Burdon, the young man, was gasping, trembling, dying near the door of Hell itself. He forced strength into his legs through sheer will. He could no longer feel the blushing of the wind, the murmuring of birds, or the sight of beauty. He was completely numb.
Body feels pain born from depth.
Heart burns with an intangible flame
a scarlet rose, trembling, ready to bloom.
Now he no longer wants to feel
the essence of life, the glowing of light.
He no longer wants to know
the world of lies dressed in silk.
He has become darker than darkness.
But do not be afraid
he will burst into light,
fierce enough to set the universe ablaze.
Slowly, with the heavy pace of a man returning to his origin, he moved toward the place where his life had first taken shape. He opened the door, the room seemed vacant, completely void, but the man he most feared was sitting in the chair at the corner, eyes fixed on the entrance. He had been waiting. It was plain to see.
"You are alive. What kind of trick is this?" Burdon shouted.
The man was quiet and still as the surface of a deep ocean. Burdon's voice echoed throughout the room for a long time, like the toll of a bell.
"Come near to me, Burdon. Calm your wilderness."
"You are the smallest piece of wisdom," Burdon spat, "yet bold enough to think you could kill me."
"I live in your mind, your heart, your every moment," Ramey replied. "Your long journey has been filled with agony, my dear. I know."
Burdon could not contain his rage. He leapt across the table between them, seized Ramey by the throat and then choked on his own fury, crumpling to the floor.
"Calm down, my boy. Calm down," Ramey said softly. "All of this was my riddle. You look devastated. Exhausted. Suffocating." He paused. "Breathe. Just breathe."
Burdon's chest heaved. Old scars began to open.
"I remember the day my hell began," Burdon rasped. "You, the man they called wise, the man they called great, you threw me into a dungeon so deep that not even the murmuring of birds could reach me. Not even the scent of a rose. Life became intangible. My skin dried out. My eyes went blind. My nostrils sealed. Look at me, there is drought in my smile, and no tears left to fall." He trembled. "You made my life into hell."
Burdon tried to weep but his eyes would not allow it. He seemed, in that moment, like a newborn, raw, bewildered, stripped of everything learned.
He was a boy meeting pain for the first time as something permanent, something living inside him. And now, slowly, against his own will, he was becoming its companion.
"The struggle of life begins at birth," Ramey said quietly. "All of us are gamblers, wagering ourselves against an uncertain world. Some call it life. Some call it adventure. I call it the virtue of destiny moving toward understanding."
Burdon shivered. His whole body was lost to sensation. He could barely grasp the words, yet somewhere beneath the numbness, they were finding a crack to enter.
"I am thirsty. My heart is burning. My soul is suffering," Burdon said. "I need water."
"There is a mug in front of you," Ramey said. "Serve yourself."
Burdon seized it and drank, three full gulps, swift and desperate.
"Do you feel anything now?" Ramey asked.
A silence.
"My boy, I am sorry for what I have put you through. But behind every season of pain there is a reason that only time can reveal. What do you see now, when you look around you?"
The light in the room was gradually brightening. The noise softened toward music. The air grew cleaner. The senses that had abandoned Burdon were returning, not as gifts, but as things reclaimed, earned back through endurance. The whole atmosphere shifted, as though the room itself recognized that something in Burdon was beginning to stir.
But the darkness had not finished with him. The moment of despair hovered at the edge of this new light the way a candle's shadow clings to its base. The shadow had hunted him even in the brightest sun, even in the clearest sky. Some part of him still did not believe he deserved to step out of it.
"You were my faith, my love, my destiny," Burdon wept. "But now every certainty has crumbled. Everything feels like sand in a windstorm."
Ramey looked at him steadily. A slow, quiet smile crossed his face, the smile of someone who has watched a long and difficult journey, and can see, at last, that the traveler is close.
"My boy, faith and belief kept you in that dungeon. They were not your foundation; they were your cage. Now you are a beast ready to be launched into fire, into thunder, into the deep waters of truth and meaning." He leaned forward. "Joy can be found even in the inn of darkness, but only if you remember to turn on the inner light. Not the light someone else gave you. Yours."
"The faith and belief you speak of," Burdon growled, "are nothing but the words of a lunatic, illusions that dress themselves as sanity. What are they worth?"
"You are worth more than all of them," Ramey said plainly. "You are not your faith in me or your belief in any idea I handed you. You are the gatekeeper of your own forbidden kingdom, the one that lies beneath your heart, your body, your mind. No one else holds that key." He paused. "You will rise like the sun after the darkest, most thunder-shaken night. But you must rise yourself."
