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| December 1998 Volume I, Number 3 | ||
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Editorial
Letters
Waiting
at the Center
A Christmas Carol That
Much on a Stranger My
Life in a Cave
Lunchtime at Camp Oak Hill
Roadside, Arizona |
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A Christmas Carol (top)
Dave Gold At the advice of Bill Richards, a phenomenal psychologist I worked with once, I started taking piano lessons a few months ago, despite an utter lack of any native talent. Music, Richards said, is one of the many ways we can reconnect to our largely forgotten roots. While sitting in the waiting room of my piano teacher two months ago, preparing to butcher The First Noel yet again, a middle aged woman and her son came in. The young boy was of indeterminate age, definitely pre-pubescent, chubby, round faced and with extremely smooth skin. Somehow, something seemed wrong about him, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. As soon as they sat down on the couch, the boy began tugging shyly but excitedly at his mother's sleeve. "Now, mom? Now?" The mother smiled and looked up from her son to face me. "Would it bother you if I read to my son?" she asked. "Oh my goodness, no," I replied, returning her smile. Her thick hands reached into a frayed, sack-like purse and pulled out a book with a colorful cover. The boy settled into the couch, comfortably and expectantly, and she began reading in a voice that seemed hardened with life but softened with love. It was indeed a children's book, a happy story about mischievous extra-terrestrials who build castles in the clouds out of peppermint sticks. The boy, whom I now guessed to be about 12, inched closer to his mother, occasionally interrupting with questions like those my 4 and 6-year-old nieces ask when I snuggle between them and read them to sleep. My smiling eyes gently scanned the boy's face for some sign of his evident retardation, while my heart overflowed with warmth and sadness. Just then the door behind me opened, discharging a teenager clutching Alfred's Advanced Piano. I rose and joined my teacher to take another shot at The First Noel, and by the time I finished my discordant hour, the waiting room was deserted. I walked into the crisp autumn night, aware of the need to be alone with my thoughts, but simultaneously not wanting to be all by myself. On a whim I drove past the office and saw that the lights were on. I parked, went inside, and found Eric Clark in front of his computer screen. "Eric, give it a rest man, it's after 8:00 o'clock!" Eric didn't look up. "We have 150 people signed up for the retreat and Avila has 54 beds. Bad math." "My God, Eric, that's a problem most groups would love to have." I opened my filing cabinet, pulled out a Snicker's bar, and tossed it in his lap. "Come on, I'm all wound up from my piano lesson and need to blow off some steam. Let's go run the golf course." Eric paused, pondered, smiled, and then began unwrapping the candy bar. "If I step on a sand-trap rake and take one in the kisser, you'll pay for the plastic surgeon?" "I'll do the surgery myself. Now let's go." A few minutes later, Eric and I were traversing the fairway of the 13th hole at North Hills Country Club. I was silent most of the time, still thinking about the boy and his mother. They had touched me in a way I couldn't grasp, and left me with a gnawing sadness that I didn't understand. Richard Rose, the Zen master whom Augie and I studied under, once observed, "The work changes you." Quirks and bad habits gradually disappear, as their corresponding obsessions become visible, then obvious, and finally superfluous. Pointless ambitions fade out. Chronic fears lose their grip. Extraneous vanities fall away. But the core personality, that essential element of you that believes it is all you are, all you have, just hangs on, and no matter what heavens or hells you go through, you always end up bumping up against the same, seemingly inextricable ego. Something just refuses to let go. Mindful of the lessons of Baltimore, I closed my eyes, and instead of repressing the sadness, I paused, breathed deeply, and gave whatever it was a chance to catch up. Soon, an image appeared on the black screen of my closed eyelids. "There was this little kid at piano," I began. Eric looked up from his golf-ball meditation, caught off-guard by the tears in my eyes. "I think his sister was there for her lesson; then her mom came in with this boy in tow; he must have been 12 or 13; I don't know, it was really hard to tell. And I didn't realize it at first, but the kid must have been slow or something, because it was some kind of