Things Keep Happening

Over time I’ve begun to notice, on my journey through these endless tunnels, that I sometimes see things that remind me of things I’ve seen before. This recently happened twice in close succession. The second time it was a stuffed animal of some kind and I made a decision. I think that decision marked the start of a new period in my life.

In case I came that way again, I put a pebble between the two sides of a folded label on which was printed “Teddy Bear, Canada”. I don’t know what those words mean, but I once saw something labelled ‘bear’ in a magazine I found in a bag of trash.

Why do I think that putting that pebble inside the label was the start of sometime new, even the start of a new possibility in my life? Because it signaled my willingness to pay attention to my own role as I keep stepping through these walls, sometime so close together that I have to turn sideways to squeeze through, sometimes as far apart as five of my lengths stretched end to end.

Actually, the time I found that “teddy bear” I had just finished measuring the corridor and calculated its width as six lengths. I was then resting against the target wall when I noticed that stuffed toy under a pile of newspapers.

I don’t really have a way of measuring time in this world illuminated by artificial light. I count my steps as I walk, calling a thousand steps one more day.

With this new awareness that I need to pay attention to what is happening, both inside me and in the passing terrain I traverse between awakening and sleeping, I have been noticing more and more. I haven’t come across the stuffed animal I marked with a pebble, so perhaps I am not really in a maze that circles back on itself. But the decision to look for recurrences in this world, which seems to be confining me, has allowed me to notice features in my surroundings that I previously just didn’t see.

Now I am noticing that the wall to my left seems to be moving. Its texture is not the dull grey of the plaster from which my world seems to be constructed. As I approach that wall, I can feel a breeze blowing dust across the concrete floor and I hear familiar sounds coming from the other side. I press my face against the wall and it responds to my weight with a moving pressure of its own. As I press the entire length of my body against its undulating length, long-forgotten images come back to me of wind and sunlight.

Then I am digging into the ground underneath this moving canvas and discovering that it is not the concrete walkway that would have just broken my claws. In no time, I have dug a tunnel, crawled through it, and am standing on all fours in the hot sunlight with nothing but dunes and sand and funnels of blowing dust moving across unending open space.

I have been guided home by the simplest of all things—listening to my inner being in the midst of a world designed to make me forget that I have one.