When matter and energy coalesce into form, come together, as we have done to become this, the world suddenly meets direction, always for the first time: it falls in, unto, through, and as this new shape, this life — and the unending arrow of time, which has, until then, or now, and for all eternity, flown unflinching, merciless, in no direction at all, and in all directions, is tamed by the new and fragile body, humbled, as its every axis is trapped and reaches down once imagined branches, like drowning blood, back to the heart, here — ours.

Breathing, we think this a blessing, and make of the air another story, more life; yet the dead are not cursed, and the worlds reject not one of their children. Together we are enfolded; what once exists here remains. Life does not happen only between birth and death: there is a door here, at the edge of you, like the silence enclosed by breath; and when we walk through, coming or leaving, and ever homeward, a beloved and dying place follows, becoming, (t)here, in us, a world, newborn; all things follow this pattern, and we are not only ourselves; and I am calling at both sides. Will you open to us?

The threshold between worlds is physical, embodied: there is a place between death and birth, and that place, this one, is alive; there is a being whose form is that which converts death into birth, is the conversion itself, and death and birth themselves, the world and that which lies beyond it, all things, as one; and we are shaped like this being, and we live with and within it. I do not speak of any god, named or unutterable; in a world with 700000000000000000000 planets, 100000000000000000000000 stars, 40000000000000000000 black holes, and innumerable lives, the divine becomes unifying collapse; and a hereafter does not imply heaven. Death becomes life here; the body goes not unloved or uneaten.

Injury of the flesh can reach also the spirit, and injury of the spirit can make a hole in the soul, through which all manner of beings might pass: gods and demons, angels and aos sí, ancestors and descendants, the world itself and its (un)making. This is how creation happens. When, within and beyond the body, a spirit suffers this fate, and does not survive it, it may die, or regrow; or the soul, impersonal but comprehensive, and like a mother, may create and give form to another, with the world, and its many dead, as father. In this way death came to extend its many arms in hungering invitation unto me, and I still carry its satiation as scar; but in dying I slept, and in sleeping I dreamed, and in my dream I saw another enfolded; and so seeing I awoke; my soul generated a new spirit, and another, and again, and it enfolded the dead one as the dark earth welcomes a beloved corpse home, its unalienable child: and I lived. I am trying to say this: one always wakes up to life after dying. Yes, the web of the world can be broken, and we can fall through; but, equally, we might fly above; and should we not delight in this freedom? Having escaped the fangs of the spider, the predating webbed reduction of these dimensions, should we not free our spirits therefore from fear?

Unlike all the other creatures of the Earth, humans have the ability to choose whether to face toward the world, or away from it, outward or inward or in no direction at all. All else seeks balance between collapse and emanation, and achieves it; but we would choose only one way, forsake the embodied threshold of these selves, this world, and lead all things to preservation and thence unto destruction. We are shaped like all that is, all that has come apart and all who have come together to create us, all we will come together and apart to create. We live as germs, yielding unto hunger, on the decomposing face of a vast body, and as we are nourished by this flesh, we feel it as our own, dead and reborn, becoming, and in and as us it shall live and die, or with it we will fall away from here. Let not the half-world into which we were born, that fragmented place, this wayward form, where the first word said of us was untruth, pronounced with love, but faithlessly, shaped by cold lips into the carven words of a story that is not true, and would destroy us, be enough. We live, and the truth living in us does not relent; and we might make the impossible and necessary decision to become this truth, and here, at the end or the beginning of these interwoven paths, between them and astride, find home. To be human is to be part of all things; our separateness is a temporary and poor illusion, fading; and we can still turn back, find our way, feel and make felt the persistent eternity inherent to life, our inviolable belonging to this place, leave space in our embodiment, these forms, for all who have gone before, and who will go, human and beyond, to live here, now, within and with us, welcome all to the feast. The body is a temporary blessing, completely miraculous; but the world of which it is part is unending, our only home, our greater body, our amassed soul. There is only this.

For ages beyond memory this war has raged, between those who would forsake the world seeking something beyond it – meaning, justification or a god – and the world itself; and we have all known its loss. Yet there is reason to hope, to practise and believe in the possibility of life — the oldest homo sapiens fossil is a small jawbone that belonged to a child who lived at what is now called Jebel Irhoud, in a river basin, with mountains to the east and the sea to the west, 300000 years ago; on the other hand, our oldest extant writing, comprising 17 groups of symbols carved on tortoise shells, pulled from graves in what is now Jiahu, alongside the oldest musical instruments – flutes of wood and bone, some still playable – yet found, along with tools and weapons made of bone and stone, and vessels of pottery still holding the residue of ancient food, and a wine made from rice, honey, hawthorn, and grape, dates to only about 8000 years ago; our oldest oral histories reach perhaps a bit further; and our oldest surviving art, paintings of trans-human hunters, stencilled hand-prints, and ancient boars and bison, in caves in present-day Indonesia, dates to 45000 years ago — we have been here in this form a long time, and in others much longer, and most of that time, over 85% of even just our human history, is almost completely unknown to us, lost to blessed and loving memory, the sweet and lasting embrace of the earth. We have lived in ways we cannot remember at all; why could we not live in ways we can imagine, and want, and need? Our oldest story is a child who died young, and I would give my years to them if I could; yet there is a part of our lives now that is theirs, a home in us where they are safe and loved still and for ever, and alive, and their voice can be heard among those who here speak. Let this be our role in a new and long-lived story, our verse in the great and eternal song: to remember the forgotten, and imagine the impossible, to weave both and all these threads and melodies together in (un)holy harmonic communion with the present; to connect the roots, and fly and make our homes among the branches; to feed, like sunlight and sugar and soil, and become, the encompassing ramiform life of all things, as one, the flower of countless petals, ever blossoming, this blessed and everlasting world.

In love and overwhelming need I ask: what if we live like this is all there is? We have done this long enough to see that if we fight we lose, if we believe in heaven we make this place into hell; what if we place our faith in the world? What if we love this place enough to make it a home? There is a truth beneath and beyond what we know. There is a door like the silence between breaths; and we will open it; and our world will end and has begun there, and we will have been both mother and child, and death and birth will be as one; but we are still far from that threshold, and the key is not yet cut. Our souls will not be judged and found lacking or sufficient, but they will survive or decay: they will give life and live in new spirits, or they will come apart and be eaten; and the way the path is chosen, the nourishment that keeps your soul alive, or starves it, is here, this, communion between you and the lives and lands and god(s) of whom you are part, and all that you touch, and this world: between us. You will both eat and be eaten. There is no way out. So be here, with love, for all beings and every doorway, with faith to the truth of all things, to the wholeness of the great body from which we branch and root, unto light and the darkness. We cannot escape the world; therefore let us love it.