The nights went by, quietly, without warning.
One month…
If he has managed to keep his spirits up, a routine of “work”—reading, drawing, chess, phone calls or messages with family and friends—he notices his body loosening. Muscles “melting” a little more each day.
When he wakes at night, his mind doesn’t always stay on track. It drifts toward dark places:
What if I never regain enough mobility…?
What if this project, already fragile, finally sinks…?
What if the workers stop…?
What if I fail to be there enough for my children…?
What if these bureaucratic hurdles jam again…?
The questions spin. Return. Chase each other. Lead nowhere.
Tired. In pain. Mind empty. Needing to pee (and the nurse nowhere in sight…), he remembers that years ago he learned to meditate.
Meditation was never a metaphysical act, nor a sleep aid, nor a philosophy. Over time, it became a way of being in the world.
Any everyday gesture could be meditation—was meditation: washing dishes, cooking, watering plants, cleaning…
He recalls an evening in Australia.
A thick fog devoured everything. So dense he could see, droplet by droplet, tiny beads drifting before his eyes.
In that snowy eucalyptus forest, the air had become “cottony.” Sounds dimmed. The world dissolved into pale gray.
The branches, with their soft, almost sensual curves, added a hint of mystery that could have been morbid. He was alone. The world had disappeared.
He took a few steps, resting his hands on the railing. An immense, deep valley stretched before him.
Then he sent into the fog the syllable “OM”, taught to him by a friend from his years in India—a friend without arms, but with endless resourcefulness.
“OOOOMMMMMMmmmm,” deep, long, perfectly “broken,” as Zakir had shown him. Vibrant.
Time ceased.
Between the fog, “windows” opened and closed: fleeting glimpses of the valley, never the same twice. Perhaps—he thought—the ultimate revelation is this very thing.
Truth—that colossal landscape—never shows itself whole.
It appears for a few seconds, fades, hints at itself somewhere else, shifts, and hides again. Leaving only a blurred memory. An intuition behind a thinner cloud.
He takes a few steps. Gravel crunches.
Drops fall from the branches, producing precise, crystalline sounds. The sounds grow, gain a clarity he had never imagined.
“Darling, it’s breakfast time. Want to wash your face?” says the nurse.
“Do you need to pee? Today you’re going home.”
He thinks: “OOOOMMMMmmmm.”
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