To thine own self be true

“Oh I will keep falling as long as I live
All without ending
And I will remember the place that is now
That has ended before the beginning.”

“Oh how is it that I could come out to here and be still floating
And never hit bottom and keep falling through
Just relaxed and paying attention.”
–Jim (Roger) McGuinn, “5D (Fifth Dimension)”, by The Byrds

It has been some time…

Dreaming of the levitation and soul flight experience. The buoyancy and lifting off. Being lighter than air and suddenly, quite magically, leaving body behind to take flight.

It is always a privileged view and trip. The ‘craftless’ version was the earlier type of this experience and is itself very special. Just the sense of being soul and/or spirit with complete consciousness having “slipped the surly bonds of earth” (John Magee’s “High Flight”) and customary, limited sense-body-centeredness.

This time something resembling a saucer a foot or two in diameter, ‘standing’ on it. At one point I must have dozed off and the craft was out of control, much to the fear of my family suddenly below, but I righted it intuitively and automatically with ease (always a feature of these flights) and brought it in for a landing back on earth. I asked the foolish question as to how I brought it and me back down but the previous sentence explains all.

This experience of flight is very much an attractive transcendental, sometimes very beautiful process. Last night’s flight was very relaxing and, of course, freeing and natural. I would have to add that it is the ultimate experience of freedom with respect to mind, body, soul, spirit, and perhaps conscious experience. I would have been quite happy to have kept flying longer. There was absolutely nothing to fear. It is an excellent ‘space’ to be in.

I wonder about the timing, being days away from my 64th birthday– the conclusion of what has, indeed, been a grand climacteric year (see Internet for note on that event). There have been many resolutions and a great freeing and moving forward. Perhaps this is the bonus transcendence and final experience of freedom that so many subconsciously look for. I couldn’t have ‘written’ a better ending for my self.

In many ways, this has been a more spiritual year, as evidenced by poems on the blog like “Northern Journey”. This past weekend an old school colleague long forgotten, whom I quite liked and appreciated, passed away. (I wrote a little about him in the online Legacy tributes.) Much of that was about how close we had once briefly gotten. I realized a few years back that I had made final contact with many of the people of my past who once mattered to me. That was a very satisfying, ‘completing’ process.

Elsewhere in my blog, in the Thoreau quotes about walking, I think he put it best–

“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and friends, and never see them again–if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man–then you are ready for a walk….I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”

“So we saunter to the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.”

And so I move forward into my favorite walking time of the year–fall. My appointed destiny. “The readiness is all.” Yes, I am truly ready for my day walks and night flights like never before.

“I’ve been one poor correspondent
I’ve been too, too hard to find
But it doesn’t mean
You ain’t been on my mind”
–Gerry Beckley, “Sister Golden Hair”

She came back. The somewhat plain slim woman with small somewhat rectangular glasses. She had told her husband (in their truck) she had seen an item the previous stop at our sale. She asked if it had gone. We said Yes, sorry.

She commented on her mistake not to buy it earlier and I may have said something to the effect that her memory was accurate–it had been there.

Philosophical about the timing, she turned to go and, as she walked by me, sitting in the lawns chair, she touched me gently on my upper right arm.

Instinctively? Appreciatively (of my observation)? Gratuitously? Naturally (she’s a tactile person)? Connectingly?

Who can say? I think many of the people who go to these sales are drawn to them (sometimes making more than one trip) for the social reason of ‘connection’ which is expressed in many ways.

As we were closing down the last day, the lone old man who was lingering for about fifteen minutes was passing by us, having bought nothing. We wished him a good day and then he started talking, at great length as some of us ‘took down’, about himself and a recent memorable personal episode. I think a lot of people who frequent these sales are lonely and come looking to talk about themselves, their lives, perhaps even hoping to unburden themselves of their troubles and concerns.

And obviously as the shoppers browse remnants of your past, your interests and values (past and current), they get to see people and lives similar to and different from themselves and their own lives. Often they buy something they didn’t expect to buy–maybe a missing or alternate piece. Maybe they were reminded about something they once believed in, wanted, or had forgotten. A very complex and private subliminal process.

The viewing of the item. The handling of it, turning it over in their hands. You can see the desire and sometimes hunger (especially with pricier, attractive items). Kids are always direct about this–running  to their parents with an item (“Can I have this?”) or, inevitably unmonitored, trying out the precarious roller skates or high musician stool.

One foreign-looking couple wanted to buy a smiling bunny helium balloon for their somewhat overweight daughter. “Will you take a quarter?” (instead of the dollar price). I said, “Only if it will make someone very happy today,” and the girl beamed as did her parents.

The simple magical possibilities of garage sale moments of being. Right down to the gentle touch on a vendor’s arm or a child’s balloon dream come true.

I never saw his wife who waited in the running car at the bottom of the driveway. But apparently she had been inside the garage and inquired about the price of a newish green HBC point blanket. (It was 125.) She liked the used beige one for 40, but couldn’t handle the red stripe. It made her physically ill. A  trauma in her childhood related to the color red. She left without buying the green blanket.

Now it was her husband standing before me–a somewhat tall, weathered, farmish-looking, holding the green HBC point blanket. It was the first inquiry about it in two years of garage sales.

“Will you take fifty?” He held out a bill.

He added, “My wife liked the other one. But it had red in it. So I said I’d go back and get the green one instead.”

And I said, unhesitatingly, “Sure”, automatically imagining why red had once traumatized her–a witnessed bloody death on the farm or highway? a severe personal injury? a red blanket held suffocatingly over her face?

Trust, empathy, pity, sympathy, imagination, fantasy–all wrapped up together. How one responds to the desires, needs, and fears of others, of complete strangers sometimes.

