Taylor thought the ritual that preceded his entering the cave was very exciting. After calling the Quarters and the Deity, he was brought into the center and they sang and danced around him. He could feel the energy swirl around him, like being charged with static electricity, he felt sparks fly off him. Then they closed in around him, chanting low and soft. He heard voices calling out to him blessings and warnings. Then, with a great whoop, the group picked him up and carried him to the entrance of the cave. Inka and Osha, the designated high priestess and priest for this ritual, climbed down into the cave and passed down into the tiny chamber all he required for this night. Everything was lights and clattering and warm bodies as he was placed into the cave. But now, in the quiet chamber alone, he felt bored. He shook a rattle for awhile, ate an apple, chanted a few songs then eased back and stared at the candle. He was tired but he desired to keep vigil through the whole night.
 It wasn’t a deep cave by any means and Taylor had explored every nook and cranny over the years living on their Farm. In the deepest part of the cave, after squeezing through a narrow passage, there was a small chamber. He had set up a small alter there: a candle, a terra-cotta Goddess figurine, a rutulated crystal sphere. Taylor sat, wrapped in layers of thick wool army blankets.
 The candle served as the only source of light and comfort. Taylor basked in the golden glow that filled this tiny hole as his eyelids drooped.
 Taylor awoke with a start. The candle had gone out. He must have fallen asleep. Pitch blackness folded about him. A darkness thick and oppressive. Taylor was afraid to move. He lacked any reference points to guide his movement. He brought his hand up before his face, but he couldn’t see it, when he touched his face it felt like someone else’s hand. There was no sleeping now. The space alternatively expanded and contracted, like being pitched into the void, an abyss immense and deep, he felt like he was drifting, moving like a bubble through black-strap molasses. Time also bent and shifted, then lost its meaning in that deep darkness. No ticking of clocks or crickets to honor its passage, Taylor never thought how comforting a watch would be. How long must he sit? How long has it been? Will they come and get him at dawn, or forget? How could he know? He sat there biting his knuckle until it hurt.
 Then he saw something: a sparkle of light like the morning star in the sky. This light seemed far away. It beckoned to him. He slowly unfurled himself from the woolen blankets and crawled towards the singular spark that floated just beyond his reach. Crawling through a crack further and the cold hard surface of the cave became more sandy and his breath echoed about him like the washing of tides over sands. Then his hand touched water, he pulled his hand back and brought it to his mouth. It tasted salty.
 This is strange, Taylor thought. Then he looked up and saw a sky tangled up by stars. Where am I? Who am I?

 Diego del Oro stood on the windswept beach. The winds were blowing in from the south, from Africa, the lair of the devilish Moors. Above him the stars glittered over the Sea that churned restlessly. He tasted the salt in his mouth. He had walked up to the water’s edge and touched and tasted the Great Sea. It was a natural gesture to the waters that he loved so well. Tomorrow he would be departing from his homeland to apprentice with the famous inquisitor, Father Kramer, Grand Inquisitor in the land of the Germans.
  It was the Year of Our Lord 1492. Diego had graduated from the University of Toledo some years ago, a priest of the Franciscan Order and a servant of the Inquisition of Espana. The victorious monarchs, Ferdinand II of Argon and Isabella of Castile, had overthrown the infidels and cast them from this land. The triumph of the soldiers of Christ to reclaim this land in His Name had been extraordinarily successful. With the establishment of the Holy Inquisition, the last remnants of the godless were being swept from Espana. The heretic, the Jew, the witch — all were culled out of the population and dealt with by the Inquisition.
 Deigo looked out over the Sea and the warm winds soothed his soul. That day he had administered a small auto-de-fe in which a number of Moors and Jews had been purged from their hiding places and delivered to God for judgment of their iniquity. The winds washed out the stink of the fires from his robes. It was his first official duty as a newly graduated Doctor of Law and novice of the Holy Inquisition. Yet now, the flush of the day’s excitement had cooled and he contemplated his upcoming adventure.
 At the age of twenty-four, he had prepared himself for a life in which he could do something significant, something lasting. He saw the opportunity to serve God, the Church and the Inquisition as a way towards his larger goal. That goal was to make a name for himself by vanquishing the foes of the Church wherever they may linger. To be another Augustine, John of the Cross or … who knows maybe Saint Diego. He chuckled softly. Well, at least vast riches and thus an easy retirement were all within his reach. As Diego thought this, he felt his spirit wax and expand. He surveyed the world and imagined it to be like a walnut, just waiting for him to crack it open and extract the sweet meat.
 “Life is good,” he said aloud to the sand and surf, “I wonder where my friend Lilly is, she promised to meet me here at about this hour.”
 “I am here, my Lord,” a sultry voice echoed in the darkness. Deigo turned, startled, then quickly relaxed as she moved in closer. The scent of orange blossoms carried on the breeze. She reached out and touched his cheek, he blushed. “Your face is warm, my Lord. I will cool it when we are in my chambers.”
 “Yes, that is well. I shall miss you, my friend. You have been a balm and a comfort to me during these last weeks.” Deigo slipped his fingers through the soft black curls and admired the silhouette, carved in shadows, of a face that was so beautiful, so elegant. “I have a small present for you.” He reached into his waist bag and obtained a smaller bag and placed it into her delicate hands. “This is for you to find better living quarters and to hire a maid. I met an old Jew who will not be needing it anymore. You’ll find fifty-five gold sovereigns in that bag.”
 “My Lord, you are more than kind. I am not worthy of such generosity. How can I repay you?” She eased up closer to him, her breath mingled with his.
 “Tomorrow I leave the land of my fathers. Tonight we’ll create an agreeable memory for both of us to hearken back to when we are old and gray.” He smiled like an angel.
 Diego took her hand. “Come, let us seek our little paradise.”
 Later, Deigo lay in Lilly’s feather bed and drifted off to sleep. He dreamt of crawling into a cave, how strange. And he shivered. Skin nibbled by frost. What an uncomfortable situation, Diego thought. If only I could wake up. He heard voices, oddly familiar, speaking in a tongue he had never heard. The words allured and bought him out of the dream, he floated up and up, about to break through the surface. Yet the surface was so far, just out of reach, when will this dream end?