"The dungeon was a dungeon," Burdon cried. "The sorrow was sorrow. The hatred was hatred. How could you leave me in that dark forest for so long, the silence, the solitude, the airless wind, until my mind went dumb and my body went numb and I became a stone that only pretended to breathe?"
The room fell quiet. They looked at each other across the table.
Soul suffers terror in the dark,
unknowing, unwilling,
followed through each narrow hallway
of the heart's destroyed beauty.
Lone survivor of the dungeon,
losing the shape of sanity,
the rhythm of the self
too faint to summon.
But illusion births illusion
until reality cracks through
powerless, senseless, raw,
and that cracking is the beginning.
Suffering and solitude.
The heart wants love.
The mind wants reason.
And somewhere between the two,
a life is waiting
to be chosen.
The depth was still working on Burdon. The beauty of the world had not yet fully returned to his sight. He was the man in the depths and the boy on the surface, not yet whole, but no longer entirely broken.
"The words faith, love, fear, and compassion are beautiful to hear, easy to speak," Ramey said, after a long silence. "But a lifetime can pass in vanity before any of them are truly understood. Do not lose yourself in their sound, my boy. Vanity leads to madness faster than any enemy."
"You have already led me to madness," Burdon said bitterly. "The madness of suffering. The madness of terror. The madness of hatred. Why? What crime did I commit that deserved this?"
Ramey rose from his chair. His voice became the thunder of a desert storm.
"To prepare you. To make you strong enough and clear enough to fight the battles only you can fight: the battle between who you perform and who you truly are. The battle between truth and the illusions you have loved. The war between your sanity and the madness the world tried to plant in you."
"But why must I battle at all?" Burdon sobbed.
"Because you have been living as a slave without knowing it," Ramey said, his voice dropping to something more tender. "Look at me. Do not cry. Rise yourself into your own triumph, and then reach for reality."
He sat back down. "Faith, hope, and belief in the wrong hands, in the wrong direction, are the oldest instruments of control ever devised. They were used to fill the hunger of those who needed power over others. But life is not about power. Life is about freedom, the kind that comes only from standing in your own truth."
"Do not believe in belief blindly. Do not put faith in faith without question. Do not hope as a substitute for living. Belief without self-knowledge is control. Hope without action is hypnosis. Faith without understanding is a beautiful prison."
"It burns," Burdon whispered. "It burns me from the deepest part of me. Why do you pour more weight onto a mind already breaking? Can you not see what I am?"
"I see exactly what you are," Ramey said. "That is why I am speaking." He softened. "Faith can create beauty. Hope can make the impossible feel reachable. Belief can feel like the power to move mountains. But only when they arise from inside you, from your own lived experience, your own suffering, your own survival. Not from me. Not from any doctrine. The whole of reality is filtered through human perception. How certain can you be that your senses tell you the full truth? There is always more hidden than what we can see."
"Then how can I be certain your perception is right either?" Burdon challenged.
"You cannot," Ramey said simply. "And that is the point. We all judge, every moment of every day, and we all fear being judged in return. That fear drives the heart toward numbness and the mind toward borrowed certainties. My advice is this: stop performing for the world's judgment. Turn your whole vision inward, toward your own reality, your own truth. Clear away the dogma. Understand yourself beyond what your senses alone can reach."
"But knowledge is power, I have heard that all my life," Burdon said. "And now you speak of understanding as something different. It confuses me."
"Knowledge builds a framework in the mind," Ramey said. "Understanding dissolves the framework and lets you see what was always behind it, even the things that cannot be sensed or spoken. You receive the world through your skin, your eyes, your heart, and so the world shapes your perception as it pleases. But if you feel, observe, and move with your soul, then you become the shaper."
Waved path of life,
so hard to carry on.
The chaos of every moment
just barely possible to hold.
Be careful,
death watches from every corner.
"Do you fear death?" Ramey asked.
"Yes," Burdon said. "Terribly. I have been so afraid of death that I have nearly forgotten how to live. I do not want to end. I do not want my existence to be swallowed."
Death, the beauty of an ending.
The love of a new beginning.
Chaos finding its stillness.
The heartbeat learning to rest.
And a new morning, always, rising.
