragment, to the whole and then returned. Shariing steps out to the patio and finds that the world has changed forever.
A scene of deadly quiet: Shariing know that all of this could be as it is; but curiosity is born with the word, and so Shariing walks in the new garden, takes in the rock benches, and carpets of flowers blazoning the vistas past infinity. There are creeks and larger bodies of water, and trails where beings can walk, even though all can fly. Shariing sees that flying is really for birds, and sorrow invades the chain of feeling.
The Other stands and watches Shariing, in turn, standing and watching the garden, knowing The Other is watching. There is great power in this moment. A power shared by the two, exchanged and balanced on some great table and time line. This was an implacable destiny, breaking through its thickly layered shell, to expose its beautiful and often comic colored head. Destiny, born from the loins of the growing pair, looks at them and laughs.
They laugh at each other as they approach and embrace, and at the meeting of form and form, a cosmic fire radiates in the air between them, and burns their forms into a new shape. In the clutches of a power bending fury Shariing grows in some places; loses in others, as the Other grows generally. The huge mold shifting hand of burnt, orange-red releases its powerful grip and the two step back from each other: changed forever.
There are great differences now; the form and nature of the material body have changed; Shariing has divided what was once two; in the search for a quality, discovered that the one single unit of Shariing requires a change, so that eternity has a face from which history can be derived.
Shariing and the Other step away from each other, and male and female are born without blood or tearing; from a single unit; and two units of, now, different material, face the divergent possibilities between them. Shariing moves slowly back from the man who stands across from her.
Time can now begin its journey of endless possibilities.
Shariing sees from the vantage of the original source every aspect of the Other's and her coming into existence; how she gave up her power that the Other could come into being; and, because she was lonely, invented the word, and knew the hollow feeling of its reality. She also knew, now, the dark void she felt on the other side of the garden was an event that had yet to take place. She could see now that beyond the event was, for what everyone else was waiting; although who the everyone else was confused her.
The Other looked at Shariing in an entirely new way. The Other, the man, didn’t even know what it meant, but could feel a mighty pulling: a confused wavering and weakness. He sat down as his legs gave out and Shariing looked down at him and felt the same things. Shariing moved away quickly and because her newfound feet were not fast enough, she shed that form and an electric current of bird with blond hair streaked from the scene in the direction of the dwelling. The man stood up and heard nothing.
Shariing spent long hours now, trying to move her mind back in newly found time, before time ever was, but she could not. Now there were words, which committed the event of her and his coming into being, to an interconnected destiny: a sequence of timed couplets exploding into words, with years and millions of years mere fractions of a second in relation to the history which would now unfold.
What were these words that allowed for a semi-permanent separation from the original? Were they like hair, in that they held some mysterious force beyond the margins of their own palpable existence?
Shariing could see now that in the original singular state of Shariing, there had been no conflict; once Shariing separated into he and she, the acts of life now had a thread, a tangent of direction and a power to pull, to change, to cleave the extant Universe into a sensational battle field. And now all those words existed, though they were not in use: words of today were antiques the next; time was suddenly a force that moved conflict.
The Other sat on a large air form in his dwelling. He looked out on the ever changing garden upon which now lay a line dividing his and hers. This was no desperate kind of thing: there was no war over the placement of ferns or pines; the line really represented a difference. It was an obvious line that curved and twisted among the objects, neither an encroachment nor an invitation: the line merely was.
The Other could not go through life without a name, though he did not know that Shariing had one, nor did she; though she felt the need to call him by some sound that would be recognized.
The two rose from their different dwelling spaces and approached the neutral zone. Each stood across from the other and studied the figure directly in front of him or her. After many moments she looked
up into his eyes and spoke:
“Shariing.”
There was a clarity in the word, which rang out like church bells shattering the countryside with a peal of steel laughter. The high and low vibrations in perfect synchronization to the very foundation of one’s soul, though that word had no significance at this moment. Shariing’s name and the sound of the name and the vibrational quality of the spoken word broke the resistance of the Other and caused him to weep in despair of not understanding. He slipped down on one leg and dropped his head. He stood up quickly and Shariing moved forward and waited. Conscious that there was expectation, the Other did not know how to fill the moment, or what the expectation really was.
“You require a name. Mine is Shariing.”
Again the peals of sound-laughter sparked collisions of neutron color and knocked the Other off balance. Shariing’s hair was blazoned with blue and soft red current flowing like power bursts across the perfect turns of her head. The Other’s hair was also glowing, with bursts of blue and brown tones. The name was to be the perfect partner to Shariing; share in the majesty of the notes which her named produced when spoken or thought, and the Other sweated privately as he struggled with the task of naming himself to the Kingdom.
