まぶしいね。でも、これらからの季節は太陽がまぶしいほど冷え込む。夕焼けは、今夜は冷
え込むなあと思わせるような寒色のピンク。でも、家の中の温度は変わらないもので、極楽
とんぼは相も変わらずミニスカに半袖のＴシャツに裸足。そろそろ七分袖に衣替えの時期か
なあ。これが我が家なんだなあ。何となく勝手知った心地のいい我が家の玄関を開けて、た
だいまぁという気分。フランダースの野で摘んだケシの花を手に、死なないで帰って来たよ、
という気分。たぶん、ワタシだけが理解できるワタシの心・・・。
たかだか２週間の「旅」で、そういうときに限って「仕事」という雑念に横槍を入れられっ放し
だったけど、それでもいろいろ考えた。そもそもワタシの性格タイプは、ニッポン人に自己主
張が強すぎると嫌われるアメリカ人でさえせいぜい全体の５パーセントもいるかどうかと言
われるINTP。そよそよと考える葦どころじゃなくて、脳みその隅々をごちゃごちゃと思考で
埋めまくる、まさにアナログきつね。ワタシの人生のポリシーは「Play it by ear」。だからこそ、
思わぬつむじ風に巻き込まれて彷徨うことがあっても、こうして帰って来て、荷物を降ろして
ほっとできるワタシだけの「サンクチュアリ」がある。「Dream」（末尾）はデール先生との黙
想に導かれて行き着いた心の奥の奥の秘境のようなところで、アイデンティティを根底から
揺さぶられて、見失っていた「自分」と再会した「夢」。
あれから１３年。今読み返してみると何とも稚拙なんだけど、先生は涙を浮かべて何度も
I’m happy for youと言ってくれた。７人のクラスメートたちも。みんな何かしら心の深いとこ
ろに掴みようのない苦しさを感じていて、ショートストーリーを書くことでそのdemonに真正
面から立ち向かおうとした。カレッジの８週間の講座が終わった後も、唯一の男性メンバー
の勤め先の厚意で終業時間後の会議室に週一度集まって書き続けた３ヵ月。その後さらに
先生が主宰するライティング教室で８週間。民族も年代も職業もジェンダーも違う８人が共
感し合ってトラウマと闘い、肩を抱き合って泣いて、喜び合って、それぞれの人生に戻って
行った。今思えば、あれはワタシにとってかけがえのない幸せな時だった。うん、初心に立
ち帰ろう、だよね。うん・・・。
さて、日常。いつものことだけど、また１０分の差でFedExの二度目の配達を逃しちゃった。
The Great Coursesのビデオ講座７つ。シェークスピアとラテン語と言語学と海洋学と、い
ろいろ・・・。学ぶのは楽しい。明日の午後に空港近くのオフィスまで取りに行かなきゃね。
それじゃあ、気持を入れ替えて、真剣に仕事をしよっかなあ。
[おまけ]
Dream
Day turned to dusk, and the landscape lost its edge. The horizon was softer, and
trees melted into forest. The sky turned from blue to indigo as night fell, and all things
that made the world in day vanished.
A female figure sat still as darkness cloaked her. She shivered from deep within.
The coldness sheared her body like a fragment of ice. She was cold. She could not
remember how long she had been feeling cold, or how long she had been sitting
there. She did not know how she had reached there. She had no shoes, and her feet
were bleeding. The darkness was comforting to her somehow but she could not know
why. She lifted her head, and looked up.
“There has to be the sky over my head, and the earth underneath my body,” she
said to herself, as if she was trying to assure herself of a firm place to be---
somewhere between the sky and the earth. Yet, she felt the skies on her sides, and
beneath her---darkened, and without edge. Darkness was the universe in which she
now floated all alone.
“Eons ago,” a deep voice resonated in the endlessness, “a burst of energy
shattered the kernel of our being, and scattered all things into the universe which had
no beginning or end. Now all things are searching for one another for they were once
one in the kernel of the crystal that was their whole being.“
She tried to turn to the voice, but it reverberated around the space.
“Who are you?” she cried out in fear.
“Be not afraid, my child, and let yourself be,” answered the voice.
Gentleness of the voice rocked her like a soft cradle. A low murmur swirled around
her like waves of the ocean, ebbing and flowing, as if to count the pulse of time from
which she was born. Night was clear in the universe. Thousands of stars shimmered.
She closed her eyes and let herself float through the shower of lights she could still see.
Then light waned. She opened her eyes and saw a star surrounded by a cluster of
pale rocks. They did not see her, but went around the star without words, as their
master marched on.
“How pale they looked,” she muttered, with her eyes following the silent procession
as it faded away.
“They shine by light of others,” said the deep voice, “because they have no fire in
them to shine.”
“How sad,” she said, and shuddered at her own feeling of sadness. “Do I shine?”
“You should know yourself.”
“I can’t see myself.”
