Chapter 11: Mirror Meditation
We listened to the wind slide over the cliffs for a while.
“Kaitlyn,” I addressed her quietly, “I want you to try to separate your mind and body, kind of like when you go to sleep. I want you to remain conscious, but I want your mind to dissociate itself from your body. Stretch your limbs out in a starburst, your extremities as far as they can get from your core, as far from each other as they can get from each other. Let your limbs then utterly relax, dropping away from your torso into the ocean of the sand. Now feel your torso get heavier and heavier, sinking into the sand, chasing your limbs down deep into the Earth.”
She said nothing, but I could tell she was taking the exercise seriously.
”While we’re working here, you will find that your head is too heavy to lift from the sand; it is sinking. You can’t even turn it, only look straight up at the blue sky and the wispy white cirrus clouds. The clouds and sky are there, but your concentration is down, on the Earth below you. Let your vision roam aimlessly in the sky, but keep your mind pointing down. As you concentrate, your peripheral vision disappears. You see nothing but pale blue sky and fluffy white clouds, but what you feel is cooling sand under your body. The sand releases its heat into your utterly naked, utterly natural body, leaving the sand feeling cool. The sun now bakes you, not the sand. The warmth pushes you down into the sand.”
I kept on in this vein, quietly, steadily, for perhaps half an hour, watching her slip closer and closer towards a trance state, then into it. My voice was as much an instrument of change as a conveyor of meaning. Satisfied with her progress I quietly said, “Kaitlyn, reach out around you with your mind without physically moving.” I paused for a few seconds, then continued, “There is life all around you. Reach out for it. Feel it rising as your body falls into the Earth. Do you feel the life around you?”
Kaitlyn’s breath was steady and deep at this point. She breathily said, “Yes.”
“Some life is stronger than others, higher. It shoots to the sky as you fall down into the Earth.” I gave her a few seconds to notice this, then asked, “Do you see the difference in heights?”
She responded with a breath, “Yes.”
“One peak is higher than the others. That peak is me, and I am near you. Do you feel my life presence, Kaitlyn?”
Another breath, “Yes.”
“Touch me, Kaitlyn. Reach out and touch me without moving your body.”
It is difficult to describe what I felt. It wasn’t exactly like a physical touch. It was a touch on my very being; someone more spiritual than me might have said she caressed my soul. I caressed her right back in the same place. She smiled faintly. We exchanged several more of these, her blissed-out grin getting wider each time.
“Kaitlyn, the second-highest peak is much farther away. You now find that you can float over to it without moving your physical body, which is now buried deep in the earth. Float to the next highest peak, Kaitlyn. Go,” I urged, quietly.
After a second, I could feel her life presence stretch out in the direction of the largest tree in sight.
“Yes, Kaitlyn! You’re going the right way. Keep going.” Slowly over the course of several seconds, I felt her spiritual presence move over under the tree. “You are now underneath the largest tree in sight. I am there with you,” and I gave her life presence a mental squeeze.
“Oh!” she gasped, surprised.
“I hugged you under the tree,” I explained.
“This day is full of weird,” she said with wonder.
“But good, yeah?”
“Yeah, that was nice.”
I squeezed again, then backed off. I then sat up, spun around on my bare butt, and faced her. I then said, “Kaitlyn, please come back into your body and sit up.” Directly, her life presence moved back into its physical home, and she sat.
Kaitlyn stared off in the direction she happened to be facing, not quite focusing for a few seconds. Then she spun on her butt and faced me. “What just happened?”
“You just connected to Gaia. I don’t mean in some mystical woo-woo stoned hippie kind of way, I mean actually and truly. My belief is that it’s a skill like drawing: everyone can do it to some extent, but only a few are really good at it. Of those that can do it well, like us, most don’t get out here in nature in a state where they can achieve it.”
“Like us?” she repeated, startled to be included like that.
“Yes, I can tell you’re naturally good at this, like me. You followed all of my directions the first time, with very little coaching. I set the situation up carefully to allow it, but it was your innate skill that reached out and followed my directions. I think you must have spent a lot of time out here to be so in tune with nature,” I complimented her.
“All my life,” she said musingly.
“You’re a local, then?”
“Born and bred. Graduated Moab High, then graduated with a BS from the local branch of Utah State. I’ve hardly even been out of the county, much less out of the state,” Kaitlyn admitted.
“I come from halfway around the world, but this is where I discovered my magic. Well, several miles from here, actually, but much like this place anyway. I think it might be easier to touch magic out here than in most other parts of the world, being so remote.”
“Magic?” she inquired, clearly disbelieving my claim.
“How else would you describe what you’ve seen me do? I suspect there is actually a scientific basis to what I do, but it hasn’t been studied systematically. Not by me yet, anyway. I’m kind of discovering this as I go along, because I haven’t had any teacher. Let’s just call it magic. As a label, it’ll do just fine. I don’t have a better one.”
“Am I your first student? Your shishya, you called it?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Yes. I’ve never sought one, not on this trip nor on any prior. I fully expected when I came out here that I wouldn’t see anyone all weekend, in fact, which is why I jumped so high when you snuck up on me.” She had the grace to look a bit embarrassed. “What brought you out this far, anyway?”
“Nothing in particular. I just like to hike, and this seemed like a good direction. I like solitude, and I didn’t see any cars parked by the road side in front of the canyon mouth, so I thought this would be a good place to find it.”
“I hope you’re not disappointed in finding this place occupied, then, Kaitlyn. I like being alone out here myself, but at the moment, I’m enjoying being with you.”
