Okay, I think I understand this. I’m not to meddle in that cold way. It won’t lead anywhere, jut take me far from this quest, lost in a frightening forest without anywhere to land.

No friend in sight, no hand of welcome. No arching protective field of being. This cold college, the maelstrom of cool, is not my territory. Exploring is a seduction that takes away the feeling heart and replaces it with intellectual cool ennui – an ennui that is as ghostly as the pale kings in La Belle Dame sans mercy. For here is the suicidal maelstrom, the field of aching sorrow – a tragic place to be faced alone. I am not here to see this, nor to enter that realm. Others may explore it but I truly believe that it is in the heart of the human being that all attributes may be found and known. There in resonance of the heart we can enter the darkest of realms and be nurtured even by those pains. For they are felt and that is how they come to be known.

And so I wrote in the diary that would become the basis of Book of Secrets 2: The Wunderkabinett.

I won’t go there again unless accompanied by my guide, who uses my heart as a sensing device to both perceive and express life through my own life experience. I had dedicated my body, heart and soul to this sort of thing quite a few years ago, before I’d ever sensed or known the task at hand. I’d known Helen and Cath, read Helen’s Book of Secrets: Itardan, before starting this section.

We were working together, you see, in tandem exploration, collaboratively creating our Book of Secrets that way. It was, like so many accounts, produced not by one single individual, but by a group working together. Notation, experimentation, compilation and illustration were often done by various workers of various abilities. Some were starting students or apprentices, often given the task of simple notation and preparation.

I had notated and inscribed much of Helen’s Itardan, or I should say Book of Secrets 1 – for Itardan was the account of the work, a sort of “making of” . I dipped into the black water of the well for that, and it was mixed with blood to write some of the pages for that most noble document.

However, I had learned from that process that it was for me to add to the great work with my own Wunderkabinett, a most complex work, without any visible help to begin with.

I collected three bright leaves of gold and allowed them stay in the frozen stream of winter. In spring when the water thawed and began to flow once more, I collected the leaves. They had become lacy delicate leaf skeletons and I coated them in gold leaf, placed them on black velvet in a lidded box, and placed the box in my cabinet.