The Divine

The Divine #1

I’m floating, and the first thing I see is a crown: purple flames along its rim, a red sun curled up inside with one yellow eye half open, smiling like it already knows my name. A pink tongue of world rolls out underneath, a trumpet that hasn’t played its first note yet. Every colour is outlined in thick black, as if the dark is hugging the colour so it won’t float away. I laugh out loud. The seed just woke up, and it’s wearing a crown.

The Divine #2

Now it’s morning in the dream and everything is yellow, warm buttery whole-body yellow. Birds keep hatching out of each other: a grey one with a bead of an eye, a red beak poking through the gold, a little flame-headed one perched up top just to see. Their feathers are a million tiny ink strokes and I can hear every single one rustle. That’s the first wind, I realise. The wind was birds all along. I’m grinning so hard my cheeks hurt.

The Divine #3

I fall through a cloud and land in a lake shaped like a cup. The water is the bluest blue, swirling in little brushstrokes, and a green fish with one red eye swims a lazy loop past my nose. A red chimney pours the river in from above. Down in the speckled sand, sleepy yellow faces blink up at me, perfectly content. Everything here holds something: the cup holds the lake, the lake holds the fish, the fish holds the light. I feel held too.

The Divine #4

The colour drains away and I’m not even a little sad, because the black-and-white world is so quiet and so detailed. A great hill strolls by on six little snail feet, a vine climbing its side, ribs of light along its back, leaves drifting beside it like flags. It’s a mountain, I realise, a young one, still walking to the place where it wants to stand forever. I walk next to it for a while. Nobody is in a hurry here.

The Divine #5

A bird shoots straight up through the dream, upside down and right side up at the same time. Its body is a column of stitched grey with a sun at each end, and the suns are full of tiny red raindrops looking at me. They’re eyes. The rain has eyes! Yellow ribbons stream off its wings and a red flame trails behind, watching where it’s been. I spin trying to follow it and end up dizzy and laughing in the grass. Sun, rain, bird: same thing, different moods.

The Divine #6

Then a whole family of birds arrives in autumn colours, gold and rust and slate and cream, every feather drawn in a hairline so fine it hums. One wears a target of an eye right on its wing. One is striped like a bee and stands guard. Two more lean in from the edges to see what the fuss is about. A long trumpet stretches across the bottom, and when it finally plays, it plays the sound of valleys opening. I didn’t know valleys had a sound. They do. It’s beautiful.

The Divine #7

Night wind. A grey shape sweeps past, all hatch marks and motion, curling like a wave that decided halfway through to become a bird. Its feathers point in every direction the wind has ever blown. A small round moon peeks over its shoulder, freckled and shy. I hold my arms out and the wind lifts me without asking, and I’m not scared at all. I’m gliding, I’m laughing, I’m part of the drawing now, one more pen stroke heading somewhere good.

The Divine #8

Everything goes soft and pale, like the dream took a long, deep breath. Spirals unwind across a log the size of a continent, and tucked into every curl there’s a little bird, a fin, a beak, a sleepy eye. It’s a nest of beginnings, and some of them are just starting to wake. I lie down on the log and listen to the spirals turn, slow as tides. I could stay here a thousand years. Maybe I will. Maybe I already have.

The Divine #9

The colours come back like old friends, terracotta and ochre and slate and cream, all holding hands. A horn rises out of the shape and blows one long pale note across the sky. A gold eye peeks out from the folds, calm and completely unbothered. Every surface is its own texture, stipple and hatch and ripple and grain, and when I run my hand across it I feel the whole earth in my palm, rough and smooth and warm. The world is finished being made. It looks pleased with itself.

The Divine #10

And then I’m home. Mountains along the horizon, a fence, a wheel turning in the sky, a little moon keeping watch, a tall tree waving hello. In the middle of the field sits a huge seed with a glowing eye at its heart: the same seed from the very beginning, from before the darkness lifted. It made all of this. It made me. I wake up with ink on my hands and my heart doing cartwheels, and I swear the room is still glowing.