"The Tower" – January 19, 2002

The Books of Fae

2022-XX-XX – "Portal to the New Earth"

"…There was a city beneath the city. A place of elemental intelligence that pulsed and throbbed beneath the crowds of people and the hustle of the urban metropolis of New York …"

It was 2002, and I was living in a raw artist's loft at the intersection of Tillary St. and Flatbush Ave., right where the Manhattan bridge connected the island with the outlying district of Brooklyn. It was a raw, barely legal place where rent was decreased in exchange for living in unfinished conditions and ongoing construction. I had come into the city with the support of my family ….

I saw the towers fall. When the twin towers that had dominated the skyline of New York city had been hammered by rogue airplanes and had crumbled. It was a deeply mystical experience for me, a crack in the firmament of the dying paradigm heard around the world.

It was not a pleasant experience. I heard the planes hit. Felt the lives lost as a wave of force moved across the ethers. I felt the pain of death and rebirth shifting through me. It was the beginning of the fall of the old world. Of my old life.

In the tarot, there was a card called ‘The Tower’, which represented great change. As I watched the Twin Towers fall from my rooftop at the corner of Tillary and Flatbush Avenue, I felt something. A vast change in the atmosphere of the world. A change in the very substance of reality itself.

The Planes Hitting the World Trade Centers

I heard the planes hit. Felt the lives lost as a wave of force moved across the ethers. It was the beginning of the fall of the old world. Of my old life.

It was 2002. The towers had fallen, and with them, the edifice of the old World. Ripples moved across the ethers of the Creation, calling me to action.

I was living in Brooklyn at the time. In a concrete and poorly insulated loft space just across the manhattan bridge. It was a place supported by the graciousness of my father, who, recognizing the grand difficulty I had with understanding the most basic aspects of Earth life, paid my rent along with a small stipend to cover my weekly expenses. With it, I had just enough money to eat and support myself, yet little else. It was a major blessing, giving me the time and space to make sense of the overwhelm that was my everyday reality. To find some way of integrating into what so many called the ‘regular world’.

Little did I know I was soon to head off on an amazing adventure into a new World.

Something had called to me while in the realms of Starwood. Something ancient and remembered, wishing to be free. To dance in the fields of the Green.

It was Oliver who understood the mathematics, the ways in which the wood could be cut into shapes and fit together. For me, it was just a part of the incomprehensibility of the earth plane, as if I could not digest the most basic ways in which things came together.

On a basic level, I just couldn't understand how things went together. While Oliver had this inborn sense of engineering, of the angles and qualities of how things came together, the best I could do was approximate a shape in my mind and try to cut it out by hand. It was as if I simply could not grasp the idea of mechanics or engineering. It was like a language that I simply could not grasp, could not conceptualize in my mind or make sense of, another aspect of what I would come to call my 'mutant powers', the chaotic way my mind organized and processed information showing up as an inability to fathom the structure and substance of how things came together in the earth plane.

Yet there was something beyond this. Beyond the play of lights and water upon the surface and stone. Something that tickled me, that invited me into something beyond the chaos of my endless drowning.

A presence.

"Where was wonder hallowed fine

show me portals things Divine

weave the working things aligned

here was wonder hallowed fine"

Very often in the evening I would walk across the Manhattan Bridge to Tillary St., having conversations with the bridge-trolls, the elemental guardians made from the very substances of brick and steel and mortar that made up the bridge itself. Theirs was a different texture than the deva i'd felt in Central Park, yet equal in their way as the guardians and wayshowers of bridges and the places between places. Often as an honorific, I would shape rhymes for them, connecting in and out of spoken word with the elemental presence that was their essence.

TIllary Tower, as I called her, was a place in construction, and in that way I felt myself in construction, somehow part of the environment in which I lived.

Of course the spirit of New York was much, much larger than the idea of the statue of liberty. She was a presence, a deva loci that existed beneath and between everything, a living force which somehow contained all of the people within her substance, cells within the body of the living city.