 Taylor opened his eyes and a light flashed in his eyes. He was cold and cramped. “Taylor, it’s time to come to the surface,” Osha said in his rich mahogany voice. The cave was lit up by Osha’s flashlight. It seemed as if a stone lay inside Taylor’s chest, for a moment he felt unable to breath. It then crumbled and he took what seem to him to his new first breath. Taylor felt much smaller and very confused. “Did you have a vision?” Osha asked as they crawled out of the cave into the beginning day. All the world pulsed with life and awareness.
 Taylor stepped out and straightened himself up. A vision? A dream?
 “Well, yes and … no.” Taylor was trying to remember, will he ever remember, he wondered. It was like piecing together a shattered porcelain vase.
 “Well, that answers my question,” Osha laughed loudly. “Let’s go and get some hot tea and biscuits into you, you’ve done alright. You should be proud of yourself. Oh yeah, I got something for you.” Osha removed a small box and handed it to Taylor, upon opening it he found a silver pentangle pendant. “Here, let me put it on. You know, once you’ve gone through an initiation you can never go back, for good or ill, you’re a Sun Dog now.” Osha smiled and messed up his Taylor’s mop of black hair. “Come on, the rest of the gang’s waiting for you. Remember, we’re all leaving for DayStar in a few days. It’s gonna be your first Pagan Festival, little brother! The Dogs are playing two concerts and giving four workshops. I’m ready to blow them away!”
 Taylor followed Osha along the path back to his home. Osha sang softly and a mockingbird echoed his tune. Taylor tried to remember his dream, it lingered just beyond his grasp, yet a word dangled in the air.
 “Lilly.”
 It seemed to comfort him somehow.
 

Go Where You Go

Crazy flaming feeling loving
We hold hands
Blood mixed with Stone.
Cool dark skin, moss and oak,
Timeless land.
My, how we have grown.

Go where you go
Shine in the night
Flow far below
the surface of what seems right.

People talking back and forth
and ‘round the bend
train whistle sad.
Who’s on her and what’s with him?
Will it end?
Hey — we ain’t that bad.

Go where you go
Shine in the night
Flow far below
the surface of what seems right.

On the edge I’ve got a hut
all my own
and a song that keeps me there.
You visit me — bring some wine —
we chew a bone.
Oh — we toast to the air.

Go where you go
Shine in the night
Flow far below
the surface of what seems right.

Go where you go.
 