“Then you are not shining.”
“Oh, don’t I have the fire in me?”
“I lit your fire in the kernel of the crystal that was life---but it was eons ago,” said the
voice, with a touch of sadness.
“Oh, I’m so cold---I must have lost my fire,” she cried out.
“Then, find it.”
She swung herself around in a wild orbit, searching through thousands of stars.
Solitary stars looked away. Clusters of stars huddled tighter. Wheels of galaxies
thundered away in eternal silence. Suddenly a bright swirl of lights caught her eyes.
Jubilant chatters and roars of laughter radiated from the mass of lights dancing, in a
bacchanalian frenzy, around a great darkness. Sparks churned around the
mysterious void in the centre. She felt herself irresistibly drawn closer to the ring of
festivity.
“Stay away,” said the deep voice.
Kicking her legs hard, she wrenched herself free from the invisible, yet seductive
tentacles of the orgiastic merriment.
“What are they celebrating?”
“Delusions,” answered the voice. “Envy them not, as they are doomed. Their
offering of light---gift of their life---will never shine on the great darkness. Nor the
darkness will shine light back unto them, because it knows not giving but only being
given. They will dance faster and closer until they are swallowed and trapped forever
in the deepest bowel of the indifference. Never again their light will shine in the
universe.”
She watched in horror as the enthralled swarm of lights went blissfully about with
the chilling courtship of their unenviable fate. She turned her eyes away from the
eerie darkness so worshipped by the unsuspecting lights, and drifted as far away
from the doomed revelry as the universe would carry her.
Her weary body loosened, and unwound like a melting snowflake. She fell into a
deep, tranquil sleep, contented that the gentle voice would not leave her. She
dreamed in a cradle of the ocean called time. A shadow of the house stood high on
the hill. The house beckoned her. She could hear waves. Fog crept up from the night,
and swathed the house, and her dream. Foghorn groaned with joy, rocked her with
laughter of the deep voice ever gently, and then trailed long into the fog as she
reached for its invisible hand.
A joyful laughter awoke her. It came from a pair of stars---yellow and blue, their
eyes locked in eternal embrace. They twirled around in a graceful waltz, with their
light shining bright on each other.
“So beautiful---,” she sighed.
“Albireo---the most beautiful of all binary stars,” said the deep voice. “The fire burns
bright in each of them, and shines on each other. Together they shine gloriously like
a beacon in the darkness.”
“Oh, how I envy their love. How I yearn for their beauty. Is my fire still burning
somewhere? I’m so cold. Please---please help me find it.”
“Your fire burns still. Want it, and then you shall find.”
“I want to find it,” she pleaded. “Yes, I want to shine!”
“Search for your fire, then,” commanded the deep voice, “Go.”
“Oh, where?”
Without the answer, the deep voice faded away, like the foghorn, into the night in
the universe.
She wiped tears off her eyes, and peered into the shapeless world. Lights gleamed
all around her. She strained her eyes to see the faintest of the lights---perhaps a
lonely fragment of her kernel, flung so far away, eons ago. She turned herself around,
searching for the fragment in which her fire still burned. Suddenly, a tiny light
flickered, and grew a little brighter. Her heart jumped. As the light came near her, its
halo spread out as if to swallow her whole. She raised her arms in front of her chest.
Her body sensed her fear, and tightened in anticipation of the slicing pain it had come
to know within. The light grew nearer, and stopped.
A girlish voice came, “I knew I would find you.”
Alarmed by the tenderness of the voice, she tightened her arms around her chest.
She tried to say something, but her voice did not sound as if it had been sucked out
and dissipated into the darkness.
“I had to believe I would, and I did---I found you,” said the voice in the light.
She felt desperate longing to reach out and embrace the light, but a vague remorse
pulled her back. She clutched her chest tighter, and stared at the halo in awe.
“Who are you?” she finally uttered.
“You know me,” replied the light, “because I found you at last.”
“I don’t know---,” she hesitated.
She felt that she had known the voice. It was a long time ago---eons ago, perhaps--
when she heard this childlike voice resonating in her ears.
“What’s your name?” She ventured.
“You,” answered the light.
“No, it’s not your name,” she protested.
The light brightened and then waned a little. “It is the name, because I didn’t have
one until I found you---and I know how much you are afraid to hear your name
because someone---”
“Stop,” she interrupted, with her cold hands covering her ears. “I have no name---
I’ve lost it, and I’ve lost my fire too. Look, I am mere ashes of myself now.”
She stretched her hands out toward the hovering halo.
“Look, my hands are cold. My feet are cold, and look, they’re bleeding. And I have
no shoes.”
The light quivered. “I know you have torn off those shoes at last. The shoes did not
fit you, but you walked in them.”
“I was told to---”
“---And the moment you stepped into those shoes, they walked you away, leaving
me behind and lost.”
“Why didn’t you hold onto me?”
The light flickered, but its voice was calm.
