Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 5)

THE HOMELESS MASTER

About 20 years ago, I worked in Center City, Philadelphia for an insurance company, and I’d take the speed line from New Jersey to a stop a few blocks from my office. Along my walk in, there used to be a homeless guy just sitting on the sidewalk. I’d watch people go by him, paying him no attention save the inconvenience they had either walking over him or around him.

I would often buy a large fruit bowl from one of the roach coaches near the train station. I’d eat some for breakfast, and give him the rest. Every morning, he’d say thank you with a “much love, brother” when I’d hand him the box of fruit.

One day, he asked me why I gave him breakfast so often. “Because I feel bad you are homeless,” I replied. He laughed, a belly laugh, exposing his missing teeth as his eyes lit up with joy.

“I take the box because I feel sorry for you,” he said.

“You feel sorry for me?”

“Well, yeah. Look at unhappy you are, working every day to make someone else rich. You’re so afraid of being free that you’ve put yourself in a prison you call a home and a cell you call a job, working for the man. You won’t see any bars around me.”

“Yeah, but you need charity just to survive,” I replied, feeling defensive.

“True, but don’t we all? Your’s comes from the man who signs your paycheck, mine comes from people like you.”

“But I provide something to get my paycheck…”

“How do you feel when you give me breakfast?” he asked.

“I feel pretty good. Or at least I did.”

“Then I provide you something to get my breakfast. Tell me, which is the more important service?”

I smiled. “I gotcha.”

“Beggars like me provide everyone a service. For some, it’s a reminder of where they could end up. It brings up the fear they have in being completely free, of being unlike their parents, their friends, their family. For others, I give them a sense of love. For many of those people they don’t feel love until they give me something. I think I provide a wonderful service, and it costs me nothing.”

He was truly a wonderful gift, wrapped in tattered clothing, dirty skin, and a rancid smell that shrouded his beautiful heart. 20 years later and I still remember him, his freedom, and his perspective.

“A beggars bowl is never empty. It’s always filled with love.”

There’s a Silence in the nights we share, a peace between us, resonating a bond forged long before we first touched and eons before we knew each other’s name. In the sweet caverns of our darkness the song of Silence courses in the space between the stars, giving life to the light that exists within it. In the night we make our music, in the night we state our prayers in the holiest of ways. In the night we know our days that are filled with the notes our hearts have played, in the tune only we care to hear,

There’s a Silence between the heartbeats we share, a Silence that allows the echos from an eternity of lifetimes to create new music from the mist. There’s a beauty to the power of that beating sound; the rhythm of life made whole by the sweat of our bodies laying powerfully upon the altar we have built from remnants of a past made whole. We’ve built such beauty from the burning embers of the bridges we have burned,  giving birth a sacred space in the spaces that we lay, together, telling secrets and stories as smiling lips gently embrace each other, as tested hearts find their sultry muse.

When our love has been made and the stories have been shared, I lay awake in such wondrous Silence, listening to you breathe, the rain falling softly on the walls around us, the  faint sounds of nocturnal creatures bringing me home to the wilderness.  I find your form in the darkness, resting beautifully as only can. I use every bit of light to take you in, and I pay homage to the darkness that has me reach for you, and the Silence that has me knowing such awesome beauty. It is then that I wonder if the light I see exists outside of us at all, or if it is the spark of creation that our Universe unfolding gifts us along the lines of the connection that we share. Such a mighty spark surely can light up the world, even before it realizes its own greatness.

Then there are those whispers; those faint tremors that rock the earth beneath our feet. Sometimes they are words, but usually they are something so much clearer. I hear them in your touch, in your kiss. I hear them in the little bumps so beautifully etched upon your skin. I hear them in your laugh, in your smile, in the way your eyes light up each and every space they’re in. I hear them in your voice regardless of the words you are using. I can feel them course throughout my Being, never stopping for long in any one place, but never leaving that place either.

I hear you whispering to me in the Sunrise, and in the moonlit sky. I hear you in the pulsing of my body, and I hear you the moment a raindrop lands on my naked skin. I hear you in everything, in the void, in the fullness, in the solid ground and the shifting sand, in the still waters and in the waves breaking hard against a rocky shore. I hear you in the cloudless sky and in the rolling thunder.

I hear your whisper in my heart, and as the tears roll down my happy face, I hear you there, too.

As a certain man I need nothing more. There is no evidence I need, no clock I need to watch. There are no walls I I need to crumble, or hills I need to climb. There is only our loving Silence, and our faithful whispers, and all I need do is listen. They never tell falsehoods, and they never mislead. In our strong embrace, the one where we squeeze all the air between us to somewhere else, we both know our wonderful, beautiful, undeniable truth. It’s a truth no one else need know, or subscribe to, or deny. It is ours, and we know exactly what it is.

Says the old man gasping on the floor, his last breath announcing its arrival.

I remember before I loved you. I remember the empty moments, the hours spent imagining who you were. I remember the healing in my life, the challenges that came in preparation for the moment I first laid eyes on you.

I remember meeting you. I remember the waves of indescribability that invaded every part of me. I remember trying to gather my senses, but being so lost in that ocean of love that I had forgotten how to swim. 

I remember holding you, my love. I remember the hope we shared in the warm breezes that had once touched the mountaintops. I remember the possibilities we explored, the stories of truth we shared, ending in those embraces that only lovers know.

I remember the strength I felt in your blissful joy. I remember those moments when nothing else seemed to matter. I remember life’s struggles becoming easier, life’s stories becoming happier, and life’s potential seemingly endless in the paths our union had lit before us.

And I remember, says the old man gasping on the floor, when time and space became too much to bear, when the grains of sand between us became more important than the beach we shared. I remember when we ended before we began, and when the rays of hope that once lit our ways became fires that destroyed the very forest we had searched for.

As I look at the faces of love that surround me now, I see your youthful face among them, a figment of my mind. Perhaps you always were part of my imagination. Perhaps you existed only in my heart, a creation of my mind as a gift to a man so deserving of your presence.

And with that a smile, a tear, and a final breath. A life of possibility had been lived.

…and because you love me, all things are possible.

Possible is the moment of our enrapture, when the moments alone will unite with the feel of our touch, the heat of our kiss, the sea of sweat that pours from our bodies.

Possible is the time when you hold my hand as we walk upon a wilderness trail, both embracing and being embraced by the Nature that holds us firm.

Possible is the miracle of our arrival, that glorious moment when time is frozen and space is narrowed to barely fit a breath of air between us. Wondrous is how two hearts always looking had found their mate, how nothing stood in their way.

‘Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.’ ~Rumi

Behind us will be the remnants of those obstacles we created, strewn about as a testament to the power of our affection. Filled-in holes and leveled hills will mark our footsteps, and the sacred suns of a rejoicing Universe will be the light that guides our way.

All because I loved you, and you loved me.

You will feel my hand strong in yours, and my body as it sinks into a long embrace. We’ll make love under the moon, letting the waves of howling ecstasy escape our bodies into the pale-lit ether. We’ll call every place where we lay our home, and surrender to the madness that we are destined to be.

Wow, what an amazing concept. What will be. What is destined.

For now, I will lick my wounds and be lonely in my thoughts of you. Such loneliness is a grand gesture of our love. It is the valley to the highest peak, the vast ocean fed by springs of eternal hope. There will be a time, however, when I stand up to find you peaking around a corner, and I take you in my arms in a promise of one final, eternal embrace. What a moment that will be, and what a kiss we will share.