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Note: This was posted on this site (somewhere) but the content fits here in this "story" I am telling. So for those of you who have seen it before...oh well

I was born on a dark moon in October of 1956. The year I turned four my parents, my baby brother and I lived in small green house somewhere north of Pittsburgh. Our house was one of three on a hillside. The three perched in a clearing cut from the surrounding timber. There were evergreen shrubs around the foundations of the house and a narrow brick ledge that seemed, at the time, so high that I was in danger when I climbed along its bricks. I loved to inch along the ledge, back to the house, my palms pressed flat against the rough bricks. I would chant as I went. Purple people eaters. Purple people eaters. I climbed past the shrubs, felt a frisson of fear, that they—and their sharp needles—would eat me if I fell from the ledge.

The day which marks for me the beginning of my spiritual life also marks my first memory. It was early winter just after I turned four. I wore a brown snowsuit with mittens hanging from strings. The snowsuit was the same colour as my stuffed donkey, a toy my grandmother had given me at my birth, my mother told me. Donkey was as big as me. He had a rough brown body, a white nose and big floppy ears. I remember the snowsuit, I think, because Donkey was so important to me. In fact at age 50 I still have him.

There was snow. It was like stars or diamonds. The sky was blue and bright, the air not really cold. My face, I remember, felt warm inside the white fake-fur of my hood. My mother dressed me and sent me into the yard to play. She stayed inside with my baby brother. It was a safe place to live (I think) and so we had no fences.

I made for the woods. I felt as if I was on long journey. I suppose because I still had the legs of a small child. I would lift my feet, my knees nearly at my chest, just to clear the snow. Just inside the wood, where I could still see my parents’ house if I looked, there was a living hump of red jagger bushes. Now I know they must have been raspberry canes, or perhaps blackberry, but at the time I called them jaggers because they had thorns like daggers. There was a small entrance into the mound that the jaggers made and a short little tunnel of the same thick woody canes. They were bright red those canes and stood out against the dark trees and the snow that fell on the hump of its back.

Inside the jagger mound, it was clear of snow; instead there was a bed of soft, fragrant leaves. They were big leaves. Bigger than my hand and they were brown like my snowsuit skin. They smelt of sleep and somehow of home, although not of my house where I lived with my family. I remember the feel of them under me. I laid down, my arms tucked in at my sides. My feet fell open a little. I stared up at the living roof, smelled the earth, felt the cushion of old life, heard the soft shush of air moving through the jaggers. I could taste raisin toast. And then I wasn’t there in the jagger-house anymore.

I felt no surprise. No fear. I was in an oval glade that closed-in-green around a small circle of blue sky. It was summer. The grass green and the trees were in full leaf, and it smelt of hyacinths, although I don’t remember seeing any. There were two people there, a man and a woman. They talked to me for quite a while it seemed, telling me things. Time was different here. It was as if I were floating in a sea, moving, yet not moving. It was as if a wave of some kind had picked me up and was lifting me gently, moving me up and down. I could not really tell what was me and what wasn’t: I had an amorphous sense of own limits. It was if the whole thing—the glade, the people, the trees, the sky, me—were all there was. It was as if it was forever and yet it was also like there wasn’t any time at all. It’s the same sense I get swimming in the sea—as if I am suspended in a drop of green light that has neither space nor time. Of course at the time I didn’t think about it like that. I didn’t “think” about it at all. I just felt the flow and ebb, heard the sounds and voices, saw the summer trees and the sky. What I learned that day registered at the sensory level not at the cognitive. So I wasn’t listening to the two people exactly, although I took all the sounds in. I was just there and open, absorbing what was present. I had no intent, nor will, no feeling really, just presence.

My family and I moved from that house sometime after this. I don’t remember returning to the jagger-house, although I am fairly sure I must have since I felt so safe and welcome there. What I do know is that this experience changed my world profoundly. I didn’t speak about it with my mother (at least I don’t remember doing so and she never brought it up to me later), but it was as if I was born that day. My memory, for one thing, was vivid: some things when they happen, I seem to record in great sensual detail. I can still, for example, remember how the leaves under the jaggers felt. I can see their big points, like maple leaves; feel them under my palms. Perhaps it is that life had depth and resonance from then on: it was as if a wakeful watcher had moved into my head; she sensed things I couldn’t.

She, I sometimes think, is the one who remembers in this new and vibrant way. (She also has, I must say, a rather wicked sense of humor, although she is not mean. She has always helped me to avoid the worst consequences of my own stupidity.) From that day I have always been conscious at some level of what I call the void. That awareness became, for me, my backbone, especially when things were hard.