What could he call himself in the light of Shariing, the thought of whose name produced a quality of light exuberance. Light games played, visibly, in the foreground, and in the mind’s interior. He knew he could not remain the Other any longer.
She was very interested by these changes: what power did change have? Was change powerful in and of itself. Was change a name like Shariing, but chose not to live in any form? Or did it precede Shariing? She stood and walked into the garden; the Other was away thinking.
She stood on the patio and challenged change to show itself, but it did not. Shariing again exhorted change to take a form, and suddenly, in a burst of smoke and confusion, the Other was standing in front of Shariing, smiling.
More than slightly shocked, she waited for change to make it’s move. The Other looked at Shariing and spoke, stammering to create something to fill the silence.
Names and more names and names past life filtered in and out of his mind. He was sick to the point of giving up, when suddenly an electric clash of green-blue current passed before him; he opened his eyes and there in the miracle of non-existent space appeared the word:
“Morningstar.”
Morning had a certain feeling and star pulled him toward the heavens except that he was in the heavens and therefor he pulled in all directions. The two smaller words put together formed a firm, pulsing, vibrant word which filled him with joy and filled him with power. There was suddenly an arrogance within the frame of him who would now be called Morningstar. There was a feeling of melancholy which he did not understand but there was much he did not understand and he let this go.
He marched through his dwelling repeating the word over and over and over again until the ring of it’s beauty had totally covered him and he wore the word as if it had, from the beginning, been him all the time, had been him always. He was Morningstar and could not wait to tell her so he flew from his dwelling straight down the curved path, heart pounding, blood burning and body pulsing with a new secret that he was dying to share. Little did he know how prophetic that feeling was, little did he see how much morning there was left before the stars, that did not yet exist, would suddenly blossom through the Universe like that seeds of yellow flax spread from a frothing plant and giving birth to the hard shell of space which was now only occupied by thought.
He scaled trees and jumped over ferns, he flew past pools and finally he jumped up onto her porch and waited. She came out of her dwelling in a shimmer of emerald green fire and approached him like a wind of soft elegance pouring molded embers through a fabric of satin sheen. He stood trembling with knowledge.
He looked up at her and without haste he spoke his name.
‘Morningstar’.
There was a piercing pain that both experienced at the same time and she smiled through tears from an unknown fountain. There was no reason to weep, but she wept. It was a name of such grandeur that there was a soft harmony that accompanied its vibration through the air, into the inner ear. It was a word like blue silk woven in the wind and born through a channel in new time. Morningstar had a soft and complete texture that curled around and filled with effervescence; she heard the sound and wept, the sound that would remain a mystery for all time, until eternity reached a corner it could not turn, and then the mystery would be revealed.
Confused and full of joy, Morningstar saw that she approved of the name, but he also felt a deep stirring, like at the bottom of a large roiling river, where the hidden current possessed a power not revealed at the top nor middle of its existence; he stepped toward her but she countered with a single step back, and Morningstar was sad and enraged all at the same time. He had begun to leave when Shariing approached him on her own, and this was the simple answer to the question that roiled within Morningstar.
Shariing reached forward and touched his forehead, so gently and with such compassion that he fell backwards. She reached down and offered her hand, but Morningstar was too bruised by his own failure to accept it. Shariing began to move toward her dwelling, then stopped:
“It is. . . a wonderful name. It is a name that suits you fully as I see you, beautiful in the sweet drafts of morning light. . .”
Shariing broke off and left abruptly for her dwelling; whe had spoken of day when there had been no day, because light and dark were a division of Shariing’s consciousness state, and Shariing was always conscious; omniconscious and omnipresent. Therefore day, which was the opposite of night, was now a fact that Shariing had brought into their world, by the word and the word was mighty by its physical presence.
Morningstar did not know the word, that single word which would carry an immensity of power later on; the feeling, now, was of a lull in his life: he could not speak, he could not walk nor relish the beauty of the garden.
He had announced with great pride the discovery of his name, and she had wept. He had tried to show her that it was a good name, she had touched him, but with pity and compassion. Who was she that she did not accept, with equanimity, that which he had accepted of her? Shariing was a beautiful name, but was it more beautiful than Morningstar?
He spent days in seclusion, nights in gloom; and when he finally realized that he did, he became angry. Anger appeared as a feeling he could not describe: he needed language to express this deep well of fiery current that exploded in his mind which meant that it exploded in reality and was visible.
