Enlightening Nonsense

It was May 29^th and he had arrived early to the Yoga & Raw Food Expo, beating the crowds so that he wouldn’t be rushing to find the room where he was going to be giving a talk. He had earned his spot as a presenter at the Expo not based on DVD sales or multiple cover photos on Yoga Journal but because of his passion and persistence.

He had met the man who ran the New Life Expos on many occasions as he himself had been going to those Expos for about twelve years straight, twice a year, rarely missing a show. He would tell his friends, “It is everything from nutrition to UFOs!” and it really was. There were “experts” there to remove your karma or tell you what the light beings from planet Zarco wanted to share, to sell you this latest greatest potion or product that when applied to the ears or stuck in your ass would give you instant enlightenment—or at minimum prostate stimulation. He also knew many of the venders because he had either bought their snake oil or had enjoyed hearing their pitch so much that had he wanted to he could sell it himself.

Last year was the first time for the Yoga & Raw Food Expo. When he attended it, he noticed that the energy was a little less frantic, less people walking around with gold metal pyramids on their heads frantically trying to reach nirvana and more people walking around with smiles on their faces and nowhere particularly to be but here now. He met some nice people, less of the nature of doomsday Christians looking forward to everyone but the faithful dying in hellfire and more of the nature of the Hare Krishna who doesn’t ask you to bow down to his god, only to share in song and dance.

Now he was in the program with a picture and bio and class description and everything. “Damn, what a strange Universe!” he thought. He was excited to share his unique voice, a much-needed voice he thought, to what was being sold as “spirituality.” There would be no hand-holding and Kumbaya-singing; he would tell it like it is and even challenge some of the empty jabber of the so-called “experts,” some of whom were there that weekend to sell their brand of snake oil that, regardless of what they said, would only serve you if you were choosing to massage a snake. “I’ll tell them the truth,” he thought, “And if they put me up on a cross for it, I will drink my cup of poison.” He had just listened to the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar and his metaphors were overflowing with Jesus.

He was also a little nervous. He didn’t worry about how his talk would go in an hour or how it would be received; he was certain that it would be kick-ass. Nor was he nervous that when he taught his yoga class the following night that he would not know what to say or that his sequence would be lame; he pretty much disappeared when he taught and let the yoga teach itself. What he was nervous about was if she were going to be here tonight and what she would think—not of the talk, but of the man.

It was almost exactly two months earlier that he met her at the last New Life Expo. On January 1^st of this year, he had done a Soulmate Meditation in his apartment and got that he would meet his mate on March 27^th, that it would be in a place that was not typical of meeting a “date,” like a bar or singles event, but some place like a bookstore when he didn’t suspect it. She would come wearing a thin dancer’s body and her name would be “Marya” or some derivative of Mary. When he sought clarification he got “Moriya.”

On March 27^th, at the New Life Expo, on the side of the bookstore, he met a thin, Russian girl whose name was Maria and had he just listened to the soundtrack of West Side Story he would probably be unable to control himself from singing out, “I just met a girl named Maria!” It was probably best he didn’t, as his high range had been crippled by a punch to the throat in his fighting days and the song was in the high baritone/tenor range and would have posed some challenges.

He had only spoken a few words with her on the side of the bookstore and given her his postcard with the information for the yoga class that he was teaching that weekend in Central Park. They parted ways and he couldn’t help but think, “What if I don’t see her again? I mean, soulmate or not, I would also like a mate in body!” Because of a man who had tried to pick him up earlier at the urinal, George Michael’s “(I’ve Got To Have) Faith” came to mind.

The next day at the Expo he was heading to the booth where his friend Thomas was selling his wares to tell him that he met “The One” when a lecture just then let out and appearing in the doorway right in front of him was Maria. He gave a little silent prayer to God, “God, I know I am an atheist and all but I wanted to thank you regardless. Uh, that’s it.” She smiled at him.

“I was worried I wouldn’t see you again,” he said.

“I knew I was going to see you,” she came back and now he had faith that perhaps she felt the soul connection as well.

As “coincidence” would have it, she was just getting out of Thomas’ lecture and was heading to his booth to see about signing-up for his workshop. I smiled again at the Universe and the way she connects all these seemingly random dots of paint into something, if you look from far enough away, is nothing short of a masterpiece.

They ended up leaving the Expo and spending the rest of the evening together and when they finally kissed by the Hudson River, there was no doubt to either one of them that the other was who they had been waiting for lifetimes.

About a month later she would tell him that she felt nothing anymore and that they should part ways.

He had been meditating/reflecting for the last 45-minutes and the silent movie running in his head only moments ago was suddenly snapped off as the lights were thrown on and the romantic movie ended with a snap. The noise of the Expo rushed into his ears and swelled his head like street noise, as he was thrown out on his butt for sneaking into the movie theater without paying for a ticket. At $11.50 a ticket could you blame him?

The room filled out to hear what the self-billed “rebel yogi” would say. He scanned the room looking for…he didn’t see her. And so he began his talk.

