Not long ago, I stopped at a convenience store to supply myself with directions and snacks. I pulled up to the shaded side of the building hoping to spare myself some of the blinding heat drowning the store in its embrace, and noticed an elderly homeless man making himself busy searching for cigarette butts in the sanded trash receptacle located just beside the door. He combed through the offerings found there, with the practiced patience of a man used to sifting the leavings of others, to meet his simple needs.
He was thin to the point of painfulness, not an ounce of spare flesh hung from his bones or crept out over the lip of his belt. His arm muscles exposed to view in his dirty t-shirt, roped and attached to his bones like small snakes curling around the long bone in his upper arm and roping his forearm with such sharpness, that he seemed somehow unclothed, compared to the ample flesh of those coming and going through his world like the shades, we no doubt were, flowing around and past him, like water around an obstruction in a stream. To say that he was dirty does not at all describe the layers of soil and the gray sheen that covered him from head to toe. His clothes carried the encroaching layering of dirt as though it were especially dedicated to ending the patches of white that, here and there, stubbornly clung to the fibers out of which it was once spun.
He wore an old baseball cap to shield his eyes from the glaring sun, his head bent to it's task of sifting and sorting, and the brim of his cap making his world a visually circumspect one. I doubt he would have seen me, even if he had been aware of my presence, which there seemed little evidence of. After he had found all the cigarette fragments of an acceptable length, he went to the dead middle of the first parking place in the shade, directly beside my car, and knees bent he sat on his spare haunches and began to sort through a stack of pennies.
There were perhaps 40 of them in all, and he made and remade stacks of them, like poker chips on green felt. He shifted them from one size of stack to another, and from one location to another, in the same manner as black jack players I have seen at tables in Las Vegas. A kind of restless and hypnotic, kinetic energy expressing itself in the placing and replacing of small towers of rounded and compartmentalized copper objects. His attention never waivered, he never looked up, and he seemed entirely unaware that he was occupying an entire car parking spot in a busy and bustling environment.
I was attacked to, and repelled by, his concentrated focus and the magic it surrounded him with, making all but his own thoughts utterly invisible to him.
Later that same week, I stopped in Whole Foods – my favorite lunch spot – and encountered a homeless woman, also completely lost in her interior reaches, and yet there were some striking differences.
She too, wore clothes covered in the same gray film, evidence of weeks or perhaps months of absence from any form of laundering. Unusually, she wore layers and layers of clothing, here in our sun drenched climate a pair of shorts and a t-shirt is all most people can endure as the thermometer climbs well into the triple digits, for many months each year.
With temperatures already over a hundred, she had on socks and tennis shoes, with slim pants beneath a floor length skirt and a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over her head, a shirt atop that…and gloves, one cotton and one plastic. Her gloves were of especial interest to me, I felt they were more about protection of some sort, rather than for the added warmth they might bring, despite the fact that they too, were grimy gray and ragged from use. I have always thought of the homeless as being underfed, (she too, was painfully thin), and yet she sat before a banquet of such rich diversity that it was somewhat surprising to me. Every type of food was represented, dairy, fruit, meat, pasta’s, grains, deserts… they were spread out upon her table in staggering volume, bound in plastic and resting jumbled one upon the next, in a veritable cornucopia of edible possibility.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that they looked inviting… some of it I would have worried, quite rightly, about salmonella issues as there is no way she could be providing the proper cold storage for her many food items, and even the breads will grow molds and become unpalatable in very short order, in the temperatures to which our city is exposed.
So my first observation was that hunger is something she is not plagued by, despite her thinness, at least on this particular day. (I have encountered her at Whole Foods on two other occasions, and each time, this day included, someone from the lunch crowd approached her and asked if they could buy her some lunch…and thus her basic survival is not in question).
I sat behind her and to the right of her, fascinated by her presence and by the expression of her interior process. Unlike the homeless man who seemed entirely beyond the pale, completely unaware of anything at all, she was quite actively engaged in an inner dialogue.
As each new “functioning” member of society entered the lunchroom, all were affected by her presence. Some stared quite openly, as though she could not know that she was being ogled, some cut quick glances her way, and one woman stopped her advance into the area and retreated back the way she had come, with a look of disgust written large upon her features…
All of us could feel her presence, and unlike the members of our collective humanity who seem to glow from within, and drag our attention their way because they are beautiful, graceful, or exquisite in some way…she compelled attention for exactly the opposite reason. Her quiet, self-contained demeanor, her unpacked and on display possessions, and her layers of dirt all spoke to a supposed misery, that may well have been our collective projections.
