Morning begins in the mezzanine glow, where coffee drips and Materne jam stirs childhood echoes. Beyond the quiet cocoon of family, the narrator slips into his silver-gray Audi, threading southward under rising sun. Aetheria lingers in the brushwood, yet the day bends toward an office of shadows and the vulture’s gaze—where memory, work, and fate converge under a single red word: Materne.

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.

#aetheria, #memoir, #brussels, #morningritual, #office, #memory, #maternejam, #writing

YD6-94(1-Materne): From Cocoon to Vulture’s Gaze—Aetheria Threads Through the Brushwood of Loss

I awake to seize the ceiling’s flush, bright, and white morning reflection at us to call a glance over the mezzanine’s gleaming yellow laminated pine edge to the room’s bay window shining curtains, sunlight at the call. I straighten leaning over, with a gaze urging Victoria through her morning dilemma. ‘It’s easy. Get up!’ I peck her cheek, before knee-straddling across her cuddled in covers, crawling on hands toward the lingering night by the top of the ladder rails leaning against the wooden boxed edge.

With a foot swing, toes groping the rungs, hands sliding the rails, I descend the ladder, peeking through the rungs at Alexander cocooned in a bright printed duvet, amidst the laminated wood L-pillar. Feet to the soft carpet, head across the window light toward the Bergère cornered by the striated spectrum of bright colors hanging in Victoria's wardrobe. Off the chair, I picked up my casual trousers, step in, slip a hand into my shirt’s long sleeve as I turn away, tucking the hem, zip the fly of my trousers, buckle the belt, pick socks, slip into a moccasin with the shoehorn of a finger, and the other paced away, rising eyes through the arched portal open to the living room, the gaping doorway to the kitchen.  

The solitary island of a table huddled by backrests to contour in the glimpse of light off the courtyard my way around to the percolator. At a stance, fit the filter, pour two scoops of coffee, a jug of water echoing the cistern to a hush, and click the switch. With the chatter of a coffee drip, tingle of cups and saucers, behind the squeak of hinges, crackle of a muesli pack, thud a carton of milk, amidst slices of bread, the toaster ping-clangs. I pour myself a spout of coffee. I let water trickle for Victoria’s milder coffee, spread Materne’s blackberry jam on toast—as the percolator gargles to a sigh, me too, this is as far as I dare to impose. Shaking mother and son out of their cocoon. Posing a tray on the shelf of the boxed bed with the hush of a reprimand: ‘My Little One! You should endeavor to rise earlier than scheduled arrival school closing doors to class, and ease your life.’

After my bowl of muesli and milk, I close the door behind me, thread my thumb through my keyring, faithful, as I step through the dark hall, out into the morning brightness that fades as I cross the front yard. Aetheria looms on Dr. Decroly Avenue, plein air pointillist to hope for winter's brushwood to soften the harsh loss of my job at Forum, with a townhouse bond forthcoming and the Audi repayments, vaulted over the night’s stalled  cars. I crossed the deserted avenue, before the looming GB, a stripe beyond the supermarket’s bare parking lot, without a prowling cat, in the hush of the morning, approaching my silver-gray Audi, for the long route ahead.

I slip behind the wheel, tweak the ignition key, shift into gear, and bushwhack in a bird’s-eye view south out of Uccle, after yesterday’s honeymoon ride to work. I coast through the community edging into the valley of Forest. I join the tramway tracks eastward, which I abandon for the green median that sails across a Stonehenge roundabout—the monster of a crash barrier—feathering the throttle. I prolong to the parkway, passing an amalgam of cowering night-lit waking mega-industrial showrooms, ending with a GB supermarket pressed against the embankment vegetation of the traversing highway, and I dive for the underpass, curling onto the on-ramp. 

As the engine purrs through the gears, I merge along deserted lanes into sunlight fragmented through the median’s green swell thicketed hedgerow. My mind is fresh and at peace, with upcoming tufts of woods stretching long dissipating shadows into fields, as signboards rise from the lanes and slip over the windshield. Paris awakens in my mind—the echoes of street vacuum cleaners, and, receding, the bustling street accordions French romantic music lingering. 

I cruise amongst a drip of far-scattered commercial panel vans, burlesque men in workmen outfits squeezed in their cabins. As I edge past, my elbow wedged on the windowsill, my paired fingertips rest on a still steering wheel, my other palm reposes on the gear shift—the four 1800cc pistons at 3000 revs on the dial, in concurrence with the speedometer needle notched at 120 km/hr. 

The gantry signboard heads toward Paris—rhyming with Parijs—like a clue to decoding my parkour through village and “Lille” farther-afield French city. But flirtatious Rijssel-Lille slips from the highway’s roadway pointers, crossing a diverging sliproad westward, telling: ‘You’re still in the Flemish Region.’—We were still boys—my brother Igor and I—at boarding school in the march village of Kain, when our soccer team went to play at an elementary school in Lille.

