Synchronicity exists in the person, not in the “real” world (whatever that is.) Two things happen all the time. Why do we sometimes go “Whoa! Those two things just happened!”
My theory is that humans are weird and we don’t really need to survive most of the time. We have all this extra time to get in trouble and a neo-cortex that’s only been around for a few million years. Who knows what all it does.
We are apparently wired to supply meaning to just about anything. (E.g. socks!) There’s a part of the brain that supplies a sense of importance to what we experience. The attribution of importance is great for survival: that lion sneaking up is more important than that grazing giraffe. If you drop acid, this part of the brain will fire like crazy and suddenly everything will be super meaningful.
There is also an area of the temporal lobe that when artificially activated creates feelings of “oneness with God”, just like there are areas of the occipital lobe that when artificially activated produce visual hallucinations. It’s only logical to assume that these parts of the brain evolved to respond to real stimuli; we have yet to find an example of a physical body evolving to adapt to something that does not exist. But again, it’s up to us to figure out whether we are hallucinating or not.
So, I have this body and it does this weird thing where it sees two things and goes “whoa! that was awesome” when part of my brain supplies the importance and another part supplies the god-touch. And sometimes this is completely made up and leads me on a merry chase through the illusionary astral. Sometimes it leads to good luck. And once in a great while it does lead up.
Learning the difference is helpful. Learning to find the one you want is magic. But what the heck do I know? All I am certain about right now is that I’m in a body that does certain things that may or may not lead to other things and I get to decide if I like where I’m going but I don’t necessarily know how to change course and anyway, most of the things that are happening to me are really happening to other people.
Oh, and atoms are made of nothing and dreams. I’m apparently quite convinced of that as well.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Curiosity
We start embattled, our identity formed in response to the rapid assault of birth. It starts the journey. We are separate from all others. Such a shock from the womb where in the dark we were the world. And now, alone and distinct with our suits of skin, we fight to breathe, to damn the air with our screams.
One thing. The terror is assuaged by only one thing. There is softness. Soft flesh that soothes and feeds. Kindness. Gentleness. And from that can spring a curiosity of the world.
What is this place to which I have come into being? This ground from which the body forms, and thus gives rise to the terror and the kindess. How then to enjoy division and separation, rather than flee from it.
One thing. The terror is assuaged by only one thing. There is softness. Soft flesh that soothes and feeds. Kindness. Gentleness. And from that can spring a curiosity of the world.
What is this place to which I have come into being? This ground from which the body forms, and thus gives rise to the terror and the kindess. How then to enjoy division and separation, rather than flee from it.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
About That Elephant...
Imagine that you had never seen an elephant and didn't have a word for it. Now imagine that you see one and you have to describe it to other people who also have never seen and don't have a word for it. Imagine that you don't have words for "trunk" and "tusk" either. How would these people respond to your description? Some might believe you. Some might think you're crazy.
Now imagine you meet other people describing something they've seen. They call it something else. They use different words to describe the tusks and the trunk, but slowly you realize that they are in fact describing the same thing.
That is the whole divine world. We all go get a glimpse and come back and talk about it with each other, but we don't have the same words. Slowly, tho, if you look at all the spiritiual systems around the world, you can start to see that we are all seeing the same thing. It's just that we are blind and the elephant is really, really big.
Now imagine you meet other people describing something they've seen. They call it something else. They use different words to describe the tusks and the trunk, but slowly you realize that they are in fact describing the same thing.
That is the whole divine world. We all go get a glimpse and come back and talk about it with each other, but we don't have the same words. Slowly, tho, if you look at all the spiritiual systems around the world, you can start to see that we are all seeing the same thing. It's just that we are blind and the elephant is really, really big.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Orion and the Devil
I love that we are made of stardust. We are. We contain elements (like GOLD) that can only be made in supernovas. Yay!
Right now I have this picture of the constellation Orion on my desktop. You can just make out the Horsehead nebula to the right of the first beltloop, and further towards the hunter's knees, the eponymous Orion nebula.
There's Betelguese, at the left shoulder, all orange and sending the light of its own supernova hurtling towards us. It has already exploded, already made its gold, and we are just waiting for the light to arrive, which could happen AT ANY MOMENT - astronomically speaking. And in a billion years, there could be people made out of that star.
