A
tranquil sea.
Tranquil thoughts.
A calm boat slowly, nearly motionlessly gliding forward.
My finger touches the water surface. For a short second, it leaves a track behind.
Like a person’s meagre time on earth.
One of infinitely many stories written on water. Feels so meaningless now. All this sensory stimulus. No-one seems to want, to dare and bear to go beyond it.
The space within remains most often unexplored, nothing anyone has time to give their attention to. A space so filled with true love, wisdom and happiness, yet so seldom prioritised.
Have humans lost all reason… lost themselves in their mind? Lost ourselves in the mental image we create of ourselves and the life in which we live.
Just one dive into the divine makes rings spread – from within and outwards.
A dive few make, as our planet can attest to.
A call for a name that shall belong to this form is heard nearby but so remote in this now. A now where neither name, form or story seems of any weight or consequence.
I blink away my tear. It offers hope when it touches the surface and rings spread.
“There you are; do you want tea? Our evening shift starts now… nice with a cup of tea on board.”
Nora smiles broadly and extends a hot mug.
I sit up. My body feels paralysed after having defied the pain by lying on my stomach on this hard bunk for a time. I try in vain to hide my suffering with my thanks and smile.
“You still have much pain, I see. How are you?”
She pulls her hand through her short hair along the side part. It isn’t as tousled, looks shiny and newly shampooed. A cooler wind brings a scent of lavender from the crème she usually moisturises with.
“I’m alright, the one who seems to have the most trouble now is Bo.”
I taste the drink in my hand.
“Mm, is that chamomile?”
I politely appraise her kind gesture through my shown interest… just as I’ve been taught.
But she is not interested in either my well-learned chit chat, the tea, nor Bo’s condition. She sits beside me.
“Can you tell me what happened? I mean, how you managed to break so many bones, it must have been a serious accident. Naturally, you don’t have to share if you find it difficult…”
No dark clouds yet in the sky. Just a thin rosy little cloud cover on the horizon above a big, red sun. We watch quietly as the orb appears to disappear into the ocean. But instead is a planet out in space. Unbelievably far from the round planet we find ourselves on out in space. One of many beliefs we humans have finally seen through. When shall the most important belief be figured out – the one about separation from what we are?
“I don’t think it’s hard to talk about, but it feels so elapsed, so over. So very non-relevant in our present predicament on this boat. As though my story from the past overshadows the presence…”
I drink my tea, stop myself before I drink it all and reach out the cup toward her.
She accepts it and then looks at me as if she is waiting for something more, a story that might entertain, perhaps.
“It’s really nothing exciting, Nora… I was on my way home on my moped after a yoga class in Goa. A family on an oncoming Vespa drove onto my side of the road when a cow ran out in front of them. We were both driving a bit too fast and a head-on collision became a fact.”
“Wow! But did the family make it, were there kids there, too?”
“Three children and an adult man had managed to get room on that slightly bigger moped. The children fared well, with only a few scratches. In some unfortunate way, I managed to land furthest down, under the mopeds and people…”
I grow quiet and swallow. She takes my hand, just like during so many storms we’ve been through together, side by side.
I share that which I’ve not shared with anyone before, something intimate I experienced during those seconds I lay buried under screaming children and heavy vehicles. I must have been somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, somewhere between life and death.
“I didn’t breathe. My feeling was that if I were to breathe, I would die. A black vacuum with a white light far inside somewhere. A woman’s voice came from the light and urged me, politely but decisively to take a breath. My trust in her was complete.”
I wipe salty tears from my dry skin and continue.
“One breath made my chest feel it was exploding. A thousand sharp knives seemed to stab me when my scream came out. I begged for her to not leave me in this condition but take me to where she was. She replied with the same confidant calm that my time was not yet up. This was God’s or Life’s voice. But I didn’t understand it just then. When I could open my eyes and could speak again, I asked about the woman who had spoken to me. The men standing round assured me there was not, nor had been any woman besides me at the scene.”
Nora lets out a deep sigh and drinks the last tea from the teacup.
The sound of the bow cutting through the water conveys that we are moving forward, despite the feeling the boat lies motionless in the middle of the sea.
I still feel ill and am suddenly weak and nauseous.
I lie down. This must be my body reacting to what I’ve plucked out of my memory bank.
Nora lies down close beside me. She dries her tears.
Stars fill the sky above us and appear to reach down all the way to the water’s surface.
Our boat seems to float, weightless through the night. So quietly.
Though only for a short moment while our minds are still awake.
“And then I suppose you needed to go to a hospital?”
Nora spreads her jacket over us.
“I spent five nights at the hospital with an IV and daily cleaning of my wounds. I lied to my parents about my condition as I saw no reason for them to fly all the way to India, as they suggested, just to see their busted up daughter on IV lying in a hospital scarcely in the range of any western standard.”
I stop talking and remember the sterile smell. Remember how I lay half-drugged by painkillers and watched the sun pass from morning to evening on the spotty white wall before me.
“I decided to try to heal myself on my own in nature. So the fifth day I left in spite of the doctor’s protests.”
“But why? How did you dare, you can’t have been particularly capable to go off on your own?”
“The light I saw right after the accident vanished completely at the hospital when I was so dazed by tablets and painkillers. It was the light that would make the accident a gift and not a curse…”
A shooting star interrupts me.
I close my eyes. An inner prayer.
"I met the light and the voice again early one morning in the bungalow on the island. The crickets had just begun their deafening song in the jungle, just before the rooster crowed, right in the middle of my greatest pain. Sweat leaked from every little pore, my fever was too high and I couldn’t find the strength to either get up or call for help… that was when she returned. She didn’t speak with me but her light was present, so strong. When it filled my being, the pain disappeared. My form seemed to also disappear for a time.
“Duangkamol, the woman who owned the little resort on the island, had poured a bucket of cold water on me, saying she believed I was dead when she came into the bungalow that morning.”
“Maybe you went over to the other side a while…”
Nora exhales again and continues, “How long were you on the island?”
She likes this story; it seems to entertain her.
“Seven nights… but I don’t want to talk more, now I want to listen to the quietness a bit.”
The silence speaks. But it is a language only one’s heart can fathom.
Her hand finds mine under the jacket covering.
Above us is the starlit sky with no dark clouds.
It was my story that darkened the light that night.
A shooting star.
An inner prayer.
An inner silence.