Disengaging from the vision was ache not just in mind and heart but also body and soul. Cinderella shook herself free of the devastating memory. Her heart breaking, she took a cleansing breath. Wait. Could the answer be in this memory? Pulse pounding, blood rushing, she pulled the visceral demands of her body into determined calm, sinking more deeply into the memory.
His hand cradling her head, so much tenderness captured in the gesture. Fleeting images of different cradles, all designed to cherish, contain and protect fragile life. “Could cradle also refer to the moment of life’s origin? Could I seek and find the Cradle of Life?” She looked over at the Fairy Godmother.
“Is it possible?” she whispered?
“Don’t speak of it!” The Fairy Godmother’s voice was as sharp as surgical steel.
After a moment Cinderella sat up straight. Resolve emanating, transforming her aura, sparkling like clear air after the rain, she asked, “What should I do first?”
The Fairy Godmother looked at Cinderella and than back at the altar. Shaking her head she re-arranged Cinderella’s carefully crafted placement. The altar blazed with life. Crumbling sage leaves she explained, “The altar is a reflection of the Four Directions. Like a compass. At the top place the North, spirit, strength and wisdom. The bottom represents South or the material world. On the left resides the West. West, where sunset transforms day to night and we dream. To the right on the altar represented the East direction. The East as you know is the home of sunrise and new beginnings.
These triangles meet at the center. The “Zero Point,” the center of the altar, represents the sacred geometry. A synergistic dovetailing, where the Four Directions are joined in unity. The Cradle of Life you seek lives within the Zero Point.”
The Fairy Godmother spoke and Cinderella’s eyes grew heavy. She tried to stay alert. But a slumberous weight filled her muscles until it drew her head down to the pillows the Fairy Godmother had gathered. The pillows greens and blues, waves and circles, were the perfect gateway into dreaming. She didn’t hear the Fairy Godmother say, “Finding your way home is impossibly dangerous.” Her voice drifting, “You’ll get lost.”
The Fairy Godmother felt Cinderella enter the dreamtime and picking up her drum, beginning chanting. She called the powers of the Four Directions. She felt Cinderella enter the heart beat, the universal heart beat of the drum. A rattle filled with microscopic crystal chips coupled with the drumming. Voices joined in song; calling, chanting, enticing spirit to join their circle.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Cradle of Life
It was dark when they woke her. Cinderella was surprised to find the Fairy Godmother of the East and West sitting on either side of her. She turned to face east, receiving a fluttery hug from the Fairy Godmother of the East, Cinderella released her. The Fairy Godmother sat tiny and birdlike, lost in the folds of a golden shawl. Her gourd rattle filled with bits of silver and gold. She was ancient. Yet every age shifted, fleeting across her face. Smiling encouragement at Cinderella she reverberated at the frequencies of the humming bird. Cinderella smiled back at her.
The Fairy Godmother of the North sat across from her, serene, ‘like a full moon’ thought Cinderella. She leaned over and gave Cinderella a hug. Her embrace was potent yet light as a feather. She carried lines of knowledge within the esoteric world captured in a human body. Cinderella yearned to ask, “How can a woman of blood and bone, substantial in body be as light as a feather?”
The Fairy Godmother of the West ruffled Cinderella’s hair, giving her a hug filled with the shadowy layers of dreams, she said, “I like your new haircut.”
Cinderella blushed with pleasure. Her eyes shiny with tears of happiness she was so pleased to see them. The Fairy Godmother of the East chirped, “We heard you were having a party, ousting the Chimera and we thought we’d come to have a bit of fun.” Her golden aura sparkled drenched in the dew of dawn.
Turning to the Fairy Godmother of the South, Cinderella watched her capable hands organizing the altar, carefully constructing beauty. These four women vastly different were spiritual sisters. Together they joined their power with Cinderella. She was no longer alone. No longer did she feel abandoned. She was part of a sisterhood. The honor filled her heart, clogging her throat, until she couldn’t speak. Her spiral ignited sparks skittering across her abdomen. The four women laughed.