"Have you ever felt a tear move down your face, not from weakness, but from the sheer weight of being alive?" Ramey asked. "I have wept. I have laughed. I have walked through my own dungeons. I feared death the same as you. I was like you, until something opened in me, a glimpse of light, and I followed it all the way here, to this way of seeing." He was quiet for a moment. "The hardest thing in the world is to tear apart the paradox of reality and find the self waiting on the other side."
"You may think me an old fool describing the world through his own vague perception. But consider: the whole world is filled with people observing life through the eyes of others, wasting the essence of their own. Nature does not judge itself. A river does not question whether it is flowing correctly. It moves by its own law, its own nature. It simply is." Ramey's voice filled with urgency. "What would it mean for you to simply be?"
"It means we are all chained," Burdon said slowly, something shifting behind his eyes. "Driven by invisible forces to think as we are told. Like a game, a long and elaborate game that feels like reality and puts us to sleep inside an illusion of truth. We are the pieces. They are the players. We are the beauty and they are the ones who enjoy it, and we are entirely unaware that we ourselves are the only reality that matters. Each of us, to ourselves."
"Yes," Ramey said.
"The stories of battle and war and duality have been telling me something all this time," Burdon continued, his voice growing steadier, something like dawn entering it. "There is something buried beneath all of it, buried beneath my own neglect of myself. There is no absolute darkness, no absolute wrong, no hatred that exists on its own. These are manifestations. The word lied to me. My heart and mind lied to me." He paused. "I am not the man I was. I am something else. Like the sun, burning on the surface, but at the core, only light."
Ramey smiled — fully, warmly, the smile of a long labor finally complete.
"You are the wings of your own soul. You are the pleasure and the sky after the clouds have gone. You are the wild, untamed self finally found." He reached out toward Burdon. "After all of it, my boy, you have found yourself."
The long time had passed, but the way had been found at last. The air was still, but within Burdon, something breathed like thunder after rain.
Then Ramey's form began to fade. Slowly, quietly, like a lamp being turned down.
"Where are you going?" Burdon cried, rising to his feet. "My heart is soaring. My soul is dancing. I feel it, the liberation. Come closer. I am like you now."
"Sh." The voice came without a body. "Do not disturb the silence. I do not have much time. Listen carefully."
Along the clouded road
the spring-bird calls:
"Who are you?"
"I am a traveler of this earth, like you," I replied.
Strangely, she believed me.
She rejoiced, laughed, and sang.
"Who are you?" she asked again.
"No one, beside you
your beauty of joy,
your breath of laughter,
your song of ecstasy.
I am simply no one."
The paradox born of paradox:
you are no one because of me,
I am no one because of you.
The sorrow in your breath,
the falseness of forced joy,
the illusion that masquerades as knowing
they have rotted my senses
and darkened the place where I dwell.
Long trails of life I have traveled.
I have smelled the rotten and felt the beautiful,
touched the soft and endured the hard
but could not find the way to freedom.
Far beyond this awful prison
I have seen the path
toward destiny and joy.
The road is hard.
Rain soaks you.
Winter frost stiffens you.
Summer heat breaks you.
But spring always waits.
Take my wing.
Feel the intangible lift of flight.
Rise above the horizon
and keep rising.
I rose, and rose, and rose.
The bright sky opened.
The heartbeat slowed
to something like peace.
The voice fell silent. Ramey was gone.
Burdon stood alone in the stillness, calling out. No answer came, only the sound of his own boots on the cold floor. Then, near the chair, he saw it: Ramey, lying on the ground, utterly still. Like a flame that had burned itself completely out and left only warmth behind.
A single bullet had done it. The gun lay nearby, empty except for that one missing round.
Burdon knelt. He lifted Ramey into his arms and held him, pressing his cheek against the old man's, feeling the last of the warmth leave.
The weeping that came was not the weeping of a broken man. It was the weeping of a man who had finally understood, and who understood too late.
"Oh, what have I done?" he breathed. "I have killed him. My mentor. My tormentor. The father of my old life and my new one. How could I have done this to you?"
He wept and let the tears fall freely, like a river that had finally found its way to the sea.
Then he rose. He stood. In his hand was the pistol, cold and small.
My senses are fading.
My heart is dimming.
My lips are drying
and the darkness gathers.
My eyes are closing.
It feels as though my soul is ending.
Oh, father of my old and new life
your splendid face,
now stilled by my hand.
I am the criminal and the judge.
I will carry you
into the delightful dawn of spring.
I am on my way, my father.
I am on my way.
He wept until the ocean itself ran dry.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank you for your precious opinion.