“All in Time”

"All in Time" – May 16, 2002

The Akashic Library stretched endlessly, its vast halls glowing with the quiet hum of stars and the resonance of infinite stories. Peter Fae and Calliope stood together before a shimmering portal, its surface reflecting the streets of New York City in the spring of 2002. The scene within was alive with movement: cars rushing past, the faint echo of jazz from an open window, and a younger Peter walking alongside a man with a confident gait, gesturing passionately as he spoke.

Peter studied the scene, his golden cloak rippling faintly as he sighed. “This was one of those moments,” he said, his voice threaded with memory. “A time when the nature of the mortal plane, and my struggles with it, came into sharp focus.”

Calliope glanced at him, her dark eyes inquisitive. “This was your time with Dan Walsh, wasn’t it?” she asked, her quill poised over the scroll she carried. “The one you called the ‘Lord of Time.’”

Peter nodded, his gaze fixed on the portal. “Yes. Dan was… an ambassador to me, though I didn’t fully realize it then. Time had always been incomprehensible to me. The rhythms of the mortal world, the structure of life itself—it was like trying to understand a language I was never taught. Dan carried an energy, a presence, that somehow made it tangible, if only briefly.”

Calliope tilted her head as she looked at the man in the portal. Dan’s hands moved as he spoke, his words animated, but the younger Peter’s expression was distant, his brow furrowed in concentration. “What made him so different?” she asked.

“Dan was a drummer,” Peter said, his voice softening. “A master of rhythm. He’d studied at Berklee, lived his life immersed in music, in the beat of things. To him, time wasn’t just a concept—it was a living, breathing force, something that could be felt and shaped. I admired him for it, even if I didn’t understand it at the time. And in truth, I didn’t. Not really.”

He paused, his voice thick with frustration. “You see, Calliope, time was… elusive to me. I felt it in flashes, but I couldn’t grasp it. I couldn’t hold it in my hands or feel it in my body. It was like I was flickering between dimensions, my sense of self constantly shifting, unmoored. Dan would talk about rhythm, about beats and measures, and it was as though he were speaking an alien language. I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t. Not yet.”

In the portal, the younger Peter and Dan stopped beneath the glow of a streetlight, their conversation continuing. Dan’s face was animated, full of passion as he gestured with his hands, explaining something.

Peter’s voice broke the silence. “It wasn’t until much later, after a trip to Burning Man, that something clicked. Dan told me once, years after this moment, that he could see it in me back then—that I didn’t understand what he was talking about when he spoke of rhythm. But after Burning Man, everything changed. I came back and suddenly… I felt it. For the first time, I could grasp what rhythm was. It wasn’t just a concept anymore. It was alive in me.”

Calliope’s quill paused mid-sentence, her gaze lifting to him. “What changed?” she asked. “What happened at Burning Man?”

Peter smiled faintly, a mixture of nostalgia and reverence. “It was the dancing,” he said. “My devotion to Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance. I’d been dancing more, grounding myself into the world through movement. Dance has always been my way of anchoring the chaos, of finding some semblance of balance amidst the shifting dimensions. And at Burning Man, that devotion deepened. The music, the rhythm—it wasn’t something outside of me anymore. It was something I became. Combined with the energies I’d sensed in Dan, it was as if the puzzle pieces finally fit.”

The scene in the portal shifted, showing Peter in the same small apartment on Bleecker Street where he’d spent so many nights documenting his thoughts and observations. Pages were strewn across a table, notebooks filled with sketches, lines, and fragments of insight.

“I started documenting everything,” Peter continued, his voice quieter now. “Every flicker, every shift. I was trying to make sense of it all—the movement between dimensions, the strange alignments I could feel but not explain. Photography became my tether, my way of capturing the moments that felt significant. It was my attempt to ground myself in the timeline, to understand the path I was walking.”

Calliope glanced back at him, her expression softening. “And did it help? Did it make the mortal plane easier to navigate?”

Peter exhaled slowly, his gaze steady but reflective. “In some ways, yes. It gave me something to hold onto, a way to track the shifts and make sense of the madness. But it didn’t solve the deeper problem. I still didn’t know how to exist here, how to live in a world defined by time and rhythm. Dan’s energy, his understanding—it was a beacon for me, a reminder that there was something I could learn, even if it felt impossible at the time.”

The portal shifted again, showing Dan seated behind a drum kit, his hands moving effortlessly as he played. The rhythm was palpable, the beat resonating even through the silent portal.

“Dan once said to me,” Peter murmured, “that all music was about what and when. About something happening in time. At the time, I didn’t fully grasp what he meant, but it stayed with me. The idea that rhythm is life itself—that the beats of music, of the heart, of the cosmos—are all part of the same flow. It was an initiation of sorts, one that would ripple through my path for years to come. From the streets of New York to the fields of Burning Man, to later moments on the Quest, it all came back to rhythm, to time.”

Calliope’s quill moved across her parchment once more, her notes forming a map of Peter’s unfolding story. “So, Dan wasn’t just a friend,” she said thoughtfully. “He was a guide. A teacher of something you couldn’t see but needed to learn.”

