Hello dear ones and welcome to today's story,
Part of a collection I have written based on mystic teachings.
Today's story is The Prisoner's Window.
So making yourself comfortable and we will begin.
A man named Edmund had been in the debtor's prison for three years.
He had made a poor investment on behalf of his employer,
A merchant who had then washed his hands of the matter entirely.
The debt was not Edmund's,
But neither was the power to correct the record.
And so here he was.
A cell,
Seven paces by five,
A stone floor,
A wooden bench,
A bucket and a window.
The window was high in the wall,
A narrow rectangle,
No wider than two hands placed side by side.
In winter it showed grey sky or darkness or the dull white of overcast.
In summer,
Sometimes a strip of blue,
Sometimes fast moving cloud.
On rare mornings,
A quality of early light that arrived at a particular angle and lay across the stone floor in a way that seemed almost deliberate,
As though placed there by someone who knew exactly what angle would mean the most to a person with nowhere else to look.
Edmund had not asked to become someone who paid close attention to light.
It had simply happened by force of circumstance and the absence of alternatives.
In the second year,
A woman came to the window from outside.
She was old and she walked with a stick and she had been given permission by which authority Edmund never knew,
To speak with the prisoners.
She came every few days.
She did not offer false comfort or cheerful predictions about how things would improve.
She did not tell him to be grateful for what he had.
She simply talked quietly about what she believed.
I was very ill once,
She told him one afternoon.
Many years ago,
I was so ill that the priest was called and the last rites given.
In that time,
Whether it was a vision or a dream,
Or something else I cannot say,
I saw or felt something I have never been able to fully explain since.
She paused.
Only this,
That love is not something added on top of existence.
It is not a quality that some things have and others lack.
It is the substance of existence itself.
The material everything is made from.
And because of that,
Nothing is outside it.
Not illness,
Not injustice,
Not even a prison cell,
Not even despair.
That is easy to say from the outside,
Edmund said.
His voice was not unkind,
But it was flat.
Yes,
She said simply,
It is.
She did not argue the point or qualify it away.
After a moment,
She said,
But I think you know something too,
In here.
You have had three years of nothing but this window and your own thoughts and whatever is underneath both of those things.
What have you found?
Edmund looked at the rectangle of sky.
He had thought about this more than he would ever admit.
He had tried,
In the long dark winters,
To nurse his bitterness carefully as something owed to him.
And yet,
He was honest enough with himself to know it,
Something else had also happened.
In the absence of distraction,
In the enforced stillness,
Things had become visible that he had spent his whole previous life moving too fast to notice.
The light for one,
The way it changed,
The way he had come to know the character of each season by the precise quality of what came through that window.
The way his own anger,
When he had finally stopped fighting it,
Had eventually become something quieter.
Not peace exactly,
Something more like a very deep tiredness that had passed through itself and come out the other side.
The fact Andy hated himself for noticing this,
As though it were a betrayal of the injustice done to him,
That he had in here become more himself than he had ever been out there.
I don't know what I found,
He said at last.
I don't have a name for it,
But I notice more than I used to.
The old woman smiled.
It was not the smile of someone offering consolation.
It was the smile of someone who recognised something.
That,
She said,
That is not nothing.
That is not nothing at all.
