The World as We Know It (30 page)

“
Love
is as strong as death.”

“
Love
the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

“Give thanks to the Lord, for the Lord is good. His steadfast
love
endures forever.”

“Whoever does not
love
does not know God, because God is
love
.”

I read as I walked with my face down toward the road, and the more I read, the more I realized that the book I had been given was not at all the book I had once thought it was. In all honesty, I had been afraid to open it—afraid of what it might say. My assumptions had been made of ignorance, based on the religious radicals who were only so prominent because they screamed the loudest. The meek are seldom heard, but their truth is so much simpler. You cannot tell people they need God and expect them to listen and understand. What you
can
do is show them His love. This, I learned, was not a book of judgment or of vengeance. Its words would never justify bigotry or hatred. Rather, it was an evolving epic series based on one central concept—love—the word appearing hundreds of times within and as a consistent theme throughout the many
testaments, parables, psalms, and letters composed by dozens of authors over a course of several centuries.

The walk was much slower on two feet than four, but those pages kept me occupied as I shuffled on. They kept me sane as the ground leveled out and the seemingly endless plain lay ahead. They kept me hopeful as the weather warmed and the days lengthened. The long road behind me had delivered great knowledge and, I hoped, great wisdom as well. Wisdom and knowledge are two very different things. It is common for a person to possess one without the other, but often we assume that a person abundant with one is abundant with both. It can be a dangerous assumption, leading us in our naïvety to believe untruths spoken by people we trust. Of those two virtues, we must ask which is more important.

I watched the crops begin to pop up from the ground on either side of the road. Grass began to green, and trees filled out with leaves. Food became more abundant as vegetation came to life. Animals came out of hibernation, and the world sprang anew, as it always had. The flowers are always blooming somewhere. Under both clear blue skies and the dark clouds of springtime storms I walked, day after day, homeward bound. The sun of the next day would dry me from the previous day’s rain, and though it would inevitably rain again, the sun would always return. I passed flat fields with farmhouses, silos, and windmills. Hay bales spread across gently rolling hills. Herds of cattle. Wild horses. I would hear the patter of hooves from behind and watch as they passed by with magnificent beauty
and speed, and I would smile and keep on walking, just another creature of the earth. All of that was juxtaposed by billboards still strewn along the sides of the road, then falling apart and falling down. The green signs divulging my distance from this city or that city were beginning to fade and rust. I wondered how long it would be before there was no longer any evidence remaining of the old world. Someone once told me that if humans suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, it would be ten thousand years before everything we had left behind was gone. What if, I wondered, we initiated the revolution on our own and then stuck around to watch it unfold?

There was one particular horse I noticed, from a distance at first. She looked familiar somehow when I saw her watching me, walking warily alone through the tall grass of an adjacent field, glancing over toward me occasionally as if to ensure that her path mirrored mine. She followed from early morning until I made my bed in the grass to sleep while she observed from across the road. Her company was comforting, reserved though it may have been. She remained at a distance the first day, but on the second I saw no sign of her. As I moved east, I scanned the surrounding landscape from sunrise to sunset, hoping that she might return, but she seemed to have made her own way, so I continued on mine a bit lonelier.

The next day, to my great delight, she appeared again in the distance; and again the next, drawing a bit nearer each morning. In a week or so, she reluctantly made her way onto the road, on the opposite side first, and then she
crossed the median over to mine. When I would stop, she would stop. When I would eat, so would she. When I would wake, she would be waiting there, her shadow shielding my eyes from the sun. The longer she stayed with me, the fonder I grew of her presence, though I still could not make sense of it. She was not threatening, but rather she seemed curious about me, perhaps even more so than I was about her. Mostly I wondered why she felt so familiar. I had never seen the mare before, but her seemingly omniscient eyes reminded me of Nomad’s. It was as if she were watching over me.

As we walked together, I began speaking to her. “Good morning,” I greeted her as each day began, and she would reply with a nicker. I would tell her tales of my travels. It kept me occupied and reminded me of where I had been, the things I had done, and the people I had met and grown to love. She was eager to listen. Sometimes we walked in silence, and that was OK too.

“What brought you here?” I asked rhetorically one evening as the sun was setting behind us.

As if on cue, I began to hear voices in the distance, carried by the thin evening air—singing voices. I looked toward a far-off wheat field standing tall, having not been harvested the previous season, where thousands of tiny yellow lights glowed and flickered in the gentle breeze. As the night fell, we drew closer, the lights growing brighter and the voices stronger. I left the road and the horse followed, headed into the golden field shining in the moonlight.

The harmonizing vocals of “Hallelujah” seemed to seep between the stalks as I pushed them aside to make a path. The grain grew taller than my head, blocking out any view but that of the stars above. Through it I was drawn by the sound of a simple song in a simple place, both eternally beautiful even without the compliment of one another. I was quiet with my steps—as quiet as I could be—the horse following as delicately as possible.

We came to a clearing where the wheat ended, overlooking a vast meadow of gentle hills. There, spread across the meadow, was an astounding sight: an immense circle of people—thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands—all holding candles and swaying together as they sang. Those on the rim opposite me were so far away that they were invisible, except for the tiny flames flickering in front of each of them. From the center resonated a magnificent sound, where all of the voices projected to a single point around which they all orbited. Only by listening from that single point could one truly comprehend it all, but finding myself near enough to feel it and hear it from any perspective, I could at least begin.

I emerged and began to walk the circle’s perimeter, the mare still close behind. No heads turned to inquire as to our presence. It was as if not a soul noticed us, too entranced by their own song to be distracted by anything outside of the perfection and beauty of their world. The light of their candles cast their shadows behind them, betraying no flaw, no gender, no race or religion, and no evil or pain. Each was of equal value, fitting into its own
perfect place as part of a sum greater than its individual parts. Without any one, the circle would have been broken.

I wandered through their shadows for what seemed like miles in the dim light of the candles and the moon. The wheat on the other side of me began to sway as the night breeze suddenly picked up, and just then, a separation appeared between two of those shadows next to me. I stopped and gazed through the opening they had created, directly between them to that single point in the center of the meadow. They did not move back, nor did they turn to look at me. All just stood singing as they had been.

I looked to the horse, who gazed back at me for just a moment. Then she lowered her head, turned away, galloped back into the glistening wheat, and disappeared.

Awestruck and intrigued by the surreal sequence, I was compelled to join their circle and fill the space that had opened as if to invite me in, and I found myself almost involuntarily swaying and singing with the mysterious choir. I didn’t ask questions, nor did my neighbors. We simply sang together through the night with all the love in our hearts.

In the soft grass of that meadow was where I awoke the following morning, and in the fields, people continued to sing and dance. There was no village that I saw—just trees and crops. Down the hill, musicians played woodwinds, the sounds of which were in the air everywhere. Music was perpetual and ubiquitous. What little was said came
through song, and everything they did was a joyous and spiritual celebration.

Life there seemed to be divinely inspired and powered. Love was everywhere. The settlement was so massive that I questioned whether it had boundaries at all. Perhaps it spread into eternity. There were no plots of land or places to claim as one’s own, but rather home was everywhere. I watched as an old artisan constructed a pan flute by hand, which was given to me to share in their joy and so that I would always have a piece of the place, and, together, we made music through the day. When night fell again, I slept in the open beneath the stars.

The next morning they were gone—all the thousands of people and all evidence of any settlement. As abruptly as they had appeared to me from the road, they had vanished without a trace, and my only assurance that they had been real was the pan flute in my hand. Placing it within my satchel, I again headed east.

18

HOPE

T
he first marathon runner didn’t live long enough for a victory lap. They say that as soon as his message was delivered and his mission complete, he dropped dead.

People still ask me how I made the last leg of the journey—over five hundred miles—in five days on my own two feet. Honestly, I say, I don’t remember. I had been tracking the dates between the time I had left the mountains and my time in the mysterious community of the plains. From that point, all I know is the date I left there and the date I returned home. Everything in between is blank. But, I say, anything is possible with faith and love. They’re an inseparable pair. Real faith does not come without love, and real love does not come without faith. As long as we hold onto those, there will always be hope for tomorrow.

I remember hearing voices as I drew near Eden Valley, and then the sight of the old gravel road off the highway. The bright green foliage of early spring radiated in the afternoon sun. As I wound through the woods, I saw children playing. In clearings, there were cabins that had not been there before and people I didn’t recognize at work in the fields. There were more people as I drew near the site of the old farm, passing me on the road and nodding with smiles to greet me. None of them knew me. They knew not that I had lived there and left before they had even arrived. They knew not where I had been or what I had done over the last year while they had built their new homes and new lives. I wondered if they had heard of me.

Down the road, I walked through an increasingly dense population, and what I came upon was a whole town that had grown from what had begun as a single cabin. There were buildings everywhere of timber, stone, and brick. In the center of town stood one with a sign in front that read “Eden Valley Postal Depot.” People filed through the doors to deliver and pick up mail, a carrier on horseback leaving just as another arrived. From where had he come, I wondered, and to where would she go? Perhaps Canada or Mexico. Beyond, even.

Quietly I roamed past the communal canopy and past the place where we used to make fires that had become the town circle. I followed the old creek, still rushing strong behind the buildings, the thick woods where I had lost my first deer still flourishing on the other side. Perhaps that was where Gabe and Mike hunted at that very moment. I
passed the stables where the town’s horses were kept, undoubtedly where I could find Noah. Nearby, a new market had been erected where farmers distributed their harvest. They came and went with horse-drawn carts, as I imagined my old friends Daniel and John did daily. Birds sang from rooftops and scavenged for leftovers dropped on the road along the way.

Then I came to Paul and Sarah’s cabin, clearly aged and weathered by comparison to every other structure around it, but still standing solid. So many things had changed since I had been gone, but even more had not. The building looked the same as it had on the day I had left. Overhead, clouds moved in and drew a shade from behind the old cabin and across the road, and I turned to see as they passed over Maria’s and my front door, there before me.

My body began to tremble at the sight of my home as it became suddenly real how close I was to seeing the one I had been longing for throughout my journey. The one who had kept me moving when I thought I could take no more. Maria and all that she meant to me had become a fading reality, one that I had been more desperate to grasp with each day that had passed, but had inevitably slipped further and further away. At times, my memories of her had felt no more real than the terrible dreams I had experienced along the way. Yet there I was, in the moment I had been yearning for since that first day a year ago, finally realized.

I stepped slowly toward the front door, then hanging on metal hinges, glass windows on either side. Fighting the
sudden weight of my arm, I lifted it to knock, my knuckles still quivering as the sound echoed in my ears. What an unglamorous way to make my return. I was filthy, dressed again in tattered rags. My hair was a mess, my beard unkempt, my body thin and frail, nearly empty handed, save for the satchel with my two most precious documents and the wooden pan flute inside. There was no grand welcoming party, and I would not have expected or even wanted one. My single and petrifying need was to see my wife, as wonderful and as beautiful as she had been the last time I saw her.

At the door, I stood waiting for an answer for what seemed like an eternity. Then, behind me, I felt her. I turned away from the door and toward the road. There, frozen in disbelief, Maria stood in the middle of it holding a basket of freshly cleaned laundry. A gust of wind caught her hair, glistening in the sunlight as the clouds broke above. In all her simplicity and innocence, she was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen, and I fell in love all over again.