Dr. Muse and the Mountain Oracle

posted by Dr. Muse

Dr. Muse consultes the Mountain Oracle.

Did you know that questions are the beginning to all the answers?  Hmm...
I often get asked, "So what kind of doctor are you Dr. Muse?"   Well, I am a doctor of Anthropology of Imaginistic Studies.  A rare field of science that is now seeing a resurgence of activity and I am the doctor in charge.  Me and Dr. Suess anyway.
What is the anthropology of the imagination I ask you?  Remember please the famous quote by Albert Einstein when he said, "imagination is more important than knowledge."  And remember what is really meant by this.  That knowledge tends to be limited by its own definitions.  Knowledge is a way of seeing things in one way and defining them by one definitive point of view.  Where as imagination is infinite; which is the nature of the universe.  So to understand the universe (that which is infinite by nature) requires not knowledge, but the imagination.  This is my field of study; the centre of my universe so to speak.

Now onto my story and the task that I have been given.  This is no easy task, and no easy subject to broach, so I will ease into it slowly;
The other day as I sat quietly with the mountains by my side and the wind in my hair.  I heard a small voice.  As if the tiny rock at my feet where trying to talk to me.  I was astonished by the seeming impossibility of this situation.  Pulling my mind back and forth from one reality to another, I began to listen to the little normal looking rock and what she had to say to me.
"Dr. Muse, you must direct these climbers, those people that are close to the mountains, in how to honour the mountains properly. To educate these climbers about how to make the sacrifices that the mountain spirits asks for if they want to receive again those blessings that man-kind once did."
I couldn't believe it, the little unassuming rock's tiny voice was barely audible.  But she gave directions in how to find the Mountain Oracle of the Bugaboos and then fell silent.

Wow! I've been assigned a task from a little rock that looks almost no different from all the other little rocks.  I had to think back to my early years of Anthropological Imaginations Studies at the Hidden Valley School in Joshua Tree National Park just to get my bearing.  During my first season, err semester there, I learned all about the imaginary magic of the desert.  Of the seemingly impossible symbiotic relationships that exists in the desert.  Like the relationship between yucca moth and the joshua tree, and how the joshua tree may go for years without blooming, and then when it does bloom, it produces this amazing looking fruit that sends out only one tiny pink little flower only one night a year, and how that tiny pink little flower is only capable of being pollinated by the one yucca moth.  I was so enthralled with this tale of desert magic that I had stayed up night after night to hear the song of the tiny little pink joshua tree flower and then witness the sexual magic of this mysterious yucca moth.  Of course all of my contemporaries (except Dr. Suess) thought I was wasting my time and telling me how the joshua trees are dying and the desert is getting dryer every year, but I waited.  I waited because I love the idea.  I loved the idea that a song like this could exist and that something so far reaching really was a reality.
Those where the early years, and they where very good to me.  I did hear the song of the tiny little pink joshua tree flower that is only sang but once a night on those rare years that the tree produces its fruit.  The song is so amazingly soft, supple and alluring that for a brief moment during that night I was lifted out of my trance of reality and into world of desert magic.

Back in my present situation I knew I had to find the Mountain Oracle, as I knew that my task was not one that I could wait on.  I readied myself for a long journey through the mountains.  My directions were complicated and I had a sense that this was going to be a bit of wild goose chase.  But the little rock, that did at first glance seem almost ordinary, had mentioned something about sacrifices.  And apparently finding the Mountain Oracle was going to take more than my imagination, as I was given specific directions about which mountains to climb over and over.  First from the south then from the north, then back again.  This was going to take sacrifice all right, but all in the name of science.

The first few days where the hardest, because I seemed so far away from reaching any sort of "destination."  I already knew the nature of these Oracles that dwell in the mountains, at least from stories if not from personal experience.  I knew that they often tended to be a bit of a trickster and were always testing the people that dared to seek them out.  I thought of this in all the harrowing places I had to tread.  The times that I found myself stumbling around in the darkness trying not to get lost or lose my will.  Or the many times that I was clinging with mere fingertips to the side of one of the remote peaks that my task had bound me to climb.  I thought about these things and why I had become a doctor.  But it was the little rock of unsuspecting nature, with the tiny little voice that told me to go, that kept me going.

After days and nights of climbing these immense rock faces, risking my life, over and over, I made it back to camp and there was the Oracle, waiting for me in silence.  As I pulled up a seat on the ground in front of her; a loud buzzing sound overcame my whole body and I drifted off into another time and space.  The Oracle was with me as my guide, along with her protector, the unassuming, non-suspecting, little rock with a tiny voice that I had met earlier.  The three of us moved through a landscape of mountains and clouds that were inhabited by thousands of god like beings from the past.  I saw things not as they are, but as I imagined them to be.  Giants, maidens,  monsters, saints, and mountain sentinels.  All strangely looking at me as if waiting for something.

I asked the Oracle about this.  I asked her why they were all looking at me so strangely, and if I had done some thing to cause this.
"It's been along time since a man has traveled through this realm and they are not sure you are even capable of seeing them yet," the Oracle replied.
Well I do see them, and it seems that are becoming aware of this fact.  In fact they were all staring at me closer now.  Turning there attention towards me, getting ready to speak.
"There is power here in these mountains," said one of the cute cloud monsters.
"It is the power of the gods," said another.
"This power is available for all those who seek it and all those that visit the high places of the mountain," continued one of the mountain sentinels.
They're ability to communicate with me was like nothing I had ever witnessed before.  They spoke to me telepathically. One after the next, continuing  each others sentences, with seamless rhythm and understanding.  As if speaking from one individual mind.
"You must make the people believe as they once did; that the mountains are alive, and that this is a place where great spirits dwell." This was the last thing that I heard before I was returned to my camp by the Oracle and her little rock protector.

Only I was returned to my camp to the moment before I sat down with Oracle and left with her on the journey through space and time.  And this time the Oracle was gone from my camp and all I was left with was this absolute feeling of deja vu.  Like some thing amazing had just happened to me, but that I was about to lose it because of my own sense of reality.

THINK Dr. Muse, think.  No better yet, imagine... I said to myself... imagine.... So I began to imagine about all the tails of the past.  About Moses on Mount Sinai, about Lord Shiva on Mount Kailash, about all the warriors who sought their visions on Chief Mountain so they could bring back sacred medicine to their people.  I thought about all the times some one in a small mountain town looked up at the mountains and exclaimed "This is gods country!", as if they had just seen a glimpse of one of the gods riding a chariot of made of clouds.

No this was no deja vu.  And for the first time in my professional life as a doctor I can say with double blind certainty, that I was there. In the presence of gods, riding the wings of the wind, sailing through time and space to a place that was once forgotten.

Once again Dr. Muse possesses photographic evidence of mystical science.  This time it's the Virgins Sentinels; Mary, Eva, and Ariel.