The Light in the Trees

The girl picked her way carefully across the limestone fissures. The dog had gone ahead of her as usual, following a zagging path with ease into the low hazel scrub that dusted the edge of the mountain. The sky was a skulking, dirty ivory. She moved slowly. It would be easy to twist an ankle here, and hard to hobble the distance to the nearest house.

When she reached the low wall that separated his small kingdom from the world outside, she hesitated. She was never sure quite whether to walk across. There was a right of way alright. It was owned by the tourist board or the heritage council or something, the whole place. It wasn't as if it belonged to him. For a moment, the girl resented him for her hesitation. He acted like he owned the place. Or was it her who acted as if he did? 

The dog was sitting next to him where he knelt. It had been drinking from the well again; drops of clear mountain water admixed with saliva were dripping from its stupid mouth. The dog smiled at her fulsomely, and she scowled. It had no sense of the sacred, this dog. She was embarrassed on its behalf. But the man did not react to either of them. She could hear him praying as he knelt by the spring. He seemed uninterested in her, or the dog, though she could tell somehow that he knew she stood there behind him, hovering, uncertain. The words came steadily, repeated and repeated.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. 
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. 

The first time she'd seen him doing this she'd almost turned around and never come back. Jesus: she'd had a childhood full of him, full of communions, masses, confirmations, they all merged in to one, and Jesus was responsible for all of them. She hadn't been to church since. Her mam refused to go at all now, after everything that had happened, even to the adoration when the pews were mostly empty. Whatever Jesus might actually have been saying had been drowned out long ago and the girl was still getting her breath back.  

She hadn't walked that first time, though, because she had found the prayer so unexpectedly mesmerising. She had forgotten that prayer could do this. She stood listening now, and after a while the words merged into a stream and lost their meaning and became an elongated drone, punctuated by a dissonant, repeating ssss, steadily beating like a thin drum over the hill. s-s-s, ss-ss. s-s-s, ss-ss. It went on like that until she felt she was falling into the sound, and the hazel scrub and the limestone bluff and the cave mouth retreated and only the sound remained. No Jesus, no sinners, no mountain, no dog. Only the sound, rolling like pasture. s-s-s, ss-ss.

Then the sound stopped and everything snapped disappointingly back into place. The man stood stiffly and unfurled his long body back into the clearing like a bracken shoot. He turned to her.

Lydia, he said. Have you seen the light in the trees?

The girl was always taken aback by his complete lack of interest in small talk. Where she came from it was all small talk. Everybody smiled and said how are you? and everybody said fine, and under no circumstances was anybody to answer the actual question. Under no circumstances was anybody to say, my wife just left me and I feel suicidal, or I'm in the depths of a rolling existential crisis, or I feel fantastic because I just got away with embezzling some company money. Everybody said fine, and then they talked about the weather or the traffic jams on the roundabout. 

I did, she said, a bit.

A bit?

I did, but not as bright as before, but deeper, somehow, and longer. I was walking home again from the shop, down past the new estate, there are lime trees there in a line, and -

And?

He would always prompt her like this, as if from the wings, as if she were standing in the spotlight dried up and shamed. He was like an arrow heading directly for ... well, what? What exactly? All she knew was how to answer, which is what she supposed she had come for.

Last time, she said, last time - the first time - when we talked about it - that time I was looking out of my bedroom window at home. I told you, you remember? I was looking out of the window, I wasn't looking for anything, and I saw the trees all shift. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and then I looked at them directly and all the trees were glowing. It was like they were dancing, they were glowing gold, like they weren't trees at all but were made of gold dust and light. It only lasted a few seconds and then it all snapped back to normal. You remember I told you?

Keep going.

And I thought maybe it was just a trick of the light or something, but you said - 

I said it was the first stage and that it would happen again. And now it has. What did you see this time, Lydia?

Like I said, it was different trees. Limes. Or maybe poplars. No, limes, because poplars are thinner aren't they? Taller. Anyway. I was just walking past and I saw the flicker again and I looked up. It was a deeper gold colour this time. They didn't shimmer, but it was like I was looking through them. Like they were not trees at all but just patterns. Geometric patterns. And I felt that - I don't know - 

What did you feel?