It should be known that I come down differently about the Devil's Bargain. That was a great deal. We get to live a whole life in the crazy incarnate state and the garden is just there waiting for us whenever figure out how to get back to it. Of course, the Devil had to make it seem like a rip off, had to pose as a snake in the grass, otherwise we would have suspected some trickery. It's just too good to be true!
I say that knowing that my middle-aged back is starting to hurt. I just got my first reading glasses last year. 150 works miracles, but my mother has just gotten 300s so eventually. I have one very close friend and for Christmas there was just my parents and my sister. I have a heartbreak still seeping from the 11 year marriage that fell apart 5 years ago. And through all this I've managed to not write that much, not create very many things, not break into management and also not get horribly addicted to anything, also haven't gone on a rampage, haven't oppressed anyone religiously or otherwise. I have neither had children nor left them on a bus. I have managed a mediocre life. And yet, when I look at Orion, I think there's something amazing echoing through me, through all of us.
To zoom in for the details of Orion go here.
Right now I have this picture of the constellation Orion on my desktop. You can just make out the Horsehead nebula to the right of the first beltloop, and further towards the hunter's knees, the eponymous Orion nebula.
There's Betelguese, at the left shoulder, all orange and sending the light of its own supernova hurtling towards us. It has already exploded, already made its gold, and we are just waiting for the light to arrive, which could happen AT ANY MOMENT - astronomically speaking. And in a billion years, there could be people made out of that star.
It should be known that I come down differently about the Devil's Bargain. That was a great deal. We get to live a whole life in the crazy incarnate state and the garden is just there waiting for us whenever figure out how to get back to it. Of course, the Devil had to make it seem like a rip off, had to pose as a snake in the grass, otherwise we would have suspected some trickery. It's just too good to be true!
I say that knowing that my middle-aged back is starting to hurt. I just got my first reading glasses last year. 150 works miracles, but my mother has just gotten 300s so eventually. I have one very close friend and for Christmas there was just my parents and my sister. I have a heartbreak still seeping from the 11 year marriage that fell apart 5 years ago. And through all this I've managed to not write that much, not create very many things, not break into management and also not get horribly addicted to anything, also haven't gone on a rampage, haven't oppressed anyone religiously or otherwise. I have neither had children nor left them on a bus. I have managed a mediocre life. And yet, when I look at Orion, I think there's something amazing echoing through me, through all of us.
To zoom in for the details of Orion go here.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Hydra And The All-Seeing Eye
A path only reveals itself in the journey. No one knows what it looks like until they’ve traveled it. If we are lucky, we will receive instruction ahead of time telling us what to look for, but usually we don’t recognize either the instruction or the luck and will pass by the obvious landmark many times before realizing that dirt path past the twisty tree is really the way to the castle.
Way back when life was first starting to collect cells, there was a point when organisms started being able to detect light. These organisms - probably a Hydra or “living jelly” - had no eyes, no lenses, no cerebral lobes devoted to interpreting the data of photons. Instead, they had molecules, specifically proteins, within themselves that would agitate when hit with light. In darkness these proteins would go about their business interacting with other molecules the way they were built to do. But when hit with the energy of a photon, these molecules would take in the energy in the light and get energized.
Now the organism had a way to tell the difference between light and dark. But at first, light and dark would have no meaning. The experience of light for the Hydra was not illumination and focus. Objects were not revealed. The original experience of light was simply an excitement in the presence of something unknown.
It might have taken generations for any advantage to come of this. The proteins originally reacted to photons not because they were seeking enlightenment or even a hunting advantage. These proteins were simply following physical laws; their bundled atoms - just energy themselves - absorbed the incoming energy of the photons because they chanced to be arranged in a way that made absorption inevitable. At first, this reaction just existed on its own. It wasn’t tied to any action in the organism. The Hydra didn’t do anything because its proteins got excited by photons.
But eventually, a Hydra did do something in response to the light. It may have taken thousands of generations for a Hydra to link the feeling of light to the feeling of movement by a water flea, but when it finally made that connection, it started catching a lot more fleas…
*****
Scientists have discovered a link between the temporal lobe of the brain (the part behind your ears) and experiences of the divine. People who have temporal lobe seizures often describe feeling deeply connected with every living thing or report that they understand the grand plan of existence. The scientists are, of course, very careful not to make any claims regarding the existence of g*d (whatever that is) although many theorize based on the assumption that g*d doesn’t exist. This leads to some illogical reasoning.
