The Island of Seeing by Palden Jenkins A short story about the visit of the young Jesus to Britain, written 1995

Such a long journey it had been! Remarkable sailors though the Phoenicians were, Yesu benYusuf was longing to retrieve his land-legs. The ocean makes you uncomfortably accustomed to a wobbling, pitching reality. The air had grown cooler, and the sun had moved lower in the sky as the ship had drawn nearer to the Islands of the Mighty, the home of the Brythons. It was just like Nippon and Kamchatka, with their snow-bedecked cedars, and their white winter carpetings – much cooler than Yisreel. However, in the Olmec lands far to the West, whence Yesu had now come, the heat had been like Negev and Sinai – shimmering days, sudden sunsets and starry nights.

Ah! Home! He felt a longing just to go home. This world-circling journey had taken years. But which home? Home aside the Galilayan Sea, or home in Sphere Huva, galaxies away, whence Yesu had originally come? Takla Makan in the centre of High Asia – or even here in the Islands of the Mighty? Yesu sighed, wishing both to go onward and back, both. His uncle Yusuf, his Essene mentor, came to his side – they had met up at Mount's Bay at the tip of Kernow, where the Phoenician boats from Carthaga and Sidon came to sell wine, oil and silks to the traders of the Brythons, and to buy silver and lead ingots from them. Yesu and Yusuf interlocked arms, leaning on each other, swaying, each of them philosophical. "You'll come to love this land... It's like Palestina, but it's different too. Can you see the greenness of the land above those cliffs? It shines!"

Yesu peered and sensed the feel of this landscape. Each new land was a new piece in the jigsaw, an insight into the sheer variety this planet offers its visiting souls. Would that those souls could simply remember that they were visiting! He had stood on the prow, taking in the power of the waves, taking in the coastal profiles, day after day. This land had a soft yet great feeling to it, with its mighty crashing waves and fresh winds, its bold cliffs, its screeching gulls and comical puffins. The ship's pilot had told them of the series of islands which they would follow as they made their way up the narrow channels: Steep Isle, Long Bran, Bran's Knoll – named after Bran the Blessed, the great Crow Teacher of the Brythons – and then Noland, Puck Hill, and eventually the holy Island of Glass – where reality reputedly becomes transparent.

There came a fair, balmy day when the pilot called Yesu and pointed: this was Steep Isle, surrounded with rushing tides. "There's a solitary man there who eats but nettles. It is said he is as old as the isle itself. They come from Cymru and Kernow and Erin to hear upon his pronouncings." They curved around it, catching a new tidal current, nosing toward another becliffed hulk further on, which was said to be Bran's crow- beak, where his oracular voice could be heard singing in the wind or hiding behind the foggy silences.

They eventually moored aside Long Bran, at a harbour run by acolytes from the Island of Seeing. This was the first arrival point on the final leg of the journey through the wetlands leading to the Island of Glass. A hale welcome awaited, the darkening moorings ablaze with flaming torches. They knew he was coming. Before being allowed to rest and find his land-legs, there were protocols and honourings to go through with the worthies of the community. These worthies were honoured to have such a prophetised visitor. The Egyptian Essenes of Alexandria had been so protective in their arrangements, preparing the way at every stage: Yesu's young soul rebelled secretly, for he wished to enter this land undramatically. But no, he was a celebrity in this land, an there would be little peace. This was his last major stop before returning to the land of Yisreel. A time of preparation.

Two days later, after a rest at Long Bran, a flotilla of ceremonial boats bore him up the winding river Brue, which teemed with wetland wildlife. Like the people of Kashmir and the Nile, they poled their flatboats forward in a laconic way, across the still, mirror-like waters. Fires blazed on all the beacon hills – flames becoloured with metals. "It is we who are blessed with your visit. Our culture is ancient, like a great oak, founded by the Kaloo, the wise defectors from the Great Catastrophe of old: we give sanctuary to any pilgrim whom the Mystery seeks. Though I hear tell that they say you both seek the wisdom of the ancients, and you carry a new element of the Mystery with you. This we have not seen since the days of Bran the Blessed." People like this old codger of an elder kept on saying things like that. Yesu secretly wished they would leave him alone, yet he appreciated their warmth.

