Nomina Numina

A boy of eight sits alone in his bed. Wide awake at a quarter to ten. The bedside lamp throws pale yellow light through the slightly ajar door and into the hallway beyond, where the darkness swallows it whole.

Beside the lamp, a small Sony AM radio. He has it tuned to the only station that comes in clearly — Mantovani’s orchestra waltzes the room, faint and unhurried. He keeps the volume low. His parents sleep next door. His older siblings beyond them.

The music gives him little comfort. Not because the room is frightening — it isn’t, particularly. But because what he senses cannot be located in the room. Not in the corners, not behind the door, not under the bed. He has checked. He always checks.

The presence he feels is not out there. It is in here — beneath the skin, in the nervous system, somewhere between the sternum and the spine. Something that has been there as long as he can remember and has no name, no shape, no origin he can discern.

He has tried to explain this to his parents. His father told him to leave the light on. His mother had him pray and write letters to radio ministries — careful, dutiful letters, addressed to strangers. His siblings called him a mama’s boy crying out for attention. They were simply answering a different question than the one he was asking. And the question he was asking had no answer in that house, or in any house he knew.

⁂

Two years later, the boy sits on the floor of his room. Scissors. Crayons. Masking tape. A shipping box flattened and cut into panels. He is building a scene — a recreation of something he has watched so many times that the television screen has become more familiar than the room around him.

He adjusts. Reconsiders. Moves a panel left, adds a wall that wasn’t in the original. As he works, something in the construction feels attended to — as though the arrangement matters to someone other than himself.

Not words. Not language. Someone nonetheless. A pressure on his attention: look again. that isn’t right. try it the other way. He follows without question. The adjustment is always better.

He doesn’t ask where the guidance comes from. The asking would break something. He has learned already that certain things are kept by not examining them. He only knows that when he follows, the room fills with a quality he has nowhere else in his life — a sense of company so specific it has its own texture. Not warmth exactly. More like recognition. The feeling of being known by something that is paying close attention.

It is the most real connection he has. His secret.

⁂

The boy is now sixteen. He walks the floors of a crowded shopping mall, scanning each face as it passes. He does this knowingly, even though it had already become an unconscious habit years before.

Silently, as each person passes: No match. No match. No match.

The endless stream of no matches doesn’t exhaust him. It confirms him. The system he has built is working exactly as intended.

What he is looking for he cannot describe. Not a type. Not a face. Something in the bearing of a person, in whatever precedes the features and arrives before the mind can form a judgment. He has no language for it. He only knows that recognition, when it comes, will come from the pit of the stomach — a feeling that reaches upward through the chest. Not a thought. A frequency. The pull of a certain gravity.

He is searching for the source of something he has always already felt.

⁂

That boy was me.

In the spring of 1990, I stood at a threshold I could sense but not name. Not a place — a quality of imminence, the feeling that the next step would not be ordinary. The choice I made then, to follow what pulled rather than what made sense, was only partially mine. Something was already pulling me forward, with a patience that exceeded anything I had been taught to expect from the world.

What I carried since those early years I would not find a word for until decades later. Blind awareness. The certainty of a presence I could not see. The knowledge of a connection I could not prove. The knowing without understanding. Being already arrived somewhere I had not yet gone.

Behind my sternum, I could feel — can still feel — something like a thread. Taut. Patient. Leading out beyond a veil I had not yet known existed.

I could not see what was on the other side.

I only knew someone was.

#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

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