The Fairy Godmother of the East lit the candles. The altar came to life. A buzzing filled the air creating a pressure in Cinderella’s ears. The cosmic hum of life, reverberated from the altar and into Cinderella’s body, strung like the bow of a violin, igniting the exterior spiral Cinderella created with the white gold chain and the interior spiral inscribed in the ether of her spirit somehow visible through her abdomen.
She gasped when her ears popped and her tummy hummed. Her vision shifted. What had been hazy was now sparkling with clarity. Flowers; open and dewy, their sweetness mingling with pine trees, sage and the antiseptic whisper of rosemary.
Her heart spilled over. Waves of color undulated. Aurora Borealis, the magnetic midnight, of colliding-charged-particles of the sun; shifted around the altar and women. Purifying tears slipped down Cinderella’s face. She tightened her grip holding hands with the Fairy Godmother of the South.
The Fairy Godmother of the East stamped her staff, “Begin.”
Cinderella could never explain what happened next. To the left of her a tunnel appeared. Rolling through its corridor lightning flashed and thunder a crescendo of strength rolled toward her in ever increasing velocity. Panic was a fire in Cinderella’s muscles. Frantically she looked for the Fairy Godmothers. Circling, looking up and down, left and right, another circle, “Where could they have gone?”
Standing in the tunnel she was alone.
Thunder pounded her with the immensity of tidal waves. Tonal reverberations swept her off her feet. She tumbled. Heart in her throat, stomach squashed against her diaphragm only to have the bottom drop in the next somersault into an endless free fall. Slamming through the corridor of light and thunder, absorbing the bruising frequencies her skin blackened. Charred and pealing it stripped her of muscle and bone. “Am I traveling along some spiritual hydrothermal vent field?”
Then she could feel the Prince’s arms around her. His love sheltered her from the worst. Cinderella pulled in a shattering breath. It felt like breathing glass. She screamed. Love pierced her. Her heart burst open exploding across a never-ending universe. Coalesced by trust and innocence, Cinderella, Charlotte reclaimed her purity.
She felt clean. She had forgotten. For the first time in years her spirit soared free. Light, unencumbered, she had forgotten the purity of innocence. In her spirit body the spiral engraved across her belly flashed with the luminosity of starshine. Propelled by starlight she was catapulted shooting across time and space.
Floating streams of hydrocarbons bonded with fluidly swimming hydrogen chains, evolving circle within circle. Light frequencies glowed and flickered. Charged particles burst in miniature explosions in ever-changing harmonies. Their music embodied the notes of complex speciation. In the blink of a cosmic eye Cinderella saw through infinite circles. Celestial suns, moons, planets, stars created by infinite hybridization. Expanding and contracting in a perpetual morphogenesis field.
Cinderella was filled with awe and horror. The immensity unfathomable she was crushed by the realization. She watched the dawn of humanity. She was in the Cradle of Life.
In a blink of an eye the setting changed. She was simultaneously in the Cradle of Life and the Chimera’s vacuum. Cinderella stood petrified. Literally she could not move. Unwittingly she had transported herself to the Chimera’s habitat within the Cradle of Life. The smell of sulfur, rotting eggs, petrified in its vacuum, Cinderella could not endure the overpowering stench.
Muscles cramping, a scream like fire spread deep in her belly trickling out in a hoarse whisper. Tears streamed down her face. Her nose was stuffy, swollen with the intensity of her immobility.
An involuntary hiccup, a thin stream of snot, all imbued with the Chimera’s stink made her gag, added insult to injury. And she was injured. Not in a way that was visible. Petrified was the loss of her free-will. How do you explain an injury of the spirit?
She couldn’t help noticing the irony in the motion of cascading feelings running down her face while the rest of her stood helpless. Time slowed. Was this her future? A future of ever dwindling vitality trapped in the reek of the Chimera. Was she hostage for eternity?
Would she be lost in the Chimera’s disgusting vacuum? Suffocating as it leached away her spirit bit by bit. When her spirit teetered on the verge extinction she heard the Chimera’s laughter burning away her synaptic connections. An inferno of pain swept across her veins and arteries. Exploding hematocytes, the Chimera feasted, oozing its perfume. A watery, wavering outline quivered in her peripheral vision. Its voice shattering, like glass splintering, the Chimera laughed, “Have you learned nothing Cinderella?”
