I went to dinner recently; at the home of a couple of friends I haven’t seen for a good long while.
They had changed quite a bit since last we saw each other, gone entirely was the Buddha belly they both had begun to grow, and in its place the bantam weight flat surface of the high school years. They both had new hairstyles and new jobs, but the same kindness and care remained.
I remember remarking once, to some casual acquaintances, that there is no better friend for a single straight woman to have, than a gay man. I got a fairly threatened response from some of the straight men to whom I was speaking…but ya’ know…I’m just sayin…
So a pair, is of course, double the pleasure.
After dinner, which was lovely and yummy – as always, we settled down to some game playing fun and as the dominos were unpacked, one of my friends allowed as to how he was going to get his “hookah,” and have an after dinner smoke. For those of you who may not know, a hookah is not a gal with a skirt up to “there” wearing fish net stockings, but rather, it’s a water pipe used quite frequently in most middle-eastern countries for the smoking of tobacco. I have seen them in the movies and as objects in the hidden-object computer games I am fond of. But never in real life…
I knew the basic shape was large, bulbous, glass spheres stacked atop one another, the fattest one on the bottom and rising to a smallish one just beneath the reservoir for the tobacco, (or wacky weed - for those of us who came of age in the seventies - in my one year of “experimentation,” I smoked wacky weed out of reconfigured paper towel role cores, once a hollowed-out apple, and of course, a roll your own…but never the mother of all water pipes…a hookah…)
The ones I have seen pictures of, all appear to be in the 18 to 22 inch range, so try to imagine…if you can, the sheer visual surprise of a hookah nearly 3.5 half feet tall. I am 5’3”, and I just know if I had been standing beside it, it surely would have reached many inches above my waist. (Yes… it is possible I am exaggerating, but if it is not actually 3.5 half feet tall…it is most assuredly, visually 3.5 feet tall).
It was red…but let us not stop there…it was fire engine red, candy apple red, cherry bomb red, lit-from-within-fireball-red…I’m saying…it was RED!!
And as my friend un-ceremoniously plucked it from the standing broom closet, it surely has to be stored in, and set it down upon the countertop…. rising in all its red magnificence, as straight and true as the Red Suited Queen’s guard at Buckingham Palace, it landed with a thud… directly upon my funny bone.
I didn’t just laugh…I bellowed, guffawed, howled, slapped the table and rolled, almost - right off my chair.
I unconsciously risked offending both my friends, when I couldn’t stop laughing and then laughed the harder, when the one friend said his partner had purchased it for him as a present, and I of course, wit gone wild…made comment about how, he surely, had secured the most tasteful one to be had… in the entire metroplex, that is our fair conglomeration of cities.
… Did I mention how RED it is?....
And with gold filigree decoration, right round its Santa Belly.
But just then, my non-smoking friend – and purchaser of said implement, allowed as to how…if I thought this, was a funny sight…I should see his partner sitting naked with his “bits and bobs” in plain view, puffing away on the thing.
That is when I had to lay my head upon the table, and weep with mirth.
The kind of laughter, that fills up your chest cavity and rolls around your ribcage massaging your innards. The kind of laughter, you normally have to pay some very capable entertainers to procure for you. The kind of laughter, that increases your heart rate, depth of breath and sensitivity to, the wonder and beauty and humor, life has to offer at every turn. Dinner, and a show…what a treat!
Finally, mirth decreasing to just a Cheshire cat grin, I watched my friend prepare his smoke. There were tiny silver tongs with which to handle the teeny-tiny-Ken-and-Barbie-sized, charcoal briquettes. Which then must be burned to a smoldering red ash, in preparation for the application of specialty purchased aromatic tobacco, to be placed atop the now smoldering coals…and finally, the gurgling of smoke as it was pulled thru its water bath. Not the tap-one-out-of-the-package-and-fire-it-up-with-your-bic, ritual that accompanied the god-awful years when I smoked, no, this ritual was a 3.5 half foot sized, RED one…with tongs, hot plate, coiling smoking tube, and fruit flavored tobacco.
Long ago, in the eighties, I visited Tokyo for nearly a month. One of the most surprising things I noticed about the youth of Japan, at the time, was the near total commitment to smoking. Every club and restaurant I entered, was filled with young people puffing away and they seemed to all have one preferred brand….Marlboro red top. The distinctive half diamond lipstick-red-top, of the package was on display at nearly every table I passed. It seemed to me, that it was the same sort of status symbol there that a Mercedes Benz car key was, in the American clubs I attended back home. The distinctive black fob - positioned just so - on the table, declaring as it did, for all to see…”yes, I am very successful, and I have the Benz to prove it”…so too, the careful display of the Marlboro red top declared the Japanese desire for the wild and wooly American expressiveness and outrageousness, in a society governed by thousands of years of studied politeness.
