I wrote this 18 months ago for someone I love with all of my being. They were worried about me and about themselves. I haven’t shared it with them.
Imagine a house. A grand old house. As strong as it is ancient and shimmering across time. A building of all architectures with towers and turrets, crenelations and corridors, domes and doorways. Many doorways. Each leading to a room of its own devising. Some rooms large and auspicious. Full of ornamentation, shining idols, rich fabrics, colours like only the sky has seen and writings carved in stone. Some small and humble with but the floor to rest on and the scent of times gone by in the air.
These rooms are where the line of men have stored their dreams and ideas over centuries and millennia and megaannum. Their visions of the divine and the structures they have built around them. Shared truths holding human hearts have attracted those who seek solace and meaning. Who find their own way of understanding by adopting the ways of those now passed. Furnishing themselves with special kinds of seeing and standing before gates erected by others, who were finding their own paths in the footprints of ancestors.
So many rooms, so splendid in their imagination, in their celebration of the majesty of human experience. Shamanism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Bahaism, Nihilism, Humanism, Sceintism, Capitalism, Consumerism, Futurism and many more. The rooms stretch to infinity and all are full of truth for those who reside within. To reassure, or perhaps it will cause concern, I remain not in any room. While I may visit and even dwell a moment in many rooms, to appreciate the myriad, decorated creations the human imagination has wrought, I belong to none.
I wander the corridors untethered, with hands, mind and heart free from carrying any particular tradition. I have wondered for many years. It was during these moments that I gazed through a window at the end of such a corridor, attracted by the rays of light in which the air danced and sang. Filled with colour and warmth I realised that I need not wonder any longer.
A way found me and I stepped outside, finding myself in a garden of such beauty that my eyes were forever changed and see differently. I now inhabit this wild garden and the garden inhabits me. A garden with no edges, filled with life of all kinds, bound by nothing and no one and within everything and everyone.
I can still see the house. In this place. In this time. I have not travelled so far yet as to unlearn completely. I see it from the outside. Windows filled with people, staring. Staring at the garden. Their shadows cast on walls, ornate rugs, alters and artefacts of their own invention, by the light streaming through dusty panes. The same stained layer that separates them from the source of their adoration.
Worshiping in their own ways that which is on the other side of the glass. Talking and singing and depicting and resisting and doing all manner of work inside their rooms. Work that they might hope, one day, in the unreachable future, will bring them to redemption and everlasting freedom. To whatever their heart desires.
While of this garden without limits I see, through the trees, other buildings. Even more ancient and now empty but for ghosts. Falling down and crumbling where they once were mighty. Reclaimed by that in which they were built. I knew then that man has long found respite from the fear of embracing his own existence by building walls between himself and the garden to which he belongs. That each of us can cause our own walls to crumble with nothing but our breath.