awakening

In the summer of 1980, I’m fifteen and sitting in the back of a VW bus my older brother drives along a highway in northern Arizona. The old Indian woman we’d picked up hitchhiking sits next to me, but we have turned to face each other in silence. She holds my hands in hers, which are brown and thick and knotted. She looks into my eyes, her gaze steady and unwavering but gentle and soft. I look into hers. There are no demands. Just an easy resting. 

I don’t recall how long we sat like this. And I don’t remember dropping her off. But before we parted, she took a pair of turquoise earrings out of an apron pocket, pressed them into my hands, and said, “For your mother.” How had she known it was my mother’s birthday?

At that age, I had no words for it, but two inchoate thoughts arose. 

The first was: “I am susceptible to this, formed for this.” I discovered, without surprise, that I was and had always been a member of a hidden clan of which this woman was also a member and that she recognized me. This clan includes everything in the universe.

The second thought was, “My mother put this in me.” She embedded within me a kind of secret valve, which under certain circumstances would spring open and render me completely porous to the emanating flow of the world and reveal that all is one single sea of energy and meaning ceaselessly circulating, traversing myriad forms, including you and me and the old Indian woman.

That was the first time I remember being conscious of my susceptibility to connection with what is. Before that, I’d simply inhabited that connection unselfconsciously. But now, for the first time, I knew the connection was always there, and I could let it sweep through me at any time. 

Given what I now do for a living, it’s striking that this revelation happened in a car with a stranger. Maybe my mom put that in me, too. Driving me to school once, she shared that she struggled with the privilege of having her own car. The only sense she could make of it, she said, was to use it to serve others: my siblings and me, her friends who couldn’t drive, and even strangers for whom she would deliver meals or give rides. 

Accompanying my mother on errands as a child, I was deeply impacted by three facts that together seemed to amount to a super-power she possessed: 

            first, she was vulnerable; 

            second, she did not guard herself; 

            third, she was safe. 

I emulated her stance as I began to move through the world on my own—at least at my best. 

A single, faded color photo is the only tangible evidence of that encounter in Arizona. In it, my hands are clasped formally behind my back. But I stand so close to the old woman that my arm touches hers, and the ruffles of her long skirt graze my shins. My smile is that of a child just awakening, orienting himself to reality, and discovering—bewildered and contented—that all is as it should be. I’d stumbled across a secret of my existence, initiated into my mother’s universe.

And what a beautiful universe it was: generous and alive. Yet, for much of my adult life, I behaved as if I could make a better one. I schemed to make myself the center of one petty universe or another: the most-praised student, most valuable player, most popular teacher, and most highly sought-after academic lecturer. Thomas Merton, another gift from my mother, once wrote, “Life is not accomplishing some special work, but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments. It implies becoming unknown and as nothing.” Yes, I craved my mother’s universe of connection, but for most of my life, I was terrified of becoming unknown and as nothing. 

Then, in about three months in 2019, I lost my job, reputation, career, home, and marriage. I became what I’d most feared: unknown and as nothing. Indignant, I first wailed and thrashed against my own unraveling. But before long, my utter impotence to arrest or even attenuate the seismic force sheering away the carapace of my ego forced open the valve within, and my heart and soul sprang like fawns into a clearing, unwittingly rediscovering my mother’s universe. 

Now I am mostly questions. 

Now, I drift in my car like a leaf on the wind of an algorithm that blows strangers across my path.

I open my door.

A stranger gets in.

I dissolve into the softness of human clay, slip into the rippling stream of language we share and ask myself:

Why is this person in my car? 

What am I meant to do for them?

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