“I tried to hold onto you, but the shoes pulled you away from me. They walked you
away faster than I could reach your hand.”
She unfolded her arms, and held her hands out toward the light.
“I tried to take them off and find my own shoes, but, believe me, they wouldn’t come
off.”
“I believe you,” said the light, “and I know, when they could not be taken off your
feet, you tried to walk in them, and dance in them, even if they did not fit---fraying
your arms and twisting your body, because you were afraid to walk barefoot through
a strange landscape. So you danced as best as you could in those shoes, because
you wanted to please the audience you imagined were watching you with eyes of
forever unsatisfied critics.”
Chill ran through her and shook her weary bones. She wrapped her arms around
her shoulders.
The light went on. “Like the fairy-tale ballerina in her red dancing shoes, you twirled
and jumped---faster and faster, and down the path you did not know whither. When
you were tired and wanted to stop dancing, the shoes would not let you stop. So you
went like the poor little ballerina, crying out for someone to stop her.”
“I wanted to stop, but every time I tried to stop, I fell, and I heard people laughing.
They laughed as I picked myself up, and taunted me as I fell. They laughed and
danced along with the shoes.”
“The louder you cried, the faster the shoes danced you in a furious tarantella,
almost spinning you out of existence, until you wrenched them off your feet.”
“The shoes were stuck on my feet, so I had to tear them off. It hurt--- oh, it hurt so
much, but I stopped dancing at last. I fell in the world I didn’t know where it was. It
was so quiet and frightful. I was so cold and, oh, I was so alone.”
She looked down at her miserable feet, bleeding from the wounds where she tore
the shoes off with the last remnant of her strength. A haze rolled out of the light and
swathed her tortured feet like gentle hands of a mother. Sobs erupted into her throat
as if they had at last broken out of a long confinement.
“Cry all you want,” said the light. “I am here---I found you. We are here now.”
She sobbed like an inconsolable child. Tears kept streaming down her face, and
glistened with the gentle light hovering in front of her.
“I want my fire back. I don’t know where it is now. It’s my fault I’ve lost it.”
“You have the fire---right here, between us, growing strong. We are sharing it,” said
the light. “That is how I knew I would find you. I looked for you for a long time---eons
since the catastrophe shattered your crystal. I looked for a fragment left in you. It
flickered like a candle so faint and so far away---like the last light on a ship being
swallowed by a stormy sea. It almost flickered out when you tried to tear your heart
out in despair. I feared I would lose you forever---if I did, I would have been
condemned to dart to and fro around the universe, like a hurricane searching for the
other eye to be whole.”
She wrung her chest with her hands. The blurred landscapes and the taunting
voices raced through her heart. Guilt stormed in with a hail of dead leaves. Then a
torrent of tears washed them away. When the raging flood subsided at last, she
found herself in the new, fertile landscape. She stopped crying, took a deep breath,
and turned to the light.
“I understand now. I am sorry---I didn’t listen to you when I stepped into those
shoes. I am very sorry I made you wander alone through the darkness, and I almost
robbed you of home to come back to. Will you forgive me---?”
The light brightened and its halo spread out to embrace her.
“Of course. Forgive yourself. We are one.”
“I’ll never lose you again---I promise.”
The pain of loneliness dissipated, and peace filled her heart so warm it began to
glow. She smiled to the light. “I feel warm. I haven’t felt this warm for a long time. I
feel I can walk now.”
“Come with me,” said the light, offering her hand.
She reached out and held it tight.
Together they drifted through the universe with no beginning or end---only the
comfort of being in the kernel of the crystal that was life.
“Sing to me,” whispered the light.
She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
“I can’t find my voice.”
“You will.”
She took another breath, and her voice came out in heavy silence.
“I can’t find the first note.”
“You will.”
She looked around the sea of flickering lights. They were watching her like the eyes
of forever unsatisfied critics. A twinge of fear tightened her throat.
“Listen to your voice,” whispered the light.
She closed her eyes. Drop by drop music trickled out like a gentle rain. She strained
her ears to catch it. Then, night gave way to day, and the sun rose to open the
curtain and shine on the stage. Trickles of notes became a stream and flowed down
the mountainside, melting snow and touching buds of daffodils. The golden daffodils
opened their trumpets and nodded to her. She lifted her head high, and with the
deepest breath since her first, let her voice join the stream.
She sang. Her voice soared to feel the blue sky, and hovered down to touch
ambers in the stream. The forest thawed out, tree by tree, and let the sun sparkle on
the crystal drops rolling off their branches. The trees unfolded, leaf by leaf, to catch
the rays shining on them. With her arms open and stretched out, her upturned face
shone by the fire burning bright within. She sang her song. Her last note spread its
wings and took her to the sky. As she soared with exuberance, she heard within
laughter of the delighted child.
“I love you! I do!” she cried.
She was one with herself, at last.
Lest we forget.
