REFLECTIONS

11-JUL-1999.

Bringing It All Together

I'd like to weave a little magic, cast a spell. When I was fifteen years old, an eight-year-old girl appeared at my door. She was naked.

"Oh, hi!" she said. She was standing in the open doorway to the bathroom my sisters and I shared. They had a door on the other side.

"You don't have any clothes on!" one of my sisters called out. All three of them had just taken a bath, and their guest had decided to explore. A hand reached out with a white towel, which this little girl held in front of her.

"That's my brother's room!" one of my sisters called out. I was a high-school football player, and my hormones were starting to stir. She came into my room to look around, and as she talked, lowered the towel.

"Come on, you're naked!" a sister said, as she walked into my room without any clothes on, too! They laughed and goofed around like at a party, and after a lingering visit, which couldn't have lasted more than ten minutes, scooted back their way. That wasn't so taboo back in 1961.

Life has real magic, and the farther you look back into childhood, the greater the spell. Some people use religion to contact those earliest memories — of beauty, hope and compassion — standing awestruck again inside themselves, within the majesty of a Cathedral or Holy Temple, as they did at the age of five or six.

Some people read, discovering books such as P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous or Idries Shah's The Sufis. I remember another experience, much earlier, when my mother and stepfather took me to a mountain resort in North Carolina for five days. They had horseback riding and canoeing there. One evening, just before dusk, I found myself down by a field swarming with fireflies, each blinking a fluorescent green or white at ten- to fifteen-second intervals, and a shallow cove enclosed by exotic trees, with a pond, or stream even further down. There were canoes with couples setting out — and I was shooed off to bed.

Twelve years later, when I was a high-school Senior, about to set off for college, my mother said, "Let's go out to the hardware store." It was a spring evening, just after supper, and the two of us drove to a newly opened mall adjoining a public library. I remember going into the library and finding a book on "Humorous Anecdotes for Public Speakers." This was really one of the few experiences I had with my mother as a friend, as opposed to personal trainer, and as I gazed through the book I had the curious impression I was experiencing some part of myself I would become. The two of us laughed and enjoyed the warm spring weather, until we folded our friendship, and fell back into the machine.

It's as if all of life is a huge machine, characterized by tension. The second anyone begins to escape from the machine, other people almost desperately try to steal our attention, saying things like, "Oh, dear!" — propagating fear and intimidation, or simply inundating us with the mundane — "How was your week?"

The tension is all pervasive. We carry it in the very fiber of our muscles, in our memories from toilet training, in the way we walk, talk, think and even feel. For many people, the tension has become so habitual and familiar, it has become transparent. That is, they think the tension is themselves. They do not see the parts of themselves which they mistakenly buried when they were very young as mystical treasures. They see the dreams they have at night as "frightening" or "weird" nightmares, not understanding these are the faintest manifestations of their true essence — an otherworldly call for help.

Some people can step aside. They grasp that the deep tensions prohibiting them from producing brown feces at a business meeting, are the same tensions that keep their essence locked in a dark cavern, for fear it will say something honest.

Clairvoyance carried on a whisper, Jesus could see into men's hearts, "I'm not a girl — I'm a woman!"

There are these schools. I'm not sure if you find them, or if they find you. Once inside, you find yourself finding yourself, contacting the part of you that dreams at night. Becoming yourself. Almost all of life wants you to forget yourself, to get ahead, get an education, get a job, get money, get laid. Nowhere (outside of sleeping at night) do you find yourself experiencing yourself, liking yourself, being yourself. Except in these schools, sometimes called "real schools," something in you begins to grow, to reach for yourself, to be yourself.

Don't forget I said that. Even when you are listening to jazz on KCSM, FM 91.1, hearing a woodwind circling the treetops, carrying the rhythm, while something else, maybe a flute, soars high across the sea. It's not just the music. It's not thoroughly an escape. Something in you can take flight and grow once again.

Ideas such as this weren't so taboo in the olden days.

Next morning, in a giant, warm wet spot, I discovered the point of no return.

24-JUN-2007.

As follows

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