Shariing stood on her porch and watched the fireworks down the lane as Morningstar tried to master this new feeling: fire-red bastions cut through into orange and ultra-violet, and the sky was burning yellow with sad hues of cream, streamed ultra-bronze. Bolts of fire-scream shot from his dwelling as the man was born into pain. This was passion and pain, and the birth pangs of words to come. This was the channel, filled with blood: red rage, flowing out the birth-canal of hatred and jealousy, created solely out of the mind of a man. This was the cleaver whose blade would separate for all eternity man from woman. He was hot.
Shariing stood and watched, ached for the time when there was only one; but also knew that the existence of Morningstar had been inevitable, his creation; and because she had created him, she could not blame him for the heat of his awakening. So she shared his pain, and discovered his hate. She desired it so she could understand where the road was now taking them.
Recalling how she had challenged change to stand before her and be recognized, she saw that change had answered her and now cleaved day into night.
Shariing moved from the porch to his dwelling; she knew that words had created this fervor and she knew that words must quell the ugly form it had chosen in birth. She moved quietly toward the storm which appeared in front of her, she arrived at the dwelling and waited.
She knew that he knew she was there; they shared the conscious Universe because they were counterparts of the One. She waited for the storm to subside. He came out on his porch and they met.
There had never been a meeting like this, of this placement, color and hue: she bowed before him and he returned the bow. She stood and extended her hand; he took her hand and kissed it.
There had never been a kiss before, and the lips that met her hand were fire and burned her deep. And she could see when he raised his head that he was hurt to the deep and gnawing kernel of their shared existence.
It was a late afternoon with a warm breeze coming off the fern garden and passing them with a gentle cooling that softened the healing that had to come for life to be insured in the balance. He waited and she waited. They had reached the moment for words, but they had to be carefully chosen to keep the harmony from the dissonance that was its inversion.
“I am so sorry about what happened between us,” she said.
They were not big words but carried with them a wash of emotions that tore through Morningstar and peeled him out of his hate and his rage. Great tears of pain welled in his eyes as he choked some single syllable out of his throat, and then, “Yes. I’m sorry.”
There was no confession but there remained something that must be said, so the pair fought for words, to get at what might save the future from the doom it faced. There was a great fear that the words could not be formed, so they both sat quietly and waited for the language of change to appear on their lips.
She looked at him, and he at her, and she could see that something was coming. It was a single leaf in the pages of time waiting to be filled, and she had no idea that what he was about to say would change the face of the future, and would add a dimension to her own self that she had sought for as long as she could trace thought through her mind. He looked at her and his mouth opened; his lips and tongue formed a sound and the sound was uttered.
“I love you.”
Oh, how could there be a sound that when spoken would carry forth such a spirit of light and sound, a clarion trumpeted from the tops of mountains; and cover the rest of the Universe and beyond with such bliss? She received these words unknown to the paradise in which they dwelled, and her soul was painted in chartreuse, and pulled from her bosom to be exposed for all time, sailing like a green parrot, seared with the heat of a power beyond which there was nothing.
Lightning filled the skies and screamed joyfully through the palace of this mansion; this word was power embodied in a single vocal stroke that pierced time. She could not respond and he could not speak again. There was no reason to continue. A statue had been born that would bear the worlds and religions of man and woman.
She reached towards him and he was torn` from his own passion; the two which had been born from the One were returned to the One, and now the single presence of Shariing was the dual presence of Them. She was he, and he was she, and they were full.
Alas, was peace never intended as a constant of electric life: peace was in the understanding that an equal amount of pain is passed in between the ecstasy, and this was simply the cycle that completed the whole, without which we would return to the single form of Shariing; alive, but seeking. That duality allowed a line to be drawn and continue on until the drawer ceased to put pressure on the source.
Shariing and Morningstar had achieved half of their journey, but it was in part two that the fireworks were born, in the second chapter that our lives really began; it was from the second half that all the questions asked from the beginning of asking originated.
The garden had become a whole unit of their experience. Since the union of man and woman, location and origin had become the elemental pore of their understanding, to symbolize which they planted a tree in the middle of the garden. There had never been a middle to anything prior to their union.
Shariing kept her dwelling, Morningstar, his; they would meet in the morning and would leave each other at night. But, though endlessly happy, each could feel the slow gnawing at his or her partner's insides. Shariing knew that she was still responsible for challenging change to stand before her and take a form, and change was cutting a hole through the middle of Paradise and Shariing knew it was now only a matter of time before the whole of this world would be challenged by change and change would prevail. She tried to imagine what that change would be; and when this process began. Shariing tried to put into reality the seeds of her own dreams.
There have been dreamers on our planet from the beginning of time, but none so powerful as to dream us into existence in the first place. It was not Shariing’s wish to bring about this change, it was her desire to see what change might yield if allowed.