He was in his flow and deep thoughts as well as silly anecdotes all were thrown into the big pot and as much as granny forewarned, “You can’t put all of those things in one pot!” the stew ended up coming out pretty darn tasty! He left them with one deep, dramatic image and a challenge and they applauded and if he had cared about anything but love, he might have lapped it up and fed his near-starving ego.

A few people came up to him after his talk with big smiles, as if they had instantly become Best Friends Forever. He smiled somewhat distantly, still glancing the room for her. And then he gave up.

“Hey, I’m glad you liked what I had to share. Did you sign my mailing list?” he asked.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Great. I have to be somewhere now but will I see you at my yoga class tomorrow night at 8:00?”

“Yes, you will.”

“Great.” And we was off in a shot.

He rounded a corner like a rock star trying to avoid paparazzi and stood there for a moment. He took a deep breath in and just as he started to let it go—

“Hey, you were great,” made him swallow his out breath and he was afraid that if it lodged in his throat he may need the Heimlich Maneuver to pop it free. It was her!

“I didn’t think you made it,” he said.

“I was hidden in the back. I didn’t want to distract you.”

“Fsoh carashaw?” he asked, which meant “Is everything good?” in Russian, showing that in between his many moments of tears over the past few weeks, he still found time to buy a Speak Russian CD from eBay and learn a few phrases that would probably only help him order borsht at Uncle Vanya’s restaurant on West 54^th Street. Still, she smiled, if not for hearing her native language come from his tongue then because his accent was terrible…and cute.

She replied in Russian that she was good, or that is what he guessed her words to mean.

“Te isdiez (Here you are),” he followed.

“Da, ya isdiez,” she said and he knew this one: “Yes, here I am.”

He thought of asking her if she knew where the Bolshoi Theater was but knew that although this was one of the few phrases he knew how to say in Russian, it would probably prove as useful as the only German line he memorized from the phrase book when he was touring Europe for seven months with the musical Hair:

“Iche hette gern ein fernglass?” (Do you have a pair of binoculars?)

So instead of speaking and removing all doubt of his foolishness, he instead took her hand and said, “Come with me.” And she did, if for no other reason than that she had grown accustomed to her left hand and didn’t want to leave without it.

He took her to the bookstore and when his friends Sonia and Ed who run the bookstore saw him he stopped their greeting with a crossing guard’s open palm, indicating, “Not now but I’ll be sure to stop by later. And by the way, do you know where the Bolshoi Theater is?”

He took Maria to the side of the bookstore and positioned them in the exact places where they had exchanged their first words. “Hi, what are you looking at?” he reenacted.

“Incense,” she came back, not forgetting her lines.

He pulled one of the yoga postcards from his backpack and handing it to her said, “I teach yoga on the weekends in Central Park. I would like for you to come join me if you’re interested.”  He realized that his old line was that he was teaching a class that weekend but he wasn’t and so chose to improvise a little. He was reminded of the national tour of “Man of La Mancha” where he had the most lines out of anyone in the play—most of them improvised. He then took the script in a totally new direction.

“As much as I believe in faith, and by ‘faith’ I don’t mean George Michael’s song—although I do believe in that as well—I also believe in creating my own reality and thus doing away with the need to rely on faith. It would put me at ease if I didn’t have to ponder all night if and when I was going to see you again. Is it alright if you join me ‘off-script’ and we walk and talk a little?” He decided to help his case by closing with one more word in Russian. “Puzhalsta? (Please),” he asked. His winningly bad Russian made the corners of her mouth rise and her cheeks with them.

“Okay,” she said, and now his cheeks were bunched up in smiles as well.

He took her hand and walked, as all the booths and people faded into a background of white noise surrounding the silent bubble that only had room for her and him. A few people shouted, “Hey Swami X!” and while his head turned to them and nodded with a little smile, his legs never stopped their progression towards the stairwell where he could exit this madhouse of smiling thickness and get out into the clear, unclean air of New York City and take in a deep breath and know that while his life has been shortened a touch, as long as she was in his bubble he didn’t really care.

He walked her to Bryant Park where, on the way, they caught up about what they had been doing the path month apart. When they got to Bryant Park, she looked at him and smiled. “Do you want to do yoga?” she said, going back to the old script from two months ago, on that magic second day.

“The air is pregnant with possibilities,” he said. “We can do whatever we want, free from the past, free from the future, just Here Now,” he said and suddenly he was a little nervous that she would take his invitation to create their own present moment as him preaching to her how she should be.

“Funny,” he thought to himself, “Last time we walked this path I had no fear, knowing that all would be well—and that ‘knowing’ ended in disaster. This time, I know that I don’t ‘know’ anything and feel nervous. If George Costanza’s Law Of Doing The Exact Opposite Of What He Would Normally Do holds—then this nervous feeling can only end in glory!”  [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjXUgxR4Z10]

“Let’s walk a little more,” she said, and for the moment he dropped all thoughts of a short, stocky bald man from Seinfeld and instead focused on the tall, thin, auburn-haired beauty from Heaven.

