One

It was five thirty in the morning in spring 1986. Ludo aged six, looked out across small village playground towards the houses and the common. There was a spring mist in the air and millions of dew drops glistened on the grass below. He was standing at the top of a slide. The cast metal steps were moulded so feet would grip to them and the pattern was strangely engaging. The hand rail was painted but the paint had worn away in places from all the hands that had touched it, revealing a smooth and scratched surface. Ludo could almost taste the metal as he looked at it. As he took in the scene around him it was as if he was seeing it all for the first time, even though he had seen it all before. But this time it was different, this time the mood of the morning spoke to him and at level beyond a child’s conceptual understanding.

In this moment he knew the world so deeply, he could feel everyone asleep in the village around him, the deep sense of rest everywhere. He knew the peace of life in this moment, vibrant but settled in its own stillness and it conveyed within it an innate sense of what it was. It was a time before the internet, mobile phones and the energetic noise of of constant radio signals. All there was was the morning and its own energetic expression as it displayed itself in all its miraculous depth.

He thought to himself briefly this is peaceful. This is a lovely thing to witness, this feeling of the world at rest. And he delighted in it, but his understanding was not concrete and conceptual, it was known as it was in a deeper part of his mind. Like a kind of ‘I know this and I get it’ whilst having no real concept of what he was getting. It was a immediate experience in that moment and as a child he began to acknowledge he was alive, knowing the world once again after a long sleep.

He could almost feel every individual drop of mist, the coldness of the metal slide, the damp air and the crisp clarity of his vision of reality. He came to experience the perfection of everything directly, without any understanding of what was happening. It would be many years before he would remember this experience and come to understand its significance after a profoundly misguided, challenging, dangerous and confused quest for meaning.

The mood of everything moved him internally so deeply, he was within it and part of it, experiencing it as it was. He was delighting in it without the need to embellish, understand or explain what was happening. Its mood communicated what it was tangible, yet intangible and elusive, but it didn't matter as he witnessed it.

Nobody knew he had sneaked out of the house, nobody knew where he was. And in that moment he felt free even though he did not know what freedom was. He then climbed the final step slid down to the bottom of the slide immersed in great happiness without any notion of where he was going to next.