B.T. Lowry's Blog, page 5

Genderizer

Broad bean media hand shake

 

 

(Listen below)

I just couldn’t decide, so I kept running the genderizer back and forth, looking at myself in the mirror. At one point I left it in between, so I was half man, half woman. On one hand, it would be good to be a man when I met the CEO. I could grip his hand really hard when I shook it. We could joke about our wives, or talk about different beautiful actresses or singers. I could win him over, man to man.

Then again, as a woman I might be able to enter his confidence more easily. I could hear him out, sympathize with him, appeal to his softer side. I might remind him of his mother, or sister. Maybe his wife.

You can listen to this being read to you here:

https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/the-genderizer.mp3

 

Or to download it, right click here and choose ‘save link as’

Vote now or forever hold your peace! (until the next round)

Figuring this out as I’m going along, I’m closing the first round on scene-of-the-week, where you can vote for the scene that you’d like to see as a short story. Tomorrow’s scene will be the last one, So leave a comment on the scene you like the best, either here, on Facebook or Twiter, or as a message to me, and see that scene transformed into a story in an upcoming post.

What is… Scene-of-the-Week?

Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. :)

Wolf in the window

Gray Wolf by dalliedee

 

You can listen to this being read to you here:

https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/wolf-in-the-window.mp3

 

Or to download it, right click here and choose ‘save link as’

It was alright until my bear broke through the barrier separating me from the mundane life.

Let me backtrack. I was there on the London Underground, Bakerloo line, going to work. I was reading a book of myths from my childhood. I held a book in front of me, changed the page sometimes in case anyone was watching. But my eyes were closed, with sunglasses on so no one would see. The stories were behind my eyelids, and so was I.

I sat with my wolf, Santoin. He’s not so impatient as me. While I looked over our map of the sacred mountain, he just sat by me, breathing and gazing ahead. He imparted stability to me, just by being there. By being so big and solid and fierce, all that and still loyal to me.

My lighter friends, bunnies and furry bears, crawled over logs and traipsed through streams and wrestled with each other like idle thoughts on a fluffy-sky day. I colored in the areas on the map where we’d gone already. The color came from my fingertips, light brown and sepia. We’d gone a long way.

We were just about ready to set out when one of the fuzzy bears climbed up next to me and reached backward, behind me where I couldn’t see, where he wasn’t meant to go, and he pushed a barrier which I’d forgotten was there, and his finger set a ripple going like he’d thrown a stone in a sideways pond.

My sunglasses fell off. I dropped my book onto a ridged rubber floor. The man next to me on the Bakerloo line looked over, fear in his eyes. What had he seen? Had Santoin crossed over with me, just for a second? I blinked in the fluorescent lights, reaching for my sunglasses.

 

Scene-of-the-Week

Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. :)

Which life event would you like to change?

_MG_7809_sequence_01 by Hugh Letheren

 

You can listen to this being read to you here:

https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/which-event-would-you-like-to-change.mp3

 

Or to download it, right click here and choose ‘save link as’

Yes, Madam, please just sit there. No, It won’t hurt, but you will feel a tingling. Alright, we are initiating now. Yes? Just relax, it’s alright.

It’s done, Madam. We’re getting the results now… It seems you have had eight major events in your life. Birth, entrance into school, a fight with your best friend after which you never spoke with each other again, the first time you sang in front of an audience, ah… the commencement of womanhood, your first child, marriage, your second child, divorce… and here we are today.

We can change one event within the budget you’ve specified. I advise you to consider carefully. You don’t want to lose anything that’s presently dear to you. But don’t overthink it either; it’s impossible to predict all the ramifications of your decision.

Ah, you look like you’ve made up your mind. Which one would you like to change?

 

Scene-of-the-Week

Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. :)

Ghosts of worshipers from five hundred years ago

This week the scene-of-week is in a video. I recently went to the magical land of Hampi in South India and was inspired to make this video about the ancient culture there, which was conquered, which has morphed into the people and customs found here today. I recommend you watch it and listen to it, but if you’d like, the transcription is below.

