Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I made the world this way: that young man of my House in Chukulmas felt as I felt; and I would go to Chukulmas after the Grass, this year. He and I would go up into the hills together and become forest-living people. We would take the roan stallion and go to Looks Up Valley, or farther; we would go to the grass dune country west of the Long Sound, where he had once told me the herds of wild horses run. He said that people went from Chukulmas sometimes to catch a wild horse there, but it was country where no human people lived. We would live there together alone, taming and riding the wild horses. Telling myself this world, in the daytime I made us live as brother and sister, but in the nights lying alone I made us make love together. The Grass came and passed. I put off going to Chukulmas, telling myself that it would be better to go after the Sun was danced. I had never danced the Sun as an adult, and I wanted to do that; after that, I told myself, I would go to Chukulmas. All along I knew that if I went or if I did not go it did not matter, and all I wanted was to die.

  It is hard to say to yourself that what you want is to die. You keep hiding it behind other things, which you pretend to want. I was impatient for the Twenty-One Days to begin, as if my lift would start over with them. On the eve of the first day I went to live at the heyimas.

  As soon as I set foot on the ladder my heart went cold an tight. There was a long-singing that night. My lips got numb an my voice would not come out of my throat. I wanted to get out an run away all night, but I did not know where to go.

  Next morning three groups formed: one would go over the northwest range into wild country in silence; one would use hemp and mushrooms for trance; and one would drum and long-sing. I could not choose which group to join, and this distressed me beyond anything. I began shaking, and went to the ladder, but could not lift my foot to climb it.

  The old doctor named Gall, who had taught me sometimes at the Doctors Lodge, came down the ladder. She was coming to sing, but the habit of her art distracted her and she observed me. She turned back and said, “Are you not well?”

  “I think I am ill.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I want to dance and can’t choose the dancing.”

  “The long-singing?”

  “My voice is gone.”

  “The trances?”

  “I’m afraid of them.”

  “The journey?”

  “I can’t leave this house!” I said loudly, and began to shake again.

  Gall put her head back with her chin sunk in her neck and looked at me from the tops of her eyes. She was a short, dark, wrinkled woman. She said, “You’re already stretched. Do you want to break?”

  “Maybe it would be better.”

  “Maybe it would be better to relax?”

  “No, it would be worse.”

  “There’s a choice made. Come now.”

  Gall took my hand and brought me to the doorway of the inmost room of the heyimas, where the people of the Inner Sun were.

  I said, “I can’t go in there. I’m not old enough to begin the learning.”

  Gall said, “Your soul is old.” She said the same to Black Oak, who came from the gyre to the doorway: “This is an old soul and a young one, stretching each other too hard.”

  Black Oak, who was then Speaker of the Serpentine, spoke with Gall, but I was not able to listen to what they said. As soon as we had come into the doorway of the inner room my hair lifted up on my head and my ears sang. I saw round, bright lights coming and going inside the room, where there was no light but the dim shaft from the topmost skylight. The light began to gyre. Black Oak turned to me and spoke, but at that time, as he spoke, the vision began.

  I did not see the man Black Oak, but the Serpentine. It was a rock person, not man nor woman, not human, but in shape like a heavy human being, with the blue, blue-green, and black colors and the surfaces of serpentine rock in its skin. It had no hair, and its eyes were lidless and without transparency, seeing very slowly. Serpentine looked at me very slowly with those rock eyes.

  1 crouched down in terror. I could not weep or speak or stand or move. I was like a bag full of fear. All I could do was crouch here. I could not breathe at all until a stone, maybe Serpentine’s land, struck my head a hard blow on the right side above the ear. It knocked me off balance and hurt very much, so that I whimpered and sobbed with the pain, and after that I could breathe again. My head did not bleed where it had been struck, but began swelling up there.

