“i want to know what a number is to a sparrow, to a lizard, to a monkey” – so writes Aya in her latest blog post about Ani*mystc. She also includes a beautiful image of mud that cracks in threes.

This chapter to me was a story about what it feels like to live in relation with the spirits. I was going to say numenous, but to me that has a disembodied quality. Gordon in this chapter is in relation to embodied spirits that most people do not see, like the dragons of the nakshakras (the lunar mansions).

What is it to look at a cloud and to see a dragon? An image is worth more than 1000 words because we can always look closer. Imagines have infinite depth, infinite associations, and infinite scales.

Gordon talks about the difference between true and real. This struck me as profound. It is the difference between epistemology and metaphysics OR logic and metaphysics. The true is something that is internally correct for its system. The real is something that works for us. Who cares if something is true if the system it is not correct for is not the ecosystem.

To everything there is a season. So says Ecclesiastes. A time of water dragons and a time of fire dragons. In my last post I wrote about number and cycles. But time is not just number, time is not clock time, time is a feeling. We could say time is an emotion, or a moment in the emotional wave.

I will highlight a few choice passages