Far beyond our familiar village, past the bordering pine thickets that defined our comfortably zoned and honed clan compound, over the swelling and heaving bosomy hills extending several days in all directions and farther still the snow-capped mountains that looked like clouds floating above the hazy blue horizon (or so the elders had told us, as none of us had seen them), even beyond them...stood the Tower.

It was not something often talked about, that Tower. I remember one boring afternoon with friends outside in the sweet lush meadow when we came across a tree stump. Climbing up it, we took turns jumping off into the green grass blanket below, yelling with joy, "Tower Power!" Our youthful yelps of delight wafted back to the compound like heartwarming aromas of freshly baked bread. Only the grownups smelled something burning, scrambled their fire brigade and dowsed our flames of fun with streams of stern solemnity and whisked us back to the village safe from the dangerous sparks of our imagination. No punishment. That was not our way. No explanation. Words were rarely our way. But the interruption was lesson enough: some banana cream pie is not to be tasted.

That evening, after a sumptuous feast of slugs, salamanders and seeds, we held our village gathering around the magical glow of an orange fire, all forty of us hypnotically submitted to the spellbinding incantational yarns that wove their piercing thick threads of enchanting unity through our wholesome hearts. We pushed our heads between the elders guarding the sanctuary to hear and to see (much as we did at birth to enter this secular sanctum). With the black-yellow-orange dance of flickering lighted glow against ancient wizened visage, the Presence surreptitiously pulsing its power over us, as the thumping beating thumping of the drumming getting louder, louder, louder, synchronizing our hearts, deeper and harder, this is what we saw and heard...