***

I look at these old ruins from above, this extensive temple which is crumbling in many places. The courtyard, now empty, must have been filled for celebrations. Deities would have been brought out on procession, accompanied by priests fanning them, offering them food, water, incense and flowers. People must have sang in the procession, beat drums and blown shehnais. Feasts were offered to the deities, then given to rich and poor alike. A king held ceremonies here, for good children, a long reign, and to please God. These dusty ruins were whole and alive. People lived here, they worshipped here. Some of the priests must have served in this temple for years, perhaps decades.

How can I just pass through this place when it had so much significance for them? How can I not stop to mourn their tragedies, and to wonder at the intricacies of their lives?

 

Scene-of-the-Week

Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. :)

Scene of the week: Nature Woman vs. Tech Man

seeds by Peter Kaminski

 

You can listen to this being read to you here:

https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/nature-woman-vs-tech-man.mp3

 

Or to download it, right click here and choose ‘save link as’

A meteorite hurtles through space. There are dormant seeds inside it, but they need a home, a planet. They cannot change the course of the meteorite and must move indefinitely, until it hits another object.

After hundreds of years, it crashes into the surface of a small moon, orbiting a gas giant. The meteorite’s surface cracks open, revealing a shiny brown seed half as tall as a man. A day passes.

The planet is not empty. On the opposite side, now in darkness, tiny machines scour the ground. They dig in then produce more of themselves, using the elements from the ground. They move over the surface like grass growing, and one in a hundred taps down deeper, searching for water for their Master. He sits in a steel-and-glass palace a hundred miles behind them. He is surrounded by machines for building, breaking down, transforming, heating, cooling and a hundred other terraforming tasks.

The seed passes into night, then back into day. It cracks. Its edges fold out like beetle-wings. Inside, many smaller seeds surround one in the center, the largest. Many of the small seeds crack open. Roots go down from them. They fight against the hard earth. They push their ways into tiny cracks, then pry them larger. The roots use the last of their life energy searching for water for their Mistress, she who is in the largest seed. She who will make this planet her own.

 

Scene-of-the-Week

Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. :)

Scene of the week: The Incarnator

River of light by webtreats

 

You can listen to this being read to you here:

https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/incarnator.mp3

 

Or to download it, right click here and choose ‘save link as’

 

Bormeal hurtled through the streams of time, firmly gripping his hammer.

It was unsettling. Not the streams. They were beautiful in their own way. He felt like he were falling through thousands of horizontal rainbow waterfalls, suspended in an infinite void. No, what was unsettling was the fact that he’d lose his hammer. He loved it. It was part of him. It was huge, like Thor’s, and it could bash things really nicely. But even though he would still look the same as he did now when he landed—bulky, ferocious, hairy—and even though he would remember everything… he could not keep his hammer. Whatever god governed all this wasn’t very kind, not to Bormeal anyway.

When he looked up, things seemed to be going reeeally slow. The figures in the time-streams—so many faces and animals and births and deaths and triumphant moments—moved as though shrunk-wrapped and half-frozen. When he looked down, they all seemed to move reeeally fast. Whole lives came and went while he took a breath. On his own level (which was changing constantly as he fell) it all moved at a regular pace, like him. A man laughed with his family, another dug a hole for a plant. Crowds of people worked on huge stone buildings. They slowed down as they passed by him, as though they were falling upward.

As he neared Earth time, Bormeal began to discern the spiritual level of people on the planet. Incarnators saw the planet in different ways, but he saw this as a hazy, multi-dimensional, colorful graph. As he fell farther, he saw the structures of politics and nations. Blocky shapes bashing against each other with spasms and crashes, waddling across the world knocking each other around. By now, a second of Bormeal’s time would be around… it was hard to guess, but… an hour of time below. As he got closer still he could make out land masses, people milling around. Battles that were important only to the people in them, and some others alive on the planet at the time, if they were nearby.

Bormeal hit the earth, lost his hammer in filaments of light. He sighed, feeling alone without it. He looked around from the top of a hill in some semi-arid land. Scrubby grass and bald rocks. Cold and drizzly. A dozen goat-herders walked below, but they didn’t look up. Bormeal didn’t appear to everyone as soon as he landed. No, there was a proper sequence to things.

