The Letter 'A'
B Y   D A N A   R E D F I E L D

IT BEGAN INNOCENTLY ENOUGH in August 1993, as an excitement building in me as I prepared to host a writer’s workshop for a Seth Conference in Colorado. I wouldn’t be talking about writing in conventional ways; instead, the focus would be on the magic of communication, which I had stumbled upon like a crystal rose left on the path by fairies.

I noticed certain correlates of letters in names and words that were meaningful to people in personal ways. For instance, the letters MO were strung like pearls on an unseen string around my life. My birth name was Moore, I was adopted by Morse, I was living on Moenkopi Street, in Moab, Utah, and my best friend’s name was Montgomery. These were hints of something profound that seemed to overlay our lives like an invisible template.

As I prepared my presentation for the conference, my mind was galvanized by the mystery. I hoped to show aspiring writers something of the enchanted forest of communication beyond the concrete city of language. I was seeing something of the blueprint and inner architecture of communication, a mechanics of meaning hidden within the outward structures, like seeing, in a wooden rocking chair, the tree from which it emerged.

And so in a fire of excitement like nothing I had ever felt before, I whipped together charts and posters and handouts, marked up with the formulae and hieroglyphics of my discovery.

I was a child discovering a new face in the mirror, a soul behind the silver shining through.

By October, the presentation was a vague memory of kindergarten stuff, as I sat at my kitchen table, day and night, a student in the invisible college of communication.

It was both me, bringing up into the light of consciousness memories, it seemed, of a long forgotten science of language, and angel energies attending, as if hovering over my shoulder, instructing, guiding, inspiring. The rightness, the passion, the ecstasy I was feeling made it seem that I was born to do this work, with everything else quickly receding into a pale memory of a life spent stumbling in the shadows of the sparkling world I was penetrating at my kitchen table.

The essence of the light was discovered in the letters of our alphabet, their very lines hiding mysteries of designs and energies unseen by eyes trained to recognize only the outermost meanings taught and recorded in the dictionaries and thesauruses.

I was rediscovering the music of language and her minstrels were talking to me. But the form of the genius came not as melodies on the page, but rather as a hidden design glimpsed in the numbers behind the letters. These were discovered by analyzing the geometric shapes of the letters and how each related to the others, revealing an esoteric mathematical design that I sensed underlay every created thing on Earth.