The rabbit hole

The rabbit hole
By Alessandro Carosi

Dreams played a big part in the two months I spent on the coffee plantation in Thailand, it was as if they wanted to tell me something, there were so many of them, and only when I woke up could I distinguish between the ones we might call “real” and those that occurred during… sleep.

One night, immersed in this parallel reality as I now see it, I met an old friend from when I was a boy and lived in San Benedetto del Tronto, and we talked about many things, but only one sentence remained indelibly etched in my mind… He said to me, “Go down the rabbit hole and find out how deep the hole is”, the same phrase Morpheus said to Neo when he was trying to make him understand that the world he lived in was just an illusion, I woke up immediately with this phrase and the face of my old friend imprinted in my mind, what was he trying to tell me or make me understand? I already know that life is not what it seems, but I’m still not sure what he meant, perhaps it was just a sign that the path I had taken on that farm was the right one.

I start the day with meditation, reading, writing a little on my blog, then I go to have breakfast and the plantation manager tells me that he is going to Chiang Rai and if I want I can bring forward my day off and go with him, I happily accept the chance to visit the city and its cafés.

We set off, the morning is surreal, with fog and timeless landscapes, I feel as if I have fallen into another reality, but it is a feeling I have experienced throughout my time living in these wonderful mountains, We arrive in Chiang Rai and, as we reach the city centre, I see the sign of a bar in front of me… in English… ‘The rabbit hole’, how should I interpret this? in my case, it means that I am on the right frequency/path, and the illusion we call reality explains it to me in this way, at least in my personal journey through this mystery we call life.

During the day, while visiting the city and its cafés, I decide to go and take a look at the place, but once I arrive, I realise that it is a block of flats and that the name is that of the building, or that if it was a restaurant or a bar, as it would seem from the layout of the ground floor, it is no longer so, I thought there would be something for me to discover, but perhaps, as in life itself, the discovery is the journey itself rather than the final destination.

The day has been wonderful and evening quickly arrives, time to leave again, I sit in the part of the van where they normally load the goods, which is uncovered and allows me to enjoy the view, with a soundtrack of music from the period when I lived in Australia and New Zealand, full of caffeine, I enjoy the mountains and surrounding villages with a touch of melancholy for a time gone by that I feel lucky to have experienced.

Time passes quickly, like life itself, the months go by and I find myself in Italy, where I am now writing this story, I walk through the city and, as if to confirm that talking about this event is the right thing to do, I come across a poster advertising an event, the title? “The Rabbit Hole”.

The game of life continues like one of those board games called “Guess Who?”, the game consisted of having to discover your opponent’s character by asking questions and removing your cards until there was one left that would, in theory, be your opponent’s character, in life, “Guess Who?” it’s about trying to understand why we exist by asking ourselves questions about who we are and why we exist, and the opposing player, God, the Universe, tries to give us an answer in their own way and sometimes in a very enigmatic way, the difference with the board game is, who really wins? perhaps the character in the other opponent’s hand is nothing more than death.