He had left the city of dreams in his youth. It happened on a day when his parents told him it was time he realised who he was in the world. It was a morning of butterflies. The sun rose late on the green horizon of the river.
He had set off from the city of dreams with the bright stones of his father’s words in his head, and the pearls his mother had made with her tears. His father had waved him off from the doorstep of their little house. The house overlooked the mountains and the distant waterfall.
His father was getting old now. The stick on which he leaned writhed with stories. As he left he was not sure he would see his father again and he looked back one last time. His father was bent in the doorway, a smile on his face whose meaning was too deep to understand at the time.
His mother walked him down the yellow path. It led through the blue fields to the river. She too was getting on in years. But there was something almost eternal about the freshness of her eyes. She was silent the whole way. There was about her silence a wealth of parables which later he would unfold into his living experience.
At the edge of the river she said only one thing to him.
‘My son,’ she said, ‘It is easy to leave, but hard to return. I pray that you return full of the meaning of the suffering of the world, and yet simple as the flower I am about to give you. The world will break you, tear you apart, rearrange you, disillusion you and maybe even destroy you. But if you keep this flower in your heart, you will return to the pure surprise of this dawn, to these gentle colours of our secret city.’
Then she did something strange. She plucked from the river-bank a blue flower. It was the only one that could be seen all around the river’s edge. She pressed the flower into the middle of his forehead. To his astonishment, it disappeared into the thickness of his skull. A blue haze passed across his eyes.
The sun rose, turning the greening of the horizon into a shimmering light on the river. A gentle breeze was blowing his yellow robe. He looked about him and was surprised to find that he was on a boat that was like a half moon. The ferryman was crouched on the prow. His mother was halfway down the yellow path. She had turned to look at him, but she did not wave. Then with the severity, which is also the tenderness of that land, she turned away and was soon lost amongst the yellow and blue.
The boat took him across the river, to the land beyond where dreams are forgotten. The land was called the real world. When he landed on its shore, the stones bruised his feet. When he looked back across the river, the city of dreams that had been his home was not there. Only a faint shimmer, a passing illusion maybe, lingered in the space where it used to be.
Many years later, when the world had beaten, re-arranged, and destroyed him, when he thought he had no home anywhere in the world, when the hearts of men and women had proved cold to him, when there seemed nothing to live for, nothing to fight for, because all things in that world of the real turns to dust or to ash, when all this came to pass he set out to return to the city of dreams.
The canoe that bore him across was simple as a new moon. He stood straight, while his suffering steered the canoe across.
The city had changed. Gone were the blue fields and the yellow path and the huts built with storytelling hands. An enchanted metropolis rose beyond the face of the young bride of a moon. Everything was bright. Music rose from the flowers and the trees.
As he neared the shore, he hoped to see his mother there. He hoped that she would sense his return in the crushing of his hopes. But there was no one there. From afar he could see that his father’s hut was a lost memory. He knew before he got to the shore that he was alone.
When he stepped on shore tears fell from his face. Where they landed a blue flower sprouted. He plucked the flower. At that same moment he felt in the air the inaudible music of a vast chorus of delight. He felt in that chorus not only the voices of his father and mother, but also of the illustrious ancestors and the ever-watchful masters. Presences in the air, which he could not see, cheered his return to the city of dreams. But what they truly celebrated was that he had not lost the blue flower in the furnace of the real world.