Mind-Spew: Snake Song

And I found myself standing on a vast, empty plain. The sky above was a dusty brown, the ground below dry and filled with great, parched cracks as far as the eye could see. Distant, volcanic mountains, black as ash, cut a jagged line across the expanse, a sawlike ridge to separate the dust coloured soil from the dust coloured sky. Dotting the plain, following no pattern I could discern or comprehend were great spires and formations of an organic appearance the colour of dark, glassy obsidian. A rough track was carved on the plain, as if walked upon by ten thousand feet before mine.

I became aware of movement above, and, looking upward, I could see serpentine creatures slithering madly across the dirty sky in non-euclidean paths, their great bodies shimmering with silver light, their tails but ghosts of light behind their rapidly travelling forms. In their great clawed hands I could see shining stars. Their doglike heads with catfish whiskers faced the same way as I was apparently travelling, down that rough, dusty road in that empty place, and those distant, craggy mountains.

I walked for a long time, or rather, what I perceived as long, for it seemed that time as I knew it before had no meaning or measure in this place. At some point I became aware that I was not walking anymore, but flying at great speed, my sense of form having changed from that of a bipedal apelike creature to that of a sinuous serpent-dragon. My long body coiled and uncoiled across the sky, the landscape below dropping away and passing rapidly and strangely, for my path was in no way straight, but a writhing, twisting way, dizzying in unparalleled complexity.

Within my clawed, shining hands there shimmered and swirled a star, safely clutched. I knew at once that it was my spirit that I carried thusly on my strange path through grimy skies. It seethed and roiled, burning brightly with both fiery heat, and freezing chill. From it came a vibrating sensation, tingling up and down my twisting, writhing, undulating form.

Before long, I found myself before a gate, an arch of carven black stone, yet it seemed to me more carved by nature than by the hands of any intelligent being, though it did almost disturbingly appear that it was once alive, as if some strange gorgon turned it to stone. It was the great snake, forever regurgitating and consuming its own tail: the Ouroboros. It's single, visible eye of dark tone stared at nothing save for infinity.

Nothing save the parched and thirsty landscape was visible through the ring of the great snake, and without trepidation I passed through that gate, my sinuous form sliding into eternity, and my burning spirit held safely within my claws. The universe and all it held, as I knew it, fell away into nothingness.

I came to myself again, back on the Earth, with a feeling of having walked through a vast field of tall grasses bent by a soft breeze, of having grasped those waggling strands within my hands. Though, my head was full of exploding stars.

[[This is from an entry to my paper-and-ink journal, dated 27/10/2k7. I have no idea what bade me to write this, but I do remember writing frantically (my writing was all hard to read chicken-scratch, telling of my speed of somewhat-intelligible scrawl), hurrying to keep my pen up with my racing thoughts, as images and feelings rapidly blossomed in my head. This writing still feels as if it is somehow not complete, as if I did not quite capture everything that burst through my brain at that particular moment (which was in the wee hours of the morning).

The Ouroboros is a significant symbol for me, and it is used in my personal spirituality, in similar vein as a circle is: eternity, cycle, unity, All And Everything. A snake that eats its own tail, formed into a ring. Where a circle means merely Eternity And All It Encompasses, an Ouroboros for me seems to mean something more concrete.

I have been told it resembles a collar, as well.

Interesting.]]