  I crouched recovering from the blow and the dizziness, and after a long while looked up again. Serpentine was standing there. It stood there. After a while I saw the hands moving slowly. They moved up slowly and came together at the navel, at the middle of the stone. There they pulled back and apart. They pulled open a long, wide rent or opening in the stone, like the doorway of a room, into which I knew I was to enter. I got up crouching and shaking and took a step forward into the stone.

  It was not like a room. It was stone, and I was in it. There was no light or breath or room. I think the rest of the vision all took place in the stone; that is where it all happened and was; but because of the human way human people have to see things, it seemed to change, and to be other places, things, and beings.

  As if the serpentine rock had crumbled and decayed into the red earth, after a while I was in the earth, part of the dirt. I could feel how the dirt felt. Presently I could feel rain coming into the dirt, coming down. I could feel it in a way that was like seeing, falling down on and into me, out of a sky that was all rain.

  I would go to sleep and then be partly awake again, perceiving. I began feeling stones and roots, and along my left side I began to feel and hear cold water running, a creek in the rainy season. Veins of water underground went down and around through me to that creek, seeping in the dark through the dirt and stones. Near the creek I began to feel the big, deep roots of trees, and in the dirt everywhere the fine, many roots of the grasses, the bulbs of brodiaea and blue-eyed grass, the ground squirrel’s heart beating, the mole asleep. I began to come up one of the great roots of a buckeye, up inside the trunk and out the leafless branches to the ends of the small outmost branches. From there I perceived the ladders of rain. These I climbed to the stairways of cloud. These I climbed to the paths of wind. There I stopped, for I was afraid to step out on the wind.

  Coyote came down the wind path. She came like a thin woman with rough, dun hair on her head and arms, and a long, fine face with yellow eyes. Two of her children came with her like coyote pups.

  Coyote looked at me and said, “Take it easy. You can look down. You can look back.”

  I looked back and down under the wind. Below and behind me were dark ridges of forest with the rainbow shining across them and light shining on the water on the leaves of the trees. I thought there were people on the rainbow, but was not sure of that. Below and farther on were yellow hills of summer and a river among them going to the sea. In places, the air below me was so full of birds that I could not see the ground, but only the light on their wings.

  Coyote had a high, singing voice like several voices at once. She said, “Do you want to go on from here?”

  Grandmother Mountain

  I said, “I was going to go to the Sun.”

  “Go ahead. This is all my country.” Coyote said that, and then came past me on the wind, trotting on four legs as a coyote, with her pups. I was standing alone on the wind there. So I went on ahead.

  My steps on the wind were long and slow, like the Rainbow Dancers’ steps. At each step the world below me looked different. At one step it was light, at the next one dark. At the next step it was smoky, at the next clear. At the next long step, black and grey clouds of ash or dust hid everything, and at the next I saw a desert of sand with nothing growing or moving at all. I took a step and everything on the surface of the world was one single town, roofs and ways with people swarming in them like the swarming in pondwater under a lens. I took another step and saw the bottoms of the oceans laid dry, the lava slowly welling from long center s
eams, and huge desolate canyons far down in the shadow of the walls of the continents like ditches below the walls of a barn. The next step I took, long and slow on the wind, I saw the surface of the world blank, smooth, and pale, like the face of a baby I once saw that was born without forebrain or eyes. I took one more step and the hawk met me in the sunlight in the quiet air over the southwest slope of Grandmother Mountain. It had been raining, and clouds were still dark in the northwest. The rain shone on the leaves of the forests in the canyons of the mountainside.

  Of the vision given me in the Ninth House I can tell some parts in writing, and some I can sing with the drum, but for most of it I have not found words or music, though I have spent a good part of my life ever since learning how to look for them. I cannot draw what I saw, as my hand has no gift for making a likeness.

  One reason it would be better drawn, and is hard to tell, is that there is no person in it. To tell a story, you say, “I did this,” or “She saw that.” When there is no I nor she there is no story. I was until I got to the Ninth House; there was the hawk, but I was not. The hawk was; the still air was. Seeing with the hawk’s eyes is being without self. Self is mortal. That is the House of Eternity.

