As the moon was leaving for the day after a watchful tour over the New Mexico darklands, a soft breeze sprang up high in the divide between the Sangre de Cristo peaks, and tumbled down to flirt with the desert night. Unmoving, the Romany brujita sat still, her eyes crossed and her hands stirring from time to time like a small bird in a restless sleep. The dark surrounded her, filled the porch and the shadowy sands around her, and lay on the double wide behind her like a heavy black animal, somnolent and thick. And so it seemed.

But things are not all as seeming is. There is for, both light and dark, and the billion-faced sparkling energies of every instant among the forms. And there is consciousness, which bides where it will and sees as it calls to see, and travels without let both among the forms and beyond them. And even in the myriad spaces beyond form where only consciousness can dwell, there is both light and dark, indrawing and out-breathing, among the myriad streams and dances that are the stuff of Knowing to the eye that will see.

And in the travels of the Seeing of Gram Petala, the silver thin thread of that single tune of a single set of strings came curling in and out, questing, something like a crystal hound, feeling its way through the heights and the shadows of the other side. She could see it was not one strand but several--parts of it, like a wildwood weed, branched over the lands around her to the north, shaking to the shudders of a city's jungle pain; and others to the dark edges of dawning in the east, tied to some far hills.

But she could not shake off what she knew in her heart and saw with her open Eye. The main body of that silver current was questing, seeking, and finding its way to her.