kid's book, like you'd read to a first grader. "And the kid was listening with such rapt attention, and he was so happy, and the mother was happy too, except that I could simultaneously feel a melancholy in her which went as far down as her happiness went up. Because even though she was a poor woman, and not a particularly attractive one, there was a beauty and a dignity about her that was somehow tied to her relationship with that child. And she knew how happy and secure her son was at that moment, and it wracked her soul at the same time, because she knew that she couldn't comfort him and entertain him and protect him for the rest of her life. She knew that the world was as cold and uncaring as she was warm and loving, and every speck of happiness that her son experienced at that moment was a dagger in her heart, because it foretold its inevitable opposite; all the kids that would make fun of him, all the girls who'd never go out with him, the children of his own that he would never have - all that he would see and want and never get, his nose pressed up against the window of life like a penniless kid outside a candy store." I was crying hard, and the tears wouldn't stop. The mother's poignant pain, born of her limitless love was just a part of it; what tore me up, right then, was all the sadness and rejection that little boy would experience over the course of his life. I felt his loneliness and inadequacy, and most painful of all, I sensed the longing nostalgia he would feel for his wonderful mother, experienced a thousand different ways but always whispering of the same dead past and those pure, warm, safe and intimate moments on that couch, where he joyfully followed her voice to secret and magical places where even boys like him were safe, loved, and never abandoned. When I awoke the next day, the first image that flashed before my still-closed eyes was a house whose every door and window had been flung wide open the night before. During morning yoga and meditation I repeatedly brushed up against those surprising, blessed hints of transcendence that instantaneously validate every moment invested in the search. Later, as I stumbled through my work day, it was clear that something had indeed opened up inside of me, and that the moods and impressions and insights which now blew in unimpeded made "business as usual" almost impossible. I had plenty of experience in carrying on with the mundane while the spiritual called; for fifteen years I'd been required to make the transition from Rose's magical kitchen, where his otherworldly presence hung like fog in every corner, to the demands and absurdities of my manic law practice. But I could see no reason to push away The Voice any longer. After all, one of the fringe benefits of working at RGI is that a spiritual encounter is never more than a few steps away. I walked those few steps to Augie's office and was surprised to find him leaning back in his chair, a quiet, thoughtful, almost affectionate smile on his face. It was a look I had encountered many mornings in Rose's kitchen, an indication that he had been thinking of me, and in fact had been waiting, patiently and timelessly, for me to walk into his world. "It is truly remarkable," he began as I took my seat across from his desk. "You and I have worked so incredibly hard at changing, at achieving, of purging ourselves in flames to become worthy of God, and, you know something Dave? It's not at all the way we thought it would be. You and I know that we really aren't doing anything—that we've never done anything, that things have just happened to us. And sure, maybe they wouldn't have happened if we hadn't worked so hard, but my God, I look back at all the miracles that have happened, and the incredibly subtle and intricate interplay of events that have brought them about, and I know that there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Take my word for it, Dave. Relax. We're in good hands. If only we could stop worrying about the details." "There was this little kid at my piano lesson," and choking back tears, I related the entire story. Augie smiled and said, "That little kid is you." Yes, that little kid is me. And I realized I knew that already, that I was just waiting for someone else to say it. The tears flowed freely, and momentarily I was free of the crushing weight I had carried ever since Little Davie concluded, as we all do, that he needed the armor of ego to protect him from a world so much colder than the one of his youth. And I thanked God for leading me, first into and then out of that armor, so that I could come to appreciate the words that I had heard so many times before: no spiritual work is ever wasted.