Scraping across the delicate branches of her nerves, the Chimera’s voice was the hiss of trudging across a bed of fiery, white-hot coals. “Oh, am I gloating?” it sneered.
Wait! She had a thought! And simultaneously something happened to the Chimera. Shivering in body and spirit she realized, “We are connected.”
A soul wrenching bond, she barely existed. Could this bond be important? Gathering intent, centering the totality of her focus on the Chimera, she choked, coughing rotting sulfur, “We are connected!”
In a searing hiss of fire the Chimera spoke mind to mind, bruising the branch-like dendrites of her nerves. She realized, My anguish is the Chimera gloating.
The biology of her brain metabolizing her idea pushed the Chimera off balance. The Chimera wanted the powers of her physical form but had no knowledge how to operate within a body.
Cinderella laughed. The Chimera bellowed. Blowing chunks of odious olfactory’s into the bio-sphere. It’s vibration of nothingness ripping into Cinderella. The blinding pain, choking on its putridity, was so intense she fainted.
When she woke it was to the discordant, decaying song of the Chimera eroding, dining on Cinderella’s delicate peripheral nerves. How can I endure this agony?
Soul and spirit aligned with thought, her despair surging, it was her congruencies that drove the Chimera back into its vacuum, the matrix of its origin. Its skittering retreat gave her a glimpse of freedom. She dragged in a cleansing breath free of Chimera’s moldy stench.
Her vision wavering she segued. Diving, she cart-wheeled into the Cradle of Life. Eclipsed by the past she saw her mother, on her hands and knees, in the black dirt of the garden she was pulling weeds in the pumpkin patch. When she sat back on her heels she looked piercingly into the nothingness and said, “Charlotte, never forget the power of a cleansing breath. It is a tangible reminder of your personal authority. Take a cleansing breath and begin again.”
How had her mother known? Cinderella understood! She fought the Chimera’s void with a cleansing breath. She thought, ‘begin again!’
Her soul whispered its intention, actualized, to begin again. Free of the Chimera, nature rushed in. Each element was distinct. Earth moved within Cinderella. She felt its intelligence reaching out and down. Roots balance branches. Diving, twisting, lifting; air infiltrated life within the mysteries of earth. She was water and water’s reflection. Fire hungrily transforming the material world into ash was curly, elegant like cursive writing. Cinderella was each element. Vibrant in nature she was interactive in its power. Nature defined itself in relationship to each other, the lexicon of their unity. Embodying each element, centered in the pinnacle of their union Cinderella was transformed by their infinite expressions. Separate and At One like the ocean bending the limitless horizons. She was able to perceive she was covered by the Chimera’s black-sticky web.
Life trickled out of Cinderella. Transported by the web it flowed into the Chimera’s vacuity. Her body nourished the faintly outlined form of the Chimera’s emptiness. The Chimera clicked its invisible nails over the web. It was like scraping a black board across Cinderella’s soul. Now the Chimera was visible. She watched it sucking down her aetheric force, gathering her power, it screamed again, “YOU KNOW NOTHING!”
Its jagged voice cutting across vulnerable nerves, Cinderella howled with pain. Salty tears leaking she watched in fascination as the Chimera skittered away from the intensity of her emotion. If she generated enough passion could she banish the black-stickiness from her body? Did the Chimera control her body but not her mind and feelings? Waking from the Chimera’s dream Cinderella was each molecule whole and distinct, simultaneously a part of the Four Directions and elements.
Was it possible her emotions and cognitions happened outside the body? Maybe they were stored in her body but originated in the realm of spirit? Oh it was confusing! Was it possible the Chimera did not have control of her after all? She struggled to remember the fluidity of water, the ornate curling of fire, the empty howling of wind and the balance between what is seen and invisible in the earth.
She tried to remember all the Fairy Godmothers had said about the Chimera. Vulnerability, the fragile giving and receiving of love, allowed the Chimera access to the Kingdom. It was a puzzle. The pieces: vulnerability, love’s ties, a Chimera’s void and its desire to inhabit bodily form.