 Jim awoke. Crows bleated. A faint breeze wafted through the window. Fishing. Oh, yes. Today. Silent padding abound. Leaf, his darling wife, snored into her pillow. Jim listened to his breath as he pulled himself together. A car pulls up and a horn sounds. He grabbed his gear, lunch, and thermos of coffee as he dashed out the door.
 “This is the day, I feel it.”
 “What are you percolating now, Jim?” James said.
 “I feel like I’m going to catch a big one today”
 Jamie quipped, “I heard you already had one!” They roared off laughing.
 It may be said that the three Jimmies were fond of subterranean drugs, for them the alteration of consciousness was a life-long quest. However, their most constant addiction, their best high, emanated through the flow of their conversation. From the Classics to Chaplin, they whirled like dervishes in long afternoons of dialogue. Perhaps trialogue is closer to the mark, rising and falling in enthusiasm and reverie. Their form of P.C. means Polemically Correct. They decided long ago that the process of how you formulate your opinions to be more important than the opinions themselves, they spent day after day in a delicious banter, delighting not so much in what they were talking about as in the how they were talking about it.
 For whatever drugs they found themselves drinking, smoking, sniffing or rubbing into their third eye, those guys saw them as tools to enhance the flow of their conversation. Their carpentry business came out of the fact that, given their wide ranging interests, they all knew how to swing a hammer and cut in a straight line. And they enjoyed each other’s company so much that they decided that they could make some money and indulge their philosophical urges in the course of their copious coffee breaks.
 In looking for an assistant carpenter, the prime requisite was what could you add to the discussion. Most were rather boring to the Jimmies. They hired and fired one after another until Osha answered their ad. He dropped by the purple farmhouse and they talked into the wee hours. They had found their man and, interestingly enough, Osha had found his band.
  For the Jimmies had been fooling around with a R&B combo for a few years as a hobby but when Osha brought his mike over and wailed like they never heard before, the music started taking over. He introduced them to Inka, Jill and Peter. Osha had been reading alot of stuff about paganism and wanted to form a coven. He met Inka and Jill at an open mike at the Strange Attractor, the local espresso bar. Inka and Jill were singing all these Goddess songs that had odd twists to them. The odd twist turned out to be Peter who wrote most of the lyrics. The original motive to get together was to explore their mutual fascination with nature religions. As Osha worked and talked with the Jimmies and their wives, he incited their interest in Paganism. In a few weeks they had started their eclectic spiritual group which became the Sun Dogs.
 So, in the fullness of time, their melodious chanting around a bonfire led to jamming in the living room. After awhile, Jill and Inka encouraged the others to back them up when they played out and were so well received they started being offered more and larger gigs. Soon they recorded a CD and, along with their regular jobs, they all began to play out on a regular basis. It was a busy and exciting time for all of them.
 But today, the Jimmies left behind their wives and children to have a day off which, given all their responsibilities and interests, was actually a rare event.
 Jamie sat in the backseat keeping time to the music in his head. He paused only long enough to take a hit off the joint that was making the rounds. Jamie’s spike red hair and robin-egg eyes contrasted with Jim’s full blood Jamaican features. James being half-Japanese and half-Irish descent, looked like an samurai sodcutter navigating the seas between two distant islands as he drove them to their special fishing hole.
 Even though the Japanese bought up the lion’s share of the Jamaican Blue Mountain beans for their own use, Jim had his grandmother send him a few pounds every month from his island home. That is what gurgled from the spout of his all-steel thermos on that fine derelict morning. The sparrows swept low over the mist-covered lake competing with the small-mouth bass for mosquitoes and mayflies. Morning doves purred high in the old rotting willow nearby.
 Passing around cups of coffee like it was a sacrament, the three friends sipped silently sitting on that slick mud bank. Jim didn’t allow any additives, that is, cream or sugar, to pollute this special brew. This annoyed Jamie somewhat who wined for some half-n-half. “Too much of life is creamed and sugar-coated,” Jim reminded him, “let your coffee remind you of the pleasure of bitter.”
 James produced a plastic baggy and passed that around. His almond-shaped eyes glinted as he was sharing the results of his mycological experiments. He and Jill made a tidy sum which helped the band acquire some nice equipment. James warned them that they were his guinea pigs and he couldn’t tell them how strong those ‘shrooms were. “It might have been better in an omelette,” Jamie commented while he chewed hurriedly washing those dry bits of fungus down with some coffee.
 Dropping their lines in the water, they began their morning discourse.
 “I’ve been reading this book that details the rise and fall of many civilizations throughout history,” James began. “The author compared and contrasted the circumstances of their eventual collapse into chaos and disorder. He found many similarities between these various situations: an uncontrollable bureaucracy, a crisis-oriented approach to governance, huge debt, highly concentrated power, and public apathy. Sounds familiar, don’t it?”
 Jim nodded. “Oh, yes. A familiar scenario all right, although I have a feeling, as in so much of historical analysis, that these so-called great civilizations are all the same from the get-go. They were the nasty conquering types that periodically rolled over the landscape. Whatever their achievements, their foundations were laid with blood and bones. It’s just so much easier for the historians to study these particular examples, dig up the cities, translate manuscripts written through the eyes of the powerful ones. If there’s any historical lessons on how to live in peace and harmony in this world, it certainly was either destroyed by these war-like ‘great’ civilizations or trivialized by our own modern scholars.”