Old cultures, thought Yesu, from the magic mountains of Bohd, to Ch'in to Quetzallan to Brydain, even to that of my own Habiru, the People of the Covenant – they all remember back to a world long gone. Old cultures. Back in Jerusalem, the Sadducees guarded the Mosaic Law against the uncouth assault of Greek modernism, and in Ch'in the Han mandarinate preserved the letter of the ethics and the mores, as if all that was new was impure. There was something endearing about the ancient traditions as well, but somehow they lacked something – somehow they lacked a cutting edge for the new times. Yet these ancient traditions had their richness – like the choirs in the echoing Great Gorge, where they had all disembarked for the night, and like the mystery play which was promised at the last stop at Puck Hill. Perhaps the old Essene in Damascus had been right when he had said that the Brythons were exemplary in their openness to change and foreign influences – the Essenes held them in high regard. These Brythons were certainly welcoming Yesu – though he wondered how much they secretly regarded him as a foreign upstart.

On climbing Puck Hill, after the mystery play, Yesu's heart leapt as he reached the low summit: there, over the last few miles of wetland, lay the Glass Island, iridescent, beckoning. The seven movingly-sculpted ridges of the holy hill were outlined in sunlight. Looking closer, he saw what travellers had talked about: a jet-flame of morphic energy gushing up – or was it gushing down? – from that renowned holy hill, gushing through what looked like massive pinnacle-stones, standing three man's-heights on its flattish summit. Amazing. This is the place. A bit like Jerusalem, in some way. Except it's verdant emerald! Everywhere!

Later on, they finally arrived at the Island of Glass. "Yesu, look at this!" said Yusuf, quietly, so not to disturb the formal welcoming proceedings atop the Harbour Hill. He nodded at his staff. It was sprouting buds, before their eyes! That didn't happen very often! This must mean something. Yesu chuckled, and flashed a look at his uncle. "Something is going to happen here." "Perhaps this might be your home, Yesu – Palestina is such a benighted land nowadays." "No, uncle," said Yesu, looking within for a meaning, "something tells me this will be your home." "Oh? Me? Leave Jerusalem? But I'm the biggest metal-trader from Libya to Persia! They need me!" "They need me too, uncle. The Nazarenes are awaiting my return. Sadly, it is not I who will return here."

The old codgers in woollen white and blue, the venerables of the island, were likable, neither too pompous nor arcane – they were glinty, welcoming characters. Yesu, Yusuf and Yusuf's trusty clerk were allocated quarters beneath the ancient rounded Hill of the Chalice, where they settled down and soon felt comfortable. It was so good to sleep in a bed on the land! The birds were almost comical in their songfulness. This was to be Yesu's home for a year, with a warm hearth, sod walls and a roof of primroses. Yusuf and his clerk were to leave after two months.

Over the following days, they were shown the different timbered halls, the oaken groves, the lake- shores, the settlements scattered about the island and the holy places of the Isle of Glass. All this reminded Yesu of Nalanda in Bharat, of Samarkand and Alexandria, each of them multilingual universities busy with advanced learning, teaching and initiation. These Brythons were averse to writing down their history and knowledge: they recited and sang in verse – even their mathematics – to harp, drum and shawm. There was not a single day when recitation or song were not to be heard. Yesu came to sit through a lot of it, as part of his studies.

There were discourses and debates too. Students of all levels, debating, surrounded by circles of deeply-absorbed listeners and questioners. And teachers discoursing on all manner of metaphysics, history, sciences and muses, in Brythonic or in Greek, even sometimes Aramaic. Most of the time, the island was closed to all but the inherents, the initiates and the students. The island and its people were regulated by the women acolytes, the givers of assent and the regulators of the Mean. But at the solstices and at Beltane and Samhain, seekers flooded in from far and wide to partake of the teachings, the chorals, the trances, the healings and the inevitable marketplace – a confluence of thousands of people, from as far as Alba and even Parthia. These pilgrimages were enthralling – a long week when it seemed as if the whole world was there, represented by these pilgrims, alive, being as it would be if humanity were awakened.

But at the Blood Spring and the White Spring and on the Tor there was silence, a wonderful silence. Silence in which to bathe in the inner flame, to be wind-cleansed and star-smitten. A chance to talk with home on the subtle frequencies of over-mind. A chance to depart into the unborn, the undying, to talk with the timeless. And then to descend, sometimes weary, sometimes bubbling, to drink of the red water-blood of the earth, under the yew trees – and under the silent gaze of the woman-ancients who sat, overlooking the water-source, conserving the Light in the winking shade.

A resonance of stillness and babbling: the Isle of Glass was so much like Yerushalayim! It was intense, multi-faceted, a meeting-place of so many different ideas and people! Such an enquiring place, where tradition gave birth to occasional new discovery. The Dreaming Mothers, the Bards and the Ovates were all in fruitful ferment: they talked of a new Unfolding of the Mystery, a new Message of love, impending over the horizon. Yet the Druids held the drama of the Great Occasions, the cosmogenic dance- trances, the canticles – and the inevitable long queues to obtain the blessings and the holy waters at the end. The lofty seasonal round of festivals and terms, of rituals and moots and classes, had gone on forever and looked as if they always would.

