I remember some experiences that I had when I was about eight years old. The year 1957 was a traumatic time for me in many ways. My grandmother had passed away and my family attended her funeral ceremony. I remembered my grandmother as a frail old woman who was only slightly taller than I was at that time. Grandmother was quiet and soft spoken while possessing a sort of authority that went unquestioned. Grandmother and Grandfather were both very old in their age as they were in their ways. After all, they had raised their family of five children on a rural farm, raised a community church, and began what was to become a small town.
Grandmother had been a well-known matriarchal member of the small community and was the unofficial head of the home. Grandfather loved Grandmother very much for her devoted keeping of the house and family. It was a great loss to everyone when Grandmother passed away after a short bout of cancer. I don’t remember much of my elderly grandparents because it was a long drive over a dangerous and twisting gravel road to get to visit them. My mother was the youngest of her family so I didn’t see much of her brother and sisters except for during memorable visits with them.
My time at home was depressingly sullen, serious with the facts of life more prominent than the demands of school. I didn’t play as much as I could have, instead opting for taking long walks through the countryside around our orchard property and home. It was during one of my long roaming walks that I happened to experience something that was inexplicable and so far removed from the physical reality that was my life at that time.
I walked to a point half way up the western slope of Becker Mountain. There was an irrigation canal blasted into the rock face of the mountain, levelled out and lined with blue clay. A small pond of a settling basin was surrounded and hidden within the forest of pine trees. Decades of misuse and neglect allowed the settling basin to almost fill in, although muddy water still flowed along the length of the irrigation canal.
I found myself standing in the middle of the swampy settling basin, on a small island of grass and bushes. The settling basin made a small glade in the towering forest of pine trees. Mid afternoon sunlight filtered down to the settling basin and made a beautifully scenic and peaceful refuge on the side of the rugged terrain that was mostly covered over by the dense pine forest. Animals and insects alike took advantage of the oasis of the settling basin.
The settling basin was an oasis on the side of a dry and rocky mountain that was covered by mostly coniferous trees. The settling basin always had a bit of free running water that deer and woodland creatures made use of. While I stood still on the island in the middle of the settling basin, there had been at least half a dozen deer appear along the southeastern boundary hidden by tall bushes. Birds flitted through the area, enjoying the shallow warm water that flowed fresh and clean. Insects buzzed noisily in the air over the soggy ground, adding their presence to the cycles of life that had come to depend upon the old neglected waterway.
I stood stock still on that grassy little island of pristine paradise. I saw the light of the afternoon sun shining down to warm myriads of lifeforms that ranged from flora to fauna that blossomed with vibrant life in an arid desert wilderness. The smell of damp ground rose up to fill my nostrils while my ears tingled with the energetic buzzing of bees and beetles, mosquitoes and moths, all clinging to the life giving little oasis. I could only stand still in amazement at the center of the little paradise. I was so enraptured with the beauty of the little oasis that I didn’t even flinch when two deer appeared at the far side of the little clearing. I watched motionlessly while the deer cavorted and rolled in enjoyment of the soft swampy grass covered ground beside the trickling flow of water.
The deer didn’t stay for very long. They drank what they needed, rolled to clean themselves, nibbled the lush vegetation in their grazing way, and left for higher and safer ground. The oasis stilled at the leaving of the deer. The deer made sounds that disturbed the still air by their passage through the thick bushes that surrounded and hid the presence of the oasis. The buzzing of insects stilled, the air hushed into total silence as the wind shifted to follow the direction that the deer had taken. I watched the bushes and soft ground slowly move back into their positions before the arrival of the deer.
I became interested in the tall grasses of the sodden piece of ground I stood on. The soil was black with the decaying of vegetation that was made darker and softer with the excessive moisture flowing slowly along the irrigation canal. I felt the moisture seep along through the soft ground and evaporate upwards into the drying movement of the air. I felt so aware of the flow of moisture that gave life sustaining fluid to the grasses and bushes growing upwards from the mush that was partly old vegetation and dirt made from dust and pebbles that washed along the flow of water in the irrigation canal.
I thought about the cycles of life that were so vibrantly alive in the little clearing that I stood in. I thought about the flow of water that gave the little oasis it’s vitality of life. I then thought about the movements of people across the dry harsh land that the little oasis was hidden in, hidden by distances as much as by the rare isolation of existence like threads of gold hidden in rocky ore of the ancient land. So little and so far in between were the wisps of life hidden in the desert and on the slopes of the ancient and erroded landscape. What a remarkable exception there was in the fact that humanity rose up to flow so hot and industriously across the ancient and ageing lands in a whirlwind of all consuming fire.
Suddenly a deeply base and elderly masculine voice sounded in the vibrations rising up with the evaporating moisture from the ground to coalesce in air above me. The deep voice didn’t alarm me, merely added to my thoughts in an authoratively guiding and reassuring manner. I couldn’t identify a presence or source of the strangely sounding words that formed in my mind as much as in the air around and above me. At first I thought the words were forming within the moisture evaporating from the ground around me much the same way that vibrations and random noise would be recognized and made sense of by the human capability to recognize patterns. But, the words flowed and made sense of themselves in a way that was not formed by the evaporation of the moisture.
I continued to listen to the flowing words, making sense and understanding what was being conveyed to me to answer questions I had about my convictions and my sense of morals. I realized that I was being taught lessons that could not have been learned by my mundane experiences. I concentrated on understanding the lofty concepts that were being imparted to me by the words coming from some unknown source. I began to suspect someone hiding in the dense bush around me, but I couldn’t see anyone. At the same time, my mind was concentrating on the gist of the lessons that the words were conveying to me.
