I am indebted to Josh Cohen who contributed material for this
conversation.
I was born looking, asking questions, analyzing,
inquiring
... with an insatiable appetite for
homeostasis
(although I had no
mastery
of it or clear-cut grasp of it at the time, I held it out to be a place
to stand where my life would be good and balanced - at best on
average, and at worst it would be tolerable / bearable /
workable
at those times when it wasn't). I'm seventy two years old now. I've
known you for forty four years. And in that time, so much of what there
is to
discover
about who we really are (or what we really are - if you
prefer) I've
discovered
just in
being around you
and
watching you work.
I no longer attempt to justify or explain how or why I
discovered
it that way. I used to. But I stopped doing that (or perhaps
it stopped
using me
to do that).
Neither do I attempt to second-guess what I see you do /
distinguish
/ come up with, any longer. I used to do that too. But when I did, all
it seemed to do was drive me deeper into the maelstroms of my
opinions,
my
interpretations,
not to mention that big old bugaboo: being right about my own
point of view
(which, even without too much ado, I've always been naturally leery
of). I did ask myself one question though, over and over and over: why
you?
why not someone else? or (more pointedly): why not me?
(this is, after all, my life), am I not the captain of the
way my own life goes? or at least: shouldn't I be?
The truth is I never got satisfactory answers to any of those
questions, so I stopped asking them. In any case, their answers would
have been reasonable at worst and intellectual at best
when what I got was experiential. Something became possible as
I watched you work
that just didn't
show up
when I was on my own. So I opened to it. I started letting it in. I
began
trusting the process. And what I got was the experience of what you
provide, the obviousness of it, the profound stand-alone-ness of it,
the self-evident-ness of it, the undeniability-ness of it. Everyone
stands
like a
possibility
on the brink of this trust, this fork in the road, the horns of this
dilemma, and asks: can it be so? can you really provide what you say
you can? Without reason, without
written
guarantee, even with my
already
always
skeptical
view,
I've made my choice. But look (I want you to get this): in making this
choice, I am one of the fortunate ones.
"I am always with you"
you tell me. Yet you take from me nothing that I must
face up to
by myself. You never intervene in my quarrel (if you did, it would rip
me off). But that's not the profundity of your
"I am always with you"
for me. The profundity of it is its total certainty, that any doubt
(albeit human) is neither required nor necessary. And once you've
supported me that way, you get out of my way so I can have my own
authentic experience. Yet even when you've gotten out of my way, you're
always with me. And there's no need to justify or explain it. It's
what's so
- at least, it's
what's so
for the fortunate ones.
For the most part, we're thrown culturally to make things difficult for
people who bring goodness (even greatness) to
our world.
That's almost biblical, yes? It's too bad, coming as it does at
a terrible cost. The cost is as long as we keep doing it, "what is"
will always overshadow "what could be". Knowing you are always with me
(as an experience, not as a reasonable, intellectual answer to a
skeptical question) is what gives basal substance / shape / form to my
own
expression.
That's the gift.
Being around you,
realizing you have no need, want, or attachment to getting anything
back from me in return, is
the privilege.
