Out of the Cradle, Endlessly...

I lived my life in the shelter of the suburbs. My world was row houses, highways and strip malls and the constant hum of traffic and electric grid. Sometimes I'd look up and it would come back to me: a memory of a feeling, something pulsing through the veins of power lines, the thing that gave those neon signs their radiance. It was always there but mostly forgotten in the day-to-day distraction in which we lived our lives. We forgot to notice how completely we were cradled by the slow, patient embrace of nature.

Maybe nothing is eternal. But set against our quick flight to the flame, the inching up of a new shoot, the gradual change of dark into dawn, the almost unnoticed motion of the stars seemed much nearer to timelessness than anything we could ever know. Whenever I was reminded, I was grateful. It tied me to something much larger and deeper than anything I found around me in the everyday. There was some faint glimmer of memory, of knowledge that I, too, was made of the same stuff, that I knew something of that same slow pace, that timelessness. Somehow, I sensed, I could participate in that patient, creative pulse that, given enough time, could recreate the universe.

Once I could feel its presence, I was drawn to it, often in the early morning before the world woke up or late at night, when it finally fell asleep. I could feel it more than hear it, but I thought of it as a voice that spoke to me directly and called me out by name. It would say, "Everything you think you know, all you see in your world is a projection, a shared illusion made real by belief and the fear of letting go."

Maybe we were all afraid that if we let ourselves wander out into that wilderness, we'd encounter something we were not made to see. Maybe, we thought, it was better not to know, better to keep our eyes and our thoughts focused on the things we made and understood, the things we could control.

And I was afraid. Whenever I walked outside, there always came a moment when I would see myself taken away. And I would feel a little shiver and wonder, "What if I can't go back? Or what if, when I do, I won't be able to tell them where I'd been and I will be left so alone with this?"

But in those early mornings, just before dawn, I would stand still, slowly lower my defense and let it in. And then it began: a pale light, just the faintest sign that the night was ending. I felt the change before I saw it. A bird called, a breeze swept up a leaf. The last of the stars began to fade like a candle floating on the water, slowly submerged. And then, just for a moment, everything was new and anything was possible. Dreams mingled with waking life, and my heart opened and expanded, reaching up into the sky. I felt at peace and connected to all that surrounded me, to the houses, roads and strip malls, to the constant hum of traffic and electric grid, to that something pulsing through the veins of the power lines, to the gradual change of dark into dawn, to the motion of the stars, to that patient, creative pulse that, given enough time, could recreate the universe.

Magic Among the Mundane

I can’t be sure that the first thing I remember ever really happened or whether it was a dream, a story someone told me, or something I made up later in life. I was very young, standing somewhere in my home town in suburban New Jersey looking through the space between two little row houses. I don’t remember much detail; the houses were likely the humble two- or three-story, neatly kept and well-maintained affairs that lined the avenues of my childhood. Small manicured lawns with matching shrubs, a driveway beside each, maybe a small garage that housed an affordable, sensible car. Maybe an old cat sat upon a wooden fence post or was curled up in a ball upon a porch. Maybe a dog barked from some backyard nearby.

In my memory of this ordinary scene, something extraordinary then appeared. As I watched, I saw a figure on horseback, appearing ghostly to me in the haze and distance, move slowly down the street, passing through the space between the two houses. I remember that he wore the clothes of another time: a tri-cornered hat, brown knee-high leather boots, and a red or blue coat with gold buttons. I heard the clip clopping of horse hooves on the pavement until they vanished with this vision as it passed behind the house.

Thinking back now, I try to make sense of this strange apparition. Was I seeing a ghost? Was this just my imagination run wild? Or could this man have existed in the real world? One fact of my childhood makes me believe that it is possible this was real. In 1976, two years after I was born, many small towns across the country celebrated America’s bi-centennial anniversary with fireworks, picnics, and colonial re-enactments. This figure may indeed have been real, may have been our town’s mayor, a high school teacher, or an actor hired to set a certain mood for the day by riding down the street on horseback dressed as General Washington or some other figure from 1776.