They stopped where the last time they had settled to do yoga and laid their mats down. This time he started to lead the private class in a bubble and she guided the second half, making some rewrites on the old script. It was a surrealistic scene where the past and the present were coming together and somehow both casting an influence on the other, like one of those “time travel” movies where as much as they try to explain it, it’s still friggin’ confusing. “Wait, so then did this past event never occur now? And how is it possible that a skate board can float on air?”

He had the feeling that they were rewriting the past, keeping what served them, playing with changes that didn’t matter either way, and hopefully changing the big event that when it occurred the air was equally pregnant with possibilities, only they had both made line readings that gave birth to Freddie Kruger instead of a Buddha. This had made his Act II feel like he was playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s snuff film, Passion of the Christ, nothing but an hour and a half of torturous beatings—considered only “enhanced interrogation techniques” if Dick Cheney had his way, eviscerating the story of Jesus the way he has The Constitution.

After the class, she rolled up her mat and he brushed off his dirty feet from doing yoga on the bare ground, just like before, and now they walked west. Like the first explorers of the Colonies over 200 years ago, they were going to “Go West, son!” into unknown terrain with new discoveries. The only Indians there were likely to see on their voyage West were of the dot-head variety and while they smelled a lot worse, he was pretty sure he could protect his lady from any chana masala hurling non-Native Americans.

When they got to the spot by the water where they had shared their first kiss and the first time he had kissed not only a human but also a soul, they paused to look out over the water. The buildings on the other side of the river had that slightly hazy distant quality that made him wonder if they were, indeed, painting their own masterpiece, perhaps putting a smile on the Mona Lisa this time, making her look less like she’s sitting for a portrait while suffering from menstrual cramps.

“Stay right there,” he said as he took out his cel phone.

“A strange time for him to make a phone call,” she thought but there was no one “out there” he cared to share these precious moments with, “Just one girl ‘in here,’” he thought as his heart beat heavily in his chest.

“I want to take a picture,” he said, just like he had taken a couple of pictures of her last time, one of which he still kept as his inner wallpaper on his cel phone and looked at longingly every time he opened his phone. He knew this wasn’t the formula to “get over her,” but he also knew that it was his only proof that the unfathomable love of Act I had really been executed and not just words in a script created yet never performed.

He snapped a couple of pictures of her and then walked up to her as if to show her what aspect of life could be captured in an electronic image. When he was right in front of her, without planning, he placed both of his hands on the side of her head and without a gap to second guess his Be-ing, he pressed his mouth against hers. As their tongues started to circle and roll like two young boys wrestling in the playground grass, his right hand slid down her cheek and found its resting spot on the center of her back; if the suction of their mouths weren’t enough, his hand was there to provide support.

And the second time, in the same place, with the same two bodies…it was just as magical. At that moment his soul seemed to land into his body with a thud and the past had been erased, the future was undetermined, and all that remained was the Present.

When they finally disengaged their lip-lock, he looked into her eyes and saw her mixed emotions. While she clearly felt a magic more profound than David Copperfield making an elephant disappear, her soul was still working to fit her body on like a bloody glove while her past doubts was acting like a rubber glove preventing it from fitting, uh, like a glove.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

“Neither do I,” he replied with intensity, “But I know there is no other possible Present for me than to be totally immersed in you.”

“But what if—?”

“Anything’s possible, Maria. As I said in my talk tonight, I don’t know anything for certain anymore. But the one thing I do know is that if we don’t explore the possibility of us that both of us will never have anything to hold onto but ‘What ifs?’” His words were calm yet firm, neither pleading nor demanding.

She looked at him, as if she was waiting for God himself to say to her, “For My sake— go off into the sunset with the boy!”

“If there was no past—from past relationships, to past ideas about love, from past arguments—would that affect your decision?” he questioned.

There was a pause, as her eyes remained locked into his. “Of course it would,” she said so softly that he wasn’t sure whether he heard it with his ears or with his eyes.

“There is no past. There is no future. There is only the Present. Here. Now.” And whether this was New-Age metaphysical theory or fact, his eyes showed that he was willing to die on his own cross defending it.

She moved in and kissed him deeply, giving her answer without words. And when they separated their lips this time, she saw tears in his eyes, which soon were joined by tears of her own. And with those tears, all past pains between them had also washed away and now there were just two souls, standing in two bodies…feeling as one.

“Fsoh ochin carashaw, nye stranna (Everything is very good, not strange),” he stumbled through, trying to score some brownie points.

“We’ll have to work on your Russian a little more,” she smiled taking his left hand with her right and they walked into the sunset—well, uptown really, which was north and not west…

Is this really how Act III began? Or did his exhale around the corner at the Yoga & Raw Food Expo leave his body in full…along with it any hope of being with her once again? The past is dead. The future is not written. There is only the Pregnant Present waiting to birth out the growth of whatever seed we choose to plant inside of Her. Plant it with love and the fairytale will be your own creation.

“The first time we kissed, I knew I never wanted to kiss any other lips but hers again.”

—Valerie from the movie “V For Vendetta”