Before long, there was knock at the door - the hotel staff, suggesting that perhaps I relocate my bags from the hall into the room. Brilliant! Absolute brilliance. “Yes Sir, yes. Good - great idea. Perfect.” My haste to get the words onto paper that cowardice had robbed my lips of during the interview set the scene for a bang up stab at self humiliation.
So . . . In not a stitch more than my oversized top and a smile, door half-open, bags all the way out in the hall, my abducted sentiments were crawling out of the woodwork and onto the page.
“Get it together girl,” I thought to myself. But there are some gratitudes that call for a sense of urgency, our time together a certain contender.
* * *
Tell me about your idea of passion?
"Well …… I certainly … wish to live as true to concept of a life as possible. I believe that every person has a cause. If we lived in a world where everyone was doing exactly what they were born to do, I’d think that would be heaven on earth - that would be Nirvana. The only real friction in the world is when people are unable to really find themselves. So I’m a big believer in, and I mean I tell myself all the time, that E.E. Cummings quote, that you probably read, about “the toughest fight you will ever fight and must keep fighting is the fight to be nobody but you.” Ya know, how do you be nobody but yourself?
And I believe that the way - that the real - that the - I believe that... I believe that everyone is always getting what they need and everything that’s happening is - that there’s this grand choreography to existence that’s beyond our ability to comprehend so that everything is working out where we’re getting exactly the chaos that we need to confront, to grow, and to find ourselves, and to be who we were born to be.
And that the challenge, the fight, I would say, the fight that Cummings is talking about is the fight against your own inner voice, which for me is the ego - is the noise inside of our... Ya know it’s probably why some people are bombastic when they’re passionate is because probably what’s happening is they’re so noisy and that sometimes their truth, their real person, comes out. But it comes out real loud and it’s kindof, in the law business what we used to call, a table-pounder because there’s so much noise and there’s so much ego inside of this person that when they finally over ride that it - the display is very overt.
So ... so the, ya know, the only ... So I wanna live with an open heart. I wanna be, I wanna just go through my life putting everything I’ve got - the last drop of blood - into everything I do. And I know the only way I can do that is if I’m doing the things that I’m supposed to be doing. And I have the same doubt that everybody has as to, ya know, is this really what I was born to do?"
* * *
Born to learn, born to see, born to feel, born to taste. Born to touch. And be touched by. Born to discover. Born to Love. All of these had been my constant companions for as much time as had passed between that moment in his office and the one when I had set my course by the light of a Berkshire Moon.
“Born to do” had been missing from me. Born to do. Yeah.
The yearning for an open heart had not, for even half a moment, been missing from me.
“May my heart grow wider and wider, until nothing in this world is left outside...” is a prayer whose words have made a home on my lips. And in my research for the interview, from Thomas Jefferson to The Hurdy Gurdy Man, it - Love - was on every page that I turned.
When the truth gets buried deep
Beneath the thousand years of sleep
Time demands a turn-around
And once again the truth is found
Awakening the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Who comes singing songs of love.
George Harrison’s gifted verse, inspired by the Maharishi’s commentary on the Bahgavad Gita, is in agreement with August Jaccaci’s Thomas Jefferson:
“America means love. The word America means love. It is time, at last, for Americans to know that meaning, and not a moment too soon.”
When the truth gets buried deep. Beneath the thousand years of sleep. To say that those words were not lost on me ...
* * *
It was the prophecy of an awakening with a considerably large bill to pay: Truth. But he was counting on death for that.
"I have this vision that I think a lot of humans have that when you die, right at the end, right when you’re about to transcend into the next form of existence, that you get the truth, that there’s this force in existence that comes forth and says “okay man, this is what you thought and this is what’s real. And it’s up to you to take that and do with as you please” as you transcend to your next form - or into nothingness - or whatever it is.He was counting on death to settle up when the “big score” had not.
And I’m very nervous that I’m gonna, that I’m, that right now I’m just a puppet and that someone’s pullin’ my strings and that I’m totally indoctrinated, and that, even though I fathom myself as this free-thinking rebel, in fact I’m just performing a certain act on the stage by, ya know, the puppet masters. So that does concern.
But I guess that the passion, really, is about - I’ve always seen myself as an anti- establishmentarian rebel. And I’ve always seen rebellion as about letting go.
Rebellion, to me, is not about taking over from someone else. It’s about backing off. And it’s a little bit of my Confederate passion because one of my favorite things is this idea that some of the Southern folks have: which was just “why can’t you just leave us alone?”
"One thing about the motorcyclist is he should, or she should, be able to grasp the notional concept of the journey as differentiated from the fallacious nature of a destination point. So the thing is that when you’re in the middle of something thats really challenging, if you accomplish that challenge you always look back and you relish the days when you were in the middle of the challenge. Unfortunately a lot of the time when you’re in the challenge you’re like “gah - I can’t wait till I get out of this and when I finish this then I’m gonna become that butterfly.” But the whole caterpillar/butterfly thing is... I mean it’s something we need, but I don’t know.
Maybe that’s what death is. But it doesn’t really happen in this existence. At least I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen it in my life and I’ve never seen it in anybody else’s life. I’ve seen people think that there was going to be that moment, particularly relative to pecuniary gain where they - I’ve known people who did make the big score. At one point I made, what for me was, quite a bit of money. Quickly. And it was great. But it was almost like some kinda drug oriented high, pretty quick it was over. And then it was like “but I’m not different now. I’m not, ya know, nothing is different. I don’t feel different."
* * *
I felt overwhelmed. It would be cumbersome to even begin to tell him what I had experienced. And even so, I almost did.
Almost.
But somehow I thought that there would be another time for that. Or there wouldn’t. All that I knew with any conviction was that this wasn’t it. So instead, I shared with him the most succinct part of it that I could summon. An old favorite:
Barns burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.
Mizuta Masahide
Seventeenth Century Japanese Poet & Samurai
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