Conversations For Transformation:
Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
Conversations For Transformation
Essays By Laurence Platt
Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
And More
Alive And Well
Bodega Bay, California, USA
September 30, 2007
I am indebted to
Dorothy
who uttered a quote*
I borrowed for this conversation.
Here we are with nothing
going on.
We've got the entire beach to ourselves, almost deserted except for a
few gulls walking along the shore, in and around our bare feet, totally
unconcerned with our presence.
It's not simply a day at the beach. It's a triumph of circumstance, a
victory over the daily grind. In the midst of the hassle, hustle
and bustle of our lives, we've chosen to be here - tranquil, at peace,
reveling in everything, wanting nothing. We've got each other. That's
twice as much as enough.
It's a perfect day, a day pregnant with
Zensatori being born as marvelous emptiness, the kind of day
a
Zen
master would choose to discourse on the emptiness of half full cups or
the fullness of half empty cups (to which, wittily, we'd
not listen raptly), the kind of day when it's OK to leave
it all behind, to bask in the moment, to take a deep, slow breath and
then start the rest of our lives.
In this moment we're whole and complete. We're going nowhere today.
Today we're here. Always here. Alive and well.
There's no arriving at the experience given by a time like
this and there's no departing from it either. Rather, this
time is the foundation of our lives. This time isn't a time when it's
merely great to be alive. This time is life. Here we're
not starting something and neither are we ending something. At best,
here we're in the middle of something. This is full, rich,
pulsating, and heart throbbingly real. Everything else by comparison is
simply a sidebar, is almost totally irrelevant in
the current way of things.
I love loving you. I love loving with you. I love being in love with
you.
I am love with
you.
It's the sound resonating like melted chocolate in your voice. It's the
playful eagerness twinkling in your eyes. Perhaps what I love most
about you is your groundedness in your Self. You're complete
even before I come into the picture. You don't need me. How I love it
you don't need me! It's a gift, a deep,
personal gift that you love me coming from no need.
What freedom! What joy! This is a miracle: right here right now with
you on this beach.
God
is in his heaven and everything's right with
the world* (as Robert Browning may have said).
Soon after being born I experienced being alive for the first time.
Actually I experienced being alive before I was born. But
my first experience of being alive after I was born was just like the
experience of being alive before I was born only more so.
It seemed to me, then, that life was all about experiencing being alive
- which I did, zealously, until something changed. What changed was new
signals incoming from life told me being alive wasn't enough anymore. I
had to become something. "What are you going to be when
you grow up, Laurence?" they kept asking me. That's how I learned being
alive wasn't enough. I had to be something
and I had to grow up, whatever that meant
...
On my way to becoming something and growing up I learned that wasn't
enough either. I also had to acquire something. I had to
amass things. If I was to ever be a man, a mensch,
I had to somehow turn myself into an accumulationmachine.
So I did - to the best of my ability. I became pretty successful at it.
Yet in the background what never felt right about it was I'd lost what
I knew was the only experience worth having, the only experience given
by Life itself: the experience of fullness and joy of simply being
alive.
Then one day You came into my life and you reminded me of something.
Actually, spoken with
rigor,
I
created
you to come into my life to remind me of something I once knew which
I'd long forgotten (it was fast becoming buried). But to say "one day
you came into my life and you reminded me of something" is
good enough for
jazz.
You came into my life and you reminded me I'm alive. That's it. That's
all. Game over.
That's why today we're right here right now You and I on this beach
alive and well.
There's nothing left to say - so I'll say it: I love You.