I am back. It doesn't look like anything has changed here; it feels like being in a timewarp, back at the starting point.
I am home and  looking at this window again. It is still here, I had wondered; So many things change...
Its frame is made of wood, polished by time and use, still has deep grooves and scratches made by my hands, feet and pens at an age when I didn't know any better. I love this texture, the contrast between smooth and rough, like a person that has mellowed with age and has the scars to prove it.

Out of the window, the same view, always different; a miracle.
Magic in a world where I feared there was none left.
Nothing to see but the sky: a robin's-egg-blue in the morning, with puffs of cotton if happy or glowering ones if angry; a quilt of lightpoints in the night. In summer such white that you lost your sense of depth; chameleon-like colours in the autumn, and  no steel has the depth or sharpness of its winter gray; and in the spring the sky takes on the green of the earth and produces singular shades; a mad painter at work.
I love the sky above and I love this window. Like a marker in time it was here when I was born, suffered through my childhood, soaked up gallons of tears during my teens and in between it was a confidant, silently conmiserating.

When I left all those years ago, I felt its weeping. I wept too, but there was the lure of God's world before me; all the countries and all the magic in all the books.
I don't know when I first noticed that Shakespeare and Whitman were not read but butchered; that knowledge was not used to light the way but to shred the mind. I had never imagined that beauty could be lost. I never had to look hard for it before, it was there; in the pattern of stones on the river-bed, in the feel of moss, in the sound of the night; in the smell of snow, of old books and new dolls. Yes, I never had to look for beauty till I moved to the cities. Beauty found and beauty lost: sliced, analysed and thrown away.

In the beginning I tried not to care. I tried to speak softly and tread gently. After a while it became a torture, a desperate quest for a kind word, a tender look, an acknowledgement.

After a while I knew what it was to be really poor; to be robed of everything worthwhile. I understood why people walked around in armours, why there wasn't anything behind their eyes. And then I mourned; I mourned for all the tin people and for myself; for all the devastation that exits, not outside but in the hearts of every one of them.

I remembered reading that , in medieval times amber was used to reflect the brilliance of your soul and that if you lost your joy in life, the amber would lose its transparency, become dull. That is what these people looked like, dead in all the ways that count. This kind of death is contagious; its starts by killing one's joy, driving a wedge between soul and mind, caging mind put in a dark cell, leaving the soul outside to cry. I cried and beat on their doors and spent so long a time trying to get inside that when I did I almost didn't get out.
When I finally could, I took my sanity and left.

On the way back home - and it was more than miles- I passed an old building and the sight of wood reminded me of home and my window and of the beauty i had known. On the radio "many rivers to cross" was playing and I felt I had crossed the last bridge home.

I am back and everything has changed...