I stood, staring at the valley before me. What was I supposed to do? I had been drawn here...but why?

And yet…a sense of peace filled me, as if all was exactly as it was meant to be, and I guess that it was.

I sat down on the sun-warmed boulder behind me. Months of frustrated searching for some kind of meaning to my life had brought me here.

Led, by a strange sense of longing, to visit this valley had at least allayed my frustration for a while, or perhaps more honestly was: action had buried the frustration. Now that I was here, I felt the frustration rise again, because now I had to admit to myself, I had achieved nothing. I had allowed a search--any search--to occupy me fully, as if it were some divine mission.

"What now?" I asked myself.

"Now, you listen to me speak?"

I leaped up and spun round, but I was alone. "Who said that?" I shouted.

There was no answer, save for a laughter that floated on the air around me.

"Show yourself, damn it!" I demanded.

Silence.

Stillness.

And then a sigh, heavy and audible in my ears.

"I will not appear to you, for I desire only to talk to you. So please sit down and relax." The voice was female, gentle and patient.

Rather than stand there arguing with someone I could not see, I sat down, stared at the tree filled valley before me, and folded my arms tightly across my chest. "Okay, I'm sitting. Now what?"

"Kareel," she said my name quietly. "You have searched for what?"

Okay, it's going to be one of those conversations...which made me think that this was quite likely either my guardian angel sent to help me--after all, I had read of such things--or a split personality. I had nothing to lose. "I want to know why I feel as if something important is missing from my life, as if there is something I am supposed to be doing." There, I'd said it.

"I do not think the issue is what you should be doing, but rather how you should be living," she said.

"Meaning what?"

"You are frustrated because that is the 'way of feeling' that you chose," the voice was on the edge of patient and patronizing!

"Excuse me?"

"It is one thing to feel that you have missed the point of your life, it is another to replace the desire to understand, with frustration. You could have searched, but you did not."

"I bloody well did," I insisted, standing up and staring around me wanting desperately to confront someone--anyone! "I searched and my search led me here!"

"More correct would be to say you did not search, but wallowed in a state of frustration, and were  guided to come here so that you would be forced to confront yourself." If her tone had not been so peaceful I would have thought she was itching for a fight.

"And?" I said, not even trying to suppress the sarcasm.

"If you were not so frustrated and angry, your next question would--should--be: guided by who?"

"Okay: who?"