Except they wouldn't. Yesu knew, and the Brythons knew: there was a larger change afoot. What Yesu knew, and the Brythons didn't, was that he himself was a catalyst of this coming dispensation, together with his cousin Johanan benZacharias. Octavius Augustus in Rome had already constituted the setting: the greatest empire the world had yet seen, encompassing all and smothering the spirit with its crazy rules and conventions. On one side: Love. On the other: Empire. In the middle: a meeting-place yet to be filled. In all the lands he had visited, there was wisdom and understanding most profound, but there was little heart. The final ingredient. The first ingredient. Yesu's time at the Isle of Glass gave him opportunity to ponder that heart, that core teaching, which would sweep like a blizzard through the ossified mystery schools and the very streets and fields of that dread Roman empire.

A few days after Yusuf and his clerk had departed to conduct business and return home, Yesu continued his studies. In his own mind he was studying how teachers communicate, yet others believed he was studying the teachings. There was much to learn from the teachings, yet in essence they were not unlike what he had learned in Bohd, Nippon and Quetzallan. It was at one of the discourses that he made what initially seemed to be an error. The teacher misunderstood the significance of the Triadic Matrix, and Yesu, during question time, made a suggestion. His suggestion fell like the sun on a dewy cornfield. He unwittingly captured the class, just like that, and all eyes were turned to him. He had been wishing but to make a contribution, but he had upstaged his teacher! Yesu was henceforth a teacher. This seemed a burden, so much had he wanted to lie low. However, this new role brought him some relief, since he had become increasingly restless as he had grown older and his beard had grown longer. People were not seeing what was simple and clear – he found himself bringing it to them.

Yesu was soon teaching every evening, to embarrassingly large groups, including Elders and Druids. They didn't seem to mind this young man disturbing the norm – they just loved his stories! He had only thought them up on the spur of the moment. They embodied his response to those lengthy discoursers, who kept people sitting for so long, as if to teach people to wait for a truth they might never obtain.

"But you came here to learn", said his cousin Maryam, ever-cherishing. She had arrived when Yesu had been there six moons. "I am learning...", said Yesu. "I feel unbottled. I have travelled so far, and have studied the ways of so many, and what do I find? That my answer, the teaching I have sought, arises within me." "You have found the woman's way, Yesu!". Maryam beamed. She loved him dearly, like no other could.

"But you came here to find that, that hidden teaching which arises within you", said one of the Elders of the Ancients, who was the last to bid Yesu farewell, on his departure with Maryam, when the primroses had once again returned. A long year it had been. Yesu was now turned a man. "And to teach to us the heart-soul of our own life. Do you know, the story I liked best was that one about the lilies... if you carry on like that, many will come to hear your word! Come back to us soon, Yesu. You are one of our own."

As Yesu and Maryam trailed slowly down to the boat-lined shore, bound again for Long Bran, Mount's Bay and the Pillars of Hercules, the gentle slope was filled with people, young and old, silent, as if sad to say farewell, yet awaiting a gem. "Walk with your head high, and tell them you'll come back," said Maryam. "But I won't be coming back, Maryam." "Oh, Yesu, you and your knowings!" "But someone will come, Maryam, I know it. Someone will come to bring the Nazarene blessing to this isle." Further down, he was lifted up on the shoulders of two strapping Brythons, so those assembled could hear him.

"Dear friends! I came as a little child to your island, and here I met my Maker who, in truth, is me. Go also, as little children, and you too shall enter the kingdom of truth, where you too are the Maker. This is a place of the Presence, yet the Presence imbues all Creation, far and wide. Here, I have learned anew of that Presence, that Power, yet it leads me along trails winding afar, far away from here. I go now from you, and you go from me – and we all are in the same Going." And he blessed them, and they blessed him.

And Maryam took his hand, for he was deeply moved, tearfully happy. Yet he carried both a blessing and a bane, and he felt it. Would that he could return to this, such a safe haven! And they went down to the lake-shore, everyone silent. All of the people somehow knew that these two young souls were leaving with joy, yet also as if to an arraignment, with outcome unknowable. And Yesu and Maryam departed from that place. And the people of the Island of Glass returned to their daily doings, yet they never forgot this young man. Some years was it to be before they heard of him again.

And so it was that Yesu visited the Island of Seeing. And his uncle Yusuf one day came back, as an exile from Yisreel and Romanitas, after the joyous return of Johanan and Yesu to distant Sphere Huva.

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