Peter smiled faintly, his voice soft but resolute. “He was both. An avatar of Time, if you will. In him, I saw a quality of consciousness that I needed to integrate. He carried a code of transformation, one that helped me understand not just rhythm, but my place within the rhythm of the world. It was a step, a crucial one, in the long journey of grounding myself in the Mythica.”

The portal rippled faintly, showing a fleeting image of Peter sitting at a small table, his notebooks open beside him, a stack of pamphlets and CDs to his left. He looked intently focused, his pen scrawling lines of thought as he listened through a pair of battered headphones.

“Dan’s influence,” Peter continued, his gaze drifting back to the portal, “along with that of James Vogel and the colors of art, pushed me toward a deeper understanding. The two of them—each in their own way—made me realize I wasn’t seeing or hearing the world as it was meant to be heard. The music of existence, the rhythm of things—it was all there, but to me, it was fractured, incoherent, like colors bleeding together in a cacophony I couldn’t decipher. It was overwhelming. But these inspirations especially gave me the inspiration to start looking for clarity. To find a way to hear the world in its true form.”

Calliope looked up, her quill poised mid-air. “And how did you do that?”

Peter smiled faintly, the memory bringing a touch of warmth to his expression. “It started with a course I discovered. ‘Perfect Pitch Ear Training,’ by David Lucas Burge. I’d heard about it through conversations with Dan and other musicians from Berklee and New York’s music scene. They were speaking a language—a language of sound and rhythm—and I realized that if I wanted to ground myself, if I wanted to make sense of the music of the world, I needed to learn it. I needed to understand the language of music. To make sense of the colors of sound.”

In the portal, the younger Peter was now listening intently to an audio exercise from the course. His head tilted slightly as he jotted down notes, occasionally closing his eyes, as if trying to match an internal sensation to the external sound.

“It was an initiation,” Peter said. “That course became a doorway for me, a way to start organizing the chaos I felt inside. It wasn’t just about music—it was about understanding the structure beneath the surface, the architecture of sound and rhythm that Dan and others could move through so naturally. I wanted that clarity. I wanted to feel the harmony they spoke of, instead of the dissonance that overwhelmed me.”

Calliope’s quill scratched lightly against the parchment as she captured his words, her expression thoughtful. “So, it wasn’t just rhythm or time you were learning,” she said. “It was the music of the world itself.”

Peter nodded. “Exactly. Through my conversations with Dan and the others, I started to see how music wasn’t just a thing humans made—it was a reflection of something greater. It was the pulse of the cosmos, the beating heart of the Akasha itself. And for me, understanding it became not just a goal, but a necessity. It was part of grounding myself into this plane, of bringing coherence to the shifting, flickering dimensions I was moving through.”

The portal dimmed, its light fading back into the ambient glow of the Library. Calliope closed her notebook gently, her dark eyes lingering on Peter.

“And now?” she asked, turning to him. “Do you feel it? The rhythm of things?”

Peter met her gaze, his golden cloak shimmering faintly. “I do,” he said. “It took years, lifetimes, perhaps. But now, I can feel it. Time, rhythm, the dance of the cosmos—it’s all part of the Story. And for me, it all began with Dan and James. They were the spark that lit the fire.”

ORIGINAL TEXT

The Books of Fae

2002-XX-XX – "All in Time"

"…My difficulty with the nature of time in the mortal plane receives an initiation in a friendship with a man named Dan Walsh, an avatar of music and rhythm whose very presence holds the keys to a new understanding …"

Lord of Time

The difficulty I had in grounding into the world was profound, with my senses on what seemed like a constant overwhelm, yet it was through the dancing and my encounter with certain avatars of what I came to understand as qualities of consciousness that I started to feel the first threads of how things worked in the plane of forms.  One of the major avatars of this was my friend Dan Walsh, a musician of excellence who I became close with during my time living on Bleeker St. in New York city.

Dan was a masterful drummer who had gone to Berkelee School of Music and was maintaining a successful career as a musician in the city.  It through my friendship with him that I first gained the ability to feel the rhythms of music.  It had happened at a passing of a threshold which involved many nights of curious conversation into the nature of time as it applied to the musical arts and my admiration of him as a drummer of excellence, and had happened to me spontaneously after heading the City of Dreams and returning with a newfound power.

In which I was spending a good amount of time moving through the streets of New Yorke, sharing ideas and inquiries with my ally Dan Walsh. While I didn’t know it then, Walsh would become a major ally on the Quest, helping me to understand that most primal of elements, Time.

Even then amongst the chaos I was in a fugue of constant divination, where what things appeared to be on the surface were experienced as signposts, portents along the Path resonating their vibrational essence beneath the surface.

Many years later, I would come to regard our relationship as one of Time & Space, each carrying a code of transformation in service to the Awakening.

It was from Dan that I received the idea that all music was something happening in time

The Color of Sound

It was an initiation, one which would repeat itself in the stars and the soil of my path in the 2005 episode "Song of the Land" and many years later in St. Petersburg during the 2016 episode "Saints of St. Pete's".