When the cast-iron flanks of a bridge appear on the horizon, my glass bubble approach the wayside flashing “Charleroi” shunning the lanes that slip away before the gantry signboard headed Paris. I coil my way down the bowstringed trusses etched in the sky, spanning the river. Through the night clinging to the underside of the iron-eared deck, launched toward the heartbeat of Wallonia’s blinding rising sun.

Funneling through divergent policing road signs, villages straggle out from the countryside, their cars ramping up into trickling traffic, awakening male and female drivers. Stressful, I fall short of the city-bound thoroughfare. I slip straight past yesterday’s sign, “Jumet,” which had ambushed me from behind a bush’s swell of foliage. Now, in the stream of traffic leading on, flickering pointers give no clue, shaking my course.

I yield, back-crawling deserted streets, entering the midst of shouldering small industrial sheds. The heel of my hand spins the steering wheel, pulling on the dirt apron to a halt, before the call of a pair of wooden doors in the mundane red brick boundary wall of an office facade.

Out of the car I step, a few strides bring me to the door lever. A crank—the door swings, clearing a doormat, clearing a trio of broad welcome treads. To the left, out of the 1970s wood-panel wainscot and glass partition above, spills a reverence of sunny morning daylight across the corridor. Yet in the hush, through the opposite partition’s glaze, Erebus cohorts in the corner of the spacious office shadow the vulture-crouch figure behind his desk. I catch a glimpse of the Chief Executive Officer’s gaze at me from the corner of his eyes. Feeling an ant’s nest swarm my torso—spied upon—I step onward. 

A stretch deeper into an empty warehouse of partitioned offices, settling the Libra’s controlling willpower, as I step away through an opposing gaping doorway with a shoulder sway. I backtrack into the adjacent office’s pool of daylight—a courtyard in the midst of Nyx, holding onto her somber empty anterior offices. Aetheria’s peace falls onto me, illuminating the bare island of two back-to-back blueprint tables. I cast a glance across the maze of light reflections; Mr. Vulture’s regard snaps back from his glimpse as I jut a hip past the sharp tabletop corner. Through my sweeping eye, I catch the ream of a rifled wave of papers, just as I left it before heading home last night. 

I repose Rico’s executive suitcase along my way, sit, and plunge a hand, lifting my Toshiba laptop over the edge to place alongside the Bill of Quantity. Raising the lid, press the On button, letting it boot up. With a few keystrokes, I load onto screen the programmed spreadsheet I created back—reminiscent of the break with Erin, as I traveled before sunrise from New York the shoreline along Long Island Sound, Connecticut, and immediately southwest of the University of New Haven, to West Haven. At Michael’s Metal Art Works, I had programmed an extension of time-and-motion studies, a Witwatersrand-co-ordination thread that slipped into the hands of a Cape Townian civil engineer. 

Yesterday, in the aftermath of my first day, I called on the slender living bust of Mr. Chief Executive Officer, dressed in a casual suit, sheltered in the shadows behind an executive desk, and handed across the ream of paper that spoke for itself. He voiced a date and words I wished fall tone-deaf, yet his eyes said: ‘Earn your worth—work this out for yourself.’ The emphatic brush-off left me mute. My eyes pirouetted away, ‘Mission impossible!’ tugging my body along, my brain in vertigo, grasping at the sheer volume that engendered the construction project vis-á-vis the time lapses. I stepped toward the exit door, across the corridor. As my mind settled, I peeked at the cover—distracted by an unusual red and bold large typeset, a front-page keyword: “MATERNE,” a knot in the string of destiny, a delightful reminiscence—

Not back then, as refugee children, behind the cloister walls, Igor quailed on me at boarding school in Kain. A hallway assembly queue before entering the breakfast mess. Mr. Prefect’s key unlocked a glazed door to a buffet of shelves stacked with Materne’s triangular jam jars, among others. He attended to paying schoolboys. Locked up, he leads us into the wash of a white-glazed, tiled, and chilly mess hall. Schoolmates scrambled through stretched tables, kicking feet over benches to sit, while Mr. Prefect, dressed in a long black robe, stood by paired doors, reading a black book permanent in the palm of his hands. 

Igor and I in a ghetto, amid fortunate schoolboys, spreading chocolate and Materne jam on bread. Our fingers peeled limp slices from bread loaf, abundant in its tray. We laid a pair of white fluffy slices on our plates. Our butter knives scooped from bricks of butter lined down the middle of the tables, spread, folded into a sandwich, and bit down, while from the jug hot milk poured into our glass.

In the chapter, Preliminaries And Generals, I read the clause stipulating: “The tenderer is deemed to have visited the site.”

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You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style?

https://sites.google.com/i-write4u2read.com/howtheuniversesculpturedourmin?usp=sharing