Out From The Center

A short story
By Tantra Bensko

We never know where to get started, because it is never obvious where the beginning is in the pathways spread circularly around us, hedges blossoming with reds, cut in shapes that suggest the other side of the ways to look at anything we might have in mind, and anything we could be surprised by in our dreams.

Because the circles extend in many directions, we tend to go in the direction of the smoke. In some of the directions we look in, the world sometimes appears to be burning up the old moments in some places more than others, and lighting up the new moments as they free themselves outwards from the core of their golden glowing. And we let it lead us.

The direction we take is like going outward from the core of all our lives into one of our beehive of quantum other lives, their compartments buzzing all around our central core. Each life thinks it is just the biggest thing. The all-important center, doesn’t it? The hedges have very different shapes in the various sections of the maze. And the blossoms are different each day with the changes of the natural unfoldment of nature, free of the human-centric ego’s attempts to hold them to one circumscribed point in space-time, and they are sometimes being more suggestive of the wafting of coils of pleasure,
 
sometimes more suggestive of bells, or nests, or grandmothers, or perhaps songs of the springtime,
 
denials of reality, nomenclature, wisps of dementia, surrealistic avenues into the next parallel reality over,
 
geometric philosophical constructs, garlands for dubious gods, circles of magic, chaos,
 
poetry of scent, calls to divine surrender, warm baths filled with petals and love, waking disheveled,
 
past life kisses, future life circuses, in between life danglings, or masks.

We use the mazes to induce synchronicities.

We start to feel a plot come on, interweaving, starting up sideways and downwards. Sometimes we just become them all at once.

The world is made of synchronicities whirling up against each other in tiny bundles, interwoven, impenetrable, impossible, leading back in on themselves, breaking out of linear time, entering our dreams and spilling out of them onto our ruffled shirts with pleasing stains.

Sometimes they are very obvious. Today, we are walking on the maze together and we realize there is some sort of darkening in the sky. It is taking on a tone we had not expected from the day, more filled in, opaque, taking its own presence in its own hands.

It feels angry at how people are trying to control it, flying chemtrails through it, which spew poisons to dumb down humanity’s evolving ability to sense beyond their beta-brainwaves’ analysis of the world. People are beginning to sense that our place within nature should be spread out in our spirits, within its loving continuum, rather than being artificially separate pests based only in the lowest level of the self. The governments’ attempts to stop that expansion, through chemtrails that waft behind airplanes and crisscross the sky with what naïve people who rarely look up assume are controls, has angered the sky. We are thrilled it is fighting back.

And we start to feel the grass palpably through our bodies as excitement, the ground being sensual to us, though we are simply walking along. We start to feel a stir within our sex, a warming, a mounding, a longing to lie down on the grass, face down.

The circles apparently go downward too, not just outwards. We had no idea. We are both lying downwards, our pelvises lightly pushed towards the earth with a subtle pressure, not calling attention to ourselves, but we find no reason to avoid doing this. It feels right. And we have opened the portal to the circles below the ground that go beyond what we had imagined this maze could be.

There are roots below the hedges, roots below the blossoms, roots below the squirrels and cats.

A cat falls from the sky. But we can’t see it, as our faces are downward in the anti-story. We don’t have to feel the arc of the plot, the conflict and questions. We agree that plots are based on addiction to conflict, to dramatic duality, and we are one with the continuum on nature.

We feel the landing of the cat below our noses, the thundering vibration of the quietness of it poise, the dreamlike agility they have on landing. Our skin starts to smoke the past.

We are agile when we fall from no matter how high to no matter how low. We are all the levels in between, ourselves. We just land and keep walking.

Copyright © 2010 Tantra Bensko
Photo adapted from an image by 1amgreen

Tantra writes:
"I break a story out of the linear framework based on problems, and characters limited to mundane selves. Instead, here is a hive of multiple aspects to the self, and a circular interweaving and morphing of existence. Characters don’t get caught in drama, and continue on with a kind of wellbeing grounded in surrendering to the fluid nature of reality, with a positive expectancy. Characters expanding into their larger selves, existing on multiple levels, inhabiting the worlds of quantum physics and dreamy consciousness explorations remind us that’s who we are, and not just the limited self of adrenalin and ego."

Tantra Bensko teaches Experimental Fiction Writing online, and in the winter, will be offering Mystical Prose writing through the UCLA Extension Writing Program. She is the author of Watching the Windows Sleep, published by Naissance Press and has more than 120 creative writing publications. She publishes authors’ work that exemplifies Experimental Writing at http://experimentalwriting.weebly.com. She has an MFA from Iowa, and has won awards, such as Cezanne’s Carrot’s own Journeys Award. She is a proponent of Lucid Fiction.  You can reach her via email at flameflower@runbox.com.