I felt they weren't trees at all. No, not that. I mean, I felt like they were there, but they weren't all that they were. I didn't feel it, I saw it. That's what I mean, I think. Ah, it's impossible! It was just - it was like they were all bundled up by some pattern of thread to the sky and the ground, and the sky and the ground weren't there either as I always thought, they were just words, and - 

The man smiled, for the first time since she had arrived. She liked the deep clefts that appeared on either side of his eyes, and the way that the smile always reached every part of his face. 

The cure for all confusion, he said, is coffee. Saint Seraphim said that. Or if he didn't, he should have done. 

He had a fire down from the cave mouth that always seemed to be alight. He had once told her that coffee was his only vice, but there was a twinkle in his eyes when he had said it, and she wasn't sure what he meant by vice, anyway. He didn't look like someone who had ever had any vices, had ever been anywhere but here, in this small wood, under the cave mouth, in the ruins of the old church. He looked like he had sprouted from the mulch of hazel leaves and moss that bearded the spring as it emerged from the face of the mountain.

Father- she said.

I told you not to call me that. 

I can't help it. What should I call you, then?

You don't have to call me anything. 

Everyone needs a name. 

I used to have a name. God took it away because it didn't serve him anymore. If he wants to give me another one I suppose he will, but what would I do with it? Nothing here needs a word for me.

What was your name? The girl felt she was taking a risk. She had known the man for two months or so now, since she had first walked into the woods with the dog and seen him outside the cave. She had known this place for years, but she had never seen anyone staying here before. It had been obvious he had moved in, though he had brought virtually nothing with him: a sleeping bag, a coffee pot, a small rucksack. Bearded, unwashed, he could have been anyone from any city doorway, but he wasn't that and she had known it right away. A hermit had lived in this cave once, centuries ago. He had built a little stone church here, which had long fallen in on itself. The embers glowed where the altar had been. She knew nothing about him at all, and had never asked. This was the first time, and she didn't know what the reaction would be.

If God took it away it means he doesn't want me to use it any more. 

Did God bring you here? 

I suppose so. 

Where were you before?

The man looked at her intently. His eyes were like those of a bird, now, she thought. His beard was white, with yellow-brown stains around the mouth, it straggled down below his neckline and only his hawkish nose and pale blue eyes could be seen above it. He poured the coffee into two dirty tin mugs and handed one to the girl. 

Around, he said. It's not important. What is important is that it will happen again. Each time it has happened to you there has been a shift, a deepening, yes?

Yes, said the girl, quietly. She sipped the coffee and felt restless and echoing, like a deep sea trench.

Each time it happens the world is precisely the same afterwards in all of its particulars, but something in the way that you see it has changed. You cannot put your finger on it, you cannot put it into words, but everything is different, though also the same, and you can never reach again the place you stood in just five minutes before, and you are not the same person who stood there. Is that how it is?

The girl wanted to say nothing, but she nodded slightly against herself. The man drew a mouthful of coffee and swallowed.

It will happen again, Lydia, because you are being drawn. God is pulling you towards himself. He has something to show you. 

Who said I even believed in God?

It felt like a bold thing to say, but the girl could feel the resistance growing in her. He always had to know everything. She needed what he had to say, because only he seemed to know what was going on with her, and yet some part of her rebelled every time. Now something in what he'd said had stuck into her like a thorn and she was aggravated in some place she couldn't reach. 

Do you go to church? he asked.

No, she said. I hate church. It doesn't say anything to me. 

Ah, said the man, resting the mug of coffee on his knee. Well. The girl glanced sideways at him, expecting something more, but he just sat looking into the embers.

You talk about God, she said. How do you know there is one?

The thing about the church, said the man, as if he hadn't heard, is that it sometimes talks about God as if he lived somewhere else. Up there, in some place we can't see. As if he he'd issued a list of rules to follow and then disappeared, and you get to find out after you're dead whether you got the instructions right. Don't you find? 

I suppose, said the girl. Suddenly she felt that she wanted to go home. Where was the dog? She wanted to go home, now. The man placed his coffee cup by the embers and stood up slowly, as if he was trying not to break something.

All I know, he said, is that when God gets hold of you, he shakes you like a dog with a rat. He shakes you until your guts are on the floor. He turns you inside out and then sets you down hollow and nothing that once mattered means anything at all. Then he tells you what you're really here for. 

The girl put her cup down and started to rise too. 

At least, said the man, that's how it seems to me.  

*

Lydia, would you serve this customer?

