Golden Current 2: City / Aster Daisy

City / Aster Daisy

Grey Grass is a city, it would be nice to call it a sit-thee one day. For now it is a city, because of its super brain pumping chaos and confusion around the body of Grey Grass. It's heart keeps pumping too, suffocated by the super brain (but not really ey?) but for now it's felt like that, pounding in and out of brilliance into eerie suburbs full of strangers. 

Ishcah didn't drown in the slough to get out, she knew about the currents, so far from the golden one… so close though. In the great play, the stars aligned and birthed her with a reillance to rust, so she hitched a rusty current to get out. The funny part, and paradoxes can become funny, Ishcah getting out is actually about Ishcah getting back in.

There are trams which leave Grey Grass and go out onto and over the water, carrying ghosts looking for their death. Ishcah caught one of those trams with her sister Rune, they went out onto and over the water and arrived in Romamor. Ishcahs sister was very Rune-ish you might say, all sacred symbols on polished stones without  ground to roll em’ on. 

Maybe Roll would be a more auspicious name, the part between the rune and the ground. It would be a fitting name for anyone, any person. Romamor is where Ischah didn't decide to go mad. You can't go mad by choice, it has to happen. Romamor is where Ischah went truly mad, that madness was in her coding, the coding of sacred patterns.

Have you ever seen those optical illusions? The patterns that have pictures secreted within them that pop out when your eyes become lazy? Well, this story is going to be a bit like that, but it's your brain's eye that has to go lazy and your heart's eye that’ll be following and then you might just ask yourself, who the heck is following and can they be followed and when then answers ‘No’ you might end up in one of the dimensions spake about in this story. So, activate discernment. 

Richard’s house is where Ishcah  lived in Grey Grass, in her adolescence. The house was one in a row of terraced houses on a street facing a lake. There was a kebab house nestled inbetween a gathering of red fir trees over the road. It was uncommon to see a gathering of trees anywhere in Grey Grass but more uncommon than that was to have a takeaway at its heart.

In Grey Grass you might have a takeaway with a young, patched, weedy beech frongling out of a crack in the pavement. The red firs surrounding Frida’s kebab house were a small forest, and the truth about a forest is, once you are inside it, you are inside every forest. It only matters that there is a forest.

Frida’s kebab house is special and it will always be special whether it stands or not. As Grey Grass deteriorates under the pressure to rectify itself, with its parks of dead wheat and dust and ponds of charcoal toads that never grow bigger than an inch, Frida’s kebab house managed to keep the firs green and plentiful or those firs managed keep the food good; news flash, the chicken and the egg came at the same time. 

On the lake facing Richard’s house, six black swans lived. They lived off anything that floated in the lake and looked very well for it. Sometimes people would say ‘It’s not right to feed the swans human food, you should feed them seeds.’ Ishcah used to gawp when people said stuff like it, her mind would whirl like this, loud and righteous ‘Find me a seed if you can (first of all) and then I will show you the seed within the seed within the seed is spoiled. I am going back to the beginning, then maybe I will feed them a seed, but until then those kebabs are the first and last wonder of this world. Can't you SEE how well they do. And anyway, humans shouldn't be eating human food either.’ All the while her mind would be playing out that way and there would be a secret of specialness, separateness in the seed of her heart. 

Benou and her sister Rune were her allies at that time. Rune Nettleship, Ischah Nettleship and Benou Water. Benou was an old friend from school and he and Ishcah came from the same place, the exact same center, making the cosmos of mysterious friendships. When you meet a friend like that, you might think you've known them in a past life, that you have some infinity with this being in some mysterious beyond, but usually you're recognising them from your future. Time is relative and doesn't exist. Your future has already happened and when something bears great relevance you feel it all at once, you go into the mysterious beyond with them at that moment. Your future is your past life. That's what soul mates are all about. When you mate, you become one, you also tend to make one, a child. That child represents two becoming one. That child is made one and then becomes separate again and does the dance of the realms. Soul mates are people that you become one with. So no future, no past, only presence. You touch the mysterious beyond, you dissolve. That's how one ends up being able to time travel. Travel companions start at the center together and they flower out, and loop back in again and meet back at the center, nothing has changed for them. True friends will often say ‘No matter who we become, or what we do, or how much time has passed, when we talk it's as if nothing has changed, we pick up right where we left off’ - that's because they began at the center, anything that begins at the center will endure eternally and will never change. With these people you can time travel, this is your soul friend. 

In the dance of the realms, there is diversity, a cornucopia of things that spring from the center and loop back into it. All the things leave the center and return to it. And when they are the farthest reach from the center they lose sight of it completely. They say it's darkest before dawn, and that's because when you're at the point of complete ignorance to your origin, you're about to tip over into your return. 

Basically put, that same center makes thousands of copies throughout the universe and they are all a bit different like a meadow of flowers. Benou and Ishcah and many others you will meet in this tale pillow out from the pollen puff of a universal torus that has the personality of an aster daisy. All the friends Ishcah made were like aster daisies. Each was like the flame or their petals, weedy, irregular flames emerging from a blocked, rusted hob. 

Aster daisies spring up along harsh coastlines, along the periphery between the ominous moon and wild, wind fuelled waters and the pavements of society. Aster daisies light up the bracken and bramble and gorse mini heaths on the edgelands, with their punitive purple and bee yellow heads, little stars yes and purple flames yes, but their stems are weedy and have shallow roots. Having shallow roots was their good fortune, it's what kept them close to being alive. 

(Dedicated to my frequent visitor in Council Bluffs, USA, lots of love, hope you enjoy)