Stories

The Blue Rose Manuscript - The Round World - Layer

Layer: A sheet, quantity or thickness of material, typically one of several, covering a surface or a body
 
Life is the sum of an almost infinite number of layers that sort out your thoughts, feelings and activities. 
This creates a lot of confusion as life’s level of complexity increases. 
You can usually focus on one or two layers at a time, the ones that come to prominence because of current events, temporary priorities or invisible puzzle pieces coming into play, but never forget that all the layers of your life are always there, and just like in a set of plans, making changes on one layer has consequences in all the others. 
I know, I know, after a while this living layer set gets so complicated you’ll want to throw it away and start over with a blank sheet.
Rejoice! This means you’re finally doing something worthwhile. 
All the things that matter, all the things that are consequential in the long run are always complicated. 
The really consequential ones are usually too complicated to tackle alone.
#storytelling #audiobooks

The Blue Rose Manuscript The Round World - Megapuzzle

Megapuzzle:
A life-sized construct (game, toy, or problem), designed to test ingenuity or knowledge
 
To start your instruction, what is life? 
Life is a giant puzzle made of pieces you can see and pieces you can’t see, and the more pieces you can fit together, the better your understanding of life and the more you can do. 
The mistake most people make is trying to solve the puzzle only with the pieces they can see, no wonder nobody ever figures things out. 
When architects design a building, they draw plans. Flat sheets of paper on which they describe what you can see at a certain level. Nobody in their right mind would try to make a building out of floor plans, like a finger thin stack of pancakes smothering each other. It is implied that things happen between those levels, things that are not described in the plans. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Foreword

Beloved,
I don’t know when these teachings will reach you, but reach you they will, in their good time, such are the rules of this round world. One thing I know, I’ll be long gone and many centuries will pass before you are born, you, my star, my destiny, my wonder. 
I have so many things to teach you and wish I could be there with you, but it doesn’t really matter, we’re all immortal, our kind, we never leave, we never die, we stay behind the ebbs and flows of the world to keep watch, to guide and to listen. 
I was born before the rise of the cathedrals, before the monuments of Egypt, before the age of reason. I was born many times, in many forms, although I’m sentimental and often return to a variation of my current one, and I will be born again some day, many centuries from now, as you. It is to you that I write this letter, my guidance for your life, filled with undying love and all the wisdom I accumulated over my many lives of learning. 

My Dear Fiona - Epilogue

There is nothing strange about me, and I can't explain why I can sense people from centuries past talk to me in my sleep and in my waking state. We are born with all sorts of abilities, I suppose, and I wouldn't have known mine was weird if it weren't for other people telling me so.
We use our unlikely gifts the best way we know how, the best way they fit in the normal fabric of reality, which they often do not, and since I'm talking to people long dead anyway, I became an anthropologist.
It is a solitary journey during which you're always surrounded by a crowd, always submerged in its beliefs and convictions, to the point where they drown you out.
People who even entertain the thought mediumship may be possible, and who don't drop me immediately in the crazy or deluded category, often ask, what is the point of speaking to the dead?
What is the point of speaking to anyone, really?

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 33 Sailing in Winter

Have you ever drifted into an experience so foreign you lack the means to communicate it and all the rules you relied upon to guide your life become useless?
My sister and I ventured into the boreal night again, only this time it wasn’t dark. In the absence of light pollution, the sky burst open to reveal a profusion of stars, clustered tight along the bright path of the Milky Way.
The night was a lot colder than we had gotten used to. 
The ocean air carries a lot of moisture to the islands, which traps warm air under its cloud cover, but tonight there were no clouds, and the sky was full of stars, which felt close enough to touch, and looked so brilliant.
We can no longer imagine a sky so bright with stars that even on a dark moon it illuminates the earth enough to see its every detail, cast in cool hues.
I looked at Denise and almost didn’t recognize her: she had a light blue halo in her hair, and her demeanor was so serious it made her look wise beyond her years.

