Story. ) Destiny . . . from STORYCHASER: Listening Art . . . A Sketchbook of Solitude . . . A Novel . . .

      Destiny

FAR AWAY FROM ANYWHERE a single light shone out; one small lamp-lit upstairs room, calling through the night, from one small white cottage on the outskirts of human existence.
  ‘I must be here for some purpose,’ he thought, ‘there must be something I am sent here to this Earth to do?’ He turned in his bed, and lay on his side facing the opened window listening to the night sounds and staring out at the dark. The sky was very large. There were no trees where he lived.
  It is true that those who lie awake at night must know they have some goal before them that shall set them apart, some enemy to conquer before morning, as they gaze out at the stars shining in their patterns and set against the deep-black of the universe, utterly vast, and infinite. Who has told them? How do they know? They know only that it is true. They see, that that very thing, that knowing in them, it keeps them ‘going;’ it keeps them living. It pulls. It draws. It bids them ever onward.  There came a quick zephyr of the night air through the window. On the desk below papers fluttered. One flew to the floor. The thinking man’s reverie, disturbed he felt something slip away from him, lost. Wide awake, he left his bed and went to pick up the fallen paper. He held it before him tilted at an angle to the window, and in the light of the stars looked at what was written on it. There were no words. Straight lines had been drawn on the page in zigzag unrecognizable patterns, moving between a number of randomly scattered little circles. It made no sense to him. And for a moment he wondered where this strange design had come from and how it had got there.
  A second quick wisp of a breeze and another page flew to the floor beside him. He reached across the desk, pulled the window partially closed, and picked up the second piece of paper. Sitting down at his desk he stared at the two pages. The second seemed blank. He set it aside. He stared at the first again. Here were lines that meant something, surely? But by the light of the lamp he saw now that they were only the result of his doodling of the night before; as he had sat lost in thought at his desk when he should have been working.
  He had stayed on and on at the cottage, to write; remaining at the edge of these desolate moors where the sky was large enough to give him inner space to work and the peace to do it in. His family had long ago migrated here, as any wild winged creatures might do; called of unknown and unseen forces. But just what he was here to write he still had no clear idea. Only a stubborn knowing that he had to be here had made him stay.
  Suddenly he looked up at the stars; and then quickly down to the paper; then up at the stars again, and down to the lines before him on the page. In the flash, as of a shooting star he knew. And it was perfect.  It all made sense.
  Of course, the lines, that like strings had pulled and drawn him to stay, they were as the lines of the light of the stars; in their firm constellations, he thought. They were not random, but set in known formations, discerned, and named, eons ago. Light-lines that had taken billions of light years to get here; and, being straight before them, had a goal, a destination . . . a certain destiny!
  He knew now that he had drawn the stars which were straight in front him through the window. Their unique positions in the heavens they were not without a pattern. In patterns were meaning and purpose. What he was looking at on the paper was what he had unconsciously seen here the other night; and transcribed onto the page before him as he had sat pen in hand, lost in thought, ‘aimlessly’ doodling. But it had not been aimless, at all.  All at once, in another seeing-instant, his thoughts took him on, further. As the lines of the constellations told a story, so the lighted lines of his, own life would do so, also!
  ‘I am sent here for a purpose. There is something I am ‘kept’ here to do.’ He smiled within himself.
  ‘Of course, my life’s pattern would form some plan on paper.  My house, my spirit, it would have some blueprint, an unshakable design that would show the developing angles of my existence, a geometry showing the course of it; even expressing my whole life’s journey. Predestined? He looked again at the paper . . . these lines that go right off the edge of the paper? What of these?
  He looked at the page more closely: what had he unconsciously drawn here? ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, as he looked up and out through the window again, ‘I am at the end of one of these tangents now? Hearing the foxes calling to each other faintly across the moors: purposefully the thoughts and intents of their own lives: their story! More; listening to the language of the night; listening to the heavens speaking knowledge, the speech of stars: their line going out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.’
  Tears stung his eyes. ‘I know what it is I am meant to do, what I am to write: the things seen and heard when I listen, below . . . ‘
  It is true that ‘the night has a thousand eyes, and the day but one.’ I am seen as I see. I know as I am known. He closed his eyes. On the page before him one small circle was illumined, watery, as one pin-point of light, twinkled in the heavens, above. Silently, and echoing in one small wrapped object on a shelf, above the desk, the stage was set; destiny unrolled her starry map and purpose poured out his secret strength.  

Continued: 
Writing Saga # 35 /STORYCHASER; A Sketchbook of Solitude; a Novel /Cameo 2; Star

(- extract from STORYCHASER; Judith Evans Deverell)