The world is full of things seen and unseen, dark and fair and light and sharp. However, it is the human mind that wraps things in words and labels making things fit into categories. However, they are not real, so much as agreements we make between one another, we agree that there a good things and bad things that they fall into spectrums, which we can discern.

The truth is always over looked, our views and agreements, are only varnish on the surface of a dark wonder we dare not unwrap or unravel.  For if we did we would change the world we know and turn it into something strange and alien an unknown.

Yet, that fear is not the only thing that prevents us from unwinding the shroud we have built. It is also our agreements, to accept what our religious leaders tell us, or what the scientists ‘discover’ as being truth. Because in doing so we belong to this group or that group. We are acceptable and respectable because we hold to the agreements.

What happens then when you stumble full force into a weak point in the veneer and pass into the realm between agreements and discover things are not what we have been told, not what we have been taught, not even what we have dreamed be it nightmare or flight of fantasy.

Looking back into the darkness and seeing eyes looking back, and realizing they are intelligent,  thoughtful and wondering as much as we are, about what we are looking at and what it means.

Often the dark in Western Society is the abyss , the bottomless pit from whence comes all manners of evil. Yet on the other side of the world it is whiteness, the blank, surface that holds terror. So which is really evil black or white?  What if it is neither and both? What if good is not one or the other but both?

What if the marvelous idea of dualistic nature is a construction formed on a lie? What if, while we appear  separate and either one thing or another we were and are so much more?

Falling is painless, you might experience it without warning, without thought, but when you hit the ground, you will realize something amazing has happened because the world has been forever changed. For once you wake up, you cannot fall back to sleep. No matter how many might try to force you back into the bed, and try to silence your voice, or relieve you of the madness you  surely must be involved in.

There are many wonders in the world both dark and fair and light and sharp.

I was born on a frosty November evening, a time just after sunset when twilight was over all the land. Of course this not the story my mother tells, she is rational, logical and ever based in reality, for all the fact that she does admit that for all her life, she cannot imagine how she got such a child as I.

You see the doctors told her, they had to take me out early, for I was not well, and that is as true as the science that had my mother got through a cesarean section. When they brought me, out, they found my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, forming a slow but sure hangman’s noose about my neck, they unwrapped it and then clamped it and cut it and brought me forth into the world on a frosty November evening.

I was by their count a month or a little more early, but my slowing heart rate had them concerned enough to undertake the surgery. To save me and to save my mother, for I would have been the second child she had lost and the doctor did not feel that she could handle another loss. Not that my mother is a weak woman, but it does rob a soul of joy, to carry a child for all those long months and end up with a grave instead of a crib.

Of course no one really knows what prayers my mother whispered when she carried me, they know she found me odd to look upon at birth, all wrinkled and furry having not passed through the birth cancel  I wore the suit of down that all babies sleep in, while floating in their water world of dreams. Of course, the doctor told her all the strangeness would pass; I would begin to look more like a normal baby the closer I got to the time I should have emerged into the world.

In some cases this was true, in others I morphed stranger still, I would roll myself over and lay staring up at the ceiling, past the toys, into the void beyond, staring and watching something beyond others eyesight, consent to watch whatever it was that I was watching.

I was quiet, far more than other children, given to periods of deep silence, that lead my mother to wonder if I could hear, or even feel.  The tests were not kind that they had her perform to ensure that yes, really, I did hear and I did feel. Granted it was months before I shed a tear, I never did, for the longest time, something that also concerned my mother, but given to science she listened to what they told her.

The final proof that I was strange in the strangest of ways was when she put to bed a baby with coal black hair and blue eyes, and in the morning went to gather me from the crib, and there, was a sable brown haired child with cat eyes, one green and one brown smiling up at her.

The eyes did not bother her in the least after all her youngest sister had much the same, so she did not think twice on why they changed so much later than other baby’s eyes, as for the hair, that too never bothered her; she just chalked it up to natural changes. Even though it happened over night.

So, there I was the quiet child, the child that watched and listened to everything, who was there but was not there. My eyes, seeing beyond what others could see. I could play quietly for hours, without a sound, nothing to tell the world what I thought, or was doing. My mother learned she had to be just as watchful as I was because I knew no fear and explored everything with interest as if I was studying it. In some ways, I am sure the normal child studies as they explore. To my mother I was just her silent bundle. Never overly fussy, obedient ,easily lead by words rather than physical means.  She found a scolding wounded me far more than a pinch would (though I hasten to add she did not physical punishing).

Of course, if my birth had been heralded or even attended by a seer or wise woman, perhaps my mother would have been  more concerned by the strangeness surrounding my arrival into the physical world.  Perhaps she might have paused to remember and mark the signs that greeted me as I opened  my eyes and looked about me. She would have then understood some of the very nature of my strangeness and why I never felt as if I was fully present even when in the room with other family members.

While I was ultimate picked up and examined by the head of the family line, and she uttered her predictions concerning me, most in the family shook their heads and  denied the possibilities as they were given.  They were moving away from the things that did not fit into the love of science, and in that they missed and lost something that would otherwise have been invaluable to them.

