An Encounter in a Forest : Dante Alighieri, Nimi Wariboko and Myself 2: Why Me?

 Summary

A person wakes up to find themself lost in a forest. A passing person offers help. Rescuer and rescued commence the journey out of the place.

As we moved on, the light of day began to dim, and so did my courage. Creatures were retiring to rest, yet I was compelled to labour to get out of this horror in which I found myself. Even the stars would journey with the night and return home at break of day, but where would I be when the sun set? Still trying to climb a mountain I never knew about till today?

“How did I get into this problem?” I asked Wariboko.

“You were asleep. Sleepwalking, you wandered. You are now awake” he responded.

“Really?” I wondered aloud.

“In fact, you can’t really return to your old home”, my guide said. “That home, as you knew it, does not exist anymore. In climbing that mountain, you come closer to what you have long sought, like a snake shedding its skin, you become something different yet still yourself, as you approach that home where all the valued things for use by us are kept and among which we dwell without knowing, the spiritual storehouse of all the potentialities of life, our true home, our ultimate destination” he concluded.

Wow. Inspiring but…was I to be deprived of the life I had always known?

“Seeker of wisdom” I addressed my helper, “should we not simply work out how I can get home? I’m really tired and I want to rest. Your words are sublime but strange, glorious but suggesting something where I would not be at home among familiar situations” I continued, my relief at rescue slowly giving way to a hardening knot of uncertainty.

I can understand people like you dedicated to spiritual adventure being comfortable with such ideas but I am not a Wariboko. I admire Dante, ranging across the universe in imagination while in exile in Ravenna, but I prefer the comfort of the familiar. I am happy to enjoy Milarepa the Buddhist hermit poet as he sings of seeking the ultimate beyond space and time but I am happier in my circle of friends and family as I have always known them.

Basho is happy to travel with the months and years as voyagers in eternity, as he puts it in his wanderings across Japan, but I just want to get home and rest. Don’t you think I would be better off guided to the home I have always known instead of to this ‘ultimate destination’ that seems so remote?” I queried.

“I see with you” the intrepid journeyer agreed. “But what shall we do? One is chased by a bull and has reached the edge of a cliff. Does one stand to be gored or jump, hoping to catch a branch of the tree growing out of the cliff face?”

Monkeys scampered from tree to tree. The sounds of various small animals came to us as they moved in the undergrowth. Do such creatures bother about such complexities, my mind queried as I listened to the man speaking.

I recalled similar situations in which I had jumped over a cliff of possibility to enter into a new life, a new way of seeing the world. Would this be one of them?

Willing and unwilling one’s will, that became my dilemma, torn between fear of being trapped in that terrible place and getting out of there, the first quick zest that filled me to the brim escaping.

“How much choice do you really have?” the weaver of words continued. “You are like a swimmer who cannot return to the shore he has left behind but is yet to reach his destination. You cannot remain in this forest. Yet, in getting out of here, your life cannot remain what it was before you entered this situation. The house made of cards has crumbled. You need to build one made of enduring material. Tombo tombo so,‘let a person become a person,’ my Kalabari people would say. Rise to theexpected and unexpecteddemands of a situation, affirm your humanity.”

Like a flower drooping at night lifts itself up as it is touched by the warm light of the sun, so were my weakening powers invigorated by those perplexing but bold words as good, strong courage ran around my heart, my spirit burning.

“Let’s continue” I declared. “Thank you very much. May you too travel fruitfully to your ultimate destination.”

“We are always on that journey, towards the unknowable, unconceivable Absolute Infinity” he responded.

He moved on. I followed.

Cover Image

Painting from Imgur evoking J.R,.R. Tolkien's masterly literary development of the motif of journey in his The Lord of the Rings.

The painting contrasts the intimacies of home with the beauties of the unknown stretching beyond the door of that home, akin to the tension between the comforts of their past life and the unanticipatable possibilities opening up for the journeyer in the story above.