Calling All Warrior Monks

July 21, 2007

Calling All Warrior Monks 

It's been a while since I've written anything; my fingers feel like two and half race horses all doped up and ready for split fixins (the half horse has two legs in my head, set right down the middle. You wouldn't think that it's balance would be so good, but it's two hooves are broad enough to cover the equilibrium, so right out of the gate it's gait gulps ground faster than a kidnapper's white unmarked van, the Malleability of Reality is totally unmistakable). I don't really have too much to say, so I'll just make this an exercise for my horses and see if they can outrace the battery on my laptop; all for the cropped hop in my wacky, wily Mr. Eds.

The past few days have been an amazing experience (I stopped to look just to satisfy my own Curiosity). The luminosity of life freely lived, as well as I know how, has been in the spirit of love freely gived (spellchecker says that's not a word, but if I lend it a voice and an equal enunciation it rings clear in my ears). Given in the form of a chance glance, or a beam of light, an adorning smile is it's backing might, and the reciprocity is sincerely implied. It's all I need, I've come to find, to find the divine behind lying eyes. Whether it's given freely, or taken by force, the love in mind knows no bounds and is reflected without even trying, without even seeking, looking, or finding.

By way of explanation of my experience, neither concretized for your understanding, nor abstracted for mine, there's a sly way to slip in between the ribs of an ego. The glory's in the shiv, constructed by love, unobstructed, and delivered in the dark. Doing in the deepest sin of a proud ness partaken laced by the crisscrossing of Crossing Paths. Isn't that just the way? When a ready run comes across some random out comer, it's either take on a fighting stance as you assess one another, to poke and prod for buttons and levers (pronounced LEE-vers, possibly painted by a British accent), to see if one can gain the upper hand in a handless land of strangers, or, maybe you just drop ideas and ideals and notions of what's real, and shove love in the form of conversation. I guess it all depends on the time and place, where you'll find your own way by ways of grace and gratitude for an attitude shared, a rarity, inside a multitude of energies bared like the teeth on the grinding gears behind the face of a crooning sin of a tick tocking clock, mocking our steady measured pace.  

So I went to the local sanwhichery here near work (to round the first turn, ol' two leg in the lead) and, alongside a waning day, my energy ran parallel to the pattern of it. My stomach had been badmouthing me for most of the morning, and I had finally had enough of dodging it's racial slurs and nasty epithets, so I decided that if it wanted some work so badly, I might as well see what I could do.

As I arrived on line at this quaint eatery, contemplating the day's deeds and how I was to refuel, this woman jumped (yes jumped; she landed on both feet) in front of my face and blurted, "You baol me sa su?!" Her dialect was only slightly garbled by a broken English delivered with a sweet and sour Asian flavor, and was possibly due to a taste of over sized tongue. 

"You buy me sa su?!" she cried again, the volume of her voice rising with insistence and shrilling her need. Her teeth had an interesting pattern to their set, if I didn't know any better, I would have said she had a black tooth for every white, as if some slightly slipped on banana peel of a piano maker had forgotten that there are no sharps or flats between E and F, and B and C. I didn't attempt to play them, but I quickly ascertained that her black keys were only gaps in the scenery, making a milieu of interacting ivory and space. 

"You buy me som su-Puh?!" I think she might have realized, by the confused airs in my eyes that I was having difficulty digesting the unexpected, so she over-exaggerated the enunciation of her final consonant (a plosive no less), littering the air around with spittle and interesting breath, but by this point I had figured out what she was requesting of me and an interesting thing happened. 

At first, my inner program kicked into gear. You know, that programming we all have ingrained in our self-concept about how to deal with a world that's never really been effectively dealt with. This particular program was the one about hobos and their apparent need to fill their stomach because they don't have money to buy it themselves, so they resort to more insistent methods of cajoling a meal from the Universe around them (okay, so maybe that's not the program verbatim, but it's a close approximation). 

I caught myself shutting down in judgment of this woman and her lack of ability to feed herself, or find food. In the wild, she'd be dead by now (in the now she's clever enough to do what it takes, which kind of makes it another kind of wildness in and of itself), socially below a person who fends for themselves and makes their living working hard (isn't it hard work to do what she does?), insinuating herself into my personal boundary and breaching all kinds of social etiquette (maybe she never got the handbook). Instead of shutting down with a shunning frown however, I found a new narrative nosing it's way into my system. This one said, "look, you have the money and she doesn't. You're going to eat and so could she. It actually wouldn't take much out of you if you were to buy this woman a bowl of soup for five bucks. Why not just ba her sa su?" 

I bought her some soup, and the relief and joy in her eyes that shone through could have felled a steadfast mountain. The guys behind the counter glanced at her, then at me as if they've seen this all before and I the sucker of this regular occurrence, but I didn't really care. It wasn't really about this woman, or me, or the situation. I was just buying soup. They kept their mouths shut, for whatever reason, and bowled up some soup with some silly smirks and knowing looks passed about like too small a joint around too large a circle of acquaintances. The really cool part came after I'd completed the transaction. 

I turned to my new wingman (wingwoman?) with, potentially, her only meal of the day in my hands, and, after she asked me to set it on the table for her (which I did), she reached into one of her many plastic bags and pulled out a packet of CreamSavers (by Life Saver I think) and handed it to me with so much graceful gratitude that I was actually touched by the gesture. She didn't have any money, or any real sustenance, but she had a pack of Life Saver candies and gave it without hesitation (not a lot to me, but probably thirty percent of her world, give or take a point or two). 

My stomach and I did eventually come to terms, but it was probably less grateful, in some respects, than the stomach that has no concept of when legal settlement will arrive. 

If I understand it correctly, meeting someone on the outskirts of social perception, where all things are equal, shares a kinship with apogee, or could, if the ego drops long enough to see through the hardened veil that instantly besots our personal point of view. A simple conversation can be a nice thing standing on line at the grocery store, or the bank, or among the ranks of warrior monks everywhere. You never know what the exchange of knowledge could be, but you'll never find out by rubbing in those things we think we are. A shooting star, or a flying fish, can be wished upon all the same and after all the fame and glory embers are dismembered, you still lie in bed alone and float on glorious memories remembered, or worries engendered by whatever it is the fear sings in your ears, as do I. But the fear doesn't really belong in a song to sing, it has not much bearing on the direction in which we're heading, which is to say, to the same place. Right Here. Right Now.