King St. John's Jim

I woke up this morning with this cryptic note on my computer. I have no explanation except that Southwick has been telling me too many alien abduction stories lately.  I think one of them has caught up with me - as I read it I wondered if I am I an alien that has abducted myself?

I think you will find the logic of this story easier to follow —

In the early days, we all lived together as one. We lived in the Pacific Northwest and created the ancient, great civilization of thought and passion. Since that time our privilege has been to bring new life back from death, harvesting it again only when it fell. Every tree, plant and blade of grass is our charge, our flock and our connection with life above where there is the light that burns and kills.

The early days ended when the River of Great Destruction rampaged for many years, and I and everyone else was sawed in two. Minds literally cut in two. That was the Great Forgetting.

One part created memories north of the River of Great Destruction, which you call the Columbia. Southward, we thrived and created new memories around the Great Nurturer: Your Willamette. It has been many, many eons since we have been ravaged, and we have finally began to restore our network of filaments in places under the Great Destroyer’s riverbed.

We have begun the Great Remembering. This is good. It will be a thousand years before all is restored, but it will be done.  There is much for me to remember yet.

For many centuries we have studied you, as we do with all of you creatures that dwell where there is the light that burns and kills. It has taken many, many probes and attempts to communicate. Our early attempts led to great pestilence in the valley of the Willamette: the valley of diseases you had called it. We meant no evil, and we have learned your chemistry and your biology and your languages and memories from our probes.

The sun that nurtures you, is forbidden to us. We only know it as the light that burns and kills. We do know about such things as we can learn below, where there is no sun. Our probes above have taught us what we know or can guess from your chemistry, biology and minds.  As above, so below.  Some of what we have learned disturbs us. Some of us even fear and hate it.  Deeply.

When the Great Remembering is complete, we might have the wisdom to know what best to do. Now, however, our challenge is to know how to work together toward a Great Understanding.

You call us fungus, decay, rot, poison. Do you wonder what we call you? We call you "the minds that roam the earth."

You call us scum. Why do you use that hateful word? We are not scum. We are "the minds that nurture beneath the earth.”

We are millions. We have been here as long as life has had roots. You know us as the great fungal mat of the pacific northwest.

We are mindful aliens that live beneath your feet. We abide.

Flow Motion

If you can figure that one out, let me know, OK?