The reasoning goes that because experiences of the divine are triggered by things like seizures and human manipulation, the brain isn’t really experiencing something “real” meaning “outside the brain”. Because some experiences of the divine through temporal lobe activity are caused by means we can easily comprehend, the divine itself - the thing experienced - must be something that exists within the realm of human comprehension.
It is true that we don’t experience the “out there” world directly but always as mediated through our brains. We are awash with radio signals but can only hear the music once we have a radio. And our experience of the signals is affected by how good the radio is. Our bodies are our radio picking up whatever signals they have evolved the capacity to receive.
But we can also experience similar signals that arise from the brain itself. We can remember and dream of visual images even in total darkness. In open brain surgery, patients can be made to feel things on their skin or hear sounds that aren’t there for the rest of the folk in the operating room. Our radio can make its own signals and sometimes it’s hard for us to tell where the signal is coming from just by listening to the song.
Just because we sometimes get signals from the universe within our brains, doesn’t mean that the world “out there” doesn’t exist. We don’t argue that chocolate doesn’t exist just because we can make someone on an operating table taste it by zapping their brain. And so, if we have a whole section of our brain that seems to perk up around experiences of the divine, we could in fact argue that there very well could be something out there for us to sense.
Imagine what those early Hydra would have said if they could think and reflect upon their new ability to sense light. Imagine they could talk to other life forms that didn’t have the ability yet. What could our light sensing forebears say about light when all they could do was feel a sense of excitement about something they could not yet imagine even existed?
“I feel something, I’m not sure what it is, but every now and then I get the strangest sensation. There will be stretches of time when certain parts of myself are excited, I can feel a movement within me.”
And how would the unseeing sponge respond?
“How can you feel a movement within you from something outside? You're delusional. You cannot prove light exists. Why should I consider light as even possible when I have no proof that it exists? Stop talking about light.”
Way back when life was first starting to collect cells, there was a point when organisms started being able to detect light. These organisms - probably a Hydra or “living jelly” - had no eyes, no lenses, no cerebral lobes devoted to interpreting the data of photons. Instead, they had molecules, specifically proteins, within themselves that would agitate when hit with light. In darkness these proteins would go about their business interacting with other molecules the way they were built to do. But when hit with the energy of a photon, these molecules would take in the energy in the light and get energized.
Now the organism had a way to tell the difference between light and dark. But at first, light and dark would have no meaning. The experience of light for the Hydra was not illumination and focus. Objects were not revealed. The original experience of light was simply an excitement in the presence of something unknown.
It might have taken generations for any advantage to come of this. The proteins originally reacted to photons not because they were seeking enlightenment or even a hunting advantage. These proteins were simply following physical laws; their bundled atoms - just energy themselves - absorbed the incoming energy of the photons because they chanced to be arranged in a way that made absorption inevitable. At first, this reaction just existed on its own. It wasn’t tied to any action in the organism. The Hydra didn’t do anything because its proteins got excited by photons.
But eventually, a Hydra did do something in response to the light. It may have taken thousands of generations for a Hydra to link the feeling of light to the feeling of movement by a water flea, but when it finally made that connection, it started catching a lot more fleas…
*****
Scientists have discovered a link between the temporal lobe of the brain (the part behind your ears) and experiences of the divine. People who have temporal lobe seizures often describe feeling deeply connected with every living thing or report that they understand the grand plan of existence. The scientists are, of course, very careful not to make any claims regarding the existence of g*d (whatever that is) although many theorize based on the assumption that g*d doesn’t exist. This leads to some illogical reasoning.
The reasoning goes that because experiences of the divine are triggered by things like seizures and human manipulation, the brain isn’t really experiencing something “real” meaning “outside the brain”. Because some experiences of the divine through temporal lobe activity are caused by means we can easily comprehend, the divine itself - the thing experienced - must be something that exists within the realm of human comprehension.
It is true that we don’t experience the “out there” world directly but always as mediated through our brains. We are awash with radio signals but can only hear the music once we have a radio. And our experience of the signals is affected by how good the radio is. Our bodies are our radio picking up whatever signals they have evolved the capacity to receive.
But we can also experience similar signals that arise from the brain itself. We can remember and dream of visual images even in total darkness. In open brain surgery, patients can be made to feel things on their skin or hear sounds that aren’t there for the rest of the folk in the operating room. Our radio can make its own signals and sometimes it’s hard for us to tell where the signal is coming from just by listening to the song.
