It’s an astonishing, beautiful idea – that the unseen exists. A world just beyond our reach. When my wife Katrin died, I couldn’t imagine life without her. So I set out to find where she had gone, tracing around the globe mankind’s ideas of the afterlife, seeking out places where the veil is thin. Places where our mortal world touched the divine. Places unseen.
My five year journey started on my doorstep. I’d first happened on Knowlton’s sacred Neolithic circles as a twenty-year-old. Its complex of sacred henges – one of which enclosed an abandoned Norman church – are no more than a megalith-toss from Stonehenge. On my initial visit five decades ago, I’d lain on its grassy banks and fallen into the deepest sleep. On that sunny summer’s day, Knowlton had cast a spell over me but I’d returned only once or twice in the intervening decades, in part tickled by the premonition of a then-girlfriend that one day I’d meet there an older, balding man.
Half a century after the forecast, and Katrin’s death, I was drawn back to Knowlton. A handful of visitors idled inside the ring bank but as far as I could see there were no old men. When they left, I had the place to myself and circled the henge as on my earlier visits. I lay down on the bank, soothed by the whisper of breeze through the meadow. Bees droned across the rolling landscape. The clear trilling song of skylarks fell from the cloudless sky. I dozed and my sense of loneliness slipped away. Knowlton had comforted me in the past so I wasn’t surprised, until a dream fleeted across my mind. I couldn’t hold on to it, apart from one last image. A young, slender-faced stranger cupped oversized ears towards me, and told me to listen.
I did, and realised that I was the older man.
Doors then opened for me in the Holy Land, the Himalayas, Amazonia, in Africa, with the First Nations people in Canada and the US. I mentioned this good fortune to a friend in Delhi and she told me, as casually as one might mention a new neighbour, ’The universe will keep sending you loving souls to guide you on this journey,’
And it did, reinforcing the sense that this inexplicable enterprise was being shaped by forces beyond my control, revealing wonders truly beyond my imagination.
This is a personal journey, and a universal one. In sharing Geography of Heaven, I hope that others will be helped to prepare for the loss of those whom we love, to realise that there possibilities – realities – just beyond our sight.
Geography of Heaven can be ordered at here
