Starting Out

There is a boy. He is very young, less than seven years old. He has been orphaned and there is nothing left for him in the city. He walks to its edge and looks out along the road towards the setting sun. He walks on. That night he sleeps in a roadside drain and in the morning walks again. None of the people on their way to the city in the early morning take much notice of a small boy who is intently moving in the opposite direction. 

He has an absolute certainty that there is another world he can walk into. Round about eleven o’clock in the morning he does. He knows this has happened. Everything looks about the same, but isn’t. The light is a little bit thicker and the noises more precise. An elderly man is walking towards him. “Ah, you’ve come,” he says. “Well done!” He turns and they walk together to a verandahed shanty house. The old man gives the boy a big glass of fruit juice. He has had nothing to eat or drink since early yesterday. As he drinks he knows that now he can live in this new world; it will not slip away.

He begins to see many things he never saw before, though he had felt their presence. For hours he and the old man sit together in silence. He is having to grow in himself, for he discovers he is much bigger inside than he knew. There seems no reason why he should ever have to move again. The old man says, “You understand now.” It’s not a question. “Yes,” the boy says. “Then it is time to sleep.” He leads to boy into a room where a bed is already made up for him. “In the morning we begin work. Sleep well.”

Around the shack is a garden and beyond that fields and patches of woodland. For the next ten years this is home. The boy learns and grows. Through a wall of light he observes the world he left. His consciousness moves at will around that world. He has stood quietly in the corner of many a room bathing its troubled occupants with compassion. He has watched babies come into the world and the old and not-so-old leave it. Soon it will be time to take his body with him on these visits.

One morning he knows. His master smiles. The time has come for him to go back. Down the road, at eleven o’clock, he pushes his body through the wall of light and appears discreetly just beyond the limits of the city. He feels the hurt that oozes from it. There is much to do. He starts in.