It’s a new year, again. It feels like if you blink then a year goes by. It makes one weary of the REM stage of sleeping. Someone very near to me once said that if it wasn’t like that – if I ever became bored – then I was probably not paying attention. I cannot say I’ve experienced boredom anytime recently. But I wonder if I’m paying attention as much as I should. I’ve noticed that as time goes on, the opportunity to deepen one’s experience grows significantly; you notice things that were always there before but you missed them. (Somewhere hidden, in the dark, are the winning lottery numbers). The trees lining the streets down the block are different every time you see them, if only you take the time to look. Every day is a new canvas.
At no time in my life was this more apparent than my work with spiritual healers. I spent several years traveling with indigenous medicine men and healers. What began as a simple curiosity grew into a fulltime in-depth, independent study into the actual phenomenon of spiritual healing. I found myself playing the often conflicting roles of: skeptic, documentarian, guinea pig, and intentional eternal student, to name a few. There were contradictions everywhere I looked. And just when I thought I would walk away because it wasn’t “real,” something would happen to keep me there: like the blind woman who walked away seeing again. I followed her around several blocks just to make sure she would be ok, but keeping my distance – out of respect. She cried in happiness, but said almost nothing. I loved that moment.
There were others, too. Perhaps the most memorable was an elderly Japanese woman with bouffant hair and a tiny poodle. She survived two husbands and a son, who died at age 9. Her most compelling story was about life in the Japanese internment camps in WWII. Listening to this very sweet woman tell her story made me want to demand an explanation of how anyone could hold her in captivity of any kind. Yet even now the current administration is at war with an invisible enemy and so Cat Stevens, a folk singer famous for songs like Peace Train, couldn’t fly here, presumably because the same administration felt he was a threat. Here is an inspiring 60 minute interview with Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam, including commentary about the ordeal, if interested.
To what or whom, may I ask? (Note: He just came out with a new album, after 28 years, recorded under the name Yusuf Islam).
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Continuing… To be sure, there was unintentional humor along the way. I once met an older woman taxi driver with a very hoarse voice who drove up in a big yellow taxi covered in religious bumper stickers. They weren’t stickers on a taxi. It was little bits of her taxicab, peering through her own private sticker world. Contrasting her rough-around-the-edges feel was her very polite, quiet, selfless young gardener friend; the tailgate on his Ford truck read, simply, “L O R D”. Just when it couldn’t possibly get any stranger, a young beachcomber drove up in a beat up Toyota with the T-O-T-and-A painted out so it simply read, “YO”.
Perhaps one of the rarest of finds was a tiny fuzzy haired New Yorker woman who was a sanyasin – she even lived at the “ranch” in Oregon where her Indian guru, Osho, led an entire community of her fellow sanyasins. Just like her, all of her friends had Sanskrit names. Looking at the menu at an Indian restaurant, she smiled mischievously and said, “Oh, these are my friends’ names!” She had a habit of wearing giant homemade dinosaur slippers (they looked like dinosaur feet) to business meetings, even showing up at my doorstep wearing them. They may have been longer than she was tall.
There were others, too, who had a way about themselves: a woman who claimed she lived at the center of the earth, under Mt. Shasta (I begged her to let me see her living room…her name was rhythmic, but I forget it for the moment)….a woman with a swollen ankle who came back 6 months later with two slightly swollen ankles.
What did it mean?
Once an entire class of the Berkeley Psychic Institute showed up and started doing a ritual called “blowing a rose”….the man named Buzz with a kidney stone, he said, one morning, when he called me, at 3:00 am….the old man with the walker who couldn’t walk on his own for 13 years, and then quietly walked out the door with a big smile, leaving his walker behind….never to return…. the Aquarian woman who wanted to become a Pisces, but refused to be born again….the people who didn’t get healed, or the healers who died from their own sickness. It didn’t seem to make sense. Then there was a movie star who was jealous of my past lives. She wore bright yellow tights and had big hair, similar to many of the real estate agents in the state of Texas.
Life is but a brushstroke on the canvas of the soul. Perhaps each life is a single breath.
In the movie American Beauty, the guy says, watching a tiny plastic bag blowing in the wind, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty, all around me….I don’t think I can take it”. That’s someone who is paying attention.
One night I tried something new(er), and escaped to the cemetery because I figured it would be quiet. There I met a woman who had the same idea, and we became friends. We chewed three packs of gum between us on the night we met and pondered what the people lying there were thinking of us, if they were even thinking of us.
And then there are the crickets (listen), slowed down, with the sound spread out. .
They sound like Gregorian chants…within Gregorian chants…within Gregorian chants…like a giant cricket sound spiral. My friend says, “We’re living in a symphony and we don’t even know it”… We’re too caught up in our own drama, even if we think we aren’t. If we can find peace in our crazy lives, then imagine how quiet the forest will be.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the college student, son of a preacher, translating the Bible into Klingon…
And is ritual magic really magic? On my own journey “on the road to find out” I noticed that after I disposed of the brown paper bag that was the symbol of my past at the crossroads of a busy intersection, as instructed, a marathon jogger with the body of David started chasing me down the road, carrying it: “Hey, mister, I think you dropped something”; I was being chased by a symbol of my past yet I was told by the shaman never to look back. So I kept running, never to find out…what it all meant… Did I miss out on something? Was it fate? At least I didn’t accidentally leave the car keys in the brown paper bag.
I promise to try to answer those burning questions to which everyone wants an answer, starting with “What is life?” and “Why does my fan not take off; I mean, they fly entire airplanes with those things?”
Soon, my little buddy Hayden will have an announcement. It’s a secret, just now, but I’ll give you a hint: beachfront.
To be continued…
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Inner Cafe is an ongoing social commentary on modern life and everything related.
