Spirit Dance
Or: all Colors Blend to White
by Stephen Faulkner
The man is Jeremiah Buttison but he prefers to be called Wind Voice. He
claims to have taken that name upon completion of his vision quest into
the wilderness east of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Whoever would show
any curiosity about how he got his name would receive a lengthy
description of his trek into the forests an unspecified number of miles
north of the canyon away from civilization to the crest of a small
hill. On this hill he fasted and meditated and danced for many hours
until he was overtaken by a trance that showed him the face of the very
air that he breathed. It also brought to his ears the voice of the wind
that told him that each human being had not a soul but a color. The
color that he, Jeremiah, exhibited for those who knew how to see, it
said, was the blue of the sky on a sun shone summer’s day.
In celebration of receiving this aural vision he continued to dance the
dance of his color and spirit until he collapsed on the ground and fell
into a long and restful slumber.
*****
“You speak of the colors of souls, Master. But I still don’t understand
what you mean by this.” The speaker was a youthful man with a gentle,
boyish face. His voice was stridently loud as he attempted to be heard
above the din of the crowd of followers surrounding Wind Voice.
“A fine question, young man,” said the Master. “It is the first
question that must be asked if one is to understand the true nature of
mankind.” The Master paused for a few moments muttering to himself as
he mulled over what the remainder of his response would be.
“First, let me say that there are many kinds of souls, those that are
dark with fear and hatred and those that are light with love and
caring. If you could but perceive the individual souls, as I do, you
would see each person bathed in a light dominated by a specific shade
and color. The darker the color, the closer that soul is to his or her
original inception and so more fearful and unknowing. And in this
unknowing grows hatred of the unknown and that which is misunderstood.
It takes many lives for one to cast off this fear and to gain an innate
understanding of the spirit of the world and its creatures, especially
of man.”
“You speak of many lives,” interrupted another follower from the crowd.
“Is your teaching, then, similar to that of the Hindi or of the Buddha?”
“Similar, but not the same,” said the Master, nonplussed by the change
of topic. “But let me finish. About the color of the soul: there are
also those whose shade is brighter, the color about them sparkling and
clear whether it be blue, green, yellow or red. These are the souls who
have gained the spiritual knowledge – not to be confused with literal
knowledge – of the ways of the world and mankind’s place in it. Through
many lifetimes, as I have said, one gathers into oneself this knowledge
of the spirit until it becomes a cohesive whole, to the point that it
becomes the actual spirit of that individual.”
As Wind Voice caught his breath in order to continue his sermon,
another follower, an attractive young woman wearing tight shorts, a
halter top and sandals, chimed in with: “So you do espouse the beliefs
of the Buddhists who hold that the soul goes through many lifetimes in
order to achieve Nirvana. Is that not true?”
The Master smiled down from his small stage into the face of this
pretty child and said, “Much the same in many aspects, dear one. But by
saying so you assume that all human beings have souls. The real
struggle, you see, is not the many lives spent in working toward that
lightness of being that brings one to the white light of truth but in
the forming of one’s own being, one’s own soul, in order to do so.”
All the din of conversations that had been humming through the crowd
until this time suddenly stopped. If one listened closely all that
could be heard would be that of the intake and exhale of the breath of
more than a thousand lungs as all present paid strict attention to what
the Master Wind Voice would say next.
“Thank you,” he said. “For your undivided attention, at last.”
After a long silence a meek voice came out of the crowd. “How is this
to be done, Master?” it said. “And how do we know whether we are ones
with souls or not?”
The Master Wind Voice came forward toward the crowd and raised his
hands above his head. He clapped them once, then twice, then a third
time, each time causing the frightening sound of thunder to roll
through the air. “Know what you see,” he said. “Understand what you
hear. If you cannot do these things, dance the dance of the spirit. If
you do not yet have a soul, you do have a spirit to guide you. So let
it take hold of you in meditation and….” He raised his left leg in
front of him, letting the lower half dangle from the knee as if it had
no muscle at all; then he stamped the foot down, causing the ground to
shake. He did the same with the other leg before gliding shuffle-foot
across the floor in a graceful dance that exhibited the beauty of his
spirit, the color of his soul for all to see. And they did see for Wind
Voice’s aura shone a bright blue from the first resounding step of the
dance until, hours later, he came to a sliding halt that brought him
nose to nose with a man who, smiling happily, just happened to be
standing at the front of the crowd. Wind Voice gently kissed the man’s
nose and backed away to take in the full sight of the crowd that he had
just entertained.
