A Letter and a Story, both from Thomas Close

THE BOY WHO FOUND A BIG HOLE INSIDE HIMSELF 

Once upon a time there was a young boy who, early one morning, found a big hole inside himself.  He was just sitting by himself in his backyard.  As if by accident, everything just stopped.  Everything.   Like the feeling just before he would doze off again for a short while after he woke up in the morning. And there it was.  He even felt that whoever he was had stopped, too.  And everything became perfectly still and empty.  And inside was a big space in the very middle of his ten-year-old chest.

And then he looked inside with his eyes closed to the middle of his head and that’s when it got a little scary.  His head seemed to expand like when you blow a big bubble and it fills with air.  He caught his breath just before he felt he would forget who and where he was.  He felt like he would fall deeply down somewhere, even though he had the astonishing sense that there was no bottom to hit.

As much as he was secretly thrilled with the discovery, it was a concern.  Kind of like the feeling in his lower body when he thought about the black-haired girl that lived down the street.  He didn’t know where the mysterious irresistible feeling would go.  But he couldn’t resist going to the edge of where that big unknown began.

The hole would totally go away if he didn’t think of it.  But with a little remembering, he could relax and, sure enough, it was always there.

When he was a little younger, his dad would tell him made-up bedtime stories about a little boy who ran away from home and went on adventures:  working at a farm and riding a horse; driving a truck; making furniture in a factory.  Lots of different adventures.  But he’d always come back home eventually and when he did he’d return “with a man’s face.”  It was a sweet cozy feeling when he had heard those stories and somehow there was that same feeling when he went inside to that mysterious hole.

The boy had some really good friends and he loved playing with them, loved being silly and laughing with them. He spent a lot of time imagining they were great athletes or adventurers.  He also had too much homework from school, it seemed.  He did it, but he didn’t like it.  With those and other distractions, he didn’t wasn’t much in touch with the hole.   And he told no one about it because he thought it strange, like maybe he shouldn’t have such a thing inside himself, like he shouldn’t be thinking about it and messing around with it!

One night he was camping out with his friends, in the mountains, on a night where there was no moo….one of those nights, away from city lights, where there are so many stars in the sky it’s downright scary. The scout leader who took the boys on the trip was talking about vast interstellar distances.  He said that if one could go as fast as the speed of light, it would only take a second to get to the moon.  It would take nine minutes to get to the sun.  To get to the nearest star it would take eight years.  And to get to the nearest galaxy, Andromeda, it would take two and half million years!.  The boy could tell that the scoutmaster was in awe of the whole situation and so were all his friends.  It was hard for him to make sense of it all and it made his head ache a little, but, like when he went to the edge of the hole inside himself, it was a delicious feeling.

In science class about that time the subject was “What causes the weather?” It was all about air and water movements and how sometimes tornadoes and hurricanes would develop.  There was a big picture of a hurricane in his book and when he saw the hole in the middle of all the viciously swirling clouds, and a picture of how in the eye of the hurricane it was sunny and still, something inside him was fascinated.  It reminded him of the hole that had been haunting him for almost as long as he could remember.

Even though he had an easy life with parents that were really nice and loving to him, he was often unhappy for some reason, upset about little things like having to do chores and homework, or worried about if people liked him. He struggled wondering and if he was a good boy or if he just wasn’t good enough at sports and school as he should be. Things like that.

He felt shaky around that same girl he liked and thought how horrible it would be if she didn’t like him.  Or even how embarrassed he’d feel if she knew how much he liked her.  He didn’t like to feel those feelings so he’d end up wanting mostly to play with his friends as much as possible or play catch with himself, throwing a ball against the wall and pretending he was a major league infielder making heroic, game saving plays, or staving off bad guys with the weed digging fork, protecting his imaginary girlfriend.

He wondered if his other friends had those insecure feelings, and decided that they probably didn’t.  Just him.  And he kept it secret.

One day though, a funny feeling came upon him.  He was sitting at his school after the school year ended and he was waiting for his friends to come and play.  He thought of some things that had happened the last school year.  Some nice, fun things, and some yucky things that he had worried about: like that bad grade in math or when that girl he really liked looked at him funny and he looked away quickly, burning with embarrassment.

Then something rather extraordinary occurred and he slipped   into an odd,  timeless state – quite  funny for a young boy. It occurred to him to really try to figure out where those things that happened were.  Actually and Really Were !   It seemed like they were in a space like that hole inside himself.  Kind of Nowhere!  Where did all the stuff that happened actually go?  Where was it?  He could remember it, but where was it Now ?  Was it gone? It must be gone because if it went into Nowhere, where is that Nowhere?   If it’s Nowhere it must be Gone! For a few moments he felt a sense of freedom from everything he was so worried about.  He promised to himself he would remember his discovery.

But since he couldn’t wrap his mind around the whole thing for very long, and even though it enchanted him to think about it, it soon slipped away.

Then something similar happened to him about that time which affected him even more deeply.  As great as it was, he still forgot about it for a lot of years, he was so busy doing things.   (And he forgot about it almost completely until he was much older with children and grandchildren of his own).  It was something he remembered about how oddly peaceful was that “eye” in the middle of the hurricane.   He noticed that the hole inside him, as foreign as it seemed at times, was like a marvelous open door to a space of enormous freedom.  Freedom from all his troubles!  No one had told him about it, but he noticed that he could secretly go there and then everything was OK.  In fact it was beyond OK, it was a quietly magnificent feeling! He could imagine whatever he felt like imagining and he was perfectly happy…so happy he didn’t even compare it to being unhappy.  Just. Everything. Was. Perfect.

When the boy had grown sixty years older, an old grey-haired man now, he woke up from a peaceful slumber one afternoon and was remembering some of these things that had occurred in his younger life and thought it would be fun to write a story about it.  It was a good idea. Because he realized he was still that young boy.  That nothing truly significant had changed.  Not really.  There were still all the challenges of being a human, except now they felt more important.  Much more important.  Children and grandchildren with troubles of their own.  Challenges at work and bills to pay. Taxes. Illness.  A whole big planet of beings full of fears and a world with seemingly no end to troubles and tragedies.

But the hole, that marvelous space devoid of any dimensions, remained unchanged—dwelling in perfect Peace, boundless and unconcerned. He could still sense that emptiness,  an enormous inner room that spread limitlessly  up and out. And he could sense that his skin was like an insubstantial border between  his inside and the world outside.    Sometimes when he could step aside from all his efforts to sort out his life by thinking about and pondering it, there remained that quiet and utter Mystery.  The man disappeared.  And in that disappearance, he discovered the quiet thrill of what he really was.

Even in the most ordinary circumstances there would occur, often unasked for, that sweet, simple instant of recognition.  Recognition, simply, that Life is alive.  Life is here, always here, and it belongs to itself.  And it doesn’t even know it until someone knows it.

And every one of those “ones” that knows it, it seems, would like to hold it and own it.  But amazingly it belongs only to itself.  And amazingly its nowhere.  And amazingly, and wonderful beyond words, it’s everywhere.

The little boy had always been home.  And now the little boy had an old man’s face.