This simple, historical fact may indeed explain away the mystery of the ghostly man on horseback. It might help me now to make rational sense of what mystified me as a child, but it does nothing to undo the sense of wonder it inspired in me then, a sense that has remained with me through all the years since. Growing up in what I remember as an uninspiring landscape filled with strip malls and highways dotted with neon signs screaming messages of crass commercialism, I looked everywhere for something more magical and mysterious to appear. Maybe this momentary vision that I encountered as a child created that hunger within me during my earliest, most formative days. Because I had seen something so strange and unexpected—a man that appeared impossibly out of a long-ago time and went walking down that common, simple street—I came to believe that, at any time, magic might appear again among the mundane, if only I knew where and how to look.

The Company of Others

I wandered out of the woods, onto the city streets. Then, I passed through the marketplace and through the city gates, and I wandered out into a wild and empty place, without home, without street, without tree, without root. Rootless and barren, I stood in it alone. And once I was there, I could not find a way out. I had no sense of where I should go next. I knew I couldn't return to the woods or to the city, even if I could find them. So, I stayed in this place, staring up into the cloudless sky. And though it was dark, I could see no stars. Night became cold, grey day, and day became night. Many days passed uneventfully. And then, one morning, while I stood staring blankly into empty heaven, I heard the sound of footsteps. I looked down from the sky.

“Hello!” called the stranger as he approached. He looked like a seller in the market, though his coat was rough and ragged, as if it had been worn through a long journey.

I looked at him silently. My voice seemed to strain from deep beneath the earth. I realized I had not spoken in ages. “Hello,” I answered faintly.

“I didn't expect to find you here,” he said.

I looked at him blankly. “You didn't,” I replied.

“No,” he said plainly and leaned his body heavily against a grey boulder that lay nearby. He pulled an apple and a small dirty blade from a fold in his coat and began to cut a piece off. “It's a long way to go,” he added with a thumb cast lightly back in the direction from which he had come. I noticed beads of sweat glistening on his forehead, lit by the faint grey light of the sky. 

“What is?” I asked, my body now beginning to turn slightly toward him.

The stranger appeared not to have heard me. After a moment, I started again, “What…”

“Huh?” he said, as if noticing me for the first time. “O. It's a long way here from my shop in the market square.”

The stranger scanned me up and down; a look of concern clouded his expression. “How long have you been wandering around out here, anyway?” he asked. “It's a long way to go,” he echoed his earlier words with a note of sadness.

I had been alone, lost, for so long, it felt so strange to speak. I struggled to answer.

The stranger looked at me with growing sadness in his eyes. “Why did you leave us?” he asked after a long silence. “What was so awful about us that it drove you out into this godless place?”

“God,” I stammered. The word seemed significant, as if it was attached to things that once meant something to me. I tried to make the connection. I looked into the eyes of the merchant.  His gaze seemed to go only as far as the place where my thoughts clamored to become words. I could feel the limit of his understanding. He could not see what I could not say.

“That IS why...” I mumbled, then turned away. A single bird appeared in the sky and glided over the horizon. I clenched my fists and grit my teeth, then went limp again. “I don't remember,” I muttered and shook my head.

The stranger stood and walked up behind me. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Come back with me, friend,” he said with gentleness in his voice. “Come back to us.”

My footsteps grazed the ground like dried leaves in the wind, barely touching the desert sand and leaving no impression. I was like a brown, empty husk. Beside me, the merchant walked with proud purpose. It was as if he challenged the sun ahead on the horizon to roll to us, so he could kick it into space. He was fearless and relentless. Occasionally, he placed a hand on my back and gave a gentle shove to speed me on my way. I was lost in thought, but he didn't notice. He talked to me with eyes ahead.

“Now, you've got to remember one thing, my friend,” I heard him say. “A man needs the company of others. A man needs to be with a family. He needs to wake in the morning and go to the market and do an honest day's work…”

His voice became a drone in my ears. It continued to hum and buzz even as my body, leaf-like and lifeless, began to float up from the surface of the earth. He took my hand in his as much to lead me on as to keep me from drifting away.

I went with him to the market square, where the crowds of people became a single, throbbing body of getting and spending, of coming and going, of money exchanged for goods, of street talk and laughter. I watched them all from a distance, as if I still stood out in that wild and empty place from which the merchant had plucked me. I was back in the company of others, though I had not returned. I didn't know whether I ever could...