The Long Way Back

I am ready to accept comfort wherever I find it – even from Deepak Chopra.  I don’t know what made me rent one of his movies through I-Tunes the other night – I guess it’s that I was so frightened again by my strange collection of tingling and numbness that I reached out for whatever looked comforting.   That was the “Happiness Prescription.” Surely I would learn something – something about Eastern Religion in an easily digestible form.   

I don’t know that I learned anything.  And yet, what happened to me was better than learning.  I was seduced.  I had a tiny tiny break through.  Deepak is totally slick with his red leather Versace Pope shoes and modified Pompadour.  But I didn’t care – I was wild for some kind of reassurance, and under the spell of his his spiel about the universal consciousness I suddenly instinctively tapped into something that had always eluded me before.  I understood what it meant to breathe and exchange air with the universe, to be part of the great eternal present as experienced through an individual body. 

It only lasted one day.  Then I went on a bike tour of Rotterdam and pinched a nerve in the OTHER leg, bringing the tingling to that one, too, and sending me spinning back into insanity.  But for a few minutes the day before that happened lying on the couch in my office with the windows open to the chirping of whatever insects inhabit this shady green corner of the solar system I felt peace and the  possibility of continuing, something I hadn’t felt for quite a while. I have faith that it will come again.  If only I could quit getting these dreadful tingles.

What Deepak preaches of course and what I have never come close to touching is meditation.  That great stillness is as unavailable to me as the presidency of the United States.  I can imagine it, but it is not in my capacities to achieve it.  Nonetheless, I am going to try (for the great stillness, I mean).  I did a tiny stint on the couch in my office again today, listening once more to those chirping entities.  Nothing happened except that I imagined my head as a farmhouse with the windows open and the curtains blowing in the breeze.  But I will keep at it; maybe tomorrow I will move closer to emptying my mind of the garbage that fills it, maybe I will start to ditch my Narcissus.  I do hear myself sighing from time to time and feel for just a second that sense of awe at the great otherness.