The Three Songs

The First Song

        The first song is easy; it is the song of magic and love. It is a song for the world and, therefore, it is the sort of thing you hear murmuring through the streets late at night or in the hum of young people dancing. I first heard it long ago; I was travelling deep into the recesses of my mind, and I discovered the image of myself. It was like a mirror, but one that was thousands of years old. Rather than bother him, the image that is, I decided to just watch. And to just see where he might be going.

        The image of myself was walking in the garden.

        He was wandering, clearly unaware of where he was going: lost and lonely. Through the canyons and forests, across the desert. The images flashed by, but I knew he'd been travelling for a long time. While I watched, he met a girl in the forest, and she took his hand and guided him. They walked out of the shadow of the forest and she led him across a little bridge over a roaring river chasm.

        And then they were children together: they were living like some innocent heroes in a tree-house kingdom, far away from the lands of their parents. They sowed the earth and they walked the land and they had adventures. And as they grew, it seemed almost certain that they were to fall in love.

        I was enchanted by the beauty.

        I believe that they both expected that those halcyon days would never end, but one day she had to leave. They were both very sad. He was alone and he missed her, but most of all, he was sad because he didn't know why she had to leave or where she was going. I think that he probably blamed himself, although I'm sure he never would have understood why. He was alone again, but it was the loneliness of loss. The forest wasn't quite as magical anymore. The tree-house kingdom seemed a bit more like a jumble of sticks than the glorious citadel he remembered.

        And as I watched, he climbed up a clearing full of ancient stones and he cried his sadness into a song. It wasn't a beautiful song; it was a keening, aching heartbreak song that none would ever want to hear.

        But they heard, all the same. The song floated through the trees and into the sky and it wrenched the heart of the birds. The slumbering stones, which had chosen that piece of ground before the beginning of days, were pierced to the core and their dreams took on the pallor of loss.

        The song caressed the sky like a lost infant, and then it fell deep into the earth and then the rock beneath. Beneath that, the song crept into the bones of the earth and it rushed, like a weeping river-child, to the arms of its mother.

        And when the song reached the centre of the earth, the mother it had longed for, I realised that beneath the stone was my mind. And below that was my brain. It slid easily through the ground, and I felt its warmth spread through my body.

        And so his song broke into the bottom of my soul, the blackness at the core of all things. It crept into the dark void in the centre of my being, and there it found its home. And it united the two: the blackness and the garden, the broken and the loved. The loneliness and the great mother.

        My head was pounding and I was looking with both eyes at both worlds at the same time. They were one.

        This is how I heard the first song.

The Second Song

        The second song came later, when I myself was older and bitter, when I had seen some of the word with my own eyes and I felt like maybe there was something I had missed out on.

        It took the form of a song I had heard a long time ago in a place that I only barely remembered. I wonder if maybe it was a song you'd sang for me, when I was only a child. It was the sort of song that you'd hear only once, but you'd feel every note touching you, straight to the meanings of things. A cascade of notes dancing through all of the ways you look at the world: notions and plans and lusts and dreams, laid-back afternoons, dark nights of soul, breakfasts and moon-lit walks. And each note was a little blessing, each chord a union. That was the song I remembered.

        When I heard it again, for the second time, it was like I was walking in the same street as when the notes first reached my ears. And so I stretched out my fingers and began to direct.

        The second song is a song of power.

        I felt myself knowing and apprehending the song's plans, remembering things from long ago; the song had strength over the great river of time. I felt myself as an ancient god, writing each movement into the things of the earth. It was like I was directing some forest symphony, walking across the planet to each corner and each wisdom: filling the world, for the first time, with the great moments of beauty and of truth.

        The song touched me and it touched all people and it looked upon itself from every eye; it heard itself because it was the ears themselves. And in knowing it fully, as its father and as its son, being able to know it for the first time, I knew it so well, I cried great tears of love and I realised I was willing to sacrifice myself so that just one pristine note of that song would be heard. I thought of you, and knew you would tell me it was a glimmer of the feeling of being in the mind of the crucified lord.

        But no sacrifice was needed. The song brought spring all on its own. And I was looking at the clouds, knowing that I could die for them, I felt at peace because I know they were my kindred and that we would love each other no matter what.

        I remembered the little boy lost in the forest.

        I sent my love though the clouds and through the old stones. I was there.

        And that was the second song.

The Third Song

        The third song, I am afraid, is a secret. It is only for the hearing; not for the telling. The third song is a song for the naming of things, for the way that cannot be named, for the land beyond the edge of the map.
        
        To travel to the place where the third song can be heard, you cannot walk too quickly, lest you overextend your body and get lost in the eye of god. You must not walk too slowly, or else you will forget where you are going and get lost in the ten thousand things. You must not step too hard, lest the mountain pass crumble beneath your feet and cascade into an avalanche. You cannot have too much spring in your step, or else you may be lost in the heavens.

        It is a long and treacherous road.

        To hear the third song, you must see the jungle as it burns at the end of days and watch the lightning cuts to the earth. You must face the darkness as your companion. You must lose yourself and hold yourself resolute to the beginning of possibility itself. You must travel to the far green country beyond the distractions that the belittling embarrassments of your mind can send you. Where you walk determines from whose eyes you watch yourself. Wherever you look, we see ourselves looking back.

        To hear the third song, you must answer a call. It is a call to see the entire earth from the eyes of each of ten thousand possibilities. It is a call to the body, to the mind, to the unity of them both: to your death, your rebirth, and to the last whisper of sound as your name fades away for the last time. A call to the infinite, to happiness, to the knowledge that you are loved.

It is a call that may drive you to madness or to death.

        But the third song is a call from all of the greatest of the worlds. It is a call from yourself. It is a call from the mouth of the forest that always surrounds us.

        When you hear the third song, you will know that all will be well. You will return to the tree of life and eat its fruit: for birth, for sacrifice and for the healing of the nations. You will become the salt that preserves this world from decay. Your heart will burn with the spark of the everlasting fire. And the fire and the rose shall be one.

        And when you hear the third song, nothing will be the same.