Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Armagh City, Northern Ireland (UK)

Meeting at a Threshold Place
By Tony Cuckson

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I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost – The Road not Taken

There are threshold places of remembrance in all our lives.  Forks in the roadthat when you take them make all the difference to the life that you might have otherwise lived.  Often you come to the fork in the road simply because you are in the wrong place at the wrong time – or so it appears at the time.

It was an early Sunday morning and I ran down the green grassy slope toward the river where I could see two friends.  One was called Squiggs and the other was called Speckydiddly.  They were standing by the fork in the path.  One way lead along the riverbank and the other meandered upward to the hilly lands of the dark wood.

I said, “Hi you guys.”  They looked at each other and there was something there in that moment between us that had never been there before.  It was as if some hungry ghost had come to feed off what was always unsaid but had always been.  We were a bunch of boys who played together and we loved this play.  Our love of our play and our sharing was a secret unsaid.

“We can’t play with you anymore.  Our priest says you’re a Protestant.” 

I heard these words and they fell like a body blow.  I didn’t speak.  I couldn’t speak.  What would I say?  I was what they said I was but I had never before found that it mattered.  It seemed to matter to others but not between my friends and me who where from both sides of a divide.  But that divide was outside the place we lived in together beyond the labels.  A place apart called the Folly Estate in the City of Armagh.

I remember holding my head down the way that Squiggs and Speckydiddly were holding their heads to their chins.  There was the longest of short silences.  It was as if I had entered a different kind of time and everything moved in slow motion.  I felt numb.

In that short space of time I could see the far distant future of a life without my friends who no longer could play with me.  A higher authority had told them I belonged to another tribe.  A terrible loneliness cloaked me and I might have cried had that not been taboo from another higher authority.  So like so many sorrows left unsaid I held my breath and made my body that little less able to love what it loves.

I turned around and began to walk back up the green grassy slope to my homeplace.  Two trees, the width of a man standing with his arms apart seemed to look down at me as if they were saying, “We will always be here for you.”  Maybe it was that which broke the spell of that priests instruction in the separateness between innocents.

“Tony, come on!  We’re off to play cowboys and Indians. Aren’t you comin’ with us?” 

The spell of separateness broken, I turned around on my imaginary horse and galloped off along the bank of the River Balnihone to search for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. 

For all the days of my youth and beyond we spent endless hours playing along that riverbank and rivers of many different kinds that flowed through our lives.  This was even amidst the endless horrors of what would become known as “The Troubles.” 

Some of them died along the way because they were at the wrong time found to be wearing the wrong kind of label.  There were times when a number of them saved me from being badly broken and even killed out on a lonely unmade road by another river. There were times when I was ushered out the back door of the pub because someone with strong labels didn’t approve of the label they themselves put upon me.

Never again did that hungry ghost of ignorance divide any one of us – either Protestant or Catholic.  Never again did I ever give my authority in spiritual matters to anyone outside myself who would tell me who or what ideas I could or could not play with. 

I never did meet with the priest who indirectly inflicted a body blow to a mind full of innocence.  I did, however, take the road less travelled and that made all the difference.  It became a kind of blessing.  I came home to love the unique spiritual authority beyond labels at my deep heart’s core.  I am still playing by the river.  It is the river that flows to the endless ocean of Love and there time really does stand still.  There I am a child of God playing in the Land of Forever Young.  I am the play of Love in form.

©  Tony Cuckson 2009