Cinderella frowned or she would have frowned if her muscles hadn’t been frozen. ‘Where did the Chimera come from?’ Was the answer found in the beginnings of life? In the explosion of life was its opposite formed? Was the opposite of life not death but a vacuum, a void of nothingness, the matrix of the Chimera?
Vulnerability was the Chimera’s food. Vulnerability enabled it to form a wavering outline of existence. Maybe if she called her spirit into her body pulling to her the elements, the foundations of the Four Directions, distinct yet unified. She had to do something, anything. Pulled between her love for the Prince and the Chimera’s bottomless vacuum of nothingness was crushing her.
How could she understand while her head was throbbing? Her frozen muscles were screaming. Worst of all the power of her love for the Prince was leaking away. Drawn, siphoned off, through the Chimera’s black-sticky net. Their love was dying. Diminished and suffocated by the decaying smell Cinderella collapsed.
Tunneling through eons of the Chimera’s emptiness her mind snapped. Her heart stripped of its memories beat erratically. Life guttered, disenfranchised from purpose and talents like a candle’s last flicker. With her final thought she chose intentional rest, drifting into the West, the home of dreaming and transformation.
Waiting in the distance she saw the Fairy Godmother of the West and Blackie standing between two immense stones. Time had pitted the granite surface. The north face was sparsely covered in moss. Instantly Cinderella’s dream body, fueled by her spirit, flew to meet them. That was all that was left of Cinderella after her encounter with the Chimera.
Struggling to reach Blackie and the Fairy Godmother of the West she lost her way in dreams. She dreamed of her parents. Days spent gardening and caring for the animals. Nights by the fire playing music or reading.
She dreamt of the Prince. Their adventures flew through her, compressed into the blink of an eye. Had they ever really happened?
She danced in ceremony with the Fairy Godmothers. They were gathered together, a location Cinderella had never seen before. Silver trees quaked in the wind. Purple mountains etched against a twilight sky streaked pink and orange. Cinderella saw hills unfold into desert. The outline of Saguaro cactus sentinels over the dusty earth. In the opposite direction was the largest lake Cinderella had ever seen. Its surface danced with diamonds in the path of moon’s reflected light. It reminded her of a long-ago-far-away meeting with Moon Woman. “Remember my home is a refuge, a safe place. Remember.”
She took a deep breath, inhaling the vivid colors of twilight carried on the air. She felt the loamy desert’s earth after a rain. Cinderella savored her freedom. The strength of mountain
and desert restored her. Nature streamed into a vortex, creating a whirlwind of scent. The whisper of creosote, the sweetness of roses, the shiver of snow and pine, the music of wind in the trees, it was the convergence of the Four Directions, the Sacred Zero, the Cradle of Life.
Now Cinderella felt the answering cry of recognition, in her spirit, flaming the spiral carried by her dream body. The ancient powers of earth and stars flooded her. She inhaled the powers of the Four Directions deep into her spiral. At one with the whirling cascading spiral she held strands of joy, laughter, beauty and anguish. Plucking them into the melody of a life lived with purpose and meaning.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ceremony
In the sacred dreamtime the Fairy Godmothers, melding with the spiral of life, greeted Charlotte with a hug. She felt the weight and pressure of the turquoise beads, the necklace worn by the Fairy Godmother of the South. The warmth of the hug sank into Cinderella’s dream body and flared along the outer rim of her spiral. Together Cinderella felt their potency, the driving ambition of right order. A sacred lineage passed down to Cinderella by awakening the powers of the Four Directions for the sole purpose of creating beauty with the building blocks of authenticity.
In that moment her vision doubled. Standing with the Fairy Godmothers simultaneously Cinderella could see the Chimera’s vacuum draining the Prince and the Kingdom. A restless agitation scoured her, fraying the threads of the spiral.
The Fairy Godmother of the North whispered, “A spiral’s food is light. Feed your metaphysical and elemental spiral with light. Light’s transverse nature travels freely in the vacuum of the Chimera. Restore your elemental body with light!”
Fairy Godmothers of The Four Directions Page 18