ANCIENT FUTURES

[ inside the Miskolctapolca Cave Baths of Hungary ]

In the Spring of our world, when our species was young, (we are but teenagers now), we would go to those places where the water bubbles up from the Earth, to bath and sing, to heal and rest.

On our journey throughout Hungary, I felt as if I was returning to these hallowed halls and ancient ways...

The sound reverberated in the caverns, till all the noise seemed to collect in the corners, sounds colliding and bouncing off one another, so that the whole space rang with particles of words.

My own voice added to the din... a low hum from my chest and stomach, like a song that originates from the deeps. Without words, this type of song is made of pure feeling.

Lights rippled along the ceiling - a sky-born shore of blues and greens... Electric lights, their vibrancy transmuted through the waters.

Old men and women sat chatting, or soaking, eyes closed, in the hot pool. Children, the embodiment of energy, ran about, splashing and playing imaginary games.

Wandering the halls, my hands running along the sparkling white walls, I discovered dragons! From their mouths there came water - bubbling, hot water, straight from the belly-fires of their dark lairs, which lay far below.

And over every shelf there ran a waterfall of rock. Their flow will play out through the eons of time, slower than water, suspended middair - spilling minerals, which cling to one another, till they tumble back down to join the floor once more.

Further on, in the very back of the caverns, sat a spaceship - a round room, filled with sound, intermittently set alight with reds, greens, blue, and then dark as the night, the ceiling adorned with spangled stars... In the middle was a control center.

Here, held in the womb of the Earth, I felt whole again.
All those parts of the past, my humanity, returned to me in fullness - these essentially human functions and rituals that make up our birth right, our heritage, so long estranged from us...

And yet, here also was the modern, the parts of life I knew so well - all a part of me too, not thrown out but entangled, the one to the other...

It was a mix of science and nature; of art and its origins, of knowing and the great mystery. 

It felt like a glimpse of some ancient future.

ELVEN BATH HOUSES

[ Hagymatikum Thermal Bath, in Makó, Hungary ]

If the Cave Baths belong to the Earth, then the Hagymatikum Baths certainly come from some otherworldly realm...