She, in fact, had more than she needed, some form of shelter was provided somewhere, clothes were available and food was plentiful…and yet, you could feel the impact she had on each of the room’s other lunch customers. A kind of…”there but by the Grace of God, go I” kind of self crossing and fearful pulling away, from one so different than all the rest of us.
Sitting behind her, and fascinated with her experience, I both watched her and didn’t. She spoke softly to herself, and ate quietly, while I tried to read the book I had with me…but every few moments she would raise her plastic gloved hand in a gesture of protection. Her palm facing inward, toward her face, she would lift her arm with speed and commitment as though something were flying her direction and might hit her in the face, if she were not so defended.
Not every time, but frequently, her other cotton gloved hand would bounce up beside her right ear…held a few inches from her head, with now a hand held in front and one on the right side, she might have been executing an energetic dance move, had there been the slightest hint of music.
Each time her hands flew up to defend her, the movement would pull me from my book to peer at what might be assaulting her from out of the reaches of the unknown, and of course there was no way for me to discern whatever had been launched at her, but I could not avoid the looking.
It began to develop a kind of superstitious quality to it… my looking and her defending herself, were so well timed, I actually asked myself if she somehow knew I was observing her at the precise moment she needed defense against my intrusion. But then I scoffed at myself for making her experience about me, something we humans are so very prone to doing.
Her need for defense was an internal one, and solely so…
Her hands in their plastic and cotton coverings, leaping into action to protect her, were the evidence of a mind divided by itself. The only threat that could possible have been occurring, there in the midst of Whole Foods bountiful environment, was the assault of a mind turned in upon itself.
We, those of us, who daily sift through our comparisons of ourselves against another, like the cigarette hunter, endlessly looking for some measuring device to determine if we are more worthy than that one, or less so than another one….are equally divided inside ourselves, but not so much, that it can be seen from the exterior.
We take some measure of comfort in the fact that our lips are not moving to the rhythm of the internal dialogue that we are constantly engaged in, and thus we assume that our hold on reality is more steady and capable, than the woman who must defend herself from her own mind, with her own hands.
We imagine that because we bathe, work, launder our clothes, pay a mortgage, and know where we are going to sleep tonight…that we are somehow better off, somehow better examples of humanity, than someone so adrift in their own interior that they cannot be reached. I submit that distinction is the splitting of hairs, a razor thin edge of difference to small to even count.
You and I, just like he and she, are victims of our own hand. There is nothing in the world that can harm us save ourselves.
If you have been betrayed, beaten, harmed, shamed, shunned, or unloved…the suffering you continue to endure is by your own hand. It is a very difficult thing to understand and an even more difficult thing to practice, but the Truth hidden behind your divided mind and mine, is that no event, no matter how evil, can reach you unless you allow it. It is your response to the events in your life, that shape your reality and nothing else…
We are put here to remember that.
Born and born again, over and over, we are required to remember that our inner experience is a choice; the outer event is a karmic obligation.
I am reminded of a Buddhist adage that describes the spiritual path of remembering the Truth in this way…“at first nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, and in the end nothing leaves.”
In the beginning of our remembering the Truth, when we are lost and trying to protect ourselves with our cotton and plastic sheathed hands, “nothing” seems to come. We cry out to our god, in whatever form he may take, and we suffer at having been so forsaken. In the middle, “nothing stays”… finally wisdom has begun to make an appearance… one day we know that all of Life’s experience sources out of how we choose to use the power of our attention, that finding ourselves is a matter of coming to know that what we tell ourselves is not real, but rather our personal illusions… and the next moment, the wisdom departs us.
Here is where I find myself…
One day I am bathed in the blessed relief of the Truth of What Is, and the next day I am sifting through comparisons with others and losing myself once more to my divided mind, and thereby empty heart.
“In the middle…nothing stays…”
Nothing may stay in the middle, but I can tell you for sure that faith blooms even so…I know in my heart of hearts, that there will come a day when “nothing leaves”. A day so full of impersonal self-understanding that I cannot be lost again amongst the rubble of the conditioned mind, a day when my heart, will no longer allow my mind, to rob me of the peace that “passeth understanding”.
A day in which I will live solely from the depth of Being, and will not be persuaded to return to the conditioned mind’s unwinnable war. Here is the Promised Land, the land that flows with milk and honey, the land of our Fathers, the end of our journey, the way back home…the place… “where nothing leaves”.
I have lifetimes of faith built upon this truth, that one day I will be free of the divided mind, that one day all of us will be freed from the divided mind…and suffering will leave us for ever, and ever, Amen.
Adayre R. Miller
5/14/2011
photo courtesy of Nardell and flickr photo sharing to see more of this artist’s work, please follow this link http://www.flickr.com/photos/nardell/5510203776/in/gallery-58398502@N05-72157626144720522/
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