The Local burn had turned out pretty good; but it was the last day and I was tired and the sun was hot. I had spent the climactic evening watching the Giant effigy of the Hindu god Ganesha burn hot, high, strong and fast into the starry sky. I had helped my good friend Michelle deliver water and friut from her first aid art car to needy late night burners. We had also gone to check out and give offerings to the -soon to be burnt- temple structure. She and I were the only ones at the glowing pavilion offering palo-santo incense and wishes to a boat that was to set sail on a flaming sea at dawn. Eventually I stayed at the temple as sunrise approached. The cresent moon hung in the sky over the eastern horizon. Warren had done well in his construction of the temple and desreved acknowledgment for it.To meet old friends out in the desert is a rare event indeed. After the flames had found their mark, I sauntered off to camp for a few hours of desperate sleep before packing it all up in order to head home with friend Dave.

Now first let me make it clear that up until now I had no real tight affiliation with Ganesha as a god form. When encountered, he was to be honored and respected, but I thought that my familiarity with a jungian archtype of a god form was to have other manifestations such as Pan, Cernnunos, Osiris, and others. Shiva was the only Hindu god that I had ever ventured to interact with. In fact some Hindu Gods kind of piss me off -to put it bluntly. So what you are about to read are the experiences that really shocked me as to how God...any God/Goddess can manifest in a person's life.

Dave had built a small geodesic dome that had housed an interactive temple to Ganesha that needed to be dismantled. The sun had risen, and the sky was draped with thin layers of high cirus clouds. I can honestly say that if Dave had not come up with the idea, and then built a temple (in order to take it down), none of this might have happened. I would have packed up my stuff and then slept a few more winks in the trailor thus missing the whole thing. I owe Dave a lot.

As I stepped out of the dome after Dave had ritually closed the space, I saw a small group looking up into the sky. I walked out, turned, and saw a rare phenomenon. A gossimer sheet of cirus cloud had stretched over the sky; as thin as gause. The sun had shown through but had revealed a full circular rainbow encompassing it....a "Sun dog". Below it had formed the colorful strip of a larger rainbow sundog refracting off of thicker clouds to form what looked like a "flaming rainbow. A flock of cranes flew in formation into the cumulous event. Science could explain all of this; and rightly so, but what happened next was beyond words....but I wiil try anyway.
Our friend Meggio had also caught sight of this sky bound display and was watching with me. The camps had been unusually quiet this morning, but I caught the drone of what sounded like a Tibetan Buddhist monk 's chanting with its droning music. I stood there transfixed. This was a visual que and now a sound que. Meggio pointed out a small set of clouds that had formed a distinct wave pattern below the second "flaming rainbow". Suddenly, it was as if the sky itself was forming huge glyphs and symbols. Meggio and I both heard this hypnotic music and had even chanted along with it. I turned to visually find the loudspeaker or radio that it was coming from....it was the low and pulsing roar of a cast iron sauna and portable shower engine that had been set up not far off from where we stood. More people around me had craned their necks upward to witness what was happening.
All of the past wishes, and dreams unfulfilled- but still hoped for came flooding back as I once again found myself praying to that whcih had brought all of this together. Grattitude had filled me to the brim and tears had started overflowing their well constructed banks. Soon the winds of the upper atmoshpere had shifted the clouds in such a way so as to include the larger, lower "sundog" into a giant double circle/Lamniscate.. I had run quickly to find pen and paper to draw a simple sketch of all of this celestial sky writing. I was shouting "I HAVE HAD A VISION!!!" (It was a private joke that Dave23 can tell about later).
A beautiful man, heavy with well kept dredlocks and smelling fresh with well blended essentail oils named "Groovey" had come looking for someone in Meggio's camp.We were both looking skyward and talking as I was drawing. The inclusion of "me" as a glyph had taken on the look of a rune that he helped me to interpret. We both stared in silent awe. Ancient Mayans had looked at the same stratospheric phenomenon and had seen the god of Quetzlcuotal...the feather rainbow serpent in the sky. Here it had actually manifest in front of our eyes. We hugged and he went on his way.

At the same time, Dave had been getting more frustrated with his dome deconstruction. The structure had blown over earlier that week from high winds and had bent some of the bars. Dave had glanced skyward as well but wanted to get this responcibility taken care of. I helped move the bars from one place to another and loosen bolts. Dave would swear at the bolts and nuts that would not give up their tight clench of their tenatious joining. I looked toward the heavens and wept with joy; Dave looked down and swore and cussed at metal tubes. The clouds shifted once again and I found myself looking at the fluffy silloette of a packaderm in the sky. Suddenly, I was seeing the silloettes of the trunk and tucks, ears and body of Ganesha everywhere. Even the paisley pattern in my surong turned into the outline of a trunk.

