111 - So it is with All-Spirit

What I had felt as I’d walked here had just been the first inkling of it. Where I had not had eyes or ears before, it seemed now I had; it was not seeing or hearing, but it was perception, and it could reach out into the dark, somehow following the paths of the life of all that lived here.

I tasted the woods, spoke to them with thought. I greeted the trees, and the grass, and the insects trilling, the rock and the soil which carried everything, with wordless and senseless love. Life beyond me called to my own, warming even my loins, the last thing I would have expected in all this discomfort. I greeted no human souls, there being none; as I’d sensed, I was alone; if I had guards, they were far away. Now, that knowledge brought no fear, for now it didn’t matter whether I lived or died.

I lay for a time just basking in it all: my bonds, that I knew now I had needed, to keep me here for this when otherwise I would have run like a rabbit; the aches in my muscles, coming up harder now as I let them relax, that told me I was intensely alive; the earth beneath my back to which I was now joined like rib to spine; the sweet heat of desire without desperation; the forest and the air from which I was not truly separated, as if my skin were an open window, from which I never had been separated, but had only become clear on that now. All-Spirit.

Would I hear the singing wind, more clear and beautiful than ever before, perhaps in the same tune as the chant formed from the senahera’s instructions to me? No, that did not happen; it was going to reveal itself in some other form, I understood. The chant suddenly ceased and, not by hearing or feeling, but by the perception I could not describe, I knew with absolute certainty I was not imagining it. Something was coming through the woods.

I am open. Fear came acrid, but didn’t block or dampen anything, or even cool the sexual pleasure. My lungs wanted to pant with it again; I let them, and freed my voice too, so that the clearing must have been filled with the sound of rhythmic moans. It was just fear—or was it a mix of fear and pleasure?—while the rest of me waited. That deeper perception was matched by those of my worldly senses I still had; I felt the steps of something weighty reverberate through the ground, and found my nostrils suddenly filled with a deep gamey scent. Then I felt a brush of whiskers, and a snuff of hot exhaled air on one foot.

What shape it had, I don’t know. Sometimes I got the sense of a bear, sometimes a wolf, sometimes a great lion or cougar; perhaps it was some agglomeration of all three, or perhaps the nature of any one animal was too limited to describe it. It didn’t matter to the senses I had, so they didn’t tell me. I knew it as presence, and by feel. You are very much a person of touch, who perceives reality through his bodily sensations… of course it was this way.

I tried to fit together what I could feel of its character, its mood, as with a person, and marveled that I was doing so with an animal. But what I felt was too foreign to fit the human terms, which were the only ones I truly knew. (It occurred to me then how enormously more there is to the world.) There was a vast sense of gentleness, and what I can’t describe as anything but wisdom, yet in wordless, animal form; perhaps it is better described as a sort of firmness, or solidity, in being, an unquestioning, and thus unquestionable, sense of its own presence. There was playfulness and curiosity too, that made it easy to imagine as a cub or pup or kitten; and a hunger I could not name.

It sat beside me on enormous haunches. Its coarse fur warmed and tickled my side at once. If I’m dead, I’m dead, I thought. The fear was instantly gone. I waited, feeling myself fall lax all over again, open and joyful to my core.

Should I speak to it? Some part of me laughed. What would I say? “I hope you won’t eat me?” “Show me my greatest and richest mysteries?” I just told my mind to shut up. Its head leaned down over mine, its breath warm and smelling not putrid, but deep and meaty. Whiskers pressed against my cheek. I sensed it opening its jaws as if yawning. I give myself. I arched back my head, the one thing I could move. Its teeth closed tenderly, just enough for me to feel the encircling ring of warm sharpnesses, and there I lay joined to the creature by mouth to throat, for a time I cannot name, since time stood still.

Then it licked my chin with a tongue like a greathound’s and rose to its feet. It sniffed around my hands, my shoulders, my hair. Now it wandered away for a little, for no apparent reason, and then back, in the way of animals, sat between my spread legs, and sniffed my genitals.

All-Spirit—it can see, and smell, what I feel. While part of me squirmed inwardly in horror—all the foreigners’ stories of Yeolis and sheep notwithstanding, I’d never had such an inclination—the greater part of me reminded the rest, this is not an animal in the usual sense. Sentience, I had learned tonight, from it, need not be verbal.

I stood at the brink, while it patiently waited. Its hunger, I understood, was for oneness with me, to make me further understand oneness, to carry me to a place yet deeper, a closer melding with all that is. I was afraid again—so many gates of fear I had run into, and broken through, tonight, and yet was not confident—and so lay speaking to myself in my mind. There is no harm here; there never need be harm anywhere. Not an avowal, but a revelation; I lay mind-blinded with it for while.

