Astral Planning

July 31, 2005

You have a found a portal for time travel. You close your eyes on the cliffs of the faraway but somehow familiar seashore. With them open you can almost see England lying north across the channel. This is rare highland seashore. Dover, Donegal, Cape Spear, Gijon, and Cape Town are bound together by similarities in light, scent and birdcalls on the arc of the wind. The smell of that wind brings images of life to you from the far distance. It hits the warm terra firma and brings you tide pool sea life, exotic flavoured oxygen. Close your eyes and imagine you are back on your own stretch of familiar seashore. Nine thousand miles away on the edge of a different ocean altogether are the same smells, textures and a wind that can sometimes make you plant one foot behind you to brace against it. It’s a cool day in Spain but it would be a warm day there. Conjure a familiar shoreline all those miles away. It is one you know. Sandstone sculptured in even ridges at low tide lies at the bottom of a familiar trail down through the long grass and blackberry brambles. Spanish children’s chatter fades to Anglo babble. It’s been two weeks but you can be home in minutes. Feel you are there. Wait it out. Clean the slate. Don’t speak. Feel the home feeling. It’s so much like falling asleep in another hotel room and dreaming a dream that puts you in your own bed. The air conditioning is the same. The darkness is the same. Similar habitats facilitate time travel. Your particles vapourize and reconstruct themselves to stand on home soil for what can seem like hours but is only for seconds. It happens accidentally at first like any great scientific discovery. Newton is hit on the head by an apple. The apple tells him how to play with the forces of natural law. Somehow we are being told that the laws of time and space can be liquefied and manipulated. It may be in our heads but who’s to say that is any different than actual physical travel. You cannot divorce the mind and body. Systems connect. Feed one and you feed the other. This trip home refreshes you almost as much as doing it the hard way by dragging your flesh and bone all the way back. Meditation works like sleep reconstructed from a concentrate -- concentrated rest. Feed your home fire then fill up on adrenaline during re-entry. Open your eyes. Scare yourself in the freefall from the astral plane. Enjoy the ride. You don’t have to understand the laws of nature to defy them.