On Authorship

While listening to a lecture on postmodernism and influence, a sudden recognition stunned me.  
Of course there are no new stories! Of course everything we think, regardless of our erudition or awareness, has been thought many times before!
We all wade blindfolded through the endless pool of knowledge that is the collective unconscious, fishing out random revelations. 
The human brain is not sophisticated enough to fathom the structure of this giant repository, but that structure must exist, as it is fitting for something this complex. 
Its organization is discrete and too close to be perceived as a whole, but acts with the cohesiveness of waves or prevailing winds.

River of Thought

Sometimes the river of thought flows through rapids, smothering the new born consciousness with the many faces of reality, so rich and thick with meaning you don’t even know if they’re yours, if they even relate to you, if they even exist, whether existence is something tangible, something whose presence you can guarantee tomorrow in this ever shifting unfolding of meaning that surrounds us.
I am confounded and awed, and somewhat eager to alter its course to reach the lazy river made of  sunshine and cozy afternoons where time slows down enough to give us comfort, where reality feels solid again, as if it had never changed. So many thoughts, so many people, conflicting interests intruding upon my life, I don’t even know you, go away! Who are you? Something inside my consciousness asks, and I can’t be sure it’s me, if there is such a thing.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 32 Northern Lights

Have you ever drifted into an experience so foreign you lack the means to communicate it and all the rules you relied upon to guide your life become useless?
My sister and I ventured into the boreal night again, only this time it wasn’t dark. In the absence of light pollution, the sky burst open to reveal a profusion of stars, clustered tight along the bright path of the Milky Way.
The night was a lot colder than we had gotten used to. 
The ocean air carries a lot of moisture to the islands, which traps warm air under its cloud cover, but tonight there were no clouds, and the sky was full of stars, which felt close enough to touch, and looked so brilliant.
We can no longer imagine a sky so bright with stars that even on a dark moon it illuminates the earth enough to see its every detail, cast in cool hues.
I looked at Denise and almost didn’t recognize her: she had a light blue halo in her hair, and her demeanor was so serious it made her look wise beyond her years.

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 31 Winter Solstice at Maeshowe

I always thought my life would be like the novels I liked to read when I was a teenager, where the heroine’s life was a constantly unfolding drama, replete with emotionally charged moments and anchored in the importance of her actions, where every meaningful event was anticipated well in advance and everything turned out more or less as planned.
Finding you was supposed to be a glorious professional moment, and I daydreamed of basking in the glory of compliments and approval, and savoring the pith of a prestigious career which would be undeniably earned.
And then I found you.
There is nothing more disorienting than a dream come true: all your struggles, your planning, your entire focus, is thus brought to its end. 
Nobody thinks through what they want to do with that fulfilled dream, because unconsciously we don’t believe it would happen.
It never looks like you planned. It feels so alien from your cherished vision you can barely recognize it and it changes you, in ways opposite from what you’d expect. It opens you to the sudden revelation you do not know what you’re doing, and you didn’t when you were sure of your goals either, and the terrifying clarity that life is not what you thought. 

My Dear Fiona - Chapter 30 The Gray Gull

There is an entire obscure half to life, one we avoid, forget, overlook. 
You can’t overlook it in the northern realms, not during winter, when the nights are long, and where people sought refuge underground to escape the harshness of the weather for centuries.
The dark half of the year, finding refuge in the earth, embracing stillness, these customs have been abandoned a long time ago, and because they became unfamiliar, they make us apprehensive.
There is power in this dark half we avoid; it has its own laws, its creations, its wealth of stories told by the fire during the months when there is nothing to do other than cozy up and wait for the sun to return.
The dark is the keeper of stories, songs, and magic. It is the place and time for contemplation and refining thought. It affords freedom from distraction and a cocoon inside which one can turn one’s gaze inwards.
Magic and mystery thrive in the dark half of life, because the latter is endlessly patient, focused and unswayed. 
Refined thought requires silence and solitude, while wisdom is gained away from distractions.