Generally, he first showed himself as an apparition, say, to a single crazy farmer. Then word got round. Everyone professed not to believe it, but everyone had their doubts. Then Bormeal appeared to a few folks in the saner section. Most of them wouldn’t tell anyone. Still, some would. Then he appeared to some of the leaders of whatever religion was prominent in that place. The monks and nuns wrote about him and distributed the knowledge to the faithful. That was pretty authoritative, but some people would always think them crazy—the proportion varied according to the society. Anyway, Bormeal would reveal himself, soon after that. Some would think he was a demon, others a god. He was neither, not the way they thought about such beings anyway.

Ah, one of the shepards had strayed behind the others. Bormeal manifested himself, puffing into the air with some nice effects around him, like yak-tails made of light were being whisked around behind him. He walked down, all buff and shiny looking, and approached the startled man.

This is part of the Scene-a-Week series. Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. 

Scene of the week: Crazy Auntie

by mysterious conspiracy

 

You can listen to this being read to you here:

https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/crazy-auntie.mp3

 

Or to download it, right click here and choose ‘save link as’

The family’s old, crazy auntie held one finger to her mouth, glanced around as to indicate all the others in the house, and gave me a look could only be described as ‘extremely conspiratorial.’ She pushed her taped-up glasses up on her nose, adjusted the sari on her frail, skinny frame. Eyebrows raised, eyes wide. Grinning like a little girl.

She spoke to me in Bengali, still glancing around and grinning. I sat by my computer, listening. I couldn’t understand her, but it was eminently obvious that she was revealing her plan to me, telling me the whats and the hows and the whens. She’d carried out some trickery, somewhere in the house. Maybe she’d mixed ingredients in the larder. Maybe she’d stolen something. Maybe she’d said something to one person, something else to another. I didn’t know, but it was mischief, and I was in on it.

This is part of the Scene-a-Week series. Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. 

Scene-of-the-week premiere: Throwing a guy through time

Boy throwing ball by Kasia

 

Welcome to the first of the scene-of-the-week series. Every week there’ll be a new scene, a glimpse of a potentially complete story. You get to vote which one you want to see as a full story in the comments below.

You can listen to this being read to you here:

https://btlowry.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/time-hucker.mp3

 

Or to download it, right click here and choose ‘save link as’

 

Time Hucker went into trance using his special machine. His assistant Gerald, who he’d seen as a big, hairy boy a moment before, now appeared as a tiny ball of light. Time Hucker’s own body now looked luminescent, his arms glassy. He stood looking down as though from a high bridge. He took hold of the Gerald-light, held him in his hand as though weighing him, and looked down into the time streams. Gerald would take the streams seriously, once he was far enough in. Oh yes.

The trick was throwing him at just the right moment…

Each stream was a different color, flowed straight in its own direction, from horizon to horizon. They looked like a hundred thousand curving, translucent rivers, all stacked on top of each other. Their distinct colors—green, blue, orange, yellow—mixed with each other in ways that he still found amazing, though he wouldn’t admit it to Gerald.

Far, far below lay Gerald’s destination, the Earth timeline. Time Hucker watched, waited. Wait for it. Wait…

He imagined himself saying to Gerald, who was both his apprentice and nephew, ‘It is tricky to toss someone from one flow of time into another, Gerald. When I first started training, my teacher had me throw stones. From where I was, I threw a stone down into the faster time streams. It’s a bit like throwing a ball from a bridge, you see, and trying to get it to land on a particular square inch of grass. Tricky. Well, it’s actually more like that example, except gravity acts on the ball more and more, the closer it gets to the ground. Because you see, Gerald, time gets denser in the lower dimensions. Not like here.’

Savvy words, but then Gerald wouldn’t listen to such things, because Gerald was more interested in the pretty colors that the rivers of time made when they combined with each other. He liked to swim among them, diving and surfacing, seeing how the colors changed depending on where he was among the layers. Why, if Time Hucker would let him, Gerald would change the time streams, just for aesthetic effect!