Just because we sometimes get signals from the universe within our brains, doesn’t mean that the world “out there” doesn’t exist. We don’t argue that chocolate doesn’t exist just because we can make someone on an operating table taste it by zapping their brain. And so, if we have a whole section of our brain that seems to perk up around experiences of the divine, we could in fact argue that there very well could be something out there for us to sense.
Imagine what those early Hydra would have said if they could think and reflect upon their new ability to sense light. Imagine they could talk to other life forms that didn’t have the ability yet. What could our light sensing forebears say about light when all they could do was feel a sense of excitement about something they could not yet imagine even existed?
“I feel something, I’m not sure what it is, but every now and then I get the strangest sensation. There will be stretches of time when certain parts of myself are excited, I can feel a movement within me.”
And how would the unseeing sponge respond?
“How can you feel a movement within you from something outside? You're delusional. You cannot prove light exists. Why should I consider light as even possible when I have no proof that it exists? Stop talking about light.”
Sunday, September 6, 2009
How To Form Gold Out Of Baser Metals
You want to know how to make gold out of other metals? It’s simple and we already know how to do it.
Blow up a star.
The first stars started out as clouds of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very simple atom, just a proton orbited by an electron. It is the most basic physical expression of yin and yang, of Binah and Chokmah. Clouds of this stuff were floating around in the dim afterburn of the Big Bang. When enough of these atoms collected, gravity took over and the atoms began to fall. At first, there were many directions to fall in, but eventually the forces of complexity sorted things out and a single center was found.
The hydrogen atoms fell faster and faster toward that center until they were going so fast they started to smash into other. Now realize, every atom has a defensive shield called the Weak Nuclear Force that normally operates to keep out protons and electrons from other atoms. But when atoms go fast enough, they overpower this force, crash through the defensive shield and achieve fusion. This fusion of hydrogen atoms is the most basic recipe for light.
This first recipe in the life of a star calls for four Hydrogen atoms. There are several steps involved. First you have to make Deuterium. Smash two Hydrogen atoms together to get a Deuterium atom, a neutrino, and two gamma ray photons. Let the neutrino and the photons escape. When you have two Deuteriums, smash those together to get a Helium atom and a bunch of energy. That energy is light and heat. It shoots out from the star and may eventually land in your eye when you look up at the sky. When this starts happening, we say a star is born.
Now, in order to make something out of Helium, you have to achieve much greater speeds than you did with Hydrogen. So at first, the Helium just falls to the center in darkness. But eventually, it too starts going fast enough to overcome its defensive shields and when Helium smashes into itself at the heart of a star it makes Carbon and Oxygen and Nitrogen, Sulphur and Magnesium, Calcium and Titanium. The recipes for these elements are more complex, but this is how the air you breathe was made as was the calcium in your milk.
These transformations produce a lot of energy that keeps the star from collapsing entirely. The star depends on this energy not just so it can shine in your sky, but also for its structure. The energy released by element creation escapes toward the surface of the star keeping it expanded through convection like a pot of boiling water. Stars are constantly boiling over into themselves.
Over the course of a star’s lifetime, it will repeat this basic motif, creating new, more complex elements out of simpler ones and using the released energy to fuel itself until it gets to Iron. Iron stops the chain. For whatever reason, if you want to make new elements by smashing iron atoms together, you have to add energy. So there is our star, going along happily producing new building blocks of existence and wham, suddenly, it cannot go any further.
When Iron starts to collect at the center, the star begins to lose its source of energy. The flame under the pot is turned off and the star begins to settle in on itself. What happens next depends on how big the star is. A small star will just collapse becoming a very dense Brown Dwarf. But a bigger star will do something else, and here’s where it gets personal. When a big enough star gets to the Iron stage, it too begins to collapse, but being so massive, the collapse reaches epic speeds and ignites a supernova.
These conflagrations of stars release so much energy that they can be seen on Earth. The Crab Nebula was formed this way and even though it’s 6500 light years away, Chinese astronomers saw the explosion in 1054AD. These explosions - and frankly I don’t know if you can still call them “explosions” when they are this big - are so massive that they smash atoms together with abandon, and in the process produce all the heavier elements on the periodic table, including all of the other metals of the Alchemists: lead, tin, copper, mercury, silver and - you guessed it - gold.*
And because we have all these heavy elements here on Earth, we know that our solar system is at least second generation. Earth was formed out of the remains of a supernova. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all the heavier elements only a supernova can make. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be here.
