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Having been so many places I wonder how it is I never got there?
In 1986, I took refuge in a stone monastery at the top of the mountain where the monks wore golden robes and goats roamed the corridors. It was a time without words. The monks believed that a message would be brought to them on the wind so they kept their voices down for fear they’d miss the sacred message. The winds, for their part, howled day and night up there while the goats bleated. For me it was hopeless; you couldn’t hear a damn thing. No one spoke but it was the loudest place I ever lived. I threw my hands up in disgust and left without saying a word.
Some years later I found myself standing in a glade. I had been on the move but now I was standing calmly. I faintly remembered staggering across the desert and skirting the edge of a vast ocean but the details were now vague. I lay down in the grass and soaked up the beams of the sun that streamed in through the forest canopy.
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember I was standing in a narrow, cobblestoned alley. At the end of the alley, a blind man was tapping his cane on the uneven stones. I stood there mesmerized as he picked his wobbly way toward me.
When at last he was upon me, I took a step to the side so he could pass but he just stopped. He propped his cane against his side, pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and began to wipe his glasses. At the time, this did not seem incongruous to me. When he was satisfied that his glasses were clean, he fastened them around his ears then carefully folded his handkerchief in a perfect square.
“Come,” he said, taking my arm.
He guided me through the village that had now become a crowded city. Several times he stopped but he didn’t seem tired or doubtful. He just stopped and waited and leaned on my arm. We turned into a passageway between two buildings and we stopped before a wooden door. After waiting a while, I made as if to knock but he restrained my arm with a gentle tug. Eventually, the door opened as if a gust of wind had blown it.
Behind the door lay a stairway. He gestured for me to go up. I started to climb and I heard him shuffling behind me. When I got to the top, I found myself once again in the glade where I had rested. I turned to ask him how this was so and all the other questions that had been rising up inside me – but he was gone.
I was back where I had started but now I knew the way.
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