05 Dec

Suspend belief for a moment and come for a walk with me.  Walk with me and certain boy who walks a certain way to school.  Day after day after day he walks this way.  He learns the path, but only in a particular way.  One day, as the boy walks, he trips on a root of a neighboring tree.  Why I don’t recall that root, the boy thinks to himself as he falls.  Upon brushing dirt from his knee, the boy notices a small hole made by a particular mammal, just under the root.  Curiosity begs investigation and the boy peaks his head into the hole.  No mammal appears, but neither does darkness.  Instead, through a circle of light the boy sees a world.  This world is not that of his own however.  In this world water becomes sky.  Maps are seen as constellations and trees form clouds.  Shadows give voice, and building foundations become towers for one to leap from one to the other.  The horizon between below and above, this and that, past and present, begins to blend, to come together, lit as one, to form another.  The boy sits up, removing his head from the hole, shaking the dirt from his hair, and  looks at the world now in front of him, seeing things somehow, a little bit differently.  As he walks to school the next day and the day after, and the days following, things aren’t quite the same.  For now the boy might find shapes in the canopies above.  He may toss a pebble into the sky, watching where ripples lead to roads.  And with an extra leap in his step, he may look down and say, “Well hello there, dear shadow, pleasure to see you today.”