Half past twenty-one hundred hours. You have been home for awhile and are ready to copy in “Grandma’s Story Fourteen” from book one. This shows a multi-dimensional sense of space-time but you don’t know if it is the right story. Let’s use it anyway as aspects of space-time are interwoven in the story. Each story is one recollected from one of the Dead. Grandma understands each of their stories. Each tells a story during their first recognition of herorhis own physical death. Each story is special to one or two people but the Dead enjoy hearing and telling stories about what is important in a life.
Grandma’s Story – Fourteen [from Braided Dreams]
Here some background on this Far Eastern story. We have two Chinese who are in love to the point that they give independently of each other yet each receives a gratification that could not be earned without the other’s sweat equity. The two are helping weave a silk tapestry, which is five and a half feet long and about three and a half feet in width. The background color of this small tapestry is a deep emerald green. The trancephysical engine that runs this silky fabric comes from its two metaphorically designed camel-colored dragons, each in a plum hued outline.
The center of the design has a small red dot between the tails of the two dragons to stop them from touching. If they do, real dragon blood will ooze from the red dot. This is what Shushu and Ch’ang have come to feel about this masterpiece of Lili’s creation. In real life, what the two know for sure is that if the dragon tails do touch real blood will run. For the safety to the reader, Lili placed a red dot, a red stop sign so to speak, in the center so it would be impossible for the two dragon tails to touch.
Strangely enough, for the human eye to fully comprehend this unusual silk embroidery, the eye must focus on the red dot in the center of the green between the two camel-colored dragons’ tails. Each dragon is a mirror image of the other, a metaphorical twin. A secret survives about this lost tapestry of the Han dynasty. A dynasty that existed in China from about two hundred years to a little after two hundred years after.
The secret is the dragon on the left is Shushu, the female, and the dragon on the right is Ch’ang, the male. Each dragon has four short legs and feet. The legs are camel colored as is the body, but the feet are beige and its clawed toes lavender. This dragon design is plum lined to separate the dragon from the dark emerald green silk background. Parts of the camel-toned body show gray shaded scales, so there is no question that this is the body of a once metaphorically real dragon. The eyebrows of the gentle beasts are oak-leaved and gray in outer form. The eyes are night black. The Chinese dragon’s ivory tusks jut outward to remind the viewer what sheorhe is dealing with. Also, jutting up from the backbone of the beasts are a line of ridged ivory bones, that look ever so much as if they are white peaked mountains as much as they are dragon white and boney backed ridgeline along its entire length. The puffy lips of the dragon that hold the smiling sharp teeth behind are violet.
The plum-lined embroidered dragon on the left juts out an S shape with the top of the S where the tail would be. The one opposite is backward S-shaped. The heads of the dragons are facing opposite directions. The one of the left is facing west, the one on the right is facing east. Both dragons are looking back at the directions they have come from. Above the dragon tails is a full moon, below the dragon tails is a half moon. On the west side and the east side are the respective quarter moons, each with an inward crescent.
Now here is what makes this ancient lost piece of colorful silk tapestry so unusual. If the viewer focuses on the small red dot separating the two tails, and sheorhe waits, suddenly the dragon heads appear to move and jump from their respective, facing out positions and instead, to look directly at the witness as one dragon.
The violet-lipped smile continues, the now one dragon’s mouth opens, and the observer takes a quick glimpse of a filled horn of plenty. Almost immediately the observer is bedazzled by the illusionary sight that sheorhe blinks and the vision collapses into the original, mirror imaged, two Chinese dragon forms. This unique illusionary vision only happens once for each onlooker.
The well designed silk embroidery immediately became quite controversial, and was soon stolen or lost. Even its legend vanished until I, Grandma, decided to revive it. Now, here is the true story behind the respective camel-colored dragons in the emerald green flag-like fabric with the red dot between the tails.
I am standing here posted on one of the stone walls of a small hut on a rounded, but ridged mountain summit about a thousand feet high. Surrounding this summit, across from the almost circular bending and east flowing river below, are higher peaked mountains in all directions. Some are snow capped others are not. This is an austere place where three people are spending their summer.
Shushu is a pleasant woman who has her own way or else. Her summer love is Ch’ang, and he is one of the most disagreeable men in the whole world, but who is also very popular with his mountain tribe. Her great aunt, Lili, shaman of both local tribes, is also on the summit. The stone hut is Lili’s for the summer months, and she invited Shushu and Ch’ang for a reason neither knew in advance. The two were to become the twin models of two dragons she was embroidering in silk. Now, in real life neither Shushu or Ch’ang, were related except by love, and they hardly looked as twins or even distant tribal cousins.
Lili knew a story on a different level of love to which both were connected. Here is Lili to tell it to you herself. Grandma raised her hand in the air and grabbed a puff of wind, pulled it down and when she spread her fingers Lili stood beside Grandma. The two gave each other a warm hug, so much so that the nearby outside temperature shot up another ten degrees.
Lili is speaking her native tongue but I give it an English twist for the reader’s benefit. Here she is.
