In my last post I made the proposition that we’re all englightened, that we just forgot about it or something happened to cloud over it, conceal it. Consider little babies, they’re so cute and wonderful and even the most hardened people start cooing and googoo gagaing all over the place when they’re holding a little baby. They’re like little Buddha’s, making us all bigger and better people than we normally know ourselves to be. I used to be that cute and that much of an opening, calling out for only the best another human being could give me. You did too. The truth/love/aletheia about it just may be that we still are.
What happened? How did I end up this way when I started out with so much promise. People used to love being around me and want to care for me, and be the best they could be around me (when I say me, you could be thinking about your me too). Dare I say, people used to just love me. That’s all there was – an inexpressible love that people wanted to dote on me, that I drew out of them. It’s that inexpressible, insatiable feeling that makes you just want to chew on a little baby’s leg and just eat them up (like that will somehow turn out well). They’re so adorable though that you just don’t know what to do with yourself when you’re with them…yet we’re driven to express “something” to them. It usually ends up with us gooing and gaaing and looking mad, bad, and wrong to others. But then the others notice you’re with a baby, and they say, “Oh, well, he’s with a baby so it’s okay.”
Consider this scene. Remove all the people and fast forward a few years. I was eight years old-ish. Right there in front of Peaches Records and Tapes. I was walking toward that spot where the mob is, down one of the aisles of cars with my brother who is about 8 years older than I am. I’d just come off a rough patch of run-ins with bums as I called them…thugs that liked to beat up or just otherwise mess with little kids for no apparent reason. They were just kids like me though. I still thought you could count on grown-ups.
Dark green. That was the color of the big boat of a car he was driving. It was a Chrysler New Yorker, or an Imperial, or a Plymouth Fury. Rusted already though it couldn’t have been more than a few years old.
Courtesy of HotFudgeDetroit.Com
He was probably mid-20’s, mid-length curly hair, mustache, jeans jacket, a little rough around the edges but not evil looking or anything. I watched him the whole way from where he started coming through the stop sign at the end of the strip plaza, just waiting for the traffic to pass so we could cross. But, I guess I was looking right at him the whole time…or I wasn’t. I must have been a threat to him (I can reason now), or maybe I was too happy (for him) because I was going to Peaches with my older brother…again, a threat.
Then he was right in front of us. Window height even with my head as he rolled by and me still looking at him. Alive. Experiencing. Being. Not afraid…just loving. Enlightened.
“What are you looking at?” It was all he said.
Taken back. Confused. Threat response. Is this guy a bum? Is he going to get out of the car and beat me up? I looked away. I looked down. I looked at my brother. He was no more eager to get in a fight than I was to get beat up.
I’ve done a lot of work to “find myself”, notice what was lost, or what I invented and I re-invent myself every moment when I’m present to the moment. I still notice that sometimes I look at people away from their eyes…their mouths, their nose, off somewhere else…anywhere to keep them from asking, “What are you looking at?”
Aware of the source of my un-enlightenment now. This being the last event. The one that closed the door and had me really forget anything about the non-sense I knew when I was three…that all there is is love. All around us, part of us, us. Our source and our being and who we’ve always been. Who he was. This guy I’ll never meet.
We develop these ways of being to compensate, to protect ourselves from these threats. But we forget about it. Forget that we created them and we’re left unsatisfied, concerned, restless…looking for something that we already have, something that we are. Truth. Love. Unconcealed. Aletheia.
I love you. Even if you’re the guy in the Dark Green Chrysler. You’ll know it, and experience it when I’m allowing myself to be vulnerable by looking at you, seeing you ala Avatar, being with you. Afraid that you’ll punch me if I see something that you don’t want me to see, but willing to risk and love you anyway.
With Love,
Ed