I got in trouble not just once...because I would use the phrases from that poem around my parents. It was some kind of adult secret that must have been handed between generations safely out of the site of children...ironically, never even knowing where it came from. They would stop short at the sound and demand to know where I had heard it. But we had sworn never to tell.

It was a pact the three of us made when we discovered it. We knew ...and obviously the writer must have known... that it was inscribed in letters far too small to foster detection and too low to the floor for big people ever to find. If it was ever read again, it would be by a child and in that time so long ago, that's exactly what we were ...children.

We wouldn't have found it then except for the game we played in the back of the stone cold silent sanctuary sitting on the hard polished marble cross legged, tossing jacks for hours.

Children recognize the work of a child and harbor a delectable taste for secrets. We knew we had a good one and in that endless struggle for credibility and perception against the adults, our secret was one of the precious few possessions they couldn't take away.

Even with my nose close to the stone, it took magnification to read. The rhythmic markings matched the dark graining in the rest of the carved blocks that formed the hundreds of vaults in the Sanctuary of the Stone Archways at the Indalli Citadel hidden so deep and unobtrusively in the heart of the continent. I was 4 in year 681 of the New Millenium...nearly seven centuries after the hideous republican corporate scourge and the insanity of the homosapien ego left the earth scorched and twisted with its explosive demise ....a legacy which even today still lingers in the wastelands of their cities and industrial jungle debris.

I was the one who found it. For two or three days my eyes had been drawn to that panel just behind that pudgy little friend of mine Carliana ...especially to the chipped corner missing half way down the markings. I didn't know then why it captured my eyes. But today I do.

Carliana is now a middle aged woman of extraordinary stature and grace and its hard to remember the ways we were then.

It was maybe 20 years ago that she and I returned to the archway, as we have all our lives to remember the secret (which we have never revealed) and expore its mysteries which are so deeply stitched into our meanings. Today we understand why our people must live completely from the heart and not from the cold constructs of sterile beliefs and an artificial mind.

When we go back, we always take the most powerful magnifying tools we can find because the intricacy of those writings cast indelibly onto the stone become more stunning the deeper they are explored...just like the meaning of the messages they bear.

It was Carliana who discovered the key in the chipped stone. Not only are the letters fascinatingly small, not even decipherable to the unaided eye...not only does each letter contain all the separate colors of fall fading from one into another and into the next letter as though there is a tapestry picture behind the text which only spells the shades of autumn as it was touched my an impossibly small pen ...but each of those colors go deep into the stone. That's what Carliana discovered. The chipped corner paralleled the penetration of the letters on the border of the text far enough to show that each stroke of magic ink had penetrated the stone to a depth deeper than the width of a finger and still maintained the fidelity of the tiny text. What could do that?

We think we know so much because we live so richly and the feelings in us are so deep and complete in our bond with the world around us. We have known peace for so many centuries. But maybe we forget that even those from the culture that collapsed before the New Millennium bore the threads of heart that have made us what we are today. Troubled, most certainly, but some bore genius just the same.

We will never know who wrote this. But after years and years of returning to examine the stone, a sense, a pattern has formed. It's almost as though the persona of its author has somehow reassembled itself like a hanging apparition, each year becoming a little clearer until today I can almost see him. He is old, tall and bent. His hair is white and even though the creases of worry and struggle are deep, there is a luster of peace and light around his face. He is witnessing that devastating spiral of desiccating death that nearly swallowed all of life and collapsed the culture of chemistry burned to its death, like all of the shaken and hideous empires before it by the insanity of ego mania and greed. That was in an era before we realized that either we eliminate those who can only foster greed ...or they will eliminate us ...along with everything else.

What I know is that even though the text bathes itself in the beauty of life's culminating celebration in autumn that he wrote it focusing on what must have been one of the last groves left as the stench of chemical rot spread its demonic shall over the planet and left the endless seas of death in its path.

Its unimaginable that what we live in today ever lasted, from the tales that survived the dyeing, much less to the richness and depth we enjoy. And, of course, it wouldn't have, had the intelligent few not realized that it was time to remove the greed and shallowness once and for all from the species. If they hadn't, you wouldn't be reading this today and I would never have found the text...or, even for that matter, ever been born.

Isn't it ironic that we harvest such beauty in our lives every day, but seldom take the time to enshrine it until it's threatened or on the verge of demise. We commemorate the vanishing ... not the sublime. It is the way we are.

I realized that there may be deep lessons and passion in what he left us there, so ingeniously hidden, so masterfully inscribed, so mystically enduring and so obviously given only for the eyes of a child.

I realized the selfishness in myself harboring a mystery like that because of the defensive pact of an innocent child... now 40 years old.

I also realized that his vision and love needed to be set free ...that if we harbored it, once it had been found, it would wither and die ...and that our spirits may die with it. Certainly, it could not be left to vanish with our passings.

But I also realized that the timelessness of this piece needed no hurry and that somehow I should remove myself from its passing into our vision. You will be reading this after my own death. I record it in the midst of a hopefully long and wonderful life. But I have entombed it into the contents of my own willcase not to be opened until after my departure and then to be published in a way that would bear no ownership or control. I have, like its author, now vanished into the wonderful wealth of nothingness. But I've left it here for you, just like he left it there for us. Now you must decide where it will go after you're gone.

I know from the feeling of preparing it for the letting go that it's what he wanted. I can feel him smile. Maybe you can feel mine now.

This is the text from the stone pilaster in the Sanctuary of Arches in the Citadel of Indali: