This is an excerpt from the Door by Bridget Trafford. You can find more excerpts to download in the Downloads section of the website.
A WHOLEOF ME
Sam thought he looks like a kid who’s just spent his first time out all night and is not sure what happens next. You and me both!
He said “You feel like a kid who’s stayed out all night and has to face mom?- me too.”
Sam looked down at her hands. After all, telepathy was not such a bad thing; not once you’d taken down the fence.
To think. Then to go beyond thinking to just being…Where the ‘I’ is just the doorway- the archway- between the inner and the outer worlds.
I remember the archway thought Sam. I remember walking under the archway from the outer to the inner, from the corridors of the citadel to its inner sanctum. I remember-
All is one; all is one all is one-
While we are fragmentations we feel pain, we feel fear, we feel alone-
But when we are One we amalgamate with the whole. There is no fragmentation, no pain, no fear, only being. We have been the drop of water in the waterfall and now we are the drop of water in the river. Again.
The individual
The world.
The universe.
The river-
A whole of me-
A river
A door-
Oh Kevin!
“Please come in Samantha.”
Samantha-her Sunday name. Calm, reassuring, competent, with a deep sense of right and wrong and engraved loyalties, like striations across his heart. She wanted to take his hand and look into the palm for the scar of the knife blade that had bound them in kinship.
“My father who is not my father” she murmured.
He stepped back, surprised, as if she’d hit him in the face with a wet kipper. No, more than surprise; shock. She realised she’d spoken aloud. And suddenly she knew what she had to do. What she’d come to say.
He was speaking.
“You see me as a father? You see me as that old? Christ! I’m only a couple of years older than you!”
“It was a quote” said Sam but without feeling the need to explain further. Where would she begin? And she’d made her decision. it was a risk but it was a doorway and she was going to walk through it. Because she always had. Often to face pain and disaster and regret. It was never easy. “You gave up on easy when you made a right into the birth canal!” I know, Kevin! I know! Its what I do! It’s what she did. The alternative was a comfortable seat.
She got into her car and drove home. She let herself in and walked across the sun-warmed tiles to the kitchen and made coffee. She opened the cupboard and rifled about for something to go with it. She remembered Steve and Steve’s house with its well-stocked cupboards and she remembered Kevin… well, times change. She came up with a half packet of digestive biscuits. The last four in the packet still had a hint of a snap about them. They’d have to do. She’d have to do something about that. Kevin would be coming back and Kevin liked multiple choice. She took the coffee out onto the porch and sat down and gazed out over the field to the hills beyond and thought about Luc. She realised she had loved him from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him as a young Native American youth and maybe even before that. So long ago…
…
He had moved from behind the ranks of women and now he and Sam faced each other. They were of similar height. His hair, like hers, was shoulder length and dark and braided at the sides. His arms were slender but already beginning to develop the taut muscles that would one day cite him as a warrior and a fine marksman. His hands and fingers were long and well shaped. They spoke of skill, and more surprisingly, of healing. But it was his eyes that caught and held…they were blue, piercing, bird- wing blue… startling…un-belonging …out of step… out of time. Sam looked into those eyes and fell through a hole in her memory – like a feather loosed from the wing of a bird – and knew. She took a step forward, reached out and impulsively grasped the boy’s hand and whispered,
“My brother.”
And as they stood, palm-to-palm, with their people arrayed all about them, the silence spoke…
“It is well.” It was the chief who gave the silence voice.
Sam and the boy were still standing face to face, their hands still held before them.
“We have met before.” His voice was pleasant, light, like the rain in summer, which falls as a caress and is welcome. But his gaze did not meet hers.
“Yes”said Sam. “But you are blind.” It was a shock.
Again it was the chief who spoke.
“Not blind. Only not seeing with the eyes.”
Sam could not take her eyes from the boy’s face.
“What is your name?”
The boy smiled then, as if he had some joke that he was eager to share.
“My name is Wanagi mini”.
Sam smiled too.
“Yes” she said simply. Ghost of the water.
Those sightless, bird-wing blue eyes, that laugh, that ageless assurance and that raven black hair…
She’d loved him through Steve, loved him through The Badlands, the grasslands and The Black Hills of North America and countless others and other places, through centuries and rodents and dreams. Always. As a brother, as a friend, as a lover, as a partner; in life; through death…
Death
.
“ I am nothing. I do not exist. See, I have no form. I have nothing for you, here, now… We may meet again- in other times, other lives. We will recognise each other. I think… My paths are many… Yours too I venture. Ours may cross. But now go! Enter the light, child of light. Follow your path.”
Life presents us with doorways and circles.
Doors – some are locked; bolted; barred; no handles; some have signs on them – Private or
No Entry. or
At Your Own Peril…
Circles- the medicine wheel, the Mandala, the sun…the serpent eating its own tail…
She felt like a 14 year-old again only without the courage and the confidence, and the nice, tight body sack, she thought ruefully.
Where would it all end?
Was this just an alternative life-another one?
Just another one of those lives she had been experiencing for as long as she could remember and if so how long would it last? Would she suddenly wake up and bump back into some dreary reality like falling out of bed?
Did it matter?
Hell no!
Then she realised they weren’t just doorways, they were archways. They weren’t just circles, they were life! And this wasn’t an ending, it was just the beginning!
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, put one foot forward and walked through The Door.
You can spend your whole life, a bird in a cage; the door is open but you don’t see it, so you keep on fluttering around and around, banging up against the bars…but there are no bars, there are no limitations, boundaries or barriers, except of your making; accept your freedom; the cage door is open; you are the drop in the river and the river itself , and you are capable of doing anything you desire…
The date was February 27
And it was a leap year…
The Little Dancer
She says it all, the little dancer,
With her hands behind her back;
With her little chin stuck forward,
With her beauty, grace, and lack.
She is set towards a future,
While at present in repose;
Too wise to try to shape it;
Enough to know she chose.
*
Be not fooled by her countenance,
Calm bought at a price.
For life has had its turmoil,
And fortune played its dice.
But note the one foot forward,
To step, if step it needs;
The quiet self assurance,
That can follow where it leads.
You may fail to understand her,
For she keeps her counsel well.
Her inner thoughts, her own domain,
And hers to keep or tell.
But the peace you sense surrounds her,
Is balance of all parts;
A completeness without ending,
Where deepest wisdom starts.
Take pride, Oh little dancer,
That you have come this far;
Take courage, life performer,
That you are who you are!
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