Of course, they were not the ones listening, just I and my Great Grandmother, my Nana, who saw things others had forgotten how to see if they ever actually knew the trick.  While I was a wee babe in her hands, I heard and I acknowledged the hearing, I took the blessings she offered and embraced the future that was yet to unfold. She knew that I knew and I have to believe that, that was all that mattered to her, that one set of ears heard and understood.

If I could I would walk you through my life on the side that the normal world saw and took part in, the part that my mother lives in, the world of logic and reason and normal things. I try not to let her know that her world is an illusion, created by her and others like her to protect their minds from what is just outside their view. Those who slip through the veil end up either medicated as suffering from delusions, dead from suicide or were always meant to slip between the illusionary world and the real world, the world of mists and shadows, of things that are thought of legend, lore and fantasy.

The world where a cat eyed woman is far from unique or unusual. In fact compared to the things I rub up against, I am very much normal, very much  ordinary, my talent is that I know them, the things that others do not know, and I get my information from source few know exist or would believe existed.

The house where I grew up stood alone at the top of a hill, surrounded on all sides by nature at its most fierce and majestic. On the Western side, the sea came in licking at the cliff that marked the end of the property, unless you counted eh beach at the base that the sea consumed more often than not. To the East, North and South, the wet, moorlands spread out, their colors being given to browns, blacks, and dusky hued purples of the few flowering plants that thrived in the wet, and musty landscape, dotted here and there for people to see were the bend and warped trees, that were stunted not by some act of malevolence but by the winds that roars over the edge of the cliff from the sea and pushed them back towards the ground even as they attempted to reach the sky.

It was a strange house, suited to my own personal strangeness, but ill became my mother, and had no effect at all on my father who was often away on some business or other. Perhaps if my mother had been given to fancies, the place would have driven her mad, with its solitude, but by chance she was often in the town down the road from the house and took me along mainly to ensure I was not idle. 

While I remained ever strange, fascinated by the machinery and other odd fancies that my Father brought home from his business trips, odd collections of gadgetry that worked minor miracles, or merely entertained. My father being a man with a passion for ever gadget that could be created or imagined, ever gear, bell, buzzer and whistle drew him like flame draws a moth, but, not without a discerning eye, he could tell a good invention from a bad, in seconds, and managed through wise investment, to keep the house, well equipped and his family well provided for, in all forms of creature comforts.

If he was distant, it was not from lack of love, but from a consuming passion that drove him ever out seeking new things. My mother, was more given to works that benefited the community about her, and socializing with her friends. She always dressed in the most current style without being over dressed, nor did she dress in such a manner as to put others down by being their supposed better, in fact, her ideal was to live to the cliché “when in Rome do as the Romman’s do’ it was a statement I heard whenever we traveled, which was not as often as some but far more than most. Again, my father’s business would draw us to some place where he had made another discovery and was exploring its potential uses.

In that simple manner, I always managed to exposure to more education, and being female and interested in these things only marked me yet stranger than what one would have thought a daughter of my mother should have been like, and what secretly my mother thought I should be like.  Try as she might she could not get me to accept the idea that I should hitch my wagon to some prosperous man’s star and allow him to care for me the rest of my life.

Indeed she realized early on I was going to be one of those women given to doing for themselves much of what she thought a man should do for me, namely support me, and provide for me in a style to which I was accustom or at least should be accustom given that I grew up in a well managed and well provided for family.

Instead, like my father, I was often buried in a book, researching this or that, but while my father was given to machinery, and my mother to the material necessities of life, I was given to exploring the occult, the smoky darker science that some thought of as folly, and others feared for its potential to unravel  the world.

Certainly there were those who embraced it, and worked with it on a limited basis, mainly because the Church spoke so loudly against man tinkering with things best left in the Hands of Deity.  This being the same Church that supported ever new scientific findings as proof that that same  Hand of Deity was guiding us to new and better heights, with each passing decade, fewer folks were studying magics, and soon they might be forgotten as steam proved the master of the world. For with machinery and steam, we had already conquered the skies, the rivers, the lakes and the oceans, our cities gleamed in their  perfect metal-ness, with glass glowing at night from artificial lights, and vehicles large and small consumed  roads and streets with dizzying speeds.

A trip across the ocean took mere hours instead of days when one boarded one of the Airships that sailed nearly silently through the air, the faint hum of the propellers reaching the cabinets on board no more than a whisper of sound.

Not only faster but safer than sailing, since the storms of the sea could  potentially pull an iceberg into the waterways and ships had been known to run into them, where as the Airships, could come down from the heights to lower levels if the storms became violent or rise higher and sail on above them, their course well established by the stars above and the ping of the beacon finders echoing  on the main deck where the crew and her good captain guided  her.

But,  I am getting ahead of myself, for now, let me try to back up to the point where I learned I was not mad, in need of medications, or science’s intervention to my sight, and hearing.  The point where I Woke Up, and found the real world.