The girl hated having to wear a mask at work. Apart from the discomfort, it meant that the customers couldn't see whether she was smiling at them or not. She felt it was important to smile, and not just because this was her first ever job. She thought that perhaps, like the man, they would see the smile in her eyes. 

Some of the customers wore masks and others didn't. A month or two ago, everyone had been stockpiling toilet roll and hectoring each other about social distancing on their Facebook pages, but now they were getting bored. People got bored easily, the girl had noticed. One week they were all furious about some urgent global cause, the next they'd gone back to sharing gifs of dancing animals. This week, the consensus seemed to be that the viral apocalypse had been prevented by all the hashtags and stockpiling, and that everything would be back to normal soon. The girl didn't think anything would ever be normal again. She had seen the light in the trees. 

Can you put a new battery in this watch for me? said the customer, a young man without a mask. Young men never wore masks, she had noticed, and they didn't often say please either. She looked at the watch, which was flashy but cheap. 

Of course, sir, she said, smiling, hoping he would notice the eyes. Can you pop back in about half an hour? 

She wrote his name on a tag, attached it to the watch and then headed in the direction of the back room, where Kenneth sat before a pile of watches in need of repair. As she took hold of the door handle, everything dissolved. 

Just like that, it happened. The girl didn't know where she stood or what supported her body or if she even had one. It was as if everything had gone. She had been glancing casually at the glass showcase of jewelled earrings and necklaces, and they had just slid away, it seemed, slid away into nothing: the glass, the jewellery, the lot. Something was still there - something existed - but it wasn't the shop or the door handle or the earrings or Kenneth or Lydia. The world had rearranged itself into a vast array of patterns, shades and shapes, towering above her and disappearing beneath into chambers and chimneys of light and sound, great echo soundings of love and distance. 

She knew then that all of this had been there all the time, behind everything she walked through, that this was the true shape of the world, or the primal shape, or something. As usual, her understanding collapsed as soon as she tried to lock it down with words, so she stopped herself and just stood wherever it was she was standing, watching the shapes and colours spiral back into infinity, watching the crystalline mountains and waterfalls of light and not being quite sure who watched any of it or what would happen next. 

Lydia!

Kenneth happened next. He came out of the door she had been about to open, and nearly knocked her to the floor. The floor was there again suddenly, normal had returned, the waterfalls and caverns and patterns were gone as if they had never been, and Kenneth was apologising for not looking where he was going. She was suddenly filled with love for Kenneth. He was the kind of person who apologised when somebody else stepped on his foot or took his place in a queue. Everybody should be like Kenneth. The universe was made up of patterns like Kenneth, patterns of love and apology, or at least that was how they started out, but most of them got corrupted by what we thought reality was, and now here we all were, hashtagging and stockpiling and fighting over stories. The girl didn't know what she was talking about or what anything meant or how she was going to get through to five 'o' clock with this great burden of love suddenly exploding from her, suddenly arrowing at her from all directions, suddenly weighing her down and forcing her to swim out far away from the shore.

*

It was dusk when she arrived at the low wall. She hadn't brought the dog this time. She didn't want to be distracted. She felt ashamed now of the state she had got herself into last time. She remembered what the man had said about God shaking people like rats and wondered if this was what he had meant. Once you had seen the caverns and the waterfalls, what were you to do with the world? He would know. If he didn't know, there was only catastrophe coming for her. 

He wasn't in the clearing this time. She could hear no prayers. She walked over to the church ruin, which looked gloomier in the fading light. The fire was out. She had never seen his fire out, but the embers were black and cold. Suddenly panicked, she walked faster up the slope to the cave mouth. His sleeping bag was gone. She ran back down to the clearing. There was no sign of him here at all. No rucksack, no sleeping bag, no coffee pot, no sense of his presence anywhere. 

She wanted to call his name, but she didn't know it. Hello! she shouted into the gloom. Hello? Nothing. Even the birds were still with the sinking of the sun. The only sound was the trickle and bubble from the stream as it was born from the foot of the mountain. 

He wasn't here. He had gone.

The girl hadn't cried for years, not like this, but as she walked back across the limestone she couldn't stop herself. The tears ran down her neck and soaked into her shirt. She was coursed by sobs that felt as uncontrollable as her visions. Everything was lost. He had talked to her about what she saw when she had nobody else to tell, and now, with everything hanging like a thin moon in winter, he had gone, gone and left her to break apart alone. She needed someone to carry her and she had nobody at all. 

