It is one of those far off memories, partly there, partly gone. I remember being taken aback by the color of the sky. It was so beautiful – it was too beautiful. I felt I was a part of something larger than I could ever fathom. It was 2002, my mother had travelled, I was four.
Sometimes during the rainy season it gets cloudy in the evenings, before dusk, and when it does, the world is shrouded in a brilliant yellow light. A color so otherworldly, so breathtaking, it has you wanting to drown in it. So you get up on your two little feet and although your guardian had asked you not leave the house, you find yourself running out of the front door and into the light. You kick off your slippers and you feel the sand and the grasses running between your toes, you spread your arms to your sides and you twirl round and round like a little dervish. You feel the pre-rain air swishing against your face, you breath it in and you wonder at your existence. You’re overwhelmed by feelings you cannot explain, but which you so intensely want to share with someone. You twirl round and round so fast you lose yourself in there. In there, there is no you, there is no beginning or end, you are an extension of everything and the entire universe is you. Time ceases to exist and you have no idea how long you keep spinning… in that vacuum, which is so pregnant with existence, so pregnant with realization.
When you finally stop spinning, you crash to the ground and you lie there staring up at the sky… the colors up there, you can look on for an eternity. I thought of the sky as a coloring book, and some kid had coloured in the different shades of the clouds and finally dipped a large brush in a can of translucent shimmering polish, swiping it all over the page, making it come alive.
Now I know how the skies get so colorful; something about molecules and scattering and particles and rays! …even so, I still often find myself awestruck at the sight of it.
I lay there, I don’t know how long I lay there for. I could hear the far off voices of other children playing, children I had wanted so badly to join, before this yellow light caught my attention and lured me unto itself. The voices seemed to come from far, far away… from another dimension perhaps.
Then I heard someone call out, once, twice and I wondered for a brief moment what it is that they were saying. It sounded familiar, the call. Then it dawned on me that it is my name they were calling. So I got up and ran back in, I smiled throughout the scolding, dreaming, thinking of ways to share with the world, my glimpse of nirvana.
