Aum Dada Gospel 6: catching light in a bottle

We are looking for old bottles. George collects them, and knows the best place to find them is in the resurrecting wilderness of old cellar holes. There, after the wood frame house has been removed by owner, stranger, or act of god, the remaining wound of foundation and whatever items were left behind are healed over time by the hands of vegetation and the sweet breath of nature’s nurse.

George had stumbled upon this one deep in the woods while wandering alone in his divining ways. Now, we were approaching its ruins so George can continue his search for kismet in a more leisurely and thorough fashion. This was the summer before ‘Lord of the Rings’ so we aren't in any character but for the ones we really think we are: pirates looking for the buried loot.

George is inside the surrounding mound where the remaining foundation has been buried in more than a century’s worth of leaf mould and wind-blown dirt. David is apprenticing, and I am busy rhapsodizing about the lilacs that once in the dooryard bloomed. Already I have visions of poetry dancing in my head. Falling through the leaves, the light of a youthful summer breaks upon our bodies like a waterfall of reverie and splashes back into the air with stained glass wonder.

“Look at this beauty!” George sings out. He is holding a small triangular-shaped green-tinted bottle looking like it once contained a medicinal cure for aging, a decanted fountain of youth. It appears pristine. The cork is still in it. And on closer inspection, a small amount of something fluid washes around its bottom.

“Open it up!” cries David, and George carefully obliges. Twisting the cork off, he brings the bottle up to his nose and smells. And smiles. David takes a whiff and begins laughing uncontrollably. George holds up the bottle to me and I gingerly sniff. I see the house new and varnished. A little girl is playing with a doll on a swing in the front yard, where an apple tree grows, its fruit still green with promise. The woods spread out like the light hair on a young boy’s arm.

Circling the earth, a web of life is reaching to the sky, first flexing down from particle and wave to atom down to molecule and then the reflex up to single-celled life to organic vegetation up to creatures roaming on the surface of the earth to these three boys looking for a message in a bottle that the world is here and now becoming conscious and aware it is a singular light within the all-encompassing light of the light of light. “God!” I proclaim.