What I Saw Through the Hedge

I have a place I go sometimes that doesn’t exist. At least, not technically. I can see it perfectly, though. I know what it feels like there. I know what I’m doing and, strangely enough, I know exactly who I am while I’m there. Sometimes there are details I couldn’t possibly know because none of it has actually happened. Then somebody says my name, the dog starts barking, my phone rings or life comes barging through the door demanding whatever it wants this time, and I’m back here. In the life that does exist.

I’ve always been fascinated by how real those little trips can feel. Not fantasies exactly, and certainly not the elaborate daydreams we had as kids where we were famous singers despite having absolutely no ability to sing. These are different. They are flashes of ourselves somewhere just beyond where we are now, and sometimes they feel oddly familiar, almost like remembering something that hasn’t happened yet.

That’s what made me think about the hedge.

There’s an old idea called hedge walking. The hedge was the boundary between the physical world and the unseen world, and a hedge walker traveled along that edge, able to move between what could be seen and whatever existed beyond it. Depending on which version you read, things can get pretty mystical from there, but it was the hedge itself that got stuck in my head.

I started imagining one running alongside my own life.

On my side of it is everything I can see and touch. There’s the house, the people I love, work, bills, unfinished projects, things I’m proud of, things I’d happily erase, and whatever fresh nonsense happens to be waiting for me on any given morning. It’s reality, and reality makes a very convincing case for itself because it comes with evidence.

But every once in a while, there’s an opening in the hedge.

I look through it and there I am.

Not some perfected version of me. I’m not suddenly twenty years younger, ten pounds thinner and strolling through Tuscany carrying a basket of bread for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained. It’s just me, except I’m doing something I haven’t done yet. Maybe I’m somewhere I’ve never been. Maybe I’ve created something that doesn’t exist. Sometimes there’s no great accomplishment involved at all. I’m simply moving through life differently, and the strange thing is that I recognize that woman immediately.

I think most of us have seen her.

We probably don’t talk about her very much because explaining that you occasionally catch glimpses of another version of yourself is a good way to make people slowly move their chair away from you. So we call it imagination. We call it dreaming. We shake it off and get back to whatever is actually happening.

But I’ve started wondering why the thing on my side of the hedge automatically gets to be more powerful simply because I can touch it.

After all, almost everything I can touch began on the other side.

Somebody once stood in an empty field and saw a house. Someone heard a song before there was music. Someone saw a business before there was a sign on the door. Every book began without a single word on paper. For a while, every one of those things existed in only one place: inside somebody’s head.

Then somehow it crossed over.

That’s where the hedge becomes interesting to me, because maybe we’re not supposed to choose one side and stay there. Maybe we’re supposed to walk alongside it.

Reality has its job. It tells us where our feet are actually standing. It keeps us from spending twenty years imagining magnificent things while doing absolutely nothing about them. But the unseen has a job too. It lets us look beyond the evidence sitting directly in front of us and see something that isn’t here yet.

The trouble is, those two worlds can travel beside each other for a very long time.

We can live one life while seeing another through the branches. We can know the person everybody else knows and still recognize someone else moving quietly beside us. Sometimes the two versions aren’t even very different. There may be only one decision separating them.

Then every once in a while, the hedge opens.

Nothing dramatic happens. No lightning. No mystical portal. Usually nobody else even notices. There’s simply a moment when the thing we’ve been seeing on the other side gets close enough to touch.

We either reach through or we keep walking.

If we reach, something strange happens. An idea becomes a decision. A decision becomes something physical. What existed only inside us yesterday leaves its first little footprint in the world today. The invisible hasn’t magically become real. We brought a piece of it across.

Maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about the hedge. Perhaps hedge walking isn’t really about traveling into some mysterious unseen world at all. Maybe it’s about recognizing that we already spend our lives walking between two realities: the one that exists around us and the one that exists inside us.

Both have power. One shows us what is. The other lets us see what could be.

And every once in a while, if we’re paying attention, there’s a break in the branches where the two meet and we get to decide which direction the story goes from there.