We are made of stars. And not just any stars, we are made of stars that transformed themselves, at least a small part of themselves, into gold. We have that history encoded in the physical fabric of our being. Not just in our cells or our DNA, but in the atoms that make those cells and that DNA. When Alchemists talk about transforming metals into gold, they are remembering the past lives of their own bodies.
*For those of you keeping track, the only planetary metal not made in a supernova is iron. Turns out, Iron is a gateway metal.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory).
Blow up a star.
The first stars started out as clouds of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very simple atom, just a proton orbited by an electron. It is the most basic physical expression of yin and yang, of Binah and Chokmah. Clouds of this stuff were floating around in the dim afterburn of the Big Bang. When enough of these atoms collected, gravity took over and the atoms began to fall. At first, there were many directions to fall in, but eventually the forces of complexity sorted things out and a single center was found.
The hydrogen atoms fell faster and faster toward that center until they were going so fast they started to smash into other. Now realize, every atom has a defensive shield called the Weak Nuclear Force that normally operates to keep out protons and electrons from other atoms. But when atoms go fast enough, they overpower this force, crash through the defensive shield and achieve fusion. This fusion of hydrogen atoms is the most basic recipe for light.
This first recipe in the life of a star calls for four Hydrogen atoms. There are several steps involved. First you have to make Deuterium. Smash two Hydrogen atoms together to get a Deuterium atom, a neutrino, and two gamma ray photons. Let the neutrino and the photons escape. When you have two Deuteriums, smash those together to get a Helium atom and a bunch of energy. That energy is light and heat. It shoots out from the star and may eventually land in your eye when you look up at the sky. When this starts happening, we say a star is born.
Now, in order to make something out of Helium, you have to achieve much greater speeds than you did with Hydrogen. So at first, the Helium just falls to the center in darkness. But eventually, it too starts going fast enough to overcome its defensive shields and when Helium smashes into itself at the heart of a star it makes Carbon and Oxygen and Nitrogen, Sulphur and Magnesium, Calcium and Titanium. The recipes for these elements are more complex, but this is how the air you breathe was made as was the calcium in your milk.
These transformations produce a lot of energy that keeps the star from collapsing entirely. The star depends on this energy not just so it can shine in your sky, but also for its structure. The energy released by element creation escapes toward the surface of the star keeping it expanded through convection like a pot of boiling water. Stars are constantly boiling over into themselves.
Over the course of a star’s lifetime, it will repeat this basic motif, creating new, more complex elements out of simpler ones and using the released energy to fuel itself until it gets to Iron. Iron stops the chain. For whatever reason, if you want to make new elements by smashing iron atoms together, you have to add energy. So there is our star, going along happily producing new building blocks of existence and wham, suddenly, it cannot go any further.
When Iron starts to collect at the center, the star begins to lose its source of energy. The flame under the pot is turned off and the star begins to settle in on itself. What happens next depends on how big the star is. A small star will just collapse becoming a very dense Brown Dwarf. But a bigger star will do something else, and here’s where it gets personal. When a big enough star gets to the Iron stage, it too begins to collapse, but being so massive, the collapse reaches epic speeds and ignites a supernova.
Supernova.
These conflagrations of stars release so much energy that they can be seen on Earth. The Crab Nebula was formed this way and even though it’s 6500 light years away, Chinese astronomers saw the explosion in 1054AD. These explosions - and frankly I don’t know if you can still call them “explosions” when they are this big - are so massive that they smash atoms together with abandon, and in the process produce all the heavier elements on the periodic table, including all of the other metals of the Alchemists: lead, tin, copper, mercury, silver and - you guessed it - gold.*
And because we have all these heavy elements here on Earth, we know that our solar system is at least second generation. Earth was formed out of the remains of a supernova. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all the heavier elements only a supernova can make. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be here.
We are made of stars. And not just any stars, we are made of stars that transformed themselves, at least a small part of themselves, into gold. We have that history encoded in the physical fabric of our being. Not just in our cells or our DNA, but in the atoms that make those cells and that DNA. When Alchemists talk about transforming metals into gold, they are remembering the past lives of their own bodies.
*For those of you keeping track, the only planetary metal not made in a supernova is iron. Turns out, Iron is a gateway metal.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory).
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Princess Dress
[Click Dogs to see all installments of the Legend of Fowl Feng. If you are reading this in a reader, you'll have to come to the blogsite.]
