"Call to Adventure" – January 1st, 2002

Committing to the Quest

We are all on the journey back to the Garden.

Starting the Jouney

Yet how to get to that world?  As a child, I read voraciously, absorbing all kinds of stories about grand adventurers.  In particular, I was fascinated with the idea of explorers, heroines and heroes that found their way into new worlds, documenting their journey into the unknown.  Of beings that somehow found their way to a hidden kingdom or alternate reality.

One of my favorite stories in this genre was “Journey to the Center of the Earth” by Jules Verne, a tale about a group of explorers descend into the depths of the Earth, discovering a whole new world.  This had inspired me deeply, for I knew there was another world, one that my constant flickering through elemental shapes granted me access to, albeit inconstantly.

I needed to find a way to stabilize my powers.  To make sense of what I was sensing and feeling, at the strange landscape that flickered in and out of my awareness like a waking dream.  In this the journey into the mystical world was a quest of necessity, a gradual anchoring of the lightning that radiated through the ethers.

It was here that I made a crucial decision.  While I had loved the roleplaying games as a childe, they no longer satisfied me.  I was not content with simply envisioning myself in a magical world.  I wanted the real thing.  To go on the Quest in service to something larger than myself.  To fulfill my compact with the Goddesses of Story, Song & Dance in a new way … embodying the adventure that longed to be written in my heart.

At my core, I knew that magic was real.  That the elemental deva who were my closest allies were real.  In that moment, I realized that I had to make a decision.  To further my devotion to the adventure.  It was a major decision, one that would eventually lead to a split between myself and my longtime friend as I refused to accept life at the margins of society, stepping away from the surface of the magic into the depths of what I knew in my heart to be true.

….

In that moment, I left the tabletop, letting go of the books and papers of an imagined reality, and committed myself to the journey deeper into the real magical world.

It was a surreal experience where I looked through the window through the reflection of another window, like a doorway within a doorway …

It could be said that the quest started when I left the world of roleplaying for the real thing, choosing to leave behind the tabletop of fantasy for the real magical world. I loved the game. I loved the creation of worlds and living within them, exploring the energies of story in a living spellwork of bardic inspiration. Yet at the end of the day, it was sitting around a table, not being out in the world or experiencing the depths of what could be. And because i'd always had a sense of the deeper subtle energies which made up the world I knew magic was real.

The time with Clark inspired me deeply for i'd seen vision of where that path, that style of genius could lead, and while I admired the excellence that sang through his form and his devotion to his craft, my interest lay in story before science. Or at least, the science of stories. Of how our world worked.

Life, I realized, was a journey of transformation, about going on an adventure. Of not knowing what lay past the door, only knowing that one must cross that threshold and commit to the Quest to find out.

Why play a character in a imaginal world when one could be the real thing? The world was vast, and there was a magical world. I had seen facets of it, snapshots of moments where i'd felt more alive, more connected to the larger universe, more mythical and real. More than that, i'd shot photos to prove it. To anchor the moments, and through that, track my way back to that world before I lost it to the chaos of my shifting gaze.

There was another layer to the world. I lived on it. Yet it flickered, shifting in and out of my awareness, and I would be lost, wandering through dark hallways and confusion.

was here that I decided to leave roleplaying behind, to feel more deeply into the subtle and mystical world that existed all around me. I felt outside of society, outside of time and space, strangely moving through a sea of shifting colors and sensations. I had investigated a little bit about the magical arts through books, but they had quickly been forgotten in the flush of firedancing and movement through the planes of my awareness. Even then, I had that sense of the elements of things. Of the police station and the firedancing, the bridge between places, my speaking with the trolls on the bridge, recognizing them as the guardians between the realms. I lived in an underland, another layer of the landscape that I navigated through in my fugue. It wasn't a contrived thing or a question of belief. I just knew the elemental intelligences were there and communicated with them. As I am at Tillary Tower, I am moving through a certain style of healing, accessing shaman

Yet even through my incoherence the patterns of that reality felt wrong. There was something distorted about them, something that agitated my very sense of self at it's core. It felt jagged, oily and thick, far unlike the touch and texture of the deva that were my closest allies.

Yet that was the thing. I saw everyone as the gods. Each of us, every human I encountered was part of something, embodying an elemental force. I considered the people a pantheon of incarnations of immortality, and was convinced that each and every one of us was a Divine being in various stages of itself."

And I was determined to discover that world. To heal myself of the splintering lightning that was constantly moving through my consciousness while making my way to a brighter world.

It was about devotion for me. About serving a noble cause.

Yet I knew there was magic out there.  Real magic.  Somewhere, out in the world, there was another world.  One just had to be committed.

It was like there were multiple layers to the world. That there were beings of magic, flush with energies and wonder existing just beneath the surface of perception.

Yet I knew there was magic out there. Real magic. Somewhere, out in the world, there was another world. One just had to be committed.

I could feel the presence of the Muses moving all around me, urging me to commit to the Quest even more fully, to live the modern myth of the paladin in service to a noble cause.

There was a presence to the city. An intelligence that was pervasive in-between the raindrops of the footsteps of the people on the pavement.

In my wanderwalks through the city I would often travel around the area near Washington Square Park. Close to this was the aspect of NYU for filmmaking known as the Tisch school for the arts. It was a place that radiated with the energies of story

Euterpe

She was real and she was not, a spirit made flesh, playing tones of light and sensation that wafted across the waters of the park like butterflies dreaming.