Ah, possibilities. The many ways to read, understand, and respond to both immediate unstructured experience as well as the requests of others.

An elderly Chinese man about 5’4″. Viewed sideways, a slightly pear shape to his figure.

No one else in the garage on a warm Saturday afternoon. Quietly and painstakingly folding men’s pants on a table. Occasionally measuring them with a tape measure he had just retrieved from his car.

(“Do you have a tape measure?” he had asked.

“No,” we answered, assuming he wanted to buy one.)

We were all surprised when he returned with a measuring tape and began to examine the pants more closely, knowledgably folding them in a neat, concise pile. Courtesy? Attention to detail? A previous life in a tailor shop? A solitary sensuous experience?
We then noticed the pants he was picking out were similar in style to the ones he was currently wearing.

Finally, he brought out his selection and paid without any haggling over price, his genuine smile revealing some missing teeth. He had found exactly what he needed and wanted. He nodded at us, and my daughter and I bowed our heads slightly in courtesy to him, which he obviously appreciated.

He was on his way down the driveway when he noticed the Tibetan meditation book and CD, and happily came back to pay yet again (his third time; he had previously bought a VHS of Dr. Paul Lamm’s Tai Chi video for older adults.

Garage sales always have their troughs as well as crests. But this gentle man made our entire day and gracefully transcended the August afternoon silence.

(for Rose and Del)

A hot August night when I was 6 or 7. Travelling with my young cheerful aunt by bus across town with my parents to the CP station at the Royal Alexandra Hotel. Standing with her with less than an hour to go when my mother asked her about her ticket. She began rummaging her clothes madly in search of it. My Dad was immediately assigned to go via taxi (a luxury then for us) back across town to do the impossible–find it and return before the train left.

It was announced that the train was ready to go–all passengers aboard, when my father suddenly rushed in. “It was lying on the kitchen table,” he said breathlessly. And then my aunt abruptly, hurriedly ran to the train entrance, leaving us for our long, slow, familiar, mundane return home by bus. My poor parents, who had trouble at the best of those lean times in rubbing two nickels together.

My aunt and parents–everything a stranger would ever need to know about who and what they essentially were. My parents–responsible and perpetually doing for others, ever stuck with the bill. My aunt–so cheerful but scattered–who left messes behind her everywhere she went in her vivacious, carefree, but oh-so-careless life.

(a distant memory)

Early 1950s. Preschool age, likely 3. Union Station. Built by the architects who built Grand Central Station. The wonderful glorious massive dome so high. The panels of colorful alluring images of trains and places. The great clock and humongous vestibule. The black and white men wearing red caps everywhere. The shouting, the trunks, carts, and confusion.

And then the descent down a long ramp into the bowels ‘where the trains would come’. An underground made up of many doors on both sides through which one could see the bottoms of lighted steep staircases going up to…? And the large crowd of unfamiliar faces, a mob in fact, anxiously anticipating what?

And then a strange loud noise which became the loudest noise in the world. Louder than thunder, visibly shaking this tense scene. Pounding, chugging, thundering above, overhead! Was the roof going to collapse? The loudest whistle and bells imaginable. A steam locomotive–a truly great technological monster to be reckoned with–had arrived. And then doors opened somewhere and the crowd pushed toward them and we were suddenly going up, up, toward the streamed daylight, the noise of unseen yelling human voices, clanging and clanking, and the sound of the mighty engines exhaling, gasping steam.

The other, later place of arrival–Kawa, Ontario–an opening literally slashed in deep woods on the Canadian Shield where my smiling hard-drinking uncle was ‘station-master’, a place only accessible by railway. The trains never stopped at Kawa and ours had slowed to a crawl. The conductor handed me to my mother who had jumped off first and walked fast with my uncle beside the moving car. It would be the same on the way back home, in reverse.

And while we were there–the solitude except for fast trains passing, the mosquitoes, the pungent forest smells, the bars on the window station to keep out bears, the lanterns at night, a Quebec heater, the old flat wind-up portable phonograph wobbly playing 78s, the liquor bottle, cribbage board, and playing cards perpetually on the table. I (or of my uncle’s kids) nearly falling into the well–a wooden cover over a patch of ground had been left ‘off’.

There is much in our early lives which is and seems irrational, even terrifying and bizarre–a perfect introduction to more of the same to follow, intermittently, in the rest of our lives. Much that is filed away as a forgotten long ago part of the life flow. And maybe sixty years later resurrected somewhere in what begins as a private, solitary moment–a man at a laptop on an early prairie morning in late August, in another century–all the adults mentioned in this piece long deceased, and only the moment itself, briefly, subjectively, remembered and recorded by ‘a lone survivor’.

‘Tis in the information and knowing, like so much else, as I discussed in previous early entries…

Ultimate sensibility is basically a blend and/or union of the experiences of sensitivity to sensory stimuli (the physical, empirical, phenomenological world) and/with consciousness (including reflection, contemplation). Life, is of course, complex and operating on many levels/’worlds’, via many processes, but the apprehension, understanding and appreciation of the particular sensibility described above is ‘higher’, more ultimate, fulfilling, and satisfying. Typically, the body, heart and spirit are actively engaged in all of this zen and Dancing Shiva-related experience.

William Blake’s

“To see the World in a grain of sand,/And a Heaven in a wild flower,/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/And Eternity in an hour.”

embodies ultimate sensibility, and it is to the poets such as Whitman, Wordsworth, and Keats that one can turn to find this desired/desirable synthesis.

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(It also goes without saying that there are limits to lives leaning heavily toward either mostly/just physical experience or what might be termed the life of reason. A balance is necessary in order to grow, synthesize, move forward.)