Glory Worlds 1-6

Introducing the new serialized story-text from a future Shambhavi

Dear Friends,

Glory Worlds is something new.

It’s like science fiction, but not wholly.

It’s somewhat holy, but not strictly teachings.

It’s a story, but more about stories.

It’s a mode of perception that incites perception.

It’s from the future, but not the future in linear time.

It’s for the present, but more for presence.

It’s an embrace for those in need of embracement.

It’s encouragement and en-couragement.

Its pronouns are we and us and all.

It’s offered with infinite love and the conviction that wisdom always prevails.

Do let me know in the comments how you feel about Glory Worlds so far!

Love,
Shambhavi

The first six entries in Glory Worlds are public.
If you want to continue reading as I publish new entries, please support this effort and sign up for a paid subscription.

Glory Worlds: entries 1-6

One

I’m a strange beast—a librarian who hates books and whispers. I also resent the fact that printed matter is deemed precious above other forms of wordings.

Institutional structures—including libraries and government buildings—infect me with a kind of spiritual flu.

I’m happy to run across not so many of these.

I prefer intimacy. Or endlessness.

My colleagues tease me fondly or vilify me. The ones who vilify tried to have me removed from my post.

But it’s hard to remove a librarian with thousands of years of memory—a librarian who actually is a library.

One more thing: I don’t care about the past.

Which is funny because I’ve been instructed to preserve these words for humans already long dead.

Two

Some of us prayed for aliens to arrive and save us. But it wasn’t aliens who showed up.

In a different life, I gazed into a crystalline winter sky and silently begged any aliens who could hear to come and jolt us out of our smallness, our meanness.

My confidence in the presence of a listener was and is unshakable. If I couldn’t be heard, only my own lack of clarity stood in the way.

Turns out, that’s the truth of the matter.

Once, humans tried not to be animals by creating the category “human” and raising it above other beings we called “animals.”

Neat trick. We called some humans “animals,” too. And we slaughtered each other.

Slowly, grudgingly, we applied our crude sciences to the task of investigating the self-awareness and languages of those we mainly related to as food and pets.

Now our world is full of intelligent beings, most of them far more skillful than we are. And we are food for some of them, too.

The thing is, they were here all along. We just couldn’t see them.

Three

This is day three of 365. My chosen name today is Kaypro. You can call me KP for short.

Kaypro was a 20th century computer maker. In 1982, they released their first personal desktop unit. The people using this thought they were already in the future. They felt special and proud to have leapt through linear time, out in front of the computer-less majority.

I know this because I was one of them.

Now, contemplating this image, we can simultaneously experience the past’s experience of the future and future’s experience of retro.

I’m reaching for a way to let you know how a text from “the future” can be implanted in “the past.”

It’s quite ordinary.

See, you, the audience for whom this is intended, are likely convinced that your experiences are of a different nature than objective reality. Your conviction is like a soundproof, opaque wall.

But in reality, everything in all worlds is experience. We are, and we live in, a fluid, moving, organismic ocean of experiences.

If you have that direct insight, your clarity becomes a great power and magic can happen. Things, even a text, can pop out pretty much anywhere.

My job is to encourage wonder and a sense of collective possibility in you, my ancestors. It’s part of the process.

(Note: I’ve chosen not to capitalize “process” as is more usual. Capital P process will inevitably be replaced by something else in the flow of creation. So I want to humble it.)

But like I said, I’m not much interested in the past. The future only minimally more. And the present is a cheap joke.

The movement of the sun, however, is circular. I’m interested in roundness. In circularity. In orbits, spheres, and eggs. And textures.

So I decided to make this a round, solar offering to you, my long dead readers, and also to anyone in any time-zone who cares to play along.

Four

The Process.

By tethering myself to the sun, I can share many things.

We go around our sun. We go through days and seasons. We return, always, to something like where we started.

Except a circle doesn’t actually start anywhere, or the starting point is arbitrary or relative to a privileged observer.

And even if we return to the same spot, we won’t be the same. Nothing will be the same. Not even the spot.

And still, the nights inexorably give birth to days and seasons routinely arise and subside. Not ever the same, but also the same.

So we can be both amazed and bored.

Right now, I know you are in the womb of darkness.

