I'm in a dark space full of energy. It is pulsating through my body. I recognize that this energy which I feel and hear is sound. I feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. I start to perceive movement. The hairs on my arms sense velocity. Something very close is moving by me very fast. Or am I moving, on train tracks, an engine all my own? I am looking straight ahead, into blackness, and I am witnessing the extreme movement through my peripheral vision, my skin and my stomach.
Then I recognize and address fear. My trust falls away. I turn my head to search for more understanding. I am instantly impacted on my right side. I am thrust to the left and again I am thrown into unknown surfaces. My balance is gone. My center is gone. Out of control and unaware of itself, I am a sock in a dryer. I try and search for a focus. Like a dancer spinning, returning her eyes to a point straight ahead, I glimpse for a moment, and remember the blackness. I return my gaze to a frontal position and attempt to accept the whipping sensation around me. I search for the dark. I find it. I look into it. I move into it. Again, I am stable. I am balanced amidst movement, I am moving amidst balance. I trust this, and I start to relax into the sensation. It is exquisite.
Eventually. I am pulled backwards, out of the black space. I sense surfaces forming at my sides. I begin to decipher their form, their density. They are two walls. I am emerging from an in-between space, just a crack. An ignored and dismissed space. I am again amidst people, places, things to do and get done. At times I catch sight of negative spaces, gaps of disuse, and I know I have been there, what exists there, that I can go there.
I hear the Black Hole’s power of gravity buzzing a low tone. It pulls at my arm hairs. It grips my whole body, at times it entices me around the corner of daily life. I peek at and ponder the fall into it. The Black Hole amplifies both sound and silence and the heartbeat in my chest. I trust it will reveal itself and I will choose to fall in, for the Black Hole exists in the awareness of the potential of negative space, the ignored space, the too rarely trodden territory. And it does reveal itself.
I squat with my back to a concrete wall, hips open, resting my body, stretching my body. I am in the middle of an endless crowd of black sheep. A space filled with beings yet also an organism in itself. After many visits I have found that if I open to its flow, this space will lead me with its energy. It will bring me in contact with exactly what I need.
Here I am, stretching my back from base to neck, stretching out the compression from a night of bartending, stretching out the constricted muscles which have been pushing menstrual blood toward the earth. The top of my head finds the wall as my hips push forward, a deep arch in my back and in this position the very crown of my skull received the bass of the whole building, the whole structure, the whole organism.
The guttural vibrations which have been hiding in the walls enter me. A new method reveals itself to me, to experience sound, to experience the movement of atoms, to experience them entering my body not through air but directly from solid to bone. The wall, a boundary, an obstacle, divulges to me that it is permeable, a flowing current. I accept, I allowed this surge to enter me, to open me up and my ego leaves. I let it go, and experienced joy is joy is joy.
There is a Star Trek episode where Kirk and the rest of the landing party are mistakenly transported to an alternate universe during an ion storm. The Kirk we are familiar with finds himself in a universe where Naziism persists, where hate has triumphed over love. In this universe Kirk is constantly under attack, his own crew attempting to murder their captain, to steal his rank. Everyone is prey or predator. No one can be trusted.
It took me thirty one years to recognize the Black Hole, to recognize that I had already traveled through it as a child. It took me thirty one years to understand that I had once been lost in an alternate hate universe, but that I was now back home. It took me thirty one years to recognize my reactions were rooted in this memory of attack, of attempted murder of the true self.
Many in this home universe have tried to convince me to trust them, to coerce me out of the corner I was backed into. I was always terrified by the hands which were reaching for me, coming at me. I did not know these hands moved from a place of love. All I saw was attack, all I felt was fear, all I could offer back was to defend myself. Like a dog that has been beaten, I lashed out.
Your hands, my meteor, they were the most patient of any. With them came whispers, reassurance that what I felt was real, but not always true. I was terrified when you told me I am not under attack. I was terrified when you told me I was doing this to myself. That my mind was reacting to an internal reality, a memory. I fought to preserve my universe, because I could not believe that this pain was self inflicted.
Your whispers told me I was not crazy to be scared, scared to be alone with my thoughts and scared of the people surrounding me. Your whispers and two hands, my meteor, persisted. Finally, I gave into the gravity, followed it and again peered into the Black Hole and I saw where I had once been, the child mind in a universe full of hate. Finally, I could see that I am there no longer. I offer the fear to the Black Hole, it is pulled in and I am free. I howl with joy is joy is joy.
I awoke to something missing. The weight was not there. Sleep fell away from my mind as it had from my body. I smelled rain, and through its light melodic pitter-patter drops I heard a howling. Hear the hound, and I, and the Black Hole’s howl. Baritone breaths crying of fear, and fear’s products of misery. Guttural reverberations invite you with their gravity.