Personal Development
Women and Men Will One Day Weave Gold in Your Hair
On Giving Peace a Chance, Being Lightness and Laughing Until It Hurts
I’m lucky. That’s right, lucky, and now having said that straight from my narcoleptic lips I can feel the tremors coming on. My eyes roll slowly wildly like two ball bearings casually set loose in a shallow glass bowl. I make myself stand up, walk away from my desk and get ready for a workout after drinking a glass of cucumber and lemon water.
I’m lucky because I’m human. I know, I know, I know, being human can feel tortuous at times, but still there’s an unending force to this life. Like the fact that similar to you I have eighty six billion neurons in my head. Being bipedal has everything to do with that, and having been non-bipedal before has everything to do with that. How’s that for an unending force? I can’t get enough of it. And how about the great apes, those giants whose shoulders carry us?
I want to tell you about how lucky I feel and to do that I want to tell you about someone, and another someone and a something, which leads to a something else which is altogether another something where we might go from there.
On any given day you will find Santiago rising around five in the morning. He likes the sound of quiet. He pulls on a hoodie and shorts. On the deck he finds his Adidas. From there he runs in the valley for an hour.
After he showers he thanks his Father for the earth and for his body and for his soul. He praises his Father for all that he will never be. Santiago praises his Father for mystery, and for tears, and for all he will be. When he cries, even if he is miserable and suffers, he is happy.
Suffer wisely!
Santiago is a therapist by profession. I’m not a therapist but he relies on me as his because I’m great at listening and I don’t repeat what anyone tells me, and I give good advice. We’re on the phone a lot, not processing like a counselor/client but just being ourselves and letting it all hang out. It’s natural, it’s easy; we knew one another when we were wild on Santa Monica Boulevard when it wasn’t easy but boy was it an unnaturally natural feeling in the midst of poverty and random meals like god-kissed kings, a little on the unwashed side however charmed. And under that being scared and knowing it and being brave anyhow.
Every morning after I wake I place my feet on the floor. Earnestly, as I say it now and in prayers, I give thanks and they are varied and full from all religions and it is wonderful. When I write about placing my feet on the floor I’m referring to a passage in Ways of the Torah, and when I look forward and full of beauty from whatever part of that text I’m committing to memory I remember my confidence is huge.
My confidence is natural. It is a form of praise. This praise extends to Santiago.
Santiago and I are drawn to each other for lots of reasons, in praise or not, religious and otherwise.
My vision of friendship includes: not seeing eye to eye, and having a stronger faith in, about and for friendship. Friendship is about unimaginable successes.
Santiago and I found each other one middle of a day when each of us reached for the last avocado at the grocery store. We’d seen one another around but face to face it was different. Two little smirking jerks gazing at one another, suspicious, unsure, with hands on the same prize, the ripe avocado, a terrific stretch of time in ten unadulterated seconds of silence and unknowing, a pulsing heat building between us, and what it amounted to in the end was all that mattered, he won the avocado and I won him.
Today his friend Jennifer is with him. She is an actress.
Santiago runs lines with her. She has a late call but what’s on her mind is her mother who is getting older, lives in another state and is sick (June 2018 is the time stamp for this tale). Jennifer wants the three of us to pray together because she wants a lot of love going out to her mother. She and I are acquaintances but it’s like we know one another more deeply because Santiago shares his love for us with us and we’ve snuck cigarettes together when we thought no one was looking and out of the blue she once called me for advice. She says I’m grounded because I don’t pay attention to noise.
Santiago calls me to join them.
Intermittently I’m between vising my family and journeying through the deep South looking for connections to all religions (not that I’ll find them all here, but more than one might suspect) and interviewing people to find out what they believe and how they believe what they believe, and if they don’t believe, what they believe about what they don’t believe. There is more, there is always more, because we are of multitudes. In additions to our differences, our languages and stories have unending similarities in the multitudes of multitudes of multitudes. Bring on the similarities and the differences. I wanna get lost and found in the multitudes and I want others who want the same thing or are at least engaged and accept that walks of life bring great personal vaults of wisdom gathered over centuries, passed down one by one, one to another, and one another as one.
In this journey I am after the eternal and I will find it because we are already living it. And all of this, without burden and a happy heart in the name of peace, each of us being a lightness as we go.
“Jennifer’s here,” Santiago says when he calls me. And like that the three of us get on our laptops and Skype. They are in Santiago’s garden and it’s kind of killing me. I am outside a white clapboard church where I know some of the people who worship here and where I parked because the thing looks like a postcard and I can connect to the network.
Jennifer and Santiago trade jokes in the garden. They sit at the long wooden table there where we’ve shared countless meals. I’m jealous, I admit it. I miss being home and going over to Santiago’s house whenever he and I are both free.
Santiago and Jennifer and I take turns saying prayers for her mother. No one’s in any hurry. We make the prayers up as we go. We’re sincere and we add laughter to it, we’ve got to, to turn sorrow on its head and sees it as a strength, a non-sorrow. We laugh and Jennifer tears up, they hold hands and I hold my hands up to the screen, and then we pray a little while longer giving thanks for laughter and uncertainty.
It makes sense our praying revolves around strong women. I love women. I love prayer and I love women and I love women in religion.
When we invoke prayer the female is there from the moment before we begin. So I when I pray for Jennifer and her mother I pray from the female source, and follow with the male source too and continue when they are one. When I pray, I am mindful for all the women of the religious texts and their times too, and their stories which we know, and the stories which were destroyed and we’ll never know, and the stories which are hidden somewhere and which we may or may never find and know. There’s got to be more stories from women out there. There’s likely some more by men hidden for safekeeping somewhere too. I’m always in prayer for whoever came before, the same way I am for whoever’s coming later, and for who we are now.
We start to wrap up the Skype. Santiago wants me to come back to California and do the photos for a feature. Jennifer says she is having a party and Santiago’s saying he won’t attend without me. Now I want to go home more than ever, but I have people I want to talk to here and elsewhere, like Hattie who I am meeting today. I have known Hattie since our time in the dining hall from university days when she was a cook and I worked the door for students, faculty and guests. Her eyes are blue and can wreck anyone’s heart. Her faith is her fortress but laughter is its door.
“You end our circle of love,” Santiago says to me and I’m all for it.
She puts on strength and honor as if they were her clothes. She can laugh at the days that are coming. Proverbs 31:25
Santiago calls me after Jennifer has headed out to the studio.
You made her cry, he says.
My heart is happy for every living woman, young and old alike, may they be loved and protected as they protect and love. Let us praise women who have come before and who are of spirit, whose breath is ours, whose history has led us to where we are now.
My heart is happy for me because I praise women, men, animals, and nature.
To our benefit, we have learned from women and men and animals and nature who learned from God we are spirit on earth.
In my mind’s eye I picture a crown, imperfect and how I like it. I place it on my head, and after I have worn it I’ll remove it and bow and pray that every day’s a day for a crown and that every head is adorned with one woven with magnitudes of faith, from multitudes of multitudes of multitudes.
As for me and Santiago, we have talked all we can and it feels pretty damn good to disconnect.