Pure Love

There is a door. It holds on to nothing. No wall, no frame. It floats in the air like a settled fact. I don't remember the first time I saw it. It was just there. As if it had been waiting for me.

I open it.

Behind it, stairs. White concrete. They spiral gently downward, no railing, no pillar, nothing underneath. They float in the void and each step holds for the sole reason that I decided it would. I go down. The void doesn't scare me. The void here is the material. It's what I build with.

At the bottom there is an island.

Round. Suspended too. I see it from above as I come down the last steps. It has the shape of a world someone drew by hand. Not geometric. Round like an intention.

The first circle is the forest. Dense. Dark. It surrounds everything else like a wall of trees. I cross through and reach the path.

The path of dirt and sand. It goes all the way around the island, between the two circles of forest. It's the most important path in my head. I run on it. Often. At different rhythms. Sometimes slowly, feet in the warm sand, listening to the breath. Sometimes naked, feeling the air on every inch of skin. Sometimes I'm hunting something I can't see. Sometimes something is hunting me.

Sometimes I run so hard that my thighs shatter the ground. The earth breaks under the weight of the stride and I fall into white. A white void with no edge, no sound, no texture. Pure nothing. And in the top right corner, a frame. Like a screen within the screen. My inner self looks at me and tells me where I stand. Where I really stand. Not what I tell others. What I am.

But most of the time I don't break the ground. I cross the second circle of forest and I reach the center.

The meadow.

The grass is tall. It moves with a wind I don't feel on my skin but hear everywhere. In the middle there's a rock. Big enough to sit on. Old enough to look like it's always been there.

I sit down.

Below there's a lake. Behind the lake a mountain. A waterfall drops from the mountain into the lake and the sound of the water fills the entire space without filling it. It's a silence that has a sound. The kind of silence you'd spend a lifetime looking for on the outside and never find.

And sometimes he's there. The little one. Me at eight, at ten, at an age I can't quite pin down. He doesn't do much. He sits next to me. He looks at the lake. And every now and then he turns his head and asks if I'm okay.

Tenderness. That's what I feel when I see him. Not sadness. Not nostalgia. Tenderness for this kid who didn't know yet that he'd spend thirty years looking for this place. Who didn't know that the place was him.

I built this world over the years. Stone by stone. Tree by tree. Each meditation laid a brick. Each run carved the path a little deeper. It's not a dream. It's a place. My place. The only place where the noise doesn't enter.

The wind on the tall grass. The water on the rock. The little one beside me asking nothing more than my presence.

That's all there is. That's all it takes.