Shaman John's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

The practice held. Each morning John sat and breathed, and the quiet stayed with him. So this morning he went deeper. He closed his eyes on the trailer step, matched his breath to the dog's, and let himself fall inward. The village sounds faded. He sank past his thoughts, down into a dark and open place inside himself. There, in the dark, he found a small boy sitting alone. The boy hugged his knees and cried. John knew the face. It was his own face, at seven years old. John's chest tightened. He remembered now. The boy sat on the floor of an apartment in New York, far from the warm kitchen in the Dominican Republic where his grandmother had raised him. He had been pulled away from her without warning. The city was cold and loud. His mother's temper filled every room. The boy had learned to watch her mood before he spoke. He had learned that love was something he had to earn. John wanted to reach for the boy. He almost pulled back instead, the way he always pulled back from pain. But he stopped. He remembered the grief he had let move through him and not swallow him. He knelt in the dark and stayed. "I see you," John said. "You are not alone anymore." The boy looked up. His crying slowed. John opened his arms, and the boy climbed in. John held him. He felt the small ribs shake and then go still. All the years of trying to be good enough, of never feeling safe, moved up through John's body and out. He wept without shame. A soft golden light spread through the dark. The spirit butterfly drifted close, its feathered wings glowing. Inside each wing John saw the deep blue night, thick with stars and small pale moons. It did not speak. It hovered near the boy's head, steady and calm, as if it had been waiting there the whole time. John understood. The loneliness he carried had a source, and the source was this child. He had left home to survive, again and again, first as a boy and then as a man. But no one had ever come back for the boy. Until now. "I'm not leaving you," John told him. "Wherever I go, you come too." The boy pressed his face into John's chest. The shaking stopped. The dark grew warm. John opened his eyes on the step. His face was wet. Brandi still breathed under his hand. The morning looked the same, but he was not. He had found the wound beneath the wandering. He had been searching outside himself for a home, teaching others to remember they were one soul. Now he saw the truth. He could not lead anyone home until he brought his own child self there first. That work had just begun.