Enlightening Nonsense

Today was a day of friends, and by this I don’t mean I got a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and sat in front of the tellie with a spoon and watched episode after episode of “Friends,” wondering if Ross wasn’t Monica’s sister if he would still be considered one of the “friends” or just a loser—although if Ben & Jerry came out with a vegan flavor I would definitely schedule such a day! Instead, I met with two dear friends who I haven’t spent considerable time with in awhile—one for about a year—and it was so nurturing to my soul that for a moment I almost forgot all the angst I’ve been carrying around like a gay Catholic that likes cock but is afraid he will burn in Hell for eternity every time he finishes sucking his priest’s dick.

I met Marc about two years ago in Central Park. I would pass by the area he hung out at by Wolman Rink, where I would see pigeons flying around him and landing on his arms and into open hands— “The Bird Man of Central Park.” He even knew all their names. “That is Socks,” he would tell me and he’d go on and describe Sock’s personality, how he was generally a loner and not into the group thing, unless it was mating season in which case he’d be puffing his chest and walking with a honey on each wing.

I used to meditate with my dog, Abandon, under a tree near where he and the pigeons would play. By “with my dog” I mean that I would meditate and she would sit by me and look for squirrels and fantasize about tearing them to shreds. Sometimes I wondered if it would affect Mark and my relationship if Abandon tore up one of his beloved pigeons.

Mark once had to mediate between me and a pigeon that had shit on me and who I had caught and on whom I was preparing to take my own dump in retribution. Through Mark’s calm yet firm guidance, the pigeon apologized to me and assured me that he hadn’t intended on pooping on me, that he just dropped his bomb and I happened to be passing by underneath at the time. I wasn’t sure if he was just saying this to appease me but I indicated my acceptance of this by pulling up my pants and buckling up and we both thanked Mark for his intervention. Mark and I would have some deep conversations about matters “spiritual” and if I ever had a problem with a pigeon, he would always act as our liaison.

I hadn’t seen Mark in about a year, passing by his spot almost daily with my dog, and when I asked the pigeons if they had any word, they just cooed like the flying rodents they are. I had been meaning to email him for a long time but, as is typical, I kept saying, “I’ll get to it tomorrow” and tomorrow never came. Finally I shot him a shortie: Hey Mark. I haven’t seen you in awhile. Is everything okay? He got back to me and we talked about meeting today, which we did, and not a day too soon for the pigeons, many of which now had shitstains on their heads.

I shared some of the struggles I had recently been going through and that while I experienced tremendous lessons and personal growth, I was still hurting. I told him how one Soul Brother wrote me an email back to the “my parents died in a car crash last night” email with something like, “Death is just an illusion,” which while I knew this to be true on a soul level, on a human level was like, “This is so totally not what I need to hear right now.” Mark, on the other hand, was a great ear that heard me not only as a soul on a journey but also as a human who hurts and when I shared with him how at times I am sick of focusing on consciousness and my soul’s journey and just want to hold a girl’s hand and be in love, his eyes engulfed me in a hug and his words rubbed my back with nurture…and teachings.

The thing about my connection with Mark that makes it really tight is that we are both “Spartans in Spirit,” who know that our paths at times require great struggle but we are both willing to lose a few battles if it results in us winning the war. We are members of the elite 300 that will probably end up dead fighting off the invaders of unconsciousness and temptation and old patterns of behavior but when we look at each other, we smile, and in the old Native American warrior tradition say, “It’s a great day to die!” and go on fighting to the death of unconsciousness—our own as well as others.

Mark has undergone similar difficulties and understandings that I have gone through—and am going through—and rather than telling me “what it means” or “how you should proceed,” he shared with me his personal experiences and what he discovered for himself, offering them as items on the buffet to either sample and savor and see if the flavor serves my tongue’s needs or decide to scrap it, leaving my plate empty for something more decadent.

This may sound arrogant but there are people I meet that I’m just like, “Dude, I liked playing with the blocks, too, but I’m no longer in kindergarten.” I may only be in first grade but my block days are behind me. Mark and I are both in the same class in spirit and, while neither one of us knows whether we will have a graduate degree to explore, a doctorate to pursue following that, an internship following that and then an externship after that—and a thousand more experiences to take before graduation—we both know our degree is closer with each effort we make and feel the lessons taking hold when we stand up from the latest knockdown and brush ourselves off ready to fight once again as warriors of consciousness.

“IT’S A GOOD DAY TO DIE!”

When each of us talked, you could feel the other listening intently—not nodding and smiling while we waited for a long enough pause to jump in with our own personal agenda. He even voiced his appreciation for how “there” I was when I was moved to tears when he shared with me the beauty of the communication in which his soulmate talked to him—versus a guy he talked to earlier who gave him a “Death is an illusion” response.

I even smiled internally at times when I saw Mark struggling for words to share his experiences, appreciating his effort to put into words in his own unique expression what we both already knew like Plato’s forms in a perfection outside the world of words. “The tao that can be spoken is not the tao,” says the first saying of the classic Tao Te Ching and yet it was never expressed more clearly for me than when I saw Mark looking to pull down the word to describe his sunset and I felt like saying, “Brother, I see the sunset, too. Let’s not talk about it; let’s just appreciate it together.”