If, however, Gerald were a good student, listening attentively, Time Hucker would have said, ‘When I threw them, the stones would appear somewhere in the timeline, very suddenly and moving very fast. Earth people would think them meteorites. Which they were, but from another time.’

Then Gerald would laugh at Time Hucker’s wit.

Time Hucker would smile and pat Gerald’s head affectionately. ‘But the problem, you see, is that people are much more unpredictable than stones. They can adjust their fall, like someone with a parachute, pulling at the corners to change direction. They can move left and right, even slow themselves down a little bit.’ His hands tightened on the Gerald-ball. ‘But they still had to move, very, very fast, Gerald. Like you will now.’

For Gerald was not an attentive student. No, Gerald had to be taught a lesson.

Ah! Wait for it…. wait…. hold…

With all his strength, time Hucker hurled Gerald down into the time streams.

This is the first week in the, Scene-a-week series. Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. Sound like fun?

New lands and old home

CC Hartwig HKD

 

There is tension in spiritual life. If I am to progress from being semi-aware to fully aware, I must face conflict, internal and external. My goal may be a state of peace, but the journey will hold challenges. One such challenge is the conflict between progress and familiarity.

I’m amazed by the endless vista before me, a limitless realm of possible conscious states, progressing up to the source of all things. And yet, like a sailor clinging to the rocks of his own shore, I am reluctant to disembark.

New lands and my old home. The wide sky and comforting ground.

States of consciousness

My home, in this context, is the consciousness that I’m accustomed to. It is now filled with family and friends, with ideas that I’ve been cultivating for years. I have a particular understanding of reality and illusion. But these things are in flux, with new elements coming and old ones going. My understanding changes. My company changes. Is there anything that is intrinsic to my very being, which will remain? if I am to progress, everything must be laid on the table and questioned.

Yet I am afraid to do it.

I recently finished my first book , Fire from the Overworld. It is a Visionary Fantasy novel, set in an alternate world. I don’t wish to toot my own horn here, but because these themes run throughout the book, I’d like to speak of it here.

Two kinds of journeys

A sketch of the story for you: two apprentice mystics live in a desert village. The girl is Yuvali and the boy is Héyowan. Both face the conflict between progress and safety in different ways.

Yuvali travels from her body, and gradually enters higher dimensions. This thrills her and she thinks she can go on forever, but to do so she must leave her old conceptions of self. She must leave attachment to her father, her mother, her village, and her body.

The other main character, Héyowan, can enter a the mind of a person or animal as though stepping into a cave. He experiences their thoughts and feelings as though they were his own. He can move into their deepest centers, to see their glowing hearts. It is a great intimacy that is possible even with enemies. He finds himself mixing with them, forgetting himself. He strives to protect the sanctity of his own identity, even while trying to help others, but often he fails.

Kinds of enlightenment

Years ago, I enjoyed reading Siddhartha (by Hermann Hesse) and The Red Lion (by Maria Szepes). I consider them to be part of the Visionary Fantasy genre. They inspired me to write more, and yet in both cases I was dissatisfied with the climax, with the point of ‘enlightenment’ of the main characters. In both books, the characters realized that everything in the universe is undifferentiated, and that they are part of that whole. When I read the books, I thought, ‘Well that’s all right. But there must be an actual center to things, not just a diffuse oneness.’ (I’m paraphrasing. I think I was not so eloquent.) This is my conviction, and along with the Vedic teachings, it has inspired the cosmology of my story.

Now, I won’t tell you whether Yuvali and Héyowan are able to reconcile all these things, so that they can make spiritual progress and also help their people, but I invite you to find out for yourself!

They say art is never finished, and I agree. Nonetheless, I’m satisfied with how the story has turned out. It’s definitely been a journey for me. As I grew near to the themes and characters, I learned about myself. I hope you do too; in your reading, writing and spiritual life.

 

Next week, I’ll be starting a new series called, ‘Scene a week.’ Every week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section. Sound like fun?

 

‘Fire from the Overworld’ available now!

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