We invent disturbances, ways to be at a distance from the harmony that’s ongoing. Mostly we aren’t attuned to it. I have witnessed this, in myself and in others. It’s poignant. Pointless. Why do we do this to ourselves?
Limberness is all. What if we gave up on the idea of a map for life, as if there could be a plan, a direction, a correlation between the picture in the mind and life itself? What if the devotion were to something besides the wish to control, to “manifest”?
A person who is soft to what comes can feel the air of moving life play on her, like an instrument. There’s an attunement to reality (that harmony). The music of the spheres, playing through her, through him. Through you, dear heart. You notice you’re no longer hungry for things to be otherwise than what they are. You move along in the current of whatever comes, only because the fight has gone out of you, the feeling is of constant stillness. There is no felt difference between you and whatever is happening, between you and what is.
No distance means no difference. (Sit with that awhile.)
The blinds have opened. The light streams in. What once struck you as the landscape of ruin now appears otherwise. You feel, simply, alive. The image of yourself in a mirror no longer stirs discomfort or dissatisfaction, either your appearance or what your face and body reflect of your lifelong experience. You’re a little child again, playful, creative, no longer living as though time were a real thing. You have remembered what it is to cherish.
Gazing into the eyes of someone else whose face is twisted with struggle and fear, you see only tenderness. How you want to gather them in your arms and murmur that it doesn’t have to be this way.
It has always been this way, and always will. The coming-and-going of bits of life. You not in charge.
You are a rose, you want to say to them: delicate like that, so lovely. Brief! Don’t you know you’re going to die? Give it up. We don’t need science to drive home our brevity. Let there be an end of reaching toward life, toward others, to fulfill what you’ve been lonely for. The longed-for companion is inside your very skin. And it is also your skin, and everything beyond it, as far as imagination can reach.
This life, oh, this life! The whole juicy thing. It doesn’t matter that pain is in the mix. Alive is alive. Aware is aware. Life takes one form and then it takes another. Each moment, it’s a flood of something. A recognition of what’s happening, outside and in. Now it’s this, you say. Oh, and now this: lookee here. Barely a wondering what might be next. Then “next” comes. It just comes, all on its own. And then goes.
It has always been this way, and always will. The coming-and-going of bits of life. You not in charge.
Some of the floods are subtle, like a drop of food coloring deposited into a vat of water. A pale impression, by the time awareness has taken it in to the full extent. Some floods knock you over, tumble you. Still, you are resting deep inside. You let it do what it will do. What else is there? You learned not to try to stand against such a thing, the pointlessness of such strain.
The drunk carpenter who rolled off my slate roof was only bruised. He lay there in the driveway, laughing, the onlookers aghast. Sober, he’d have broken a limb or his head.
Living this way is being limp, only you’re utterly sober. That’s what this is, the clear-eyed absence of resistance. Feeling whatever has come. That drop of food coloring. How it floods awareness, how you feel whatever is there, taking it in entirely. Then it’s gone. Clear water again. No silt on the bottom. Nothing stuck to you, weighing on your shoulders, sending acrid juice into your stomach, keeping you awake at night, swimming in regret or dread.
The emptiness of it! Yet aware. The recognition: hereness, mere hereness. Oh, and gratitude. Joy sometimes, the realizing it could have been otherwise. It was otherwise. Fifty years of otherwise. Of rolling off rooftops in a panic. All those broken bones. All the wishing I’d been more cautious, or thinking I had it coming.
* * * * *
I sat on my porch with my brother a few summers ago. He was visiting from his home in another time zone. Our talk goes deep, always. We don’t take our time getting there. The cherishing is palpable. We know enough to get right to it, not skate along the stupid surface of things. We never have long together, during our infrequent visits. (And we know we’re dying.)
That delicious lazy afternoon on the porch couch with him. The birds in the maple. The stillness of the warm air.
He told me about something he’d observed. It took place several years before then, when we’d rendezvoused in New York. We were walking through Central Park, he and I and my daughter, the day we went to Coney Island. It was after that, after dinner, and the walk at dusk through the park.
I’ve never told anyone about this, he said, but now I’m telling you. Indicating what an impression it had made. Memorable enough to stick, worth reporting years later. He said it by way of illustrating how something had gotten through to him, that day in the park.
We three were walking along, sipping on the milkshakes we’d gotten after dinner, talking and laughing, when the toe of my sandal connected with a stone or a root, and then I was lying on the ground, my chocolate milkshake a little on me and a little underneath me. The small crowd of concerned strangers gathering as I sat slowly up. It was clear — to me, and soon to them — that no harm had been done. (Well, apart from the dark brown cold sweet confection dribbling into the earth where I sat, and my tan pants now darkening and splotchy with same.)
My brother was squatted on one side of me and my grown-up daughter on the other. Each took an elbow and restored me to upright. Whereupon the kindly crowd, reassured, dispersed, and we three resumed our amble, me with my empty cup.
Now, my brother and I are on the couch, maybe three years after that day in Central Park, and he says, I watched you fall that day. I waited. His intelligent blue eyes penetrated mine.
God, I love my brother.
Yes? I said.
He looked a little past the side of my face, out toward the trees, as if seeing the movie of that moment play in the air beyond my head.
You were utterly relaxed. Nothing in you fought the fall. I have never forgotten it. I understood, then, what life feels like to you.
I love my brother because he notices such things. Because he recognized it for what it was. And because he didn’t say anything, for the longest time. And because eventually, he did.