I increased my concentration to do the dual tasks of learning the lessons and at the same time look for any sign of someone standing very close to me in a hidden position. The source of the deep voice moved from coming through the air around me to emanating from the soft ground I was standing on. I felt the faint thin vibrations flowing up my legs to my body and then my mind. I perceived the course of the words through my physical body to my mind and felt the increase of the base hum that carried the vibrations to make up the words that were being recognized in a coherent way by my awareness. I felt a reactive factor as I formed my thoughts in response to the flow of the words being recognized out of the vibrations. I thought of an intelligence directing the flow of words and acting in concert with my thought processes to guide and correct my thought formations into the patterns that were making sense to me. Someone had to be hiding very close to me to be able to impart the intellectual rapport that I was reacting to in a very intense manner.
I became so concerned that someone was hiding very close to me that it interrupted my concentration so that I could seek out whomever it was that was engaging me in the intellectual conversation. The trouble was that it wasn’t a conversation because I didn’t say anything audibly beyond my thoughts in response to the stimulus of the words. Yet, I kept insisting to myself that someone had to be hiding in the bushes very close to me and I kept looking around for any sign of that person to suddenly become visible to me. I didn’t want to find anyone hiding in the nearby bushes just as much as I couldn’t understand there to be any other sort of source for the voice that I was interactively engaged in talking with.
The voice somehow understood my dilemma when it commanded me to stop looking for someone hiding nearby. The voice began to demonstrate that it wasn’t originating from another human. I conceded that the voice was not humanly possible when it demonstrated that it could be projected from different points around me at the same time. The voice went on demonstrating other things that weren’t ordinarily possible. A leaf on a bush beside me burst into flames. I became curious about that at first. I looked closely at the flames sprouting from the leaf much along the same lines that moisture evaporated from that same leaf. It was so pretty to see the flames that I examined very closely. I could see the pretty colours of the flames becoming tangible very close to the leaf, but not actually touching the surface of the leaf.
I became amazed and attracted to the flames on the leaves of the bush beside me. Momentarily the little dance of flames ended and the leaves were left untouched and in the exact same positions. I knew that there were flames on the leaves, that the flames did not touch the surfaces of the leaves, and that the flames had ended or gone out. I happened to glance over to a bush that was separated from the rest of the bushes around it by a narrow trough of very shallow water. The bush suddenly leaped up in flames that grew much larger until a column of smoke arose above the bush.
I became very agitated and excited because the threat of fire in the region that was at a dangerously high and dry flammable condition. The flames continued to flicker outwards and rise high above the bush that had just been soft green and lush with leaves. The flames were soon all that was visible of the bush that flared large flames and rose up into a tall column of white smoke. The thick column of white smoke drifted along towards the south in a gentle breeze along the side of the mountain. The flames burned for about five minutes before they diminished until the little bush was left standing as it was in the same condition on the same spot on the little bit of an island. No leaves were actually burned at all.
The fact that fire had ignited and burned above the bush for some time was a very amazing event to me. It was not as if a little bush had exuded a wisp of smoke that might have looked like a fire. This was real flames shooting upwards five or ten feet in height and spread all around the bush in the manner of a giant camp fire. After all was said and done, the bush was left in exactly the same condition it was in before the event of the fire. All the while during the event of the fire, from the first little flames on nearby leaves through the flare-up of the isolated bush on the bit of island in the middle of the settling pond, the deep resonant voice droned on and on about all kinds of things.
The voice had erroneously assumed that I had some knowledge about the Bible, Jesus, and religion in general. The fact was that I was almost totally ignorant of all three topics that the voice had questioned me about at first before settling down to examine what I did know and then explain certain facts to me that were deemed necessary for the moment. I would think that the voice had talked to me for almost half an hour in total before it was satisfied with my understanding levels. As quickly as the voice had appeared and had begun talking to me, the voice simply faded out and disappeared completely. And, I had been standing in the same spot for long enough for my weight to sink my feet, or rather my shoes, low enough into the ground to take on water.
My shoes were a valuable item to me and getting them unforgivably wet meant a punishment by a three foot long piece of green apple tree branch. I grimaced at that fact as I pulled my wet feet in sodden shoes up out of the ground they had sunk into and began my trek home. Home was some distance away and my quick pace soon dried out my shoes. My shoes were completely dry long before I reached home. I kept thinking the whole way home about the event of the burning bush and the invisible voice that had talked to me for so long. When I did get home, I was so worried about the condition of my shoes that I completely forgot about the fire event up on the side of the mountain.
I had seen fires before then, and many fires since then, but none of the fires I saw were anything like the fire on the bush high up the side of the mountain. Since the event of the fire on the bush, I have become familiar with all kinds of technologies that could have produced the same results of leaving a bush undamaged by flames. But, there was nothing that could be detected of the preparation of the area nor of any possible sort of technologies that could have mimicked the effects I had witnessed when I was ten years old.
There is much that can be said about myths and legends, all sorts of cons and pros that would argue one point or another. I happen to believe in a lot of things, some of which can only be best described as ‘just is’. There are a lot of things that go on in our big world and we can’t pretend to begin to understand all of it, let alone what little of it that we see through the narrow window of perceptions that we use to view the world. And, I am certain that many people have experiences that are either unexplainable or are best described as being completely out of this world.