I left Mark with a big hug and felt like I had in the first few weeks with the girl who I believed to be my soulmate, that even in separation we would always be deeply connected. As we walked our separate ways, tears came to my eyes in appreciation to the Universe, knowing full well that it hadn’t forsaken me, or even threesaken me for that matter, the same kind of prayerful appreciation I had felt in regards to my soulmate experience [See “The Mushroom Cloud”].

I checked my voicemail and saw there was a call from my friend Maria “DZ.” She was getting a facial and wanted to know if I wanted to meet her afterwards to go to this greenery in my hood where I once accompanied her to buy plants for her garden. I was like, “I’m in” and made a mental note to check out her skin when we met, as I had had my mani and pedi last week but I was seriously overdue for a facial.

When we got to the greenery, it had just closed about five minutes prior. She had walked about forty blocks to get here and she said, “What a waste of time,” but I knew it wasn’t, that what the Universe had in scheduled was not for her to accumulate more bushiness for her outdoor garden but for the dead leaves of our inner gardens to be trimmed and pruned through our cooperative sheers. We decided to walk more and talk.

She had told me last week about her recent ex- and how he had shut off all communication with her without really giving her any real explanation and how frustrating this was for her. Today she shared with me a recent email she sent him and I expressed how it really seemed like, while she may not fully jive with how things went down, that she seemed to have come to a place of peace for herself with regards to the situation. And then suddenly a swelling overtook me and as if being doubled over from the one salmonella’ed raw almond that exists in the country which has resulted in big Big Brother applying heat to every almond so that there is technically no such thing as a raw almond for purchase anymore, I hunched over with one hand on my knee and the other hand carrying shit bags for my dog, pressed against my head…and balled.

“DZ” was like, “Oh my god, are you alright?” She started to screw up my cry and I had to tell her that I just needed to do this for a second and to leave me be. I’m reminded of a woman who came up to me on Thursday and said in that “I can see” psychic way, “You can release what you’re holding in your heart.” While I’m guessing her intention was one of caring, I wanted to respond, “I am in grieving at the moment and need to go through this now for my growth. To release it before I am ready would not provide me the understanding I need. Now kindly fuck off.”

You see the psychic was like “DZ,” when they see someone cry they just want to help them to stop crying—or otherwise laugh and make fun of them. While very nurturing, this is not always what’s best for the crybaby. But while “DZ” did back off, she still wanted to know what the heck was going on.

I told her that the Universe was making things so clear to me by providing mirrors in others to reflect my-self so that I could better see my situation from a more objective point of view. This past Thursday, a guy I had met only once before was sharing with me about his father not being up to speed in consciousness and how this was really frustrating him. It was my story. Earlier today Mark shared with me things he went through that I went through and experiences he was having with his soulmate that I had touched on briefly with my SM and desired more fully. Now “DZ” was sharing with me how she was hurt by a lack of communicative effort from her ex-partner—which was exactly my story—and I was running on overload. It was really an overload of appreciation, because the Universe and I both know that I’m pretty thick and need things spelled out for me extremely clearly in order to get it and She was providing me with just such a “See Spot Run” lesson plan.

When “DZ” and I parted ways at 72^nd Street, I watched her walk for a little, only in part because I’m an ass man [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tujqM2u-BVo] but mostly because I overflowing with appreciation. It felt like we were leads in a movie and all the sidewalk traffic people were just extras hoping to get their big break by the director saying, “You—instead of just walking by, I want you to ask our star for the time.” I called out to “DZ” and she turned around. I said, “You are a dear friend to me!” She mouthed, “What?” and if she weren’t such a dear friend I would have told her deaf ass to just forget it but instead I repeated myself. “You’re a dear friend to me!” She smiled and I put my hand to my heart. She put her hand to her heart and for a second I thought we were 33^rd Degree Masons signaling each other that there would be children’s hearts served tonight at the Lodge meeting.

I’ve recently called in my Soul Brothers and Sisters to stop hiding from my prodigal self. At first I got a bunch of Afros coming to me until I cleared up with the Universe what I meant, that I was asking for my family in spirit—not a higher amount of melanin. My Soul Brothers and Sisters love me for me and care about me and my journey—even if my journey is foreign to their own. And since we don’t want to fuck each other, there is a purity in how we relate. I’m calling them back to join in the big barbeque. I’ve been working so hard on my own that I’ve seemed to forgotten to take a break and enjoy the ritual of killing other creatures, throwing sauce on them and putting them over a fire with family. At this point I don’t even care about running the grill.

I look forward to when I reconnect in body with the One that is my Soul Mate. But until she is ready to join me—or rather, I am ready with fertile soil for her to lay her seed and take root—I feel very blessed to have my Soul Family welcoming me back home. I had a pretty good time burning through my father’s inheritance, but coming home to his open arms was more valuable to me than any misadventures on the way.