I remember that I had been walking with someone beside me. I don’t remember ever knowing who it was, but I knew that I was comfortable with him. I knew that he appeared to me as being much older than I. He was both quiet and full of wisdom, and I took it more for granted than perhaps I should have that we were friends of an ancient status. With him beside me, I was being lead back to a curve in the valley which bent northward. Eventually it would have halted at the mouth of a metal culvert tube disappearing under the road at Thirteenth and Mannatt, but we had traveled less than half that distance before stopping. The drainage channel was broad and flat bottomed then, and it’s seepage wended back and forth. Although I suspect it was occasionally mowed, the flanking ridges were pleasingly arranged in a natural disarray of plum thicket, young mulberry and elm with a smattering of other small and large shrubbery that offered to this little boy of ten years, a welcomed seclusion on an early Saturday morning.
With anticipation my attention was directed towards the southeast bank of this hillside. I stood with my back to a rise leading to the park’s baseball diamond and my face to the west roof line of Belmont Elementary well above my head and beyond the slope of the second "slightly more abrupt" rise. Before me, I was directed to look into the hillside between two shrubs. As I lowered my sight, the gentle slope appeared more as a meadow than a hillside with a lone elm tree standing as a sentinel between three levels of land.
I remember the morning sunlight being bright and clean; much like that which captured in a tiny dew droplet would sparkle as it hung suspended from a predominant point at the tip of some leaf. It was within the space between two thoughts, that a miracle occurred. Between the moment of seeing and the moment of realizing that I saw, this sparkling light transferred into another dimension. Astonished, I had witnessed the hillside before me take on a crystal clarity that outlined itself - the hillside had become transparent before my very eyes. It was as if I had X-ray vision. Where the hillside had dissolved, a new scene appeared. There before my eyes was a space ship. It was as if it were parked there just beneath the surface of the hill's slope, and as I looked upon it I could hear the humming of an idling engine.
My friend did not motion for me to approach it. Rather was the case that it was left up to me to decide what to do with this revelation. At first I assumed that if I had tried to walk up to it, I’d begin walking up the invisible slope of the existing hillside. I stepped forward, and realized that I was in fact treading upon a new surface which was not the hillside. It was as if the earth had been excavated around this ship just for my purpose to approach it. When I got closer, I discovered that the ship itself was transparent in a way that I could not comprehend. Here, it was invisible, yet I could distinguish every contour and component, except for where the doorway was located.
In a way that escapes logical deduction, I somehow became aware that this ship was mine. My friend stood silently as the thought processes of a ten year old child caught up with the realization. It was as if a method existed that conserved energy - or perhaps didn’t require energy - which "allows" one to know without having to learn. Whatever the case, as a side affect, I instantaneously knew of some prior existence for myself as well. I knew "of" it, but not "what" it was. I understood this experience as a form of knowledge necessary to come to the conclusion, yet so abstracted that I could not pinpoint the content of the thought. For a brief moment I was awash in excitement, but just as I began to sense a mood of remorse in my friend, it quickly spread to me. Where for a brief moment, I visualized myself sailing through mortally undiscovered reaches of a secret universe, the thought was interrupted with another which was projected by my companion; "The ship was mine only if..."
In the unfinished statement, ghostly visions were conjured of ancient obligations that I felt bound to. I knew in that moment that some form of mortal imperative lay before my current life and it was just as unfinished as the statement that my friend projected. For a brief moment, my thought associations echoed the same sensations as were aroused in the "Hall of Light" when I had been making my life choices. But these were somewhat unsettling for they arose from an obscure personal history of a faraway "other life", that seemed barely near enough to brush the edges of my memory. Like the sensation of a feathered wing stroke abruptly and unexpectedly placed upon the cheek, the nostalgia of these long forgotten acquaintances and promises flushed through my mind. In another instant, they were gone.
Quite deliberately, I shook the gloomy feeling from my mind and as I felt around the area where I suspected the door would be, I asked if I could enter the vehicle. For the first time, I sensed a reluctance to comply from my friend, but in the same instant it seemed that his benevolence suddenly made the doorway appear before my groping anticipation.
It was not a large ship. To a child’s perception, I would say that it was perhaps twenty feet long and half as wide. Altogether, it’s size accented the intimacy I had immediately begun to develop with it. "Whiplash" came to me as the name that I would bestow upon it as I stepped inside looking at and feeling everything within reach. Oh! How I admired the thing. It was no different than what I might have felt knowing that I had full access to a candy store. I sat in the control seat and slowly moved my hands over the double handled steering grips covetously, and although I could realize where the sides of it’s fuselage were, I noticed too that through it’s ample sized view screen before me, there lay only dirt where it obviously rested nose first in the hillside.
I didn’t ask if I could fly it. I didn’t have to. The thought came to mind though. And in his amoebaean response came the words, "Not yet."
"I sure would like to." I plead looking in the direction of my etheric friend.
But he responded with a dangling comment, "...You must accomplish your duty first ..."
"...Before I get the key ... I know." I finished the response for him with a tone of dejection, knowing that it’s purring motor meant nothing until the key were bestowed upon me. And that could only occur after completing whatever obligation was necessary before leaving the earth plane. With reluctance, I submitted to the tugging sensation that it was time to leave this special place, and in so doing, leave the secret present that rested beneath the hillside at Belmont Park.
Ever since that inspiring moment, I have pondered what my obligation was supposed to be - what purpose my life held in store, to accomplish. And too, I’ve wondered why that obligation remained as such a mystery to my consciousness. The boy that I was, eventually grew up to be a man, and throughout all of the painful experiences of life, somehow the possibilities of focusing upon finding my obligations got disrupted. And now, all these years later, I begin to analyze the mysteries of this crucial word, ‘obligation’, once again. In toying with the term and how it was presented to me, I cannot help but to wonder whether obligation becomes an objective "to attain", or might it be, simply to "continue on" with something as with tools that have already been placed in my vibration. In the former theory, I have yet to find that ‘thing’, and then perform with it what I must. In the latter theory, I perhaps have been utilizing all that is necessary all along...