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To Be an Alchemist Dream While Awake

To be an alchemist dream while awake. To be an alchemist dream while awake as an artist. Dream as an artist in love. Dream deeply, in love with your materials. Adore them; arrange them, love them, attend, make rhythm, love! Love!

Chains of black marks stream forward on what seems to be a flat field in front of me. My hands dangle in an awkward posture. Fingers move oddly, furtively, dashing out, flickering, clashing, zip, clatter, clash, as if these words had anything to do with strange hand movements and lines of black ruts on a virgin white earth far below, as if an Eagle overflew an army formation in the fresh snow. What could these little black figures so many miles below me, jerking slowing like water on an uneven surface, these trains of black that advance into light, what could they have to do with you, my Angel? And what does this, this body, these words, these murmurs on the wind, have to do with you? What could they?

Word and writing have nothing in common. Marks and motions and movements and murmurs and memos and mudras and moods having nothing in common with Word. Word is invisible. Word is silent. Word neither rises nor falls. Yet flickering blue lights reflecting on shop windows, sending out hollow tin can loneliness into the ether on city pavement have nothing to do with story or laughter or horror or knowing. Bodies in motion, humans and electrons, orbit ever. Orbiting, they move. Flickering, they move. Slithering, they move. They move like shadows. They move like shadows with the Sun. They move and they have nothing to do with me. Yet I love them. I love them so I may move.

I am the Soul. I Love. I am Love. I am Love Eternal and Absolute. But I can touch this world and I can love this world. And with my love in this world I make pictures and words. Oh world, you I love carefully through this human being, through these awkward hands, tending you and making his hands to move so that I might sing to you and whisper and kiss you with my magic. For what else could make these marks come to life? It is I who make the flickers and marks. He has learned to coincide these movements with my love and to catch my love and transmit.

See how I whisper. See how I whirl out like the Lion of the Sun. I am the Soul. I am a child laughing. How this body moves to me as I love it.

I am the Soul and I See. I See patterns. I See Beauty. And what I See is Made when I See.

I am the Soul and I Hear and I See and I Smell and I Move and I Make. I am the maker of Artifacts bright. No mere mimic knows the things that I Know, nor can he make them. I am a laughing child.

Artifacts I make, beautiful with my breath. From myriad ceaseless movements, I select, I touch, I light up, I show, I hide, I move, I hide, I laugh and I laugh. From the jiggle of atoms buzzing to the grand cascade of stars, all of these I Work. I make a Grand work of Art. Grand sand grand mud grand streams steams flames smoke and wind, all I Play, all I Make. For I am the laughing Child.

Listen to me, for I Know: to be an alchemist dream while awake.

 Eric N. Peterson is a Toltec priest and member of The Tequihua Foundation, a Riverside, Southern CA nonprofit whose mission is to continue the ancient consciousness-transforming arts of the Toltecs. The Aka Dua is an energy prepared by a particular Toltec line. The Aka Dua assists in the alchemical process of transformation by which an ordinary human becomes the shaman.

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