Beyond the Horizon

There lived, in a little unremarked town, a man named Jonas, notable for ways quiet, habits meticulous. He served as an accountant in some lowly firm, a life of figures and accounts, his nights of clock-tick in a room alone. He never had big dreams or deep desires to change his life; he was satisfied with the gentle beat of his existence and rejoiced in routine and predictability. Yet, under the surface of a man with such a calm exterior, an odd longing was growing-something he could not explain or understand.

It had begun on one rainy evening when Jonas was walking home from work. The streets had been slick with water and darkened by heavy clouds held against the sky. Down a small alley, he walked along, and something caught his eye. The flicker of movement was there, almost nonexistent in the dim light. Curiosity, a thing he hadn't felt for years, pulled him along, into the alley. He went inside, and the dripping of his shoes on puddles echoed off narrow walls. There was also a tattered leather book lying on a pile of old newspapers.

Without a second thought, Jonas picked it up. He ran his fingers across the worn cover, the paper yellowed by years and aged into wrinkles and cracks on the spine. It was an inconspicuous book neither big nor small, thin nor thick. Nothing of distinction. But there was something about it, that suggested it had been waiting. Jonas tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat, he stood to move along and continued home. His step was a little bit heavy, a reminder of this: something had changed.

That night Jonas sat at his small kitchen table. The book lay open on the table in front of him. Its words were strange, written in a language he didn't understand, yet he was attracted to them, his eyes skimming the symbols as if they held some special meaning. As he flipped the pages, the air in the room seemed to grow heavier, almost electric. Strange thing, but he felt a pulling within him, like he was standing at the edge of a precipice from which he could not quite drop.

For several days, Jonas became obsessed with the book. He took it everywhere: he'd shove it into his bag as he left for work, reading over lunch, reading through pages late into the night. The more he read, the more words seemed to shift and change, giving glimpses of things he couldn't quite grasp: images of distant lands, faces of people he had never met, fragments of conversations that his mind recalled long after he had closed the book.

Jonas sat one night in the small room of his home, book open on his lap. A glimmer was coming from the pages: slight at first, growing brighter and brighter. He leaned in, catching his breath in his throat, as the words on the page grew blurry, swirling up to form shapes, images. Before he could move, the glow had engulfed him, and suddenly, the room was gone.

Jonas found himself standing in an open field, a vast, endless blue above him; the air was warm, heavy with the scent of wildflowers and grass. Down to his hands he looked; where he had expected to see the book, he instead found a small, shimmering stone. It was cool to the touch, and smooth, softly glowing in the light of the sun. Jonas felt a strange sense of calm come over him, as if this place, wherever it was, had waited there all his life.

He began walking; his feet moving almost instinctively across the soft earth. He walked, and around him the landscape changed to something else. He was suddenly inside a field and then, in the next breath, inside the forest, where tremendous trees above him brought in the soft leaves whirling with the wind. He felt time blur; days and nights passed, leaving him a haze of vivid colors and strange sensations. Jonas never questioned any of it. All he did was move through this world, guided by an invisible force, along a path that seemed to have been laid out for him long before he arrived.

Along the way, he ran into others-persons who seemed to just be passing by in this strange land, each carrying with them his own stories and burdens. They whispered their tales among the whispering voices, far-off worlds and lost histories for which the melancholy Jonas heard would quickly come to whole the scene. But there was also a deep sense of connectivity as though all these moved toward some common destination lying just beyond the horizon.

Days became weeks, and he slowly came to realize that it wasn't a dream for this place was real in some form or manner. The stone, in his hand, began to warm, light up like it was leading him somewhere. Then once one evening the sun got positioned behind the hills and down beyond the sea putting a warm golden hue upon the earth, and it was in this moment that he saw it.

There was a great ancient tree whose limbs reached toward the heavens and whose roots followed curved courses down to the earth's deep core. The stone in Jonas's hand pulsed with light, as if directing him toward the tree. As he approached, a deep sense of peace settled over him, a quiet certainty that this is where he was meant to be.

Without a word, Jonas set the stone at the base of the tree. The world was suddenly transformed; the air was charged with electricity, and the tree was glowing as its soft branches swayed in the wind, as if it were alive and knew he stood there. Then, just as it had begun, the light extinguished itself and the world stood silent once more.

A very long time, Jonas stood there with this kind of pulsating heavy heartbeat, filled with wonder. Not knowing what had just happened or what it could mean, but knowing something had changed inside of him. Never again the same world, his world.