My Life in a Cave (top)
Rachel Medlock Go west and north far enough from Durham, NC and you'll eventually run across the small town of Linville. There's nothing fancy in Linville; there's a set of railroad tracks, an old factory, a few tourist knick-knack shops, and a segment of the Pisgah Mountains, the highest mountains in North Carolina. I think Kristin, Rob, and I would have missed the small mountain town entirely if not for the "Linville Caverns" sign. On seeing it, Kristin jerked the car to a stop, earning a honk from the truck behind us, and swung into the parking lot entrance. For fifteen minutes, we wandered around the gift shop outside the caverns, rummaging through postcards, figurines, toy guns, and rabbit pelts while we waited for the next tour to begin. Finally our guide motioned for us to gather around the entrance. She gave us her well-worn spiel—"no touching the formations they're living things no flood lights on camcorders please but flash photography is allowed please stay with the group"—and ushered us inside. I've been in a number of caves in my life. Southern Missouri, where most of my family lives, is pock-marked with them. Each and every dark gap between limestone slabs offers another byway into the underbelly of the Ozark Mountains. Once, when I was nine or ten, my father and uncle took my younger cousin and I into one of the small caves near my family's farm. As a joke, my father and uncle accidentally "lost" us there, with only one dim flashlight between us. For ten minutes, we tried to choke back our rising panic while we felt our way along the limestone passageways. They suddenly reappeared with a ruckus behind us, making my cousin and I let loose a scream that probably permanently loosened the stalactites. Of course we laughed at our gullibility later, but there is something about the dark, moist, dank of caves that touches a primordial fear in everyone. In Linville, our guide took the edge off this natural fear of the cramped underground by cheerily pointing out all the possible interpretations for the rock formations. "And this is a slab of bacon," she said, her flashlight bobbing along the dripping ceiling to show just how it was so. "And here is our wedding scene, and over here an elephant..." I tuned her out after the first few, because I felt something else, something much older, welling up from deep within me. A forgotten piece of my primitive man had floated to the surface. He wanted to know if we had somehow gotten lost inside our Self. Indeed, the narrow, rough tunnels, shallow stream filled with blind trout, and bizarre, bacon-esque rock formations seemed to belong to a dream, and not to a sunny October Sunday at all. I tried to reassure him that it was only a cave, not our Mind, that soon enough we would be back in the figurine-filled gift shop, but then woozily admitted to myself that maybe he was right--maybe there was no difference between the 20 million year-old caverns and my own dream-consciousness. "Yes," I had to answer him at last. "I guess that's exactly where we are." The tour continued. Soon we were in the heart of the cave—2,500 feet below Humpback Mountain. "In this part of the tour," our guide said, "we turn all the lights off. This will be complete and total darkness. If you were to stay this way for more than three months, you would go blind--but you would go mad far before that." She warned us that we should hold on to someone in case we got frightened, and if we had any glowing watches or jewelry, we should cover them up. And then the lights went out. Eyes shut. Eyes open. Eyes shut, eyes open. No difference. Were we floating, suspended in black goo? my primitive man wanted to know. No—there, my boot sole could still thump the path below. The story goes that two local Linville boys found themselves in this same position about forty years ago. They went in with only one lantern, which, of course, went out. For two days they crawled through the darkness, looking for the one and only exit from the center of the Mountain. My primitive man and I imagined ourselves as those boys, groping along velvet blackness, wet stones our only guides, eyes yearning for light. And finally, to emerge from a mountain's heart, to fumble into the sun, out of alien slime rock formations—would that be a kind of birth into consciousness, an awakening from this over-powering dream? In the middle of lunch hour in the Bryan Center Cafe two days ago, a far cry from Linville Caverns, I had coffee with my film professor, Mani Kaul. Mani, who is from Bombay, was telling me about a certain school of Indian metaphysics that believes all living material belongs one of three basic states: sleep without dreams, sleep with dreams, and wakefulness. Man, Mani said, is the only being capable of all three states. "But it would seem like there would be a fourth state," I said, "an awareness of the wakefulness." Mani's old eyes smiled at me. "Yes," he answered, "you are exactly right. There is a fourth state: the knowledge that the other three states are but dreams. But only a few ever learn to see that." And I continue to grope for the light. |