“Your own dance will be its own expression of your spirit, your own
personal experience of who you are and where you are and what you are
meant to be.” The Master sighed deeply, understanding the scope of what
he was describing. “And not everyone can do it, for not everyone, I am
sorry to say, will achieve what they seek: a soul that is singularly
their own.”
The crowd let out a common, searing groan of disappointment tinged with fear.
“But that should not stop any of you from at least trying, no? Come,
then, any of you who will, come with me to the Center and we will start
with each of you.” And he began to walk away from them. It took several
moments for the crowd to break up and form a thin line of interested
men and women to walk, then run to catch up with Wind Voice in order to
become his disciples.
*****
“This week’s Profit and Loss Statement, sir,” said Wind Song’s office assistant as he handed his boss the sheaf of paperwork.
Wind Song only looked over a few pages of the report before pronouncing
the entire weeks’ worth of profits to be unsatisfactory. “I gave a
lecture each day at the Center and two others at functions where I had
been invited,” he said. “With all that, how do you come up with such a
measly number as this?” He tapped a pen point on the last page of the
report with a calloused forefinger. “Tell me that, hunh?”
“Several of your Center lectures weren’t all that well attended, sir,”
explained his assistant. “And we gave one of the outside concerns a
break on your customary stipend since they are a non-profit
organization.”
“On whose authority?”
“Uh – Mister Tengwith signed off on it, I believe.”
“Get him in here!” the now angry guruji barked. His assistant did a
quick about-face and had already taken several steps in preparation to
do his boss’s bidding when Wind Voice suddenly called him back. He
rummaged in his top desk drawer for a pad of paper just as his
assistant arrived back in front of the desk. The Master scribbled out
two notes and held them out to the young man as soon as he had torn
them from the pad. “Give the first one to Tengwith,” he said. The young
assistant’s face blanched as he read the neatly legible scrawl. “And
the other one goes to HR – a new hire order to go into the papers and
online as soon as possible.” The assistant hesitated as he looked to
his superior for verification that this was really what he was being
asked to do. “Get going,” said Wind Voice evenly. “We have a lot of
work to do coming up and I can’t be without a second in command for
long.”
“Yes, sir,” said the young man and, turning to carry out the order he
had been given, nearly tripping over an unseen ripple in the carpet.
“Clumsy fellow,” Wind Voice muttered to himself with a chuckle as his
assistant hurried away. “But ambitious, too. Just might turn out to be
a real asset to the company.” At the speed of thought, then, his
expression turned from mirth to serious as quickly as his facial
muscles would allow. “I’ll have to keep him reined in, though,” he
voiced his thought in a whisper. “Don’t want to have to deal with
another Tengwith. There is only one person in charge here and I won’t
stand for insubordination of any kind from any of my staff.”
He looked down on the papers on his desk and began to make notes in the
margins of the P & L Statement; suggestions on how to improve upon
such a shoddy showing in the future.
*****
I desperately hope that no one reads this until after I am gone for I,
Wind Voice, the leader, the teacher, the luminary, the guru and
spiritual head of the Center for the Study of the Human Spirit, am a
fraud. I write this as a memoir solely to myself that I might look back
on my life, my thoughts and realizations and know who I was, who I
wanted to be and who I ultimately became. If this, then, is an exercise
of the mind of a man who is still but a work in progress, I do not like
the result I see at this time in my life. I have become a venal,
self-serving charlatan. The bottom line is what I use as a gauge of my
worth as a person and, in so doing, I have sunk to the level of a
Scrooge, a Midas, a McDuck rolling in the money kept hidden in
underground vaults. I have become a miser and a thief, taking money
from people who look to me for at least a shred of the truth that I
profess to have divined.
The latter part is true; I have glimpsed some of the truth of
the world, its spirit and how it blends with the spirit of mankind to
form a vivid whole from which we have come and, as most of the holy
books contend, to which we shall all return. The dance of the spirit
that I stepped and shuffled in my quest for a vision of enlightenment
did bear a fruit that I had not expected. The Word and words beyond had
come to me, a light shone on my eyes in all the colors of the spectrum
from deep red to even more intense purples than ever I had known before
or ever will again from that day to this. I saw, I heard, I was in awe
and transfixed by the beauty of what I later realized was only the
result of four days of sleep deprivation and hunger brought on by an
ill-advised fast; hallucinatory delusions, fantastic deliria, dreams
brought to life in my head, my eyes, my ears; my mind run rampant with
madness.