You remember hurtling through space. That’s what you’d say if there were someone to tell. Hurtling through space with great purpose and destiny, only there was no way to tell really that you were moving at all. No air to blow against you, the stars so distant they never moved day after day. At first, you really didn’t think about going anywhere.
Slowly the darkness grew gray and thin, and even more slowly you realized this must be light. Then you spent some time hovering or hurtling through the light until you started feeling that maybe your were going somewhere. As if your thought conjured it, a faint breeze began to press against your cheeks, if you had cheeks, which is about as certain as the day.
The wind, however, doesn’t seem to care if it’s blowing against a cheek, or a meteor, or a wave of energy, or any of the other things you imagined you might have or be. The wind just blows stronger and stronger, pushing against your every contour like a hand pressing back and you get the idea that you have spent something like time imagining all the things that hand might be touching.
You are really moving now. You are getting someplace. And now the idea of a destination comes to you, a place where this hurtling will stop and this idea in you head makes the whole light around you shift so that you are no longer hurtling though space but are falling towards some ground. Just as you realize you are falling way too fast to stop, you hit something.
You look down and see you are wearing a long dress. “Princess dress,” you think wistfully.
“Oh bloody hell! We’re rescuing a princess?” exclaimed a horrified Rubeus. Sophie gave an exasperated sigh at the interruption. Hydra kept silent, turning her long beak from one side to the other. Chalydrus rolled his giant dragon eyes.
“You will not be rescuing anyone, Rubeus. You have other duties.”
“Then why am I here?” Rubeus stuck out his chin and Fowl Feng thought Chalydrus was going to blast him right there, but instead he just held Rubeus' gaze for a moment and then turned to Sophie. “Continue, dear maiden.”
Sophie was silent for a moment. Feng wanted her to continue because it seemed so important to her. He put his paw on her leg and said, “I’ve never rescued a princess. Might be fun?”
She reached out and rubbed Feng's ear. “Oh you are a sweetie, aren’t you Fowl Feng.”
“Um, no, actually I’m not. Bit of a bastard really.” He nosed around in the dirt for a moment and then said under his breath so no could hear. “I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten puppies.”
Sophie just smiled and turned back to the fire to continue her story.
You remember hurtling through space. That’s what you’d say if there were someone to tell. Hurtling through space with great purpose and destiny, only there was no way to tell really that you were moving at all. No air to blow against you, the stars so distant they never moved day after day. At first, you really didn’t think about going anywhere.
Slowly the darkness grew gray and thin, and even more slowly you realized this must be light. Then you spent some time hovering or hurtling through the light until you started feeling that maybe your were going somewhere. As if your thought conjured it, a faint breeze began to press against your cheeks, if you had cheeks, which is about as certain as the day.
The wind, however, doesn’t seem to care if it’s blowing against a cheek, or a meteor, or a wave of energy, or any of the other things you imagined you might have or be. The wind just blows stronger and stronger, pushing against your every contour like a hand pressing back and you get the idea that you have spent something like time imagining all the things that hand might be touching.
You are really moving now. You are getting someplace. And now the idea of a destination comes to you, a place where this hurtling will stop and this idea in you head makes the whole light around you shift so that you are no longer hurtling though space but are falling towards some ground. Just as you realize you are falling way too fast to stop, you hit something.
You look down and see you are wearing a long dress. “Princess dress,” you think wistfully.
“Oh bloody hell! We’re rescuing a princess?” exclaimed a horrified Rubeus. Sophie gave an exasperated sigh at the interruption. Hydra kept silent, turning her long beak from one side to the other. Chalydrus rolled his giant dragon eyes.
“You will not be rescuing anyone, Rubeus. You have other duties.”
“Then why am I here?” Rubeus stuck out his chin and Fowl Feng thought Chalydrus was going to blast him right there, but instead he just held Rubeus' gaze for a moment and then turned to Sophie. “Continue, dear maiden.”
Sophie was silent for a moment. Feng wanted her to continue because it seemed so important to her. He put his paw on her leg and said, “I’ve never rescued a princess. Might be fun?”
She reached out and rubbed Feng's ear. “Oh you are a sweetie, aren’t you Fowl Feng.”
“Um, no, actually I’m not. Bit of a bastard really.” He nosed around in the dirt for a moment and then said under his breath so no could hear. “I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten puppies.”
Sophie just smiled and turned back to the fire to continue her story.
