A slush-filled wasteland, dragging in the drab color and texture of the winter, stretches before him for an eternity in the distance. The walls close in and pulsate as he walks slowly, inexorably, toward the end of the hallway, where a cacophony of nothingness awaits him. Nothing but a room with olive green walls covered only partially by the white scribbling of topics past. The mystical gives way to elemental, elemental to mathematical, mathematical to the almighty atom, and the atom to who knows. Every day the same. Echoing steps through depressed hallways. The same plod toward a vacuum. Step, step, step…

That is, until a vision of blazing crimson with dual jade orbs appears before him, ushered down from heaven and out the stairwell door. She glides rather than plods, carried by a cushion of celestial radiance. A turn of the head and her mane flows backwards like a fiery back draft, hinting the location of the great folds of reality. Step…

He looks into her eyes and begins to fall. The grey, stagnant walls fall away into oblivion and are replaced by brilliant emerald corridors. Reality shimmers in green glow for an instant, as if a filter had fallen in front of his eyes. But what are eyes good for anyway? He drops further into the dark, verdant adorned pools and swims in liquid wonder. It is warm and relaxing, and he sinks further in.

Where he is now, there is no need for the senses. He is in that place for which there is no name: the scene before birth, the microsecond between sleep and waking life. He floats in amniotic fluid…back in the womb…cradled in the timeless invisible force known as maternity, known as woman.

The stars come out, pin pricks filling not only the sky but the earth. He watches as they rearrange themselves in patterns of fanciful mirth, as if they were fairies dancing with the ceaseless background radiation of the universe. They are the same sights and sounds that caused the ancients to gaze into the heavens and wonder, so long before the advent of the written word.

And somehow he transcends the written word, the language of man, and moves to the melodic, musical language of the gods, which is spun out to generation upon generation who walk with deaf ears. But auburn and green trails on his eyelids clear the wax from his ears and the cobwebs from his eyes. Clarity. Consciousness. Valhalla. Nirvana.

Step…And then his other foot falls, the grey walls continue sliding by, and auburn and emerald go with them. The muse sways along, blazing an enlightened path behind her, until the next glimpse of truth.