The Marlboro red top has a long and storied history. The tougher than tough American cowboy, sporting a single smoke tucked behind his ear. The James Dean wanna be, oulaws-without-a-clue, with their redtop rolled into a white t-shirt sleeve, or the Rat Packer whose eyes are permanently squinted from the smoke swirling up around his head, while Jazz greats play mournfully on stage. (Just a tiny bit of interesting trivia here – the Marlboro brand was originally conceived as a woman’s brand, the filter paper as bright a red as the box top, so ladies of the fifties could smoke without leaving a telltale lipstick stain…it flopped, was brought back in house and reassigned a Cowboy as the advertising hook, and well, as they say…the rest is emphysema racked history).
I guess, we may rightly assume, the RED hookah will not become the status symbol that a Marlboro red top once was in Japan…for heaven’s sake… it would have to be carted around in a child’s red-flyer wagon, the one with the big fat rubber wheels.
Now, these essays are dedicated to my spiritual journey…and you may be thinking right about now…that I will be incapable of making the leap from hookah’s, cigarettes, and jazzy bad boys, to spiritual clarity and discernment. You may well have underestimated my commitment…
The whole of the Spiritual experience might well be encapsulated in the idea of the Present Moment, or the Eternal Now, or the Experience of Being, but what all these various names mean are one and the same thing…that your heart, mind, soul, and spirit are firmly aligned with the location of your body.
Most people do not fully understand the concept of The Now, it has moved into the lexicon of language and is now become a word similar to God, or Heaven, or Manifesting…lost is the vitality of the word - it having been replaced with a “concept,” for the mind to add to its’ inventory of concepts.
Living engaged with the Now means complete absorption in the experience currently expressing itself thru the body. Thoughts of the past, future, or indeed any thought that does not suit the current experience does not exist, nor does any other moment save the one just under your feet.
There are a handful of physiological conditions that by their very nature force a person into the Now. An orgasm, “or little death” as it was once called, primal fear as in a-snake-is-slithering-your-way-better-run-for-the-hills, and The Belly Laugh…
These three snap us immediately and firmly into our bodies where “thinking” cannot invade the moment with thoughts of past or future, to rob of us of the only moment we can actually live in.
Truly living it turns out, has nothing to do with how much you achieve, or how many experiences you get to pack into your allotted time. Truly living is measured by how many minutes you stay completely grounded within your body’s present moment experience…and by that measure a child who dies in utero, could potentially have “lived” longer than a man who dies on his eightieth birthday.
Here’s the most important point, true spiritual maturation or growth can only happen in the present moment. For every moment spent imagining you can manage the future, or reminiscing about the past, you have moved into the illusion and fallen into the deadly dull sleep of the unawakened, or what the Bible calls the Lost.
While asleep, the toxins of desire, needs, goals, planning, becoming, seeking, grasping for greatness, and all the various forms of searching outside oneself ripen and threaten the very life from which you are running. Your mind and heart sicken, even as the clever ego convinces you that what you are believing must be believed, that what you are doing must be done, that what you are afraid of must be defended against….
And happiness, well being, harmony and Joy slip by and become increasingly unattainable no matter how much you have, have done, are applauded for, or how great is your name.
Here is a masterful definition of Happiness, by an author whose name is no longer known to me…”Happiness is the condition that ensues when all seeking, grasping or desire for anything outside the immediate situation has stopped. It is the condition that exists when all feeling of poverty, need, insufficiency and comparison has stopped - a condition in which desire is absent. It is the mirror surface of a pond when no wind blows. This explains why it disappears, the moment we try to grasp it, by any effort of wish or will.
Happiness seeks nothing outside itself; pleasure seeks constant rewards and tidbits. Happiness simply is. It has no cause and does not depend on outside props to hold it up.” – Author Unknown
Pleasure seeks…happiness simply is…
The next time primal fear has you by the throat, or your loved one and you join in harmony, or a red hookah gives you the belly laughs…try to capture the experience of Beingness, the total cessation of the thinking mind and all its cleverness and craftiness, and you will be closer to the Eternal Truth than you have been at any other point in your life. Truth does not need you to “believe”… in point of fact… believing is one of the greatest stumbling blocks to understanding, if not the greatest.
And once you have experienced a moment free from the thinking mind, then I bid you…
Now that, “You have found the conditions in which the openness of your heart can become the reality of your being. Stay here, until you acquire a force in you that nothing can destroy.” G. I. Gurdjieff’s
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