"He's gone off asleep—actually," I heard her mutter, as she left the room with a fling of her little skirts, shutting the door behind her with a bang.
That bang was far away. I was already rising and falling in that natural happy state which to me meant freedom. It is hard to tell about, but that dear Fillery knows, I am sure, exactly what I know, though he has forgotten it. He has known us somewhere, I feel. He understands our service. But, like me, he has forgotten too.
What really happened to me? Where did I go, what did I see and feel when my rhythms took me off?
Thinking is nowhere in it—I can tell him that. I am conscious of the Sun.
One difficulty is that my being here confuses me. Here I am already caught, confined and straitened. I am within certain limits. I can only move in three ways, three measurements, three dimensions. The space I am in here allows only little rhythms; they are coarse and slow and heavy, and beat against confining walls as it were, are thrown back, cross and recross each other, so that while they themselves grow less, their confusion grows greater. The forms and outlines I can build with them are poor and clumsy and insignificant. Spirals I cannot make. Then I forget.
Into these small rhythms I cannot compress myself; the squeezing hurts. Yet neither can I make them bigger to suit myself. I would break forth towards the Sun.
Thus I feel cramped, confused and crippled. It is almost impossible to tell of my big rhythms, for it is an attempt to tell of one thing in terms of another. How can I fix fire and wind upon the point of a pin, for instance, and examine them through a magnifying-glass? The Sun remains. What I experience, really, when I go off into my own freedom is release. My rhythms are of the Sun. They are his messengers, they are my law, they are my life and happiness. By means of them I fulfill the purpose of my being. I work, so Fillery calls it. I build.
That, at any rate, is literally true. My thinking stops at that point, perhaps; but "I think" I mean by "release"—that I escape back from being trapped by all these separate little individualities, human beings each working on his own, for his own, and against all the others—escape from this stifling tangle into the sweep of my big rhythms which work together and in unison. I search for lost companions, but do not find them—the golden skins and radiant faces, the mighty figures and the splendid shapes.
They work without effort, however. That is another difference.
I, too, work, only I work with them, and never against them. I can draw upon them as they can draw upon me. We do draw on one another. We know harmony. Service is our method and system.