Prisoner of Awakening

There was once a wooden boy by the name of Jeremy. This wooden boy became wooden ever so slowly, believing his experiences in life more than he trusted his heart. And as the circle of involvement of his heart began to shrink, the circle of involvement of his rational mind began to enlarge. So, by the time our wooden boy was a late teenager, he had no regard for anyone but himself. He wasn’t a bad boy, just short-sighted to the point he often didn’t notice when he hurt others or made life difficult for them. 

Then one day, this wooden boy was sent to a real prison, the inevitable consequences of his decisions in life. And his story is worth telling.

 Jeremy gazed across a barren desert landscape dotted with countless round, deep pits in the sand while he stacked another bale of hay. Normally, he would be out there with the other inmates, shoveling sand, but today was different—he had been assigned to special duty. The prison foreman shouted for him; it was mealtime. Reluctantly, Jeremy wrapped his legs and arms around the ladder and slid to the ground. He heard the clatter of metal as one of the guards rode off on horseback. As he strolled past one of the bunkhouses, the sound of music flowed out from a radio, and he wondered if it was the latest dance trend, the Charleston.

Jeremy's current home was part of a loosely connected prison system that utilized chain gangs. It was an effort to showcase a tough approach to crime for the politicians, but in reality, these makeshift prisons consisted of just a few low-slung buildings, isolated in the desert, making escape nearly impossible. With as many canteens as the prisoners could carry, that would still not be enough. Even the most determined prisoner wouldn’t have the means to survive the journey. There was no viable escape.

Many prisoners had left their bones in this forgotten stretch of sand and wind. A few guards patrolled on horseback, rifles in hand, but they exuded a sense of indifference. If any prisoner dared to flee, they’d be fortunate if the guards chased them down to bring them back; often, it seemed no one cared.     Jeremy felt as though life was perpetually stacked against him, and his imprisonment was just one more example. He believed the court had dealt him an unfair hand — the judge, the prosecutor, and even his own incompetent lawyer had let him down. He had continuously shouted his innocence in court. Now, he wanted to voice his frustration over the absurdity of having to dig all these holes.

Inmates traded their last cigarettes for a chance at being on special duty, as it was seen as a coveted escape from manual labor. The warden insisted that digging holes was a great way to keep prisoners in shape, making it their daily grind. The guards were strictly instructed to ensure the digging continued relentlessly. Yet Jeremy couldn’t shake the feeling that there must be another reason behind the hole-digging.

The prison had ample workout gear, albeit well-worn, so if keeping fit was the goal, why focus so much on these holes? His growing curiosity, combined with his annoyance over the pointless digging, led him to obsessively ponder the purpose behind these pits. He attempted to ask guards questions casually but shifted to eavesdropping during floor mopping, which allowed him to navigate through the buildings. However, he found no information about the holes. As sleepless nights turned into days filled with anxiety and speculation, he neglected meals, losing track of time.

A food cart delivered lunch and dinner to the work sites, relying on prisoners to serve themselves, leading to the bosses overlooking his lack of appetite. Dark circles formed under Jeremy’s eyes, with a vacant stare directed towards the ground.

No one paid notice, as the other inmates had their own struggles, and the guards were far too inattentive to qualify as the guards of anything. Before long, Jeremy became gaunt, and when someone finally recognized his decline, they whisked him off to the infirmary.

Once it was confirmed he wasn’t in immediate danger, they sent him back to the bunkhouse to recuperate. For him, this reprieve meant an unexpected break from digging—three glorious days. His fellow prisoners envied him, wishing they could trade places, even for a fleeting moment, to escape the relentless hardship of their daily lives.

The prison offered Jeremy the chance to recuperate and regain his strength, but his obsession only deepened. Yet within that haze, he finally stumbled onto the truth he sought. He overheard two guards quietly discussing the very issue that haunted him: the warden possessed a map revealing the location of buried gold somewhere on the prison's property. As each hole proved fruitless, the excavation sites spread across the desert. The map bore a peculiar instruction: “DIG DEEP FOR THE ł HOLES,” where the “ł” resembled an ink blot. The warden had decided that, despite its odd phrasing, the directive meant simply to dig deep. He had heard from a credible witness that there was buried treasure somewhere in the desert on prison land.

An indescribable energy surged through Jeremy, awakening him with newfound purpose. The prospect of gold finally made sense.

Eagerly, he jumped into line for digging duty the following morning. With each swing of his shovel, he felt revitalized. However, his determination soon overshadowed his dwindling energy. By the time he reached his third hole, exhaustion overtook him, and he collapsed, hidden from view deep down in the pit. Barely conscious, he stared at the unyielding wall of sand before him, feeling life slipping away as an internal shattering echoed within.

     Jeremy was worn thin, not just in body but in spirit, his thoughts dulled and his heart emptied of care.

Sometimes, extreme duress or illness breaks down one’s will and resistance to vulnerability. Childish as it was, Jeremy had always felt something was pressing in on him his whole life. He felt if he gave into it, he would disappear forever. But not even his childhood fear could lend wings to limbs now. Jeremy suffered a complete break; but instead of slipping into insanity, he was swept into a world brimming with life.

Jeremy knew nothing of runaway spirits and spiritual awakenings. All he understood was the wild, unsettling sensation that would have sent him fleeing, had he any strength left. He was convinced he was unraveling. He no longer felt like the boy or the man he was just a minute ago. Instead, he felt something vast and invincible, unfamiliar, yet intimately himself.