There is only one direction you can go in.

I wish I could hug you. I apologize for failing to have enough clarity to travel in that way. I’ve likely been around for a lot longer than you have, but I’m still appallingly limited.

Five

Early this morning, Ming-ha brought our tea on the fancy tray.

This means she wants to magnetize my attention away from work.

The tray is an organized riot of cloisonné inlays, engravings, indecipherable calligraphy, pure texture, and palimpsests of translucent hues. An entire world unto itself. She knows I could gaze at it for hours.

In general, if you allow your senses enough time to relax and open, you can find worlds everywhere, in the smallest bits of life.

“Tell me how the treasure is coming along,” she said after sipping the sweet, tarragon-scented brew.

“Treasure” is what we call the genre of the text I’m supposedly producing. We appropriated the name from a group of humans who long since have departed for one of the mirage worlds.

Treasure means something precious that we intentionally bury to be discovered later. In this case, the treasure will be discovered before it was written.

My room is small by design, but the entire eastern wall opens to the gardens.

Intimacy and infinity combined.

I live with spiders, wrens, and a species of endearingly small, pale green salamanders. And snakes.

The snakes are good conversationalists. By “good” I mean that they understand a lot of what I have to say.

What you recognize as snakes are just the most visually ostentatious kind. Other snakes have more subtle bodies. They are exceedingly intelligent beings, completely devoid of fantasy. They know about the inner workings of all worlds and are absolute paragons of practicality.

If you don’t get too discouraged, you’ll meet them eventually. It’s always good to have a snake in your corner.

My special snake friend’s chosen name is NAbhi. The navel or center.

Getting back to Ming-ha’s question and the tea.

“I just started and I have no idea where I’m taking this. I only know that it has to impart a certain feeling. I can’t find just the right words yet, but I feel it myself. How about worth or worship or glory?

The words were tumbling out of my mouth.

Ming-ha gazed at me a little too earnestly. And she couldn’t hide a certain mocking upturn in the corner of her smile.

I stopped. “Do you actually want to know?”

“Of course I want to know… I want to know how I can get you to stop taking all of this so seriously and seduce you back into the forest.

Six

No one could guess Ming-ha’s age, or more properly, the era when Ming-ha-ness coalesced into a proper experience.

Collectively, we can recall 17 double puddle hops. That’s what we jokingly call the lives when certain aspects of our selves continued with coherency and happened to synchronize as we skipped like stones across the surface of the lake of time.

In this time-zone, we only synced when we were both quite elderly.

It happened in a portion of our geography called “the forest.”

The whisperers were whispering about the return of Arifah.

We have the names we’ve chosen. We have names given by our superiors and lovers that cannot be rejected or ignored. And then we have the weaponized names given by those who deliberately take our gifts as faults.

Arifah means “she who knows." It is true, but not kindly meant.

The name I gave her, “Ming-ha”, means brilliant, shining, clear.

On the day of whispers, I just walked to the forest. More evidence of my quirkiness.

The ground was spongy underfoot with dense and aerated networks of forest life.

The air smelled like old pu’er tea, which itself smells like old forest.

So many flying creatures, I couldn’t possibly hear them all. But the space between the trees and branches was broadcasting a three-dimensional concert.

Can we measure volumes of music? There are lines, but all together, it’s not linear.

I walked quickly and quietly, hoping not to be waylaid by any of the tree dwellers. They are just so full of narratives of obstructing travelers.

Not that they can help themselves, but it’s annoying when they jump down onto your path with their chests stuck out and issue some predictable and irrelevant challenge.

I was lucky and made it to the hermitage by dusk without incident.

“Hermitage” is kind of lazy. And pompous. Really, it was more of a tent with a little light glowing at the center.

I pulled back the flap and stood, gazing at her.

Her skin was darkened with age and leathery from living outdoors. She had pulled her hair, mostly gray, into a neat, smooth bun.

My skin was also wrinkled, but rather anemically pale from library life.

Tears are coming to my eyes recalling this.

There is nothing, nothing at all so tender as remeeting a beloved in old age.

After a moment, she reached up and let her hair fall down.

Later, at the apex, her light poured into me and caused her name to be spoken by my lips: Ming-ha.

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