  So of what the hawk’s eyes saw all I can here recall to words is this:

  It was the universe of power. It was the network, field, and lines of the energies of all the beings, stars and galaxies of stars, worlds, animals, minds, nerves, dust, the lace and foam of vibration that is being itself, all interconnected, every part part of another part and the whole part of each part, and so comprehensible to itself only as a whole, boundless and unclosed.

  At the Exchange it is taught that the electrical mental network of the City extends from all over the surface of the world out past the moon and the other planets to unimaginable distances among the stars: in the vision, all that vast web was one momentary glitter of light on one wave on the ocean of the universe of power, one fleck of dust on one grass-seed in unending fields of grass. The images of the light dancing on the waves of the sea or on dust motes, the glitter of light on ripe grass, the flicker of sparks from a fire, are all I have: no image can contain the vision, which contained all images. Music can mirror it better than words can, but I am no poet to make music of words. Foam, and the scintillation of mica in rock, the flicker and sparkle of waves and dust, the working of the great broadcloth looms, and all dancing, have reflected the hawk’s vision for a moment to my mind; and indeed everything would do so, if my mind were clear and strong enough. But no mind or mirror can hold it without breaking.

  There was a descent or drawing away, and I saw some things that I can describe. Here is one of them: In this lesser place or plane, which was what might be called the gods or the divine, beings enacted possibilities. These I, being human, recall as having human form. One of them came and shaped the vibrations of energies, closing their paths from gyre into wheel. This one was very strong, and was crippled. He worked as blacksmith at the smithy, making wheels of energy closed upon themselves, terrible with power, flaming. He who made them was burnt away by them to a shell of cinder, with eyes like a potter’s kiln when it is opened, and hair of burning wires, but still he turned the paths of energy and closed them into wheels, locking power into power. All around this being now was black and hollow where the wheels turned and ground and milled. There were other beings who came as if flying, like birds in a storm, flying and crying across the wheels of fire to stop the turning and the work, but they were caught in the wheels, and burst like feathers of flame. The miller was a thin shell of darkness now, very weak, burnt out, and he too was caught in the wheels’ turning and burning and grinding, and was ground to dust, like fine black meal. The wheels as they turned kept growing and joining until the whole machine was interlocked cog within cog, and strained, and brightened, and burst into pieces. Every wheel as it burst was a flare of faces and eyes and flowers and beasts on fire, burning, exploding, destroyed, falling into black dust. That happened, and it was one flicker of brightness and dark in the universe of power, a bubble of foam, a flick of the shuttle, a fleck of mica. The dark dust or meal lay in the shape of open curves or spirals. It began to move and shift, and there was scintillation in it, like dust in a shaft of sunlight. It began dancing. Then the dancing drew away and drew away, and closer by, to the left, something was there crying like a little animal. That was myself, my mind and being in the world; and I began to become myself again; but my soul that had seen the vision was not entirely willing. Only my mind kept drawing it back to me from the Ninth House, calling and crying for it till it came.

  I was lying on my right side on earth, in a small, warm room with earthen walls. The only light came from the red bar of an electric heater. Somewhere nearby people were singing a two-note chant. I was holding in my left hand a rock of serpentine, greenish with dark markings, quite round as if water-worn, though serpentine does not often wear round but splits and crumbles. It was just large enough that I could close my fingers around it. I held this round stone for a long time and listened to the chanting, until I went to sleep. When I woke up, after a while I felt the rock going immaterial, so that my fingers began sinking into it, and it weighed less and less, until it was gone. I was a little grieved by this, for I had thought it a remarkable thing to come back from the Right Arm of the World with a piece of it in my hand; but as I grew clearer-headed I perceived the vanity of that notion. Years later the rock came back to me. I was walking down by Moon Creek with my sons when they were small boys. The younger one saw the rock n the water and picked it up, saying, “A world!” I told him to keep it in his heya-box, which he did. When he died, I put that rock back in the water of Moon Creek.

