We know what we know, and I knew it was up in the heavens somewhere. When I was young I’d look up at the moon or the star-filled sky with a silent plea to be taken back. I drew a picture with a needle on black scratchboard, scratching away at the dark for the light to come through and reveal a girl like myself sitting in the window, bathed in moonlight, staring up at the moon, dreaming of the heavens. Then a picture in black pencil on white paper of a girl being taken to a home that was here. It was up a path, an inviting little white house set back among the trees. I didn’t know the way so I had to be taken. Who’s house and who carried her, and how it all come about were questions that didn’t need answering. Dead or unconscious or merely asleep didn’t matter either, for she was being taken up the path towards the dream of home.

One was a dreamer who scratched the darkness away to reveal the light, the other blocked out the white to reveal a story, and both were right, for I needed to dream as much as I needed to believe there was a way home, if only I had someone to take me.

But by the time I was twenty-six and no one showed up I lost hope. I wanted to escape into the darkness of oblivion but it wasn’t in the cards. The void was an illusion. Yet there was a way all the same. It was a grid of squares I had to walk myself. I saw it on the alternating black and white squares of checkered linoleum, each one equal, side by side, the dark and the light. But it was harsh with no leeway, and I kept drifting into gray areas where the light was softer, and if I couldn’t see very well, the damp and the mist were comforting, like walking through the clouds. Then on a day of bright sunshine when it was hot and dry, someone new crossed my path and I told him how I liked the gray areas. ‘There is no gray,’ he said, ‘there is only black and white.’ And before he went away he taught me how to bear it, so that what once seemed far away and out of bounds was actually here, in the light within.

‘How did you get here?’ I was asked.

I walked the grid of time and space and was carried along by a dream. I stopped looking at orbs in the sky and studied the squares of black and white that were here. If science can say that white contains all the colors and black is their absence, and art can say the opposite, I can point to the path that leads to the light of the spirit within.

Definition of Awakening: http://atreeoflight.org/Glossary

“The dawning awareness that a reality exists beyond the physical plane.  The realization of the existence of a higher self, the soul.  As the light of the soul breaks through the barriers of the concrete mind, higher dimensions of life and consciousness are recognized.  On the plane of the soul, the interconnectedness of all life is sensed, giving rise to a desire to serve the greater good.”