That is all done with now. I have parlayed all that into the business
which I now run: the business of the faker, the charlatan, the con man
and sneak thief of the souls of credulous fools. Here is the truth, I
say with a sneer and an outstretched hand; pay me and it is yours. And
they do, so easily led, they do.
And after all these years of work and riches, I feel my conscience
coming to the fore. Stop this, I tell myself. Go away, become for your
followers the guru that they think that you truly are. Hide out in the
mountains, in a cave, in the desert, in a small town where no one has a
clue to who you really are. Repent as if you were about to be baptized
a Christian – another fool’s folly of half-truths and ceremonial
mummery – and live the life of a simple honest man. Give up all of the
laudatory moans and shouts of your devotees and followers, all that you
have gathered together like a pool filled with the undeserved manna of
the hearts, minds and souls of those who call you Master and Guruji and
Wind Voice and the shanti filled wise man of the millennium. Know who
you are, Wind Voice. And be that man. Just be
Jeremiah Buttison, the guy who used to be just Jerry to your friends
and neighbors, Mister Buttison to those you had only just met. Just a
guy; that’s all.
Be him, be Jerry, be a friend, a neighbor, a guy that folks like and
are proud to know. You don’t need all this frippery that goes with
unearned wealth and praise. All you need is just to be who you really
are. And you know who that is.
So, just BE.
*****
Many years later, in a small town on the North Shore of Long Island an
old man lays supine on his bed in the last throes of a terminal
illness. Today, he knows, is the day that he will die. He is ready for
it, wills it to come and take him away to where the multitude of colors
of the souls of the world come together to blend into the brilliant
whiteness of the One.
“You listen, Wind Voice,” says the familiar voice in his ear. “But you refuse to hear.”
“The name is Jerry,” he says aloud to the room for there is no other
person there for him to speak to; he is alone in this room. “There is
no Wind Voice here.”
“As you say,” the voice concedes. “Still, though, you seek something that is beyond your power to join.”
“You speak in muddy terms, Voice,” says Jerry. “And why is it that this
madness comes to me anew at this time in my life when all is about to
be done with?”
“Because I am your death, Jerry. I have always been with you. I am now
here to quash those misunderstandings that you had formed so long ago
when you danced to what you assumed was the rhythm of your spirit.”
“Misunderstandings? What is it that I had misunderstood?”
“That not all colors of the spectrum blend into the bright white of the
totality of the Great Spirit of this universe. Remember, the Earth
remains and blue is the color that envelopes the mother of all life.
Blue is the color that Mother Earth cleaves to her breast as her own
and will never relinquish it to the spirit realms of the All.”
Jerry is taken aback by this bit of news, but is not bothered by it. What, after all, does the color blue have to do with him?
“If you would but look within, my friend,” says the Voice, having heard
his thought. “You will see that you still have the old power of
divining the color of an aura, those of others and yourself as well.
Tell me, when you do see what I ask you to, what color shades around
the periphery of your human body?”
Jerry closes his eyes and concentrates his attention inwardly, squints
and focuses his mind’s view until he sees the silhouette of himself –
bone thin with emaciation, dry as the husk of a dead insect – and sees
the shadow made of several hues of blue surrounding him and anchored to
the grounding supplied by its mother, the planet, the world, as if by
an invulnerable umbilical chain of love.
“Ah, you see, Wind Voice,” Says the Voice in his ear, now faintly as
his senses begin to null and fade. “You see and know that what I say is
true. True.”
And the last words that Jerry Buttison, a.k.a. Wind Voice, hears before
all fades to nothingness is a final saddening knowledge of his spirit
before his only true life comes to its final, dissipating end: Such is the death of the soulless.
THE END
© 2020 Stephen Faulkner
Bio: Stephen Faulkner is a native New Yorker, transplanted with
his wife, Joyce, to Atlanta, Georgia where Steve was semi-retired and
back to his true first love – writing. After 25 years in Georgia he and
Joyce are now fully retired and living in Central Florida. He has had
the good fortune to get his stories published in such publications as
Aphelion Webzine, Hellfire Crossroads, Temptation Magazine, Liquid
Imagination, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Fictive Dream, Flash
Fiction Magazine, and The Literary Hatchet. His novel, Aliana in
Paradise, has been published by World Castle Publishing and is
available through Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.
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