  I had been in the vision for the first two days and nights of the Twenty-One Days of the Sun. I was very weak and tired, and they kept me in the heyimas all the rest of the Twenty-One Days. I could hear the long-singing, and sometimes I went into other rooms of the heyimas; they made me welcome even in the inmost room, where they were singing and dancing the Inner Sun, and where I had entered the vision. I would sit and listen and half-watch. But if I tried to follow the dancing with my eyes, or sing, or even touch the tongue-drum, the weakness would wash into me like a wave on sand, and I would go back into the little room and lie down on the earth, in the earth.

  They waked me to listen to the Morning Carol; that was the first time in twenty-one days that I climbed the ladder and saw the sun, that day, the day of the Sun Rising.

  The people dancing the Inner Sun had been in charge of me. They had told me that I was in danger and that if I approached another vision I should try to turn away from it, as I was not strong enough for it yet. They had told me not to dance; and they kept bringing me food, so good and so kindly given that I could not refuse it, and ate it with enjoyment. After the Sun Risen days were past, certain scholars* of the heyimas took me in their charge. Tarweed, a man of my House, and the woman Milk of the Obsidian, were my guides. It was now time that I begin to learn the recounting of the vision.

  When I began I thought there was nothing to learn: all I had to do was say what I had seen.

  Milk worked with words; Tarweed worked with words, drum, and matrix chanting. They had me go very slowly, telling very little at a time, sometimes one word only, and repeating what I had been able to tell, singing it with the matrix chant, so that as much as possible might be truly recalled and given and could be recalled and given again.

  When I began thus to find out what it is to say what one has seen, and when the great complexity and innumerable vivid de tails of the vision overwhelmed my imagination and surpassed my ability to describe, I feared that I would lose it all before I could grasp one fragment of it and that even if I remembered some of it would never understand any of it. My guides reassured me and quieted my impatience. Milk said, “We have some training in this craft, and you have none. You have to learn to speak sky with a earth tongue. Listen: if a baby were carried up the Mountain, could she walk back down, until she
learned to walk?”

  Tarweed explained to me that as I learned to apprehend mentally what I had perceived in vision, I would approach the condition of living in both Towns*; and so, he said, “there’s no great hurry.”

  I said, “But it will take years and years!”

  He said, “You’ve been at it for a thousand years already. Gall said you were an old soul.”

  It bothered me that I was often not sure whether Tarweed was joking or not joking. That always bothers young people, and however old my soul might be, my mind was fifteen. I had to live awhile before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking and not joking at the same time. I had to come clear back to Coyote’s House from the Hawk’s House to learn that, and sometimes I still forget it.

  Tarweed’s way was joking, shocking, stirring, but he was gentle; I had no fear of him. I had been afraid of Milk ever since she had looked at me in the Blood Lodge and said, “What are you here for?” She was a great scholar and was Singer of the Lodge. Her way was calm, patient, impersonal, but she was not gentle, and I feared her. With Tarweed she was polite, but it was plain that her manners masked contempt. She thought a man’s place was in the woods and fields and workshops, not among sacred and intellectual things. In the Lodge I had heard her say the old gibe, “A man fucks with his brain and thinks with his penis.” Tarweed knew well enough what she thought, but intellectual men are used to having their capacities doubted and their achievements snubbed; he did not seem to mind her arrogance as much as I sometimes did, even to the point of trying to defend him against her once, saying, “Even if he is a man he thinks like a woman!”

  It did no good, of course; and if it was partly true, it wasn’t wholly true, because the thing that was most important of all to me I could not speak of to Tarweed, a man, and a man of my House; and to Milk, arrogant and stern as she was, a woman who had lived all her life celibate, I did not even need to speak of it. I began to, once, feeling that I must, and she stopped me. “What is proper for me to know of this, I know,” she said. “Vision is transgression! The vision is to be shared; the transgression cannot be.”