That your gods have abandoned you.

Does your foot feel abandoned when you stop being aware of the floor under your soles?

Does your breath feel abandoned as you go about your daily life, constantly unaware of your breathing?

All these things seem so because our human awareness is narrow by default, like a searchlight which swings over existence in the dark. Without that light, we can perceive little. The gods and daimons and spirits and angels and saints dwell in the dark forest of the Soul which is lit by sun, moon and stars.

They play and laugh in vast revels of silence, in the haunted cathedrals of void between the galaxies. They feast in the deepest oceans and quicksilver-mirrored lakes, Perhaps once in a while they may pause in the spotlight of our consciousness, grinning at our fear of the dark; our desperate searching which brushes the edges of their groves and bowers and heavens upon heavens.

And then, as our batteries begin to die, as the power which we fought so hard to preserve begins to fade, they may grow still or silent; they may whisper signs and portents of encouragement.

It doesn’t matter.

Because we must learn to be, without that searchlight. We must learn to feel with skin and bood and bone, to see with our hands and lips, to inhale the perfumes and scents of that same dark forest of the Soul.

To walk without that light, without that safety of existence as we now know it always at our side; to take the rising of the Deep Below and the falling of the Heavens as they may be – to move with fierce, merciless, feral innocence, immersed in the grace of a child who has returned to their primordial state.

There, we can touch, and play and explore. There we are welcomed home with moonlight in our eyes, suns crowing our heads, blossoms in our hair and joyful, atavistic laughter.

No fear, for the water of the forest is so cold and icy clear that it burns and chills us and makes our bones ache. Shrieking in mirth, then we grow warm again in the heat that comes up from the Earth.

It’s all here, if you’re ready to take the plunge, to cast aside the hermit’s lamp and spin the wheel as you dance in darkly dappled days and nights, with the pulse of your blood as drumbeat.

You were never alone in the first place. Or the Last Place, either.