 “Good point, good point,” James said, “but certainly you would agree that we ourselves are members of a similar war-like civilization right here in the United States of Amerika.”
 Jim’s lower lip curled out. “Yeah, I’d go along with that.”
 “Well,” James continued, a fermenting gleam brightened his features, “I got to thinking that all the signs and symptoms are present in this very day and age for the collapse of the Great American Way. We, as a nation, are teetering on the brink of a fundamental shift in power and resources.”
 Jamie interjected. “If that’s true, where are the present day barbarians gonna come from.  Who’s gonna displace those who have all the power now?”
 “I don’t rightly know,” James said. “It just seemed to me that we are in a very tenuous situation and if we are to avoid ruin we better start shifting our priorities quick.”
 “Why should we avoid ruin,” Jamie said, “could be just the medicine that we need right now. We’re just too big for our britches, that’s all. We need to learn a little humility. I saw this map once where the United States was redivided into smaller countries with an eye on more local self-sufficiency. Anyhow, we’re not citizens of this country nowadays, we’re consumers, even the politicians in their smoozing speeches have turned away from the focus on citizenship to calling us ‘consumers’. That’s where the real problem lies, we are being disenfranchised of our power as citizens. The only way the people in this country are taken seriously is when we consume all those worthless products spewed out by the multinational corporations. Consume — consume!” Jamie’s orange hair glowed in the dawning light. “I think a good dose of social unrest is just what we need to stir up the zombie TeeVee spoon-fed anti-culture we have right now.” Jamie lit up a fatty and the smoke obscured his freckled face as he passed the joint to James.
 James held the joint with the tips of his long fingers, tracing smoky patterns in the air as he made his point. “But don’t you see, that is one of the signs that collapse is just around the corner: public apathy. Most of the people in this country don’t even know that their constitutional rights are being picked away ever so slowly. The whole war on drugs is a good example. If they really cared about people’s unhealthy relationship to drugs they would funnel the money into treatment and not guns. Making drugs illegal only maintains their sensational profitability and thus the relationship with drugs and crime. But no, they want to execute drug dealers as if that would slow the growth of people wanting to indulge. Damn, the CIA is the biggest baddest drug dealer there is and every revelation about them is quietly swept under the rug.”
 “Well,” Jim smiled, “one of our basic theorems is that we’re all doomed, whether individually or as a culture, but how we’re doomed is the salient question.”
 They all nodded in unison on that point.
 Jim took a long draw on the joint and spoke in that high, holding-his-breath way. “To return to the original proposition, that is, issues surrounding the fall of ‘great’ civilizations. I’m reminded of a tract I read concerning the fall of the Roman Empire and the onset of the dark ages. It argued that the fall of the Roman Empire was accelerated by the rise of Christianity.” He exhaled a mighty billow of turquoise smoke and shivered as the herb and shrooms began to meld in his brain.
 “But I’ve always heard that the Catholic Church was the repository of the ancient knowledge as the barbarians swept through the Empire,” Jamie said, “they preserved the knowledge to be released in a future time of greater stability.”
 Jim coughed and spit. “Ah, another case of history being rewritten by the victors to sanctify their actions and demonize their enemies. The early Christians believed that one of the signs of the end of the world was the spread of knowledge. Also it was alot easier to maintain an iron grip on an ignorant population than one educated in a wide spectrum of belief. The Christians felt that toleration of other’s beliefs to be persecution of itself and, as early as 382 AD, declared that any opposition to its own creed in favor of others must be punished by the death penalty.”
 “Man, that’s harsh,” James said while he molded a ball of clay he had scraped from the bank into a wrinkled face.
 “You bet, and don’t think it’s not happening today. Remember those renegade priests killed down in El Salvador? Yeah, it’s still happening. In any case, the Christians destroyed libraries and schools, drove out scholars, broke up marble temples and statues feeding the pieces into lime kilns for mortar, and discouraged laymen from any form of education. Let’s see, I think it was St. John Chrysostom who boasted years later that “every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world has vanished from the face of the earth.” Weird guy. So it came to pass that all of Europe was plunged into a dark age of ignorance and superstition by the xenophobia of the Catholic Church. One can only imagine what works of art and literature that were ruthlessly plundered during those times. Strangely enough, it was the Islamic culture that was the repository of all the great western cultural writers at that time.”
 “Well that’s something which couldn’t happen today,” Jamie said, “there’s just too many places where our knowledge is stored. Just look at the internet.”
 Jim shook his head. “I wouldn’t bet on that, did you ever see the movie Brazil?”
 “No,” Jamie said, “Don’t you think we should put some bait on our hooks? I know it’s a pain to break up the conversation by catching a fish but my kids wanted to eat some fish tonight.”
 Overhead a Great Blue Heron glided down out of the watercolor sky.  It looked like a relic from the age of dinosaurs, its long trailing legs and huge wingspan, its confident flight. The three Jimmies sat quietly and watched it as it landed in the shallows. A ripple of warm feeling passed between them. They glanced at one another and smiled. Life is good.