The Parting of the Veil

The parting of the veil first happened for me in 1964, when I was eleven years old. I was coming home from school. It was a long walk for me, but I was old enough to walk it alone. Often I stopped at the library, and I had done so today. I was holding my new library books and practicing whistling. The sky overhead was a magnificent red and orange sunset of ragged clouds and torn gaps full of dark and light. An unearthly glow hung over all. I watched it unfold as I walked, drinking it in.

            Suddenly the whole skyscape looked like a movie being projected onto a veil. I saw the curtain it was shining onto quivering as if in a breeze. Then the veil parted, and a beautiful Lady looked through it at me. Our eyes met, and I felt she loved me more than I had ever thought possible – more than anyone could, more even than my mother. I realized that I loved her too. And then quite suddenly I was just a small boy staring at a sunset. The veil closed, its swaying folds stilled and vanished, and I saw only the familiar solid forms of my own world again. But I remembered afterwards that this world is like a movie projected onto a veil, and there are Other People who live on the other side of the veil, who know us and watch us with love shining in their eyes.

            In this blog I will tell many stories of my strange encounters with love at the heart of the Natural world. But I will finish this post with a tale from 2011, now I am 58, of watching my wife Peggy have such an encounter. No doubt hers was nothing like mine, but in each case we went into Nature deeply and there Something or Somebody touched us. My first blog story, of a stone in an abbey wall that showed me its memories, is another variant on that same moment of direct contact within the physical world. Peggy's story illustrates what happiness can lie in these encounters.

            Peggy’s feet don’t like to twist, or come down hard on rocky ground. Sounds like no big deal in the city, where the earth has been artificially flattened for your convenience. But that means she can’t enjoy mountain trails. And she’s a gardener! No fair, especially when you live on the “Garden Island” of Kauai and can’t get out into the great lush tropical garden that flourishes everywhere on the island, where people do not interfere with it. It’s all twisty, uneven ground! 

            So she went to the shoe store the other day and got some great shoes – they are fairly rigid and lace up tight round her ankles. We took them out for a spin the other day – their maiden flight. We went to the trailhead at the far end of Olohena and hiked up it. It is a gentle grade but certainly “rocky ground,” since it is also a watercourse. For once, no trucks are to blame; the water alone carves deep ruts in the mud. The shrewd traveler follows the footprints of those who have gone before, sometimes still soft and sometimes frozen like little concreted way-signs.

After her first cautious steps, Peggy was transformed! She could walk the trail! Her feet were fine inside their safe high-tech armor. And the joy of it was that she simply forgot about her feet. She was deep in the little flowers that make wedges and scarves of color over the green hedge – the erosion patterns that shape old fence posts into works of art – the shape of a stone by the trail – the winged clouds that flighted overhead in bunches and the deep sweet long-eyed view to the sea. Over us and between us and through us played a music too lovely to name or even hear, felt and known by feeling, like blind souls in the dark, who come to the Feeling and follow it like children. Aloha ‘aina, the locals call it. And I loved her in that land-love, and we walked hand in hand up the path of wonders and were, for a little while, children ourselves.

At the top of the hill she kissed me and we looked down the long canyon to the tiny village, houses shining in the sun like a train set lodged in papier-mache mountains, and beyond the blue triangle of the metal sea. It was like being giants above the world of men.

All the way down the mountain side Peggy’s eyes shone like she carried the sun within her. Her step was completely different. She was almost dancing from rock to rock. And I realized my life-wise wife was gone, and a beautiful young woman walked beside me. There was no wrinkle on her face, and her eyes were the clear eyes of a young adult seeing the world for the first time. I would have said she was in her early twenties.

Feeling my almost 60 years, I walked in her light and felt her freedom. I was afraid the first time I saw her do this, coming home from Ke’e Beach years ago. But now I know we are Protected and she will be allowed this joy. As we neared the trailhead and the car her years seemed to return to her. And I was reminded once more that I live with a white magician, a kitchen witch – someone whose magic is strongest, because it is of the heart. I am a lucky man. 

Watch the next post for another story of magic contact with Nature! In that one the heroes and heroines are named Lilith, Twinkle, Tigger and Blackie.