As we sit and ask the questions of eternity, so does Shariing; and laughs a good laugh at the dream-realities that began with her and now reside with us, and exist because of them, as a part of them; and, therefore, our efforts to measure time are only elaborations upon the being wrought around the power of the first two.
These were not ugly thoughts, they were not thoughts born from hate or viciousness; these were the thoughts of change that Morningstar simply did not see in the correct light. And something was happening to Shariing: she had become even more beautiful than before and this change was growing from within her; was change she did see from the correct light, and this change was growing in her, making her radiant from the inside; which galled Morningstar even more, and made him impatient and cold.
The quickening loomed and Shariing dreaded and willed it all of a kind. Her beauty become so radiant that she was almost pure light, Morningstar had driven himself into almost pure darkness.
She had set out new clothes for herself: an array of electric violet current that shaped itself slightly like a robe, which she draped over her form and walked into to the garden, to its the center and knelt down at the base of the large tree which looked down upon her, as a god. She whispered some words, prophetic, and the tree wept at the wisdom of her being.
Morningstar arrived from nowhere, mad beyond anger; he moved toward her and she stood to receive him.
He wanted to tell why he was angry but there were no words to express this kind of force. Shariing moved toward him lovingly, pointed to her stomach which was now large with the creation of change within her, and Morningstar was for a moment silent and without anger.
He viewed her and then premonitored what would follow. And so suddenly he struck her across the face and his hand, upon impact, exploded into a thousand rays of pure sunlight. Shariing would not accept this slap or any kind of assault from this being who had originated in her own consciousness; she raised her hand and struck Morningstar, with such a blow that his whole being was uprooted from the paradise and thrown into a whorl of dazzling, turning, exotic electric current. He spun out of the void of pure harmony and into the dark sleek cosmic sky that Shariing had always seen, beyond the gateway of the garden.
Reached out and grabbing onto the mantel of Shariing’s new robe, he pulled her with him and, so, they tumbled into the dark sky illuminating that which had never seen light. They fought in a sea of darkness bringing it light. From the force of their violence was energy changed into mass; did this swirling mass of exploding gases fill the galaxy. They turned and battled, glittering in light fantastic, flowering in the fire of an electric cauldron; condensing, deeper and deeper, into a single ball of energy, until the point of conception and the furious blast of space into a particlized volcano; thrown bodies across a distance unmeasured today in the years light takes to travel from one end to the other.
Stars, meteors, earths and planetary bodies: the birth pangs of Shariing as she and Morningstar fought; the center of this mammoth: a swirling ball of fire and immense molecular structure at the heart of a tree, on its branches born the flowers of stars and the buds of huge moving galaxies which spread out past time and sprout worlds we shall never see. And further in the center of this living heart is our birthright, and her name is Shariing and she is the living Mother out from which our unions radiate out. . . out to our eternal Father who is Morningstar, who waits now for the long procession of life to meets its eternal seed which is change, the only thing in our world, constant.
Shariing was always happy, always knew that deep in the core of herself was the child of our existence. She required another to fertilize this seed and she divided herself that Morningstar could come into being and be that other.
She has no hate and no sorrow. She knows that the fight she fought with her counterpart to time was a birth pang which we would all share as our destiny, as would energy always return to its source after change has been its partner.
Shariing comes to us from that leaf of time, filled in by the inexorable moment of birth. She is love, she is you. She is all that ever was and all that will ever be, and through her we live to experience this most fabulous life, on an earth that is her body, in a galaxy that is her mind, from a beginning that it is not in the realm of words to explain. And beyond this. . .is SHARIING.
SHARIING is everything.
SHARIING!
Mark Mc Quown has been honored as a Quarter Finalist in the 1997 Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship; as a Semi-Finalist in the 1998 Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship; and a Quarter Finalist in the 2000-2001 Scriptapalooza. His screenplay Graduate School was named fourth place winner in the 2006 Winter Script Network contest in Los Angeles.
He is the recipient of the 1997 Santa Clarita International Film Festival Award for Animation receiving similar accolades at the the 2000 Telluride Independent Film Festival, the 2002 Telluride Independent Film Festival and the 2002-2003 Key West Independent Film Festival. He was a Finalist, along with co-writer Donna Lizzio, in The International Family Film Festival.
Mc Quown is a co-screenwriter for the film PJ, starring John Heard and Vincent Pastore; and he is presently on the faculty and a production staff member for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy of Los Angeles. Mark recieved his MFA in Directing from UCLA, and is a member of SAG and AEA; as well as the New York Dramatist Guild and the Association of Los Angeles Playwrights.