“Yes, me too,” Kaitlyn said. After a moment, she asked, “So why didn’t I see a car?”
“I biked up to the canyon entrance, then walked my bike up the wash. My campsite is about half a mile in from the Kane Spring Road, about a mile and a half back down the canyon from here, back towards Moab.”
“Oh,” she said, “I came in from the other direction, then. I parked off Pritchett Canyon Road and hiked down here from that end.”
“That explains it, then,” I agreed. After a moment of reflection, I said, “The sun is getting low, about to go behind the canyon walls. It’s going to get chilly down here when it does. How about we hike down to my camp and get some dinner?”
I must have been winning Kaitlyn over, because she didn’t hesitate before saying, “Okay.”
“You can get dressed if you want.”
“I don’t think that would be very sociable when you’re going to have to wait until you get back,” she said. “Besides, doesn’t nudity help with the lessons?”
“One of the most surprising things about doing magic — a key thing that you must understand about it — is that your effectiveness decreases the closer you get to technological artifacts. The more skilled you get, the closer you will be able to get to tech artifacts and still do magic, but no matter what, they’ll always be an impediment to magic for you. There’s nothing closer to you than your clothes, jewelry, and other personal accessories, so for all practical purposes, a newbie like you can only do magic while completely naked.”
Kaitlyn started to look skeptical, but before she could voice her objection, “Yes, I see that you don’t think of your clothing as technological, but it is. Even cloth made from completely natural fibers is woven into tight, repeating, regimented patterns by nearly unerring machinery. The patterns in fabric are quite unnatural. The fabric is then either colored in big vats using synthetic dyes or has patterns imprinted upon it with even less natural processes. The finished cloth is then cut, folded, and sewn into still less natural shapes. Modern sewing needles are high-precision mechanical artifacts which sewing machines use to make a rapid series of precisely spaced punctures into the fabric, routing the thread along a mechanically precise path. When the store sells you a garment made of 100% natural cloth, Kaitlyn, you’re getting something that’s miles away from what clothing looked like a thousand years ago.”
I pointed to her pile of clothing and continued, “That tee-shirt of yours over there is a great example. It’s sold as 100% cotton, but the thread that holds its seams together is likely a cotton/polyester blend to avoid tearing when you stretch the fabric over your head when dressing and undressing. There’s a lot of stress on those hems at those times, if you think about it. The tag is almost certainly synthetic, and the design on the front is screen-printed with a type of plastic.”
“There’s a lot of clothing that is made entirely from synthetic fabrics like Lycra, Polyester, and Spandex. These are much worse for magic users. Even if you aren’t wearing anything particularly fancy, most underwear is made of a blend of synthetic and natural fibers.”
Kaitlyn’s skepticism was clearly fading by this point, but I went on, “Then there’s the real poison on this dart to your magical heart: the zippers, buttons, and other fasteners. Your jean shorts over there are held together in part with rivets. Rivets, Kaitlyn! None of this is in the slightest bit natural.”
I could see her starting to think deeply about this. Good.
“Now consider your accessories and the contents of your pockets: your belt, jewelry, pocket pen, wearable electronics…”
Kaitlyn was nodding a bit now.
“All of these products of technology screw up magic users by their very presence, their effect increasing the closer they get to you. Some of it is in constant contact with your skin, like your underwear, and the rest is millimeters away at most the whole day through. There’s hardly a person on this planet that doesn’t have at least half a dozen products of our high-tech society near at hand to them at all times, with clothing being the most commonly found and also the closest to you. It’s why there’s so little magic in the world, Kaitlyn. It’s why I had you leave your clothes so far away. It’s why I left mine a couple of miles down the canyon.”
I walked over to the sandstone shelf, picked up the pile of litter in my cradled arm, then started to walk back toward her clothing pile, and she turned to join me, taking a course that brought us back together, side by side. When we got to her clothes, she just tucked her clothes under her arm and gave me a small gesture, silently telling me to walk on, that she wasn’t going to get dressed again.
“Why would you have to walk farther away from your clothes than I did? Aren’t you better at this than me?”
“I am, and you’re right, I can do more in closer proximity to technology than you’ll be able to at your skill level, but what you did here today was actually a pretty minor thing. You didn’t have to get very far away from all instantiations of technology to get free enough of it to learn how to do it.”
She seemed a bit disappointed in her minor accomplishment.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to undermine what you’ve achieved today, Kaitlyn. It’s a huge first step. Almost no one on the planet can do anything like it. If you stop right here in your education, you’re already a mage of uncommon power and skill, but to be frank, that’s because the bar is set pretty low by humanity these days. I’m just saying that there’s a lot more you can do with practice. I’ve only been at it for a few years, and I’ve gone much farther than we did today. Together, I suspect we’ll progress even faster, being able to bounce ideas back and forth, teaching each other and pushing each other past obstacles.”
Continuing, I said, “What I wanted to do today was sink deep into Gaia and commune with her on the scale of miles, so I had to put my campsite and all of my things outside that radius. I wanted to feel a hill rising from my belly. I wanted to be a canyon.”
“Did it work? Before I showed up, I mean.”
“I was getting there, but I think I’m going to have to finish cleaning the trash out of the whole area I want to merge with. This canyon is bookended by two different Jeep roads frequented by tourists, so there’s a lot of it, blown in from the roadway or carried in by rainstorms from where it was originally dropped. I was so distracted by such a huge sphere of litter that I didn’t even notice you as you snuck up on me.”
She grinned. “You did jump rather high.”
“Ummm, levitating ourselves we will not be attempting today, young Skywalker,” I attempted in my best Yoda voice.
She winced, but in a cute way.