I was standing in my bedroom with the lights out facing the wall while the speakers blasted forth their enchanting music; just standing there, solitary, listening to the music. I don’t know how long I stood there but about twenty minutes later I realized I was laying face up on the ground as each individual note penetrated my body. I closed my eyes and let the music travel through me until my body lost itself along with all feeling. As I lay there perfectly relaxed, my mind drifting in and out, I suddenly realized a small window in the black of it all.
Through this small window I could actually see my bedroom as if my eyes were open. As I concentrated more the window began to expand slightly, showing more in my vision. And then the view switched from my bedroom to the kitchen. And standing in the kitchen was a little girl, about eight years old. It was hard to make out any real features because rather than being in colour, everything seemed to me as if it were the negatives of a camera's film. The little girl smiled at me and lifted up a can of beans. Suddenly my view switched to one of the couches in our living room, only the bottom half of it could I see through the window. And I saw someone’s legs crossed and a magazine open as if they were reading it.
All this intrigued me but I came out of it suddenly and thought nothing of it. I didn’t really know what the point of the girl in the kitchen was, but just today I noticed a picture of my mom when she was a girl and it looked exactly like the little kid had. Little strings in my mind that had been tangled suddenly unraveled. I felt a realization had come over me that I had already been pondering for quite some time. What was the little girl doing in the kitchen? Was my mom in the kitchen at the time of this meditative session?
My mother had always seemed to be a good solid authority figure until I began to question her authority. Then she would either explode or stay subtle and complain to my father. This always made me feel like she had a fragile view on what the world was like and when anything challenged that it had to be smudged out or else her whole world would collapse. And it always seemed somewhat childish. Like when you’re a child you have this simple view of the world but as you get older you realize there’s a lot more to it than that, a lot more complications. But she had never really let that simple view be torn apart, and as she grew up she only reinforced it by guarding it with her religion.
So when I began to put these things together, it seemed I had been struck by an epiphany of some sort. That what I had seen was really my mother’s soul, and it was still a child. And for some reason now I am downcast.