In that spirit I can give myself, I thought, and leaped over the brink. Perhaps I had a wing on my shoulders and would fly, perhaps I didn’t and would plummet to my death; no matter. I raised my hips to its open mouth as I had my throat.

I find myself shy to describe this, doubting my ability; I am not a writer as, say, Norii Maziel is a writer, but I wonder if this might be even beyond his power. I suppose it is that it is so personal and delicate too; and yet the Committee had laid and would lay me no less open.

The animal’s tongue on my manhood was muscular as a snake but warm; tender as silk, or a breeze, but insistent. I give myself. It wound around me, impatient, heating with its own hunger, then pulled away with that same animal capriciousness, then was back, licking carefully and thoroughly, as a cat cleans itself, around my anus. When it was satisfied at its work, it pressed the tip of its tongue in. This way, I knew, it would draw me into a deeper giving, the giving that is so total that the lines between one being and another are erased; I felt that intent, and joined my own to it.

Like Shininao in the dream, it reached further into me in increments, but this was penetration by life and the creation of me, not death and my destruction. I need do absolutely nothing, not even think of doing anything, not even think of how I was. That was familiar, and I suddenly knew where from: the Ten Tens.

I felt penetrated to the heart, bleeding in the sense of mixing my blood with its, still contained within our two bodies, when it drew its tongue out, shifted its weight and thrust another appendage of hot flesh slowly and gently into me; its member, which was narrower than a man’s, but firmer—and yet the creature was without maleness, if you can understand that, since maleness excludes half of the whole, and it was an all-creature. Its full length took me as deeply as I could be taken, so it seemed as if its tip pressed into my heart. It held me there still, for a while, and then its tongue wreathed around my manhood again, and its mouth sucked me in, between tongue and palate.

We short and stiff-spined human things must take turns, between giving pleasure with the mouth and taking it with the member; not so those whose bodies are built supple enough to bend double. I fell into a deeper and wider tide of pleasure yet, roaring out like breaking sea-waves all down my limbs; each level it lifted me to, I could not imagine greater, until I was lifted to the next.

The truest partner in ecstasy pleasures him or herself on your pleasure, your ecstasy-throes bringing its own ecstasy, the most physical and thus truest appreciation of another person. So the creature did, piercing me and being pierced by me at once; it was pleasuring itself through me. I understood; my place was only as a conduit, as a hinge between its action and its own pleasure; I was there only because I was alive and could feel, and so respond and thus reflect it to itself.

So it is with All-Spirit, I understood. The Divine creates for no purpose but its own joy, and to see itself joyfully reflected; what else is there, really, in life? And so what is the world, with all of us on it? The reflection that the Divine has created, so as to shine joy back to it; joy manifest.

I came as is far beyond my power to describe, as did the creature at the same time, but for me, at least, it was a peak not only of flesh but of revelation. All came clear to me, which was already clear to the creature, without words. I will describe it as best I can, knowing I do not do it justice, but hoping at least that some sliver-sized beam of the universe-encompassing shining I was shown will come across.

Everything truly is going as it should; I almost laughed as I saw it. Speak of doing what All-Spirit wants, and it sounds too limiting for what that really is, as if All-Spirit were a strict war-teacher or a bossy administrator. To do what All-Spirit wants, you need only be alive; the more alive you are, the more you are what it wants. That is all it wants: nothing more, nothing less.

Komona was indeed right: I was afraid of All-Spirit, or at least had been, as far back as I could remember, until now. The Ten Gods of Arko we experience incrementally, since they are each a tenth of it. All-Spirit is all spirit: all at once. All-Spirit is all-possibility, the shattering certainty (as Surya knew) that all is good—so that he could always say, utterly truthfully, everything is going as it should. All-Spirit is the erasure of every pang of doubt or fear, every snake-thought of the death-hour, every black anger or even annoyance, every harsh word or contemptuous glance. All-Spirit is the truth, known to the bones, of a goodness too huge to approach with anything, at first, but absolute terror.

All this came to me at once, without words; I use words only to convey it, though I know I truly cannot, as words divide into parts, and this was something indivisible. How long I came, and was fully in the revelation, I don’t know, whether a bare instant or a bead or a year; I had the revelation that time means nothing, as well, and, while I was there, that revelation erased time. I could neither hope nor fear the end of it, because while I was in it I was capable of no thought at all, only the utter shattering of every cell with ecstasy. When it was over, I could not be sad it was over; I was full of too deep a satisfaction to be sad over that, or anything.

I lay spent, slowly becoming aware again of such things as the slowing of my panting breaths, a touch of soreness in my throat from yelling, the coldness of the night, and the thousands upon thousands of tiny life-paths in the earth and trees all around me. The animal gave me one last fond lick, then lay down beside me, cuddling its huge body close, its fur soft and radiating warmth.

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