The Well

Konya, Turkey, March 1248

                                      by Adina Dabija

-There, said the boy, struggling to catch his breath, pointing towards the stone well.

As fast as we have run here, now I didn't want to move. I didn't want to get close to the well. My feet would just not move. I didn't want to check if the boy was saying the truth. I knew he was. But I would have rather go home now and believe that Shams left again to Syria, like three years before, or somewhere else, maybe even back to his hometown in Tabriz. I could have imagine him angry and revoted or calm and loving, like he used to be. I could have kept the hope that he is well and alive and one day he will return to me. Or I could have sent my son Sultan to search for him again and bring him back. Sultan could have became a rambling dervish, he would not find his peace until I would not find mine...Was that what I envisioned for  Sultan? Is that what a father would wish for his son?

-        I've seen them with my own eyes, said again the boy, intrigued that I wasn't moving.

Or I could spare Sultan and my wife Kira all this agony right now, facing the Reality.

-        It was just the head they threw in, they carried the body away, that way, said again the boy pointing towards the bushes.

My feet started to move without me knowing of them. I shank, ready to become a stone in the well's wall. It seemed to me that all my life I have been moving towards the well, since the moment I was born. I arrived. I stood there. It seemed to me like my entire existence was just a preparation for this moment. My life has been a dream and I was now coming to Reality. There, at the border of the well, I've seen my existence with painful clarity. But not as a recollection of events. I've seen it condensed in a point, round, perfect and perfectly meaningless. A point hanging in time, holding on nothing but  God's breath. I've seen you seeing me in the first day we've met. From the bottom of the well two eyes of fire were watching me. They too were starring at that point. Our gazes met there. We were seeing together from Eternity. Past, present and future melted into each other. The wind started to whisper your name in the leaves of the magnolia tree: Shams, Shams... And from the rose garden came the fragrant answer: I am here, I exist, I exist.  Space filled with an intense vibration: from shrunken I began to grow. “You who know/ Jelaluddin, You the One in all,/ say who I am./ Say I  am You” whispered the garden. That's when I became you. I was everywhere, I was free, I was spirit.

From that moment words would not stop coming out of my mouth. But it is not me saying them. It is something vibrating, resonating with me, finding me. Me finding Me, Me finding You, You finding Me, You finding You. Only in this vibration I find peace. Only there, in the saying, I am one with your spirit again. You used to say “Whatever enters in the words, is an invitation”. I am inviting God to replace your presence. I have a moment. I have an alif. “When everything becomes know from the alif, there is no need for anything else, you used to say”. I am speaking now. “There is a voice that doesn't use words”. I am listening. I am nothing but movement and fluidity. I don't know if I am saying the words or the words are saying me. The borders became blurred. “I am dust particles in sunlight./ I am the round sun./ To the bits of dust I say, Stay. / To the sun, Keep moving./ I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches./ Silence, thought, and voice./ The musical air coming through a flute,/ a spark of a stone, a flickering/ in metal. Both candle,/ and the moth crazy around it./ Rose, and the nightingale/ lost in the fragrance./ I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,/ the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,/ and the falling away. What is,/ and what isn’t”.

There is no point in mourning you, my beloved. The moments when we've been together melted us in one eternal entity. No departure or coming is a cure for this. We are an eternal embrace, sun and moon dancing together, separated, but a reflection of the one plan of the universe.

It is year 1248 in Konya. Shams has been murdered. This is a fact. I see the blood on the well's wall. I taste it, it's your blood. The boy is telling the truth. I do live now past your death. In France the king starts the seventh crusade this year. Other thousand, maybe hundred thousands of death are coming. But still, the Universe keeps a balance. Not by chance they start to build the gardens of Alhambra this year in Spain. It's because I am staying here at the border of the well right now and I don't become a stone. I dissolve myself into your being and I dissolve your beloved being into God. I start to flow. I am doing it for all the lovers who ever lost or will loose their beloved, only to become everything, only to become God. I am doing it for women who lost their children. For husbands who lost their wives. For countries who lost their men at war. It is me who blows in the air the spirit of the inscription on the Alhambra wall: “A running stream evokes the illusion of a solid substance for the eye, so that we wonder which one is fluid. So alike are fluid and solid in the river that you can't tell which one is flowing”. This is the day the earth was changed into other than the earth (14:48). Right here, right now.