The Wind is Our Ally

A tendril falls in front of her face as she moves the broom around the bench. Not even from the corner of her eye does the shimmering ahead peek in. And then in the next instant, the breeze settles the sand again.

It's particularly difficult to ensure the sand is level around the bench because there are edges of the iron legs to navigate around. The fine particles of sand are spread unevenly like snow drifts. She smoothes the piles into even flat sheets. The brush strokes are measured, only frantic when the drifts rise like dancing ghosts and her hard work begins all over.

We watch her every motion: sometimes the broom is heavy, sometimes light, sometimes she bends, sometimes straightens, sometimes she circles around her work, sometimes she zigzags, sometimes following a fine lace pattern on an imaginary hem.

The witness is not the Mystery.

One day she wearies. She comes to rest, propping her broom against the bench.

The wind does the rest.

The wind cradles every speck of sand. Then with a gentle breath, the burnished gold buried under millimeters of grain is revealed at least as far as where horizons tumble over ledges.

Even when she awakes refreshed, and even should she pick up the broom from time to time absentmindedly to rearrange a few particles of sand, she will always know the ground she walks on.

I'm walking across the Starbucks parking lot. A man walks by side to side with an older couple. Italian, silky black hair, shades of moss colored clothing accenting his olive skin, a living sculpture.

I stiffen.

"No, don't be tempted..." the uncompleted thought wedges in. An insidious belief has nested this year which is basically that loving any one person would detract from my singular goal of loving everyone. And sex is even more of a distraction.

Arjuna Ardagh shares this story in his book: "There was a monastery in the Middle Ages where scribes were making copies of the Bible. This was before the printing press was invented, so they would write it all out by hand. Every now and then the abbot would do a random quality-control check, calling in a scribe and flipping through his pages. "No!"  he cried on one such inspection, hitting his hand to his forehead. "The teaching is 'celebrate,' not 'celebate'.""

The thought need not complete to do its job. It's like The Look that my mother mastered and shot at me when I was a kid. Where dense strings of warnings and guilt were folded in the gooey dough and baked in.

In that split second, "Allow it" fills in the unfinished sentence. I noted the banished feeling does not have the hard edge of possessiveness. The resistance melts. Only a simple appreciation of beauty remains. And the wind picked up in my mind and a vast peace settled. Not a concoction of manufactured peace, but pure unadulterated bouyancy.

I enter the Starbucks.

The music playfully asks, "Got to ask yourself a question: Where are you now? Where are you now?"

A few minutes later, after I've ordered a pumpkin spiced latte, the Italian walks by the glass window. I half expect to recreate something. That note is a memory, yet the symphony continues to play and its beauty morphs but does not fade.

I settle into the armchair and my eyes fall on the movement-inspired mosaic painted at the far wall which I've somehow never bothered to perceive before at this Starbucks. A few phrases are scattered among the images like magnetic poetry on a fridge door.

My eye picks up only one:

the wind is our ally

p.s.  I write nonfiction. The first story had been swirling in my head for a few days before I went to Starbucks. It's true in a sense too but obviously more metaphorical because as Rumi writes: "I can't say what has happened. What I'm saying now is not my real condition. It can't be said."

I'm reading Groundhog Day and Dave writes:

But remarkable things began to happen too. I don't write much about them, because they're not the kind of reports most people would find "credible."  Certainly nobody cut from Michael Shermer's skeptical mold. But these remarkable things would happen at significant moments, and one always seemed to lead to another, as though they were meant to happen that way.

What's credible? I'd rather hear about unmediated first-person experiments than have things handed to me as the packaged truth. This is my story. Take it with a grain of salt. Or sand. Hopefully you won't use it to build a fortress of beliefs (of which skepticism is only one belief) - but forge your own path, your own experiments.

It would be a shame if no one dare wrote about the remarkable, the incredible.

Although Dave has a point. I wanted to share what happened Monday night. But then thought better of it: It's not the sort of thing folks would find "credible". And I'd have to share someone else's personal story which I am loathe to do without permission. But what are the chances of walking into the Chinese restaurant where you always order the Firecracker Chicken. And it's 7:30 p.m. and no one else is there. The Taiwanese owner tells me the Holy Spirit moves her to share her life story with me. We've only exchanged pleasantries and orders and credit cards before. What are the chances of being blown away by the story which eerily echos your own and is precisely what you needed to hear that evening. And when the story is over, the restaurant fills in with patrons and it's boisterous and busy again.

Ah, too many remarkable things for one week.

Later I learn the song playing is Wisemen from James Blunt's "Back to Bedlam" CD.

flicker photo by Lorrie McClanahan

Comments

[Irina]

I don't think loving a particular person is a distraction from loving everyone. The two are not mutually exclusive, because they are different kinds of love. Human mind and emotional spectrum is so beautiful and fascinating precisely because of the complexity, precisely because there are so many things we are able to do without even knowing that we can. We can love the world, but have a completely different attraction towards a single person.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Irina,
For me, I had used intense focus on needing one person's love to narrow down the expansiveness of Love itself. So when a relationship broke up in early January, I decided to use it as an opportunity to take time for a singular focus on 'awakening.' But I had not realized I inherited a set of new beliefs with that decision that were simply baggage. Aha, resisting love and beauty in any of its forms wasn't the ticket either!

[Mosaic]

wow!!! We can love the world, but have a completely different attraction towards a single person.