O.K.....o.k..... I had been sleep deprived, I was working in a hot environment and needed a little water. I scrounged water from meggio's camp and sat in the shade with the distant but comical rantings of a man and his dome. In front of my eyes was a coconut cracked in half.. I asked for two pieces. gave one as offering to all of the elephants that kept 'popping up' around me. This offering in Hinduism is called "prisaude". Meggio gives big warm hugs and she squeezed the tears right out of me. She also shared a tastey bean salad. I was still stable but knew that I needed to cool off. The world had become a paradice of numerous elephants; and the way that all of this had manifested had taken me totaly off guard. It was as if I had inadvertantly walked into a world of the sublime hidden inside the world of the mundane; I was in a sacred bubble flooded with feeling and a deep sense of wonder. I had been transported on the back of an invisible elephant and was going where ever it led.
I had been kind of thinking of what my personal "glyph" would be if I were to imagine one and here it was....as big as the sky....as I stood transfixed on the ground where a temple to the 'god of writing' (Ganesha) had been housed. Dave and I had talked about "personal glyphs and symbols before. People sometimes have them tattooed on their bodies. Some draw them,carves them onto ritual tools, or sew them onto special fabrics. We all can identify with symbols of the devine, the geometry and mandalas of the sacred.

I still needed water and a cool wet rag. I had wet my babooshka a few times....but was still in a state of thinking how much of this experience was real and how much was due to mild heat exhaustion. I did have tangible witnesses though. Everyone else had been right there just as suprised at what had taken place above their heads. Meggio had validated the 'music', Groovey had helped interpret the signs, and Dave had constructed the temple that was now no more, yet the sacred space that he had carefully brought into being was still there. I had seen the trunkated clouds, packaderm outlines, and tusks everywhere; Ganesha was in everything..... but thought it best to keep that to myself for the time being. We finished our stint with the dome and left the site waving meggio and friends off. If Dave had not built the temple then maybe none of this would have happened. I would have caught a few more winks of sleep and missed the whole thing.....thank god for Dave23.
The coolness of the nearby dive/scuba shop was a welcome relief. I sat in the shade speechless and occasionally tearing up with gratitude over the events that had all transpired. Wow.....ohm Ganesha......ohm shri-Ganshea....what else can be said when the clouds are as high as an elephant's eye.

There is a magic out there and in us that does not thwort the laws of science. It is a type of magic that abides the physical laws and foundations of the known universe; and it seems to happen to all of us, be it for good or ill. It is the magic of divine coinsidence. To be at the appropriate place, at the right time while doing a certain thing, or interacting with a specific person. It is deep, profound, unexpected, and unexplainable. It is commonplace average, and ordinary. Its ripples of effect can wave throughout time; seen and unseen. No puff of smoke, no teleporataion, no transmuting lead into gold; nothing so base or contrived as that. It is a sublte thing that can find its manifestation where and when it will. Sometimes a person will stack the dominos of moments and consequences unknowingly through choice and counterchoice to have them all fall from the gentle push of a single threshold event. Sometimes it is shear luck or fate. But it does happen.

I have noticed that there are times where a series of time sensitive events come one right after the other that might create a pattern recognized by the participant, or observer that points to some meaning for them. Or sometimes just the events themselves as they unfold within seconds or minutes of each other- can leave us dazzled and amazed. Sometimes the the meaning cannot be fathomed ...if there was any meaning to the series at all. Human minds are biologically built to seek out and recognize patterns from the stimulous information surrounding them. At times the pattern is recognized and assimulated; sometimes not. It seems to be a constant interplay between choices made, stimulous responce, and the magic of the type, style, or previous relationship, and definitions of stimulous that comes into being at that present moment. Planning for these experiences can happen but planning can only get you so far. Waiting, or conscious sensitisation,( some call it meditation), may also help to attune ones awareness to these divine coinsidences. It all depends on the choice of the individual.
Written histories of peoples and cultures, stories, myths, fairytales, are amalgamations of different kinds of records of these events, and bare witness of how they play and ripple throughout a given timeline. Monroe called it manifest destiny, Moses called it the will of God, Loa Tsu called it the Tao manifesting itself at that moment, Priestesses named it the touch of the Goddess.
People through out time have tried to describe it, become one with it, control it, befriend it, escape it, condemn it, observe it, define it, and embody it. Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung knew a thing or two about it, and Stephen Hawking wrote a book about it (Short History of Time). Yet even the Buddha himself said that no one person or observation can totally encompass the many facets of its surface nor plumb its depth. We are singularly the eyes, ears, tongue, and feel of it. We are also utterly at its glibbily indifferent mercy. It (and we) do a tightrope act through out our lives balancing between the ralative and the absolute. We tap into it while dreaming. We wade throught it while awake. We are blessed and we suffer from its effects. We live in a golden age when the human race has recorded and analysed it to our greatest extent. We have even manipulated it by taking a few unranium atoms, alining them,and spelling out the letters IBM and taking a picture with an electron microscope. We have sent lenses out of our atmosphere to take photoes of the first galaxies ever formed.Yet we exist as a fragile scummy film stretching across a small pebble of rock circling a ball of flame; one of a billion others just like it...just close enough to see the others, but too far away to say "hi" and hear an anwser shouted back. Quite the paradox; what an adventure; these divine coinsidences. I hope that all of us can be sensitive to those moments that might be happening around us. I hope that we can tap into that singular secret meaning that might be ment just for our ears only, or catch a glimpse of that glimmer of a star that beckons our attention. I hope that as we study and analyse our navels, that we take a moment to look up and see the rest of what is around us.---1,000 bows