A warmth rose from Jeremy’s chest, spreading to his fingertips, dissolving the boundary between self and other. Suddenly, he was the sand, ancient and enduring; he was the sunbeam, arcing across the sky; he was the hush, the pulse, the everything and the nothing.

Time itself unraveled, its thread slipping loose from the spool of centripetal motion.

In a single heartbeat, every unspoken belief that had hazily become Jeremy’s identity to defend to the death, shattered.

He was a man without time, a man without country, a man without identity, and no will to refuse his captive role as witness.

Jeremy witnessed, saw his whole life unfold, each moment woven with meaning. Like footprints trailing across sand, every step had led him somewhere. In the universe’s gaze, Jeremy realized he had always mattered, always been gently cradled in a cocoon of ignorance, awaiting something like this break, this first peck, this first crack, in the cosmic egg. In every dark corner of the globe of Jeremy’s mind, chaos gave way to purpose and meaning.

Every single step had meant something, was part of a plan, was not “nothing”. Jeremy also saw his anemic regard for anything meaningful had been deliberate. For what he felt now was a burning interest in life, a fierce curiosity as to what it all means.

Tree branches may seem tangled and wild, but each twist and turn reaches for the sun with purpose. That was how Jeremy made sense of it all. Every question he’d ever buried was now answered before he could even ask it, and these were the questions that truly mattered—the ones he’d always felt too insignificant to voice, too convinced of life’s emptiness to consider.

He was no longer an outsider. He had finally come home. The old lie—that he was worthless—crumbled, replaced by a sense of worth so overwhelming that every belief, preference, and doubt turned into the residue of nonexistence. He realized insignificance was impossible; only ignorance of his own radiant nature had kept him blind. Though his body was frail, his mind had never felt so clear, anchored by a solidity that could only be called “real”.

Jeremy felt real. He never knew what he thought to be reality wasn’t. He saw that so-called normal life was a voice-over from the past. It was life already lived, bleached of any possibility for the unpredictable good.

He suddenly remembered some odd fragment out of his past, “Life is Real then only when I am.”

This unshakable sense of self seemed to belong to another world. The words, “It hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar,” also passed through his mind, a fragment of poetry he thought might be Wordsworth’s—the only line he could recall.

Jeremy stayed in the hole as long as the bosses allowed, wrestling with the torrent of thoughts that now flooded his mind.

Pressed against the wall of sand, he suddenly understood the words on the map the warden held in his possession. The ink stain was no stain at all, but a hidden letter, revealing the message: “DIG DEEP FOR THE WHOLES.” As it continued, it was a map to the soul, perhaps even a kind of Koan.

There was no gold. He could not explain it, but he sensed connections he had never felt before — connections to something ancient, perhaps as old as the first human. The map in the warden’s possession had that feel to it, as though it had been left here deliberately and long ago, buried in the sand, meandering its way to the surface, finding its way into the warden’s hands, waiting to drive minds to the breaking point.  

The bell rang, marking the end of the workday. Jeremy pressed his palm into the gritty sand, forcing himself upright. He wavered, determined to climb out, and reached for the edge of the pit. But his strength failed him; his body was little more than a shadow of itself.

A hand reached down and latched onto Jeremy’s wrist and hauled him up. Jeremy’s frail physique made it easy. “The warden has a surprise for you. You’re all right, man. I’ve never seen anyone in your shape work like you have these past few days. I’ll be sad to see you go.”

Jeremy’s mind swam in a fog, barely registering the words swirling around him. “What does he mean he’s going to miss me?” And there was not a single episode of a boss being nice to Jeremy, not once since he’d been here. “What is going on?”

Guided into the warden’s office and eased into a chair, he barely had the strength to blink as the warden approached. “Son, a man was pulled over by the McClaine County sheriff’s office. Under interrogation, he confessed to the robbery you were charged with, although they pulled him over for only a ticket. He had the store owner’s watch on him at the time of his arrest. Your release has already been processed. Son, you are free to go.”

The world felt newly malleable, as if it could be molded by hands that grasped its secrets. Because Jeremy just saw it happen. In the very next second, he was no longer experiencing the future his destiny had determined for him. The future Jeremy once imagined had vanished. Life’s compass spun through endless chances, each indistinguishable, until a single event broke the pattern and changed it all.

They packed his bag and dressed him in street clothes. With a boss on each side, Jeremy was gently steered toward the prison’s front gate, where a supply truck idled, ready to carry him back to the world. With the opening gate, Jeremy dropped all pretense and fell to his knees.

The torrent of tears he had never dared to cry in his whole life now burst from his chest. They would now have a stopping point. They would now run out. They would now exhaust themselves, be finished along with all the sorrow that caused them. He couldn’t cry before, ever. He didn’t dare. If he ever gave into them once, there would be no stopping.

As Jeremy sobbed into his hands, overwhelmed by the lavish feelings of forgiveness he felt towards himself and all humanity, a crowd began to gather as Jeremy committed the one unforgivable sin of prison life — never show weakness. As the crowd grew larger, something became apparent. As Jeremy bawled in front of a rapt audience of hardened criminals, not one of them stood in that hardness. For a split second, Jeremy’s display of humility and vulnerability was so innocent, it disarmed every man to a T.

Later, the men scoffed at such a pansy, remembering the display of unforgivable emotion. But it took a little more force to get it back in its box; and men were heard to suddenly shout their derogatory remarks against “feeling” a little too loudly.

     As for Jeremy, no one knows. For now, his step is fresh and alive, marching with purpose to an unknown future, unpredictable with cosmic surprise, but now, with every step, he goes as the wooden boy made real.

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