This week's Sunday Story is another fantastic entry to June's short fiction contest:
In Utero, In Universum by Star A Prufrock
It is the beating of my mother’s heart which connects me to the life awaiting me, which hums beyond the confines of this anatomical chamber. But it is the whispers of my own soul which connect me to the pulse of the Cosmos. It is not just amid inner space I dwell, but in outer space as well: one side of my being existing in not one, but in both—as I prepare…to live…
What will I forget? What will I choose to remember? Which secrets will sink below the ocean of consciousness and which will rise again to its surface?
There is no greater teaching to come from without than there is to come from within. This do I feel, this do I know. Awake in the womb am I and still aware in self; the long sleep that is to come once I have passed through the death of birth, not to awaken until the birth of death.
Where will I call my home? What name am I to be given? What is the mission for my life? Whom shall I love? By what means shall I die and when? Already have I knowledge of these things; this knowledge stirs my toes, it moves my fingers and it will serve to open my eyes when the time comes. It is the memory encoded in this ever-evolving body’s DNA, the memory of soul which speaks to me. It is the voices of my ancestors, the utterances of the stars and of all the selves I have been.
‘Selves’ you ask? Oh you see, I am very old and I have lived many lives. I have been a prince amid the sand-colored pillars of ancient Egypt. I have been a slave among the bone-white columns of Greece before the king of Christianity was born. I have sipped Spanish wine as I wrote scriptures by candlelight when I was a monk during the Dark Ages. I have gazed out to a sea bluer than the eye of a sapphire as I manned a wooden craft which sailed its waves. I have kissed the lips of a peasant girl whose skin gleamed golden like the wheat she gathered into a hand-woven basket. I have tilled the land of an Irish-green landscape which smelled of the earth after a springtime rain. A thousand deaths have befallen me and so then a thousand births.
In the newness of this body--in this configuration of flesh, blood, skin and bone—I am a phenomenon, a jewel-like wonder in the core of my mother’s being. I am in the center of all time, all space. Beside this body there is a light—it is this light which has been speaking to you of such secrets; it is that of my soul’s. This light is the one which I shall be guided by in the life to come. It is all that ever was, is, and shall be.
No comments:
Post a Comment