Garden of Moonlight

Late at night you discover a beautiful hidden garden.

It was dark out still, the sky not yet painted with the hues of the summer morning. The street lamps were still on, blocking out the stars and moon, becoming the beacon for condemned moths. You were the only soul outside at this time. Wandering the suburban streets close to home.

There was a feeling in the air. Almost indescribable, it felt thick and dark like soil and gentle as the Earth. It was a feeling you had known from your childhood home. Nights as a teenager, drenched in that feeling accompanying sadness. Now, as an adult, it felt like the visitation of magic

The magic itself was not bad or evil, but it was dark. Like a blanket of night wrapping around you to keep you safe. As you wandered with that feeling, something drew you down a certain street, and to your wonderment, there was a forest path you'd never seen. Lit in the light of the street lamps, what looked like just a wall of thorned bushes, hid an opening large enough to walk through.

You poked your head in cautiously, wondering if it was clear what was on the other side. At first, it was only darkness until you saw a soft, moon-like shimmer in the distance. It lit up the path enough to show that it continued deep past the brambles.

It was late at night, and you didn't have much besides the flashlight of your phone; however, you found yourself walking in.

The brambles pulled at your clothes, and some thorns scratched your cheek. Despite the pain, it was a welcome distraction from your growing insomnia. Sleeping had become a task where you lay for hours, tossing and turning in the darkness. In some ways, it felt like you were incubating, as all sorts of thoughts raced through your mind. As if there was a message deep inside waiting to be heard in the dead of night.

Maybe here on this dark path you'd finally find some answers to the unanswered, vague, and unasked questions hiding in your peripheral.

As you passed through the initial wall of thorns, you found the path opened up wider and the plants here were softer, kinder. Like the path, something inside your body softened, opening, a feeling so distantly familiar you were unsure of its origins.

The thoughts formed slowly, but they came. Maybe you needed to move through pain first, accepting it as part of the journey, and then, only then, would this softness open up inside. Just like the thorned bushes had been necessary to move through without judgment to get to a gentler place, you needed to let yourself go without judgment. To feel without clinging to thoughts of painful criticism.

You wandered deeper, pushed on by this feeling of understanding. Something was special about this place, and you needed to explore.

As you approached the shining light, your surroundings grew plain to see. There were bushes of white roses, and chunks of rock that looked as if they were once towering pillars, now reduced to rubble littering the forest floor.

You looked up into the trees, searching for the light’s source. It was only when you walked into a clearing that you found it. A statue of a woman stood in tranquility, her hands held a bowl atop her crowned head. The ornate silver bowl gleamed with reflected light from the object it held. A glowing white orb, it looked almost like a soft egg or fruit, or perhaps, it most closely resembled the moon.

The statue’s eyes seemed to gleam cleverly as you approached, as if there was something she knew that you did not. A quiet woman with secrets.

The magic of this place took your breath away. You hadn’t expected to find something this beautiful beyond that opening. Maybe a forest you may have missed at some point during one of your nightly walks, but you did not expect an entire garden.

There was clearly more to learn about this place, the object the statue held, who this statue represented, the stories of the long forgotten pillars, and where this place came from. If you left, would you ever find it again? With that question in mind, you began a journey that would forever change your own story.