I am Lili of the mountains. I dance the mountain air to walk cloud tops when I dream of life now long ago to you, but not to me. It has been as twenty years of life, these two thousand of yours, that is how I sense it. Everyone is different though, just like on Earth. Grandma and I get along because we related when I was alive. You have to dance away a piece of your soul before you can talk one on one with the Grand Lady of Nature and our human selves. It has to be without intent. I bent that whisper in the west wind though I sense an east by northeast wind is blowing today.
The two I am telling a story about were dancers as I am. Shu-shu is the pronunciation I like, I am Li-li, and I pronounce Ch’ang as Kay-Eng. This is my story and that is how I will pronounce the names. You read silently so I don’t suppose it makes any difference, but I like to hear the language sing as I talk in my native mountain tongue of your long ago.
That particular summer of your long ago, I had begun a embroidery project with an emerald green backdrop. Something unpronounceable was in the air when I stared into the green silk cloth. My left foot touched something unseen, a stone I immediately dug up. It was what you would call camel in its color tone. That which was unpronounceable in the summit air was Plenty and Bountiful, at least on its sharp edge. Others would call it goat, but I understood differently, that is why I was a shaman, and the others were not. Understanding is a sense, like smell. It is.
Shu-shu and Ch’ang both smell goat. Shu-shu is my grand niece. Ch’ang loves her and can do nothing about his love. Shu-shu loves Ch’ang, and she can do something about it. She chooses to do nothing. Ch’ang therefore, also chooses to do nothing. Together the two become as a single room, like this stone hut Grandma and I, Li-li, presently stand on. To exert their separate personalities Shu-shu shape-shifts into a doorframe in the west wall. Ch’ang shape-shifts into a doorframe centered in the east wall. The river, a thousand feet below, runs from west to east. A thousand feet above the river, love attempts to construct a bridge between the two doorframes.
Love is a condition and cannot build literally build the bridge between the two. Hearts build bridges. Those stone walls, the west wall and the east wall of this hut, are the rigidity of their hearts to this day. The centered doorframes are the souls of Shu-shu and Ch’ang.
Li-li took a moment to smile in the moment as she suddenly transported herself to the center of the stone hut where she can see out the two opposite doorframes. In life I could not see both doorframes at once due to the Nature of Things. Dead, I can. This is not a trick, I assure you, smiles Li-li.
I, the Li-li, think. Each doorway is a Dragon of Plenty and Bounty. Each soul-framed doorway is equal. I, the Li-li, remember. Each doorway is invisible in the Nature of Things. Each doorframe is invisible in the Nature of Things. Each wall is invisible in the Nature of Things. I, Li-li am also invisible in the Nature of Things. Yet, I am writing in the Nature of Things. I am writing in Grandma Earth. Grandma Earth is visible to all who are a part of her. This is how it is, there is nothing that can be done about it.
I remember. This is what I thought those many years ago and this is still what I think today. I made my embroidery that summer. I am the small red dot. Shu-shu is the west dragon. Ch’ang is the east dragon. When a living human being stares at the red dot long enough sheorhe sees not a red dot, but the tip of the tail of me, Li-li, the Red Dragon. It is then that the mirror image dragons, Shu-shu and Ch’ang, immediately form into one dragon. Shu-shu and Ch’ang become an illusion of One, so I may create the read tale of the lost green silk embroidery with a central red dot of a dragon, two mirrored dragons, and the four phases of the moon intact.
With that said Li-li disappears.
Grandma carefully steps down off the stone walled hut and she continues the story. Beautiful country. I like the mountains perhaps more than the seashores of the world. A rocky aesthetic tranquility rises into the upper atmosphere, and you do not have to reach the mountaintop to have a sense of the majesty of solid white peaks touching ethereal blue sky. Grandma suddenly shifted into a little mountain jig, and for a few seconds those old black feet were moving like a river dance spectacular. Standing straight and tall, moving those feet with her hands on her hips, Grandma could outdo them all. “I move in those human feet doing the stomping,” she said with glee. “I dance when I feel like it.” With that, Grandma jumped to a cloud top and Li-li re-appeared. Both of them kept right on dancing until they were out of sight.
Any time you see a single cloud or two out there in the blue sky, without too much trouble, you can see old Grandma doing a jig on the top of one of them, with those bright old black eyes smiling to beat the band as she stomps those wonderful airy black feet of hers.
Dance to the rhythm of Necessity’s call
One foot moves and the other one follows
Fate and Free Will sit it out in the hall
Like flowers swaying down in the hollows.
Cloud dancing with Grandma in the sorcerer’s dream
Are a past and a future, what is the difference?
Words dancing a story in a variety of theme
In balance and cadence and conscience and prudence
Dance with the rhythm of Necessity’s call
Both feet move and the quick mind soon follows
From Grandma’s black gums with white teeth in a sprawl
Merlyn crosses dream’s river in the swift-flying swallows.
***
I cannot remember if this is the correct story. Too many stories by Grandma, too many books. I’m tired, so this will have to do.
You have more words than you have lives, orndorff. Post. – Amorella.
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