Journey to Indescribable Beauty : Awakening: Journey to Indescribable Beauty, #1

By Andrew P. Murray

A magical, mystical epic romance of a love story in which a man sets off on a journey to find himself and finds the Love of his life.

 

Pure poetry and a rattling good read!

 

Awakening is the first book in the Journey to Indescribable Beauty trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew P. Murray
• Release date: Feb 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393555544

Book preview

Pre Dawn

Suspended by a cremaster to a branch of the tree where it had spent its whole life, Caterpillar began to pupate.

Snuggled into a shell formed from its own skin, Caterpillar turned and faced the darkness.

A trans-continental voyager, the Monarch Butterfly begins its journey of several thousand miles with 9-15 days spent in a beautiful vibrant green chrysalis edged with gold beadwork.

***000***

Chapter 1: Primal Cause

Murray looked at the gun in his hand.

It was a black Walther PPK, the same gun James Bond used. Seven rounds in the magazine, one round in the chamber. Double action, point and shoot. Very light trigger pressure when cocked. Drop hammer safety on the right, just next to his thumb. Spare magazine, seven rounds, in the shiny black ex-military holster.

They wouldn’t be needed. Not today. One was enough.

Today was the day. Enough was enough was enough.

Time for an ending.

Murray eased back the safety until he felt it stop.

Next, the hammer, also with his thumb.

The unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.

One smooth move, gun to head. One light touch, finger on trigger. Falling hammer,  exploding gas. A shattering blow and it would all be over.

Messy, but that wouldn’t be his problem. Not anymore.

Sitting on the end of his bed, in front of his mirror, Murray looked at the gun in his hand, closed his eyes, and faced the darkness.

Time passed.

How long? Who knows?

In the depths, without volition or conscious thought, Murray felt his thumb begin to move.

Slowly.

Click, Safety on.

Snap, drop hammer safety.

Murray decided not to die today.

***000***

Life began its slow journey back into Murray’s world.

Time started, darkness faded.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he saw a forty-two-year-old white male.

Brown hair, green eyes surrounded by dark rings.

His once strong body was running to fat.

His arms, once capable of carrying 50 kilos each at the same time, flabby and spindly.

Annihilation, he said. "From the Latin ad nihilo – reduced to nothing, obliterated. And yet - not today. Today I live."

No, said a deeper part of him, Today, you do not die.

You chose to not die. That is a very different thing to choosing to live.

I’ll take it – for today, said Murray, locking the gun in the safe and hiding the key.

In the days ahead, it would become his motto – Today, I choose not to die.

It got him out of bed.

It got him a job and a car and a small place of his own.

It freed him, in some indefinable way.

He knew now he was not an ultimate victim.

He could choose to die at any time.

As long as the option was there, he was empowered.

He could choose to go another way.

***000***

Murray’s past was a broken book.

From a happy, middle-class home in Zimbabwe, he was uprooted.

Aged nine, he lived first in a caravan in a South African trailer park and then in the concrete jungle of Hillbrow, the Soho of  Johannesburg.

Battling poverty, his parents raised him as best they could.

He was schooled, clothed, fed, loved - mostly.

Early on he decided he would not be poor all his life.

At high school, a student engineer promised that an engineer would never lack for work.

He qualified as an engineer.

On the back of the new wave in IT, he entered the corporate world, gathered capital.

Working in IT in financial services, growing from computer programmer, to business analyst, to project manager.

Leaving a highly successful professional career, he founded a construction company.

Going from strength to strength, beginning with renovations, then new builds, he did residential property estates, then shopping malls.

By his mid-thirties, he had had it all.

Adrianna, his beautiful blonde wife.

Three lovely children, Calvin, Tyler, Samantha.

In March 2007, he took his family to the Seychelles to celebrate becoming a dollar millionaire – a self-made millionaire measured in US dollars, aged 35.

In August 2007, the US dollar index plunged through the 80 mark, driving the world into global financial crisis.

Contracts were cancelled, homes weren’t selling, tenants lost their jobs and couldn’t pay.

Battling to hold it together, fighting a rear guard action to save his empire, company, and family, Murray spiralled deeper and deeper into negativity.

Driven away by the intensity, Adrianna took the children and moved first to her parents and then in with another man.

Murray fought on, bitterly losing battle after battle until the banks liquidated him.  Taking his sports car, house on the hill overlooking the city, his reputation in financial services, even his bed.

Then the final blow struck – Adrianna wanted a divorce. She wanted to marry her new lover. He would take her and the kids to England, leaving Murray behind in South Africa.

Torn between his love for his children and his wish for their best future, he had signed them away.

They were gone, beyond his reach.

Living in a room in the outbuilding of a friend’s house, Murray had hit rock bottom.

Now, taking it one day, one decision at a time, he was back.

Today, I choose not to die.

***000***

For some months, Murray settled into a routine.

Get up, clean up, go to work, come home.

Relax, unwind, repeat.

One morning, swinging his feet out of bed, his back locked.

Solid.

Agony to stand, almost impossible to sit.

Relief meant twisting his hips to the left, his shoulders to the right.

Moving like a crab to his cell phone, he googled chiropractors.

Choosing the nearest and waiting till office hours, he called in sick at work and made an emergency appointment.

The sign outside the office said Dr. Robert Isa.

Call me Rob, said the chiropractor, shaking hands.

Medium build, mid-thirties.

Aquiline cast to features.

Light hair, brushed back over penetrating blue eyes.

Clean-shaven.

White coat.

Rob brought immediate relief with some brisk manipulations.

He then sat at his desk and looked at Murray.

I think you have a serious problem, he said.

"There are two kinds of chiropractors. One kind are bone mechanics, simply clicking things into place.

Others, like me, work with subluxations, blockages in the spinal cord that prevent the flow of light or energy through the body.

To a bone mechanic, these blockages are seen as a partial or incomplete dislocation of a joint.

From what I see, your body is trying to