The Valley of Humanity (standard:Inspirational stories, 661 words)
Author: Cyrano	Added: Apr 20 2008	Views/Reads: 3391/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Did you ever have such a dream...a dream that so completely reassured you that life is only the beginning?

I thought once I'd got it out, you know, mastered it in some way, given
it musical justice, it wouldn't haunt me the way it does. Haunt is a 
strange word for something that comes to a mind, filling it with such 
incredible beauty. Yet no other word truly represents the circumstance 
in which I'm continually visited and revisited by the vision of this 
dream.  I always wake up tearful, sobbing sometimes, not tears of 
distress you understand, but joy. The sheer joy of finally 
understanding something that perhaps lies beyond this world. I say 
perhaps because ultimately I'm a writer, but before that I'm a human 
being, a mortal soul as different and as complex as the next.  Sure 
it's a dream, how could anything so splendid, so huge, so enthralling, 
so unbelievable be anything else? 

I was a young man the first time the dream enraptured me.  I didn't
understand it; the strange, haunting, beautiful sound, then a boy 
carrying a torch, and as he entered into the valley, this galactic, 
sumptuous cavity buried between the hills of my life, thunder rolled in 
from every corner of the sky. But the thunder was not menacing, nor 
brought with it any sign of rain, more it was heralding. But the boy, 
such a boy, his complexion could have been that of every skin color, 
his hair wild, and his face...well, his face, yes, but that's for 
later.  I saw him enter the valley from my lookout high on a hill.  I 
do not know why I was there, or why I felt so infernally alone.  I was 
merely a spectator to what was coming.  They came in battalions, 
legions of men, women and children following the boy with the torch, 
carrying bright banners, streams of silk entering into the valley. 
Faces full of joy, dancing to the endless thunder rolling in and 
peeling across the valley floor. 

I sat on the hillside for days...days I tell you, blissfully deranged,
listening to the thunder and the beat of the drums, watching the 
millions pass by.  It's like, well it's like each of their faces was 
known to me, of my kind, my nation, my life actually born of their 
dancing, following the child with the torch.  Darkness comes and goes, 
hunger is satisfied without eating, sleep ...I don't know...I just 
don't know.  From deep within the thunder of the valley's flowers, 
reverberating upward through wind shaken willows, the drums sounding 
from the outriders on their horses, a feast made of music, every taste 
exciting, a constant breeze of pure sound that I could not turn away 
from, nor wanted to.  I had this urge to join in.  Who is the boy with 
the torch? Why do legions follow him?  Is it because of the light in 
his face, this constant peace that emanates from his being, his 
youthfulness?  Where is he going...from where? There seems no reason or 
rhyme, just endless nations of people, joining hands as if they'd never 
known borders, war, or religion. Or they'd know every bit of it. I 
cannot say what whirling feeling possessed me standing there on the 
hillside, just that when the last perfection disappeared from the far 
end of the valley I was left wanting, hungry, waiting for something.  
The thunder of humanity rumbled into the distance, and the music in the 
breeze quieted. I knew the serenity of it all was leaving me, standing 
there alone, a troubled boy seeing something of the way it all should 
be.  The whole of human kind, marching, maybe, to what lies beyond, and 
I was less fearful, caught up in the whirling celestial tide of human 
kind.  Finally, overtaken with silence, the music spiraling out toward 
another place I saw on the far hill the torch in the hand of the boy, 
held high.  That boy was me. I was him. I lay down and slept soundly 
amid the peace of knowing what lies beyond. 


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