path

"How's your spiritual path...what is your spiritual path, anyway? I don't know." He's a good friend, and we've covered a lot of conversational ground. I welcome his thoughtful queries into my life. But we've only skirted this subject. And even that's more than I've done with most anybody else, for a long time. I tell him, "I don't know what my path is". He's considerate toward my uneasy edges, and we move on to something else.

Later, I wish I would've said this: "It's the path that I'm on". But I don't want to be misunderstood, as obtuse or combative. It might've taken more time and mental energy than I had at that moment to explain what I mean by that.

But then, as many times before, Life offers a helpful series of visual aids. Covering the gaps that words won't stretch across. The next morning, still weighing this question, I pick up the Sufi Book of Life. I'm thinking, heavy-hearted, of the box of things I still need to gather up and return to my former companion. You know, that last odd, very tangible, box of stuff. The act that ensures you're really confronting your pain, and letting it go. The book falls open to this, in the list of the 99 Beautiful Names: Al-Afuw, "Blowing Away the Ashes". The short meditation describes a burning and clearing of accumulated impressions and energies, to return to what's truly needed. It quotes Rumi, "grief cleans you out/like a good fast" (I just asked my friend, the night before, about fasting practices). It suggests releasing "anything you don't need that is sitting on the surface of your heart". This confirms my intention to deliver the stuff, simple but symbolic, by the 31st. As I read these lines, a new CD is playing behind me: "The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter", which I just got a chance to buy. Over this Sufi wisdom on clearing, on passing through the fire and becoming whole again, Josh sings, "Don't let me into this year with an empty heart..."

Also this morning, there's a phone message from my younger-older magical-oracle-Buddhist friend. We haven't spoken in a couple months, and I've been thinking of calling her but haven't yet. She says she's always open to talking. I call her that night. Here is one of her astonishing and completely offhand remarks, which I shamelessly transcribe: "I think that the next two decades are going to be completely occupied by love, and loving. The old system is cracking apart, and people are hard-pressed to find something that works...(so) they are having to look inside themselves..." She attributes a large share of humanity's current anxiety simply to this, the new and unfamiliar process of "looking inside" for strength, for ideas. For passion and compassion. Not everybody would buy it, but I think it's fair enough as a share of the explanation. Especially if you assume that, whatever aspect of reality they're working with - spiritual, political, material - this is uncharted territory for many. That'd be cause for some anxiety, right?

Then, before I know it, she is gifting me with her customary flood of affirmations. Spoken as by-the-way and habitual as are her jewels of insight. She has no doubt, she says, that I'll be ready for such transitions of thinking and being, since I'm such a "kind and loving and beautiful - and scholarly! - person." She concludes that "this kind of commitment to love is what will enable humanity's future..." How I'd like to believe that. In any case, what can it hurt to try? I'm humbled by her words. To tears, in fact. I've felt far and away from any of those things lately. But she reminds me, in most every conversation we have, that not only do I want to become such a being, I am capable.

Then, a rare night of sleep and dreams offers more sustenance. In a series of dreams, I try out the same scenario (a trip to a place of authority, with some unnamed request), in two very different episodes. One in which I'm disoriented, sluggish, and have to encounter my mother as one of the figures in uniform. The other with a recent immigrant as a travelling companion, whose joy and gratitude for the abundance he perceives all around is contagious, restorative, liberating. I wake again and reach for a another bit of insight: today, it's friend Brian's "Bite-Size Mantra" cards (http://www.qtnrg.org/BITE.HTML). The one I draw begins "Cleaning up old business makes room for new -- a process of sifting, sorting and releasing. Unburdened by the old, you are lighter and more able." Yes, I am. And I will be more so, after I deliver that box of stuff.

But, all of that to say: this is my path. I can't define it, more than to say that I have surrendered - yes! even when I have given up - to the One All Love that has known me. And it returns the giving, in every and any inexplicable gesture. I said I'd travel wherever the way led. And it sure enough led. And still does. Though it's not smooth or level ground much of the time. Or even visible. But it's there to be walked. I don't know how else to describe it. Except as it opens, again and again right in front of my barely-waking eyes.