She reached the car, opened the door and sat behind the wheel, her hands uncontrollable. She drew deep breaths and waited for the tears to end and the sobbing to crest and fall away. She gripped the wheel, closed her eyes, focused on her breathing. She felt like the waters of the ocean in the passing of a storm 

When she opened her eyes it was almost dark outside. She could barely see the mountain. She thought she could make it home now. She would focus on the road. She had only been driving for a few months, since her sixteenth birthday, and she needed to be clear in her head, especially at night. Driving at night could be hypnotic, especially in lonely places like this. But she wanted to be hypnotised now and never wake up. She started the engine and moved off slowly, watching the headlights sweep over the stone walls like a lighthouse beam and curved away.

It was less than five minutes before the car stopped. She was driving carefully around a series of corkscrew bends spiralled with hazel and outcrops of rock like broken teeth, when the engine coughed several times, stuttered and died away. The car rolled to a stop by the roadside. The girl threw her hands in the air, stifled a scream, looked instinctively at the fuel gauge. Empty. This was it now, this was not a joke anymore. This really was it. All the shit he had sold her about God calling, all the stories about rescue. Or were they about rescue? She had thought they were, but perhaps they had been about something else entirely. Well, where was God now? Had God given her a glimpse behind the veil, and then abandoned her at the roadside, alone in the dark? What kind of God was this? 

This morning, the universe had been full of love; it had been built from it like brick, and she had wanted to live in it and preach it to everyone she saw, to hymn it in all the notes that were ever made. This evening, it was revealed as cold and unforgiving of any human notion. Perhaps she had misunderstood everything. She wished she had never come here at all. What would mum and dad think when she didn't come back? They had already wondered where she was going. She only wanted to be at home, in front of the TV, with their voices murmuring in the kitchen. She wanted never to have started driving, working, anything. She wanted to cancel her adulthood right here. She wanted to be further away from herself than it was ever possible to be. 

The door opened and the man got in and sat in the passenger seat beside her. He looked at her intently as he pulled the door closed, as if to gauge her condition.

What? she said. Where -

I told you, he said, do you remember? Nothing that once mattered means anything at all. Does it feel like that?

Go away, she said. Get out of my car. Where were you? What are you doing here? Do you know what I saw? 

She looked over at him. She saw the lines at the edge of his eyes again. His beard looked even messier than usual. 

I will go if you want me to, he said. Of course. He waited for a response. The girl stared at the steering wheel. The headlights were still on, illuminating a barbed wire fence and a field of rush wandering out beyond.

Say the Jesus Prayer with me, said the man, after a minute. It's easy. You've heard it before.

I don't want to. 

What you want has very little to do with anything at this point, said the man. 

I don't see what Jesus has to do with anything either. 

Humour me. 

I don't believe in Jesus. I don't even like him. 

Well, he's used to that. Think of it as a mantra, if you prefer. Mantras are more acceptable than prayers these days, I know. Just say it, and keep saying it and we'll see what happens, shall we?

Do I have to?

You don't have to do anything. You came to find me, remember. All of this is your doing.

The girl said nothing because there was nothing to say other than Get out of my car or OK then, and she didn't want to say either of them. 

Lord Jesus Christ, said the man, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. He said it quietly and then said it again. He said it four times and then he kept saying it, each time deepening it somehow, sinking it down into a place beyond his presence, each time increasing the volume slightly so that it filled the car without being loud or obtrusive. s-s-s, ss-ss. s-s-s, ss-ss. After a minute, the girl began to join in, hesitantly, annoyed at first and then embarrassed but then, realising he was not listening, realising she was not being judged, with more intent, until she felt her voice deepening too and filling the space and moving up and out and below and beyond. s-s-s, ss-ss. s-s-s, ss-ss

And then she felt it happening again. Not instantly this time but more steadily, gradually, as if she were being given a chance to turn and run, a chance to sit up and say Stop! and go home instead and feed the dog. She stayed with it. s-s-s, ss-ss. s-s-s, ss-ss. The sound filled the car and the road and the landscape until there was no car or road or landscape or anything at all, but his voice was still there, she could still hear him and he had stopped praying now and everything that had been rhythm was now silence and plain. She saw the crystals again and the rivers of time and all of the angles and multiples rainbowed into everything in ways that could not be communicated.

Welcome to the Kingdom of God, said the man's voice.

It's what I saw this morning, she said. She heard her own words but saw nothing of herself or him. She knew she was being watched and that she always had been. There was a presence, behind her and all around her, and she was afraid and not afraid at all.

The what?

The Kingdom of God. This is what we call it, anyway. It has other names.

What is it?

It's just the world. The world in its perfection. You were always here, but you never saw, because you were never looking. This is the state of humanity, we walk through paradise with our eyes shut. But it's all around you, all of the time. It is all just as it was when you walked to me over the stones. Nothing has changed at all except the way you see it. 

I don't understand what you're talking about. 

You do. 

Do I?

Faith, Lydia. Don't believe your eyes. Believe everything else.

Everything was flickering then, everything was illuminated, and whatever the great presence was it was one she had felt before, perhaps forever, only through some veil, some curtain, some glass.

Do you see how the threads connect it all? said the man.  When I first saw it I nearly died. The lights in the trees are the lights in your eyes. When your mind takes the world apart to learn what it is, all that it learns is the anxiety of separation. We call this the Fall. And when you see that there is no mind and no parts, when you see that death is not possible and that you are every creature that moves and beats in time, when you see that the old, true communion ties you to the creator and the created, all as one - then you are back in the Garden. Then you are everything there is. That's the Kingdom of God.

The girl said something in reply, but she wasn't sure what it was. She could see nothing, even her own body. The universe was obstructing her view.

At least, said the man, that's how it seems to me.

How did I get here? asked the girl.

You died. 

You mean - 

I mean you died. Not your body. Your body is still in the driver's seat. Snap your fingers and you'll see the headlights and the wire again, just as it was. What died was your self, your will, and just for a moment. Your self gets in the way of reality, you see. Your small worlds, your little truths that are not truths, the temptations, the opinions, the striving. They have to die for you to see. To see the Kingdom, you must give up all of your ideas about what the world is. That's what they were supposed to teach you in church: how to die. 

The girl stared at everything at once and it all seemed to stare back. 

Die to your self, rise again, serve the world, said the man. That's the lesson of Golgotha. In order to see reality as it is truly constituted, you must kill your false self, and leave the false world. Leave everything you construct and cling to. You must die to it all. True strength lies not in crucifying, but in being crucified. When you die to your self, you will be resurrected as everything, and then no empire can touch you.

So what is it? said the girl. The normal stuff, I mean. The everyday things. What's happening?

My conclusion, said the man, is that everything you see every day, everyone you know, everything around you: all of it is made by your mind. None of it has any substance unless you believe it does. You created the mountain, the cave, your place of work. You created me. We create our own little worlds and we carry them on our backs like sacks of winter wood. Once they break and fall away, there is reality, waiting for you. Sometimes, for some lucky people like you, the breaks can happen with no work on your part. But most of the time, the false world doesn't die on its own. We have to kill it. That's the work. That's the long, long work. 

My world, said the girl. I made it?

You made it, said the man. Your fears, your anger, your needs, your passions, your desires: they made it all. Everything you see is what you need to see. It's like a series of clues, I think, clues that you have to find. When you finally escape, you see this. This is the real world. This is the Kingdom. 

But what do I do with it?  said the girl. What do I do now?

It's not what you do with it, said the man's voice. It's what it does with you. 

The girl felt some shiver pass through her body, though she didn't know where her body was or what was watching or speaking. The presence ws here again, everywhere, all around. 

Everything shimmered for a second.

He has something to show you, said the man's voice again. And then suddenly it was gone, everything was gone, the voice, the kingdom, everything dropped away as it had done in the shop and the girl was back in the car, as if no time had passed or years had passed. 

Outside, the headlights were still illuminating the wire and the scrub. Was that an owl? She thought she heard an owl pass over. 

There was nobody in the passenger seat. 

The girl peered straight ahead of her, screwing up her eyes so that she could make out the parliament of trees assembled just beyond the reach of the beam. The silver road rolled away before her like a canyon floor. She noticed that her hands, still gripping the wheel, were shaking slightly. Everything was the same as it had always been, and everything was new.

She turned the key, started the engine and began to move slowly away down the hill.

Dark Mountain, July 2020