Disaster
Oakland, CA 29 October 1999
Nothing seems right this morning. All sixes and sevens. It is only when I am completely out of my routines that I see how deeply embedded they really are. How much I depend on them. More than “structure” because structure implies some sort of immovable “thing”. Some of the patterns – the ones that I am aware of anyway – act more like a coxswain, riding in the boat with me providing rhythm and pace to my day. The habits and patterns that are outside my awareness are so troublesome to me. This morning is an opportunity for me to see more and more of them operating, and to pay attention to myself when I am rowing this boat alone, in a shell without a coxswain.
Earlier this morning, while taking a shower (funny expression, I wonder who I take the shower from) I couldn't find anything I needed. I am at my sister’s house, and I can’t find anything I need. No shampoo visible. No soap either. Rummage through some cabinets and find some shampoo. It’ll have to be soap as well. Then I hear myself say in my head, You should have brought your own. You should have been prepared. You need to be more self-reliant. Then I realized I left my journal at home. How could you be so stupid?? You thought you might not go home. Why didn’t you put it in the bag?? And it goes on and on from there.
How quickly, how effortlessly, I go into self-recrimination mode. It is the one pattern I carry with me no matter where I am. If only I could contain self-recrimination inside a bottle of shampoo and then “forget it” from time to time. How freeing it must be not to carry it around all the time.
What purpose does it serve – all this self-criticism? Maybe it is some doomed attempt on my part to make me a better person. Some antidote to the fear that, if it were not for all the tortuous self-talk, I might sometime get to the very bottom of my psyche such as it is, and I won’t find anything there. I suspect that might be a universal fear. Certainly it is for me at times. What if, at the end of all this inquiry, and struggle, and delving, I get to the very core of me, my essential New Age Self, and find nothing there? My deepest suspicion is that this would be wonderfully liberating. My ego, though, my conscious self here and now, believes it would be a disaster.
Disaster comes from the Italian word disastro (dis- away, without + astro star). For the ancients disasters occurred because of an unfavorable alignment of the planets and the stars. I guess it was literally acting without the stars, sort of flying blind. Disasters, then, are not events, but outcomes. Disasters don’t strike; they emerge when something is not in alignment in the Universe. When I am not in alignment with the Universe. That means disasters are occurring all the time, I just don't see them. I get distracted by the thought that magnitude matters – as if the size of any disaster I could imagine matters at all in comparison to the infinite size of the Universe.
Disasters may be opportunities of us, for me, to pay closer attention to alignment. Maybe that’s why there is so much kindness and generosity displayed during a disaster. For a moment, just a moment, we get a glimmer of what it is like to be truly alone – to be without the stars, and we get a chance to put the Universe back right again. All the little things become crucial. Where one stray lamb makes all the difference to the survival of the flock, and where one grain of sand moved into the right spot saves the whole beach. For a moment there we are all alone, the gods have abandoned us, we only have each other.
And then the disaster receded, and we all go back to sleep.
So here I am sitting in a coffee house on Grand Avenue, “The Oldest Coffee House in Oakland”, recovering from the disaster of dislocating myself for a night and not having my own shampoo. No small thing, if I stay present to the deeper bits.
Forcing myself out of a pattern I was in, out of a routine where I thought I was in control, has created an opening for me – an opening to see how fragile it all is. How life, how this life I have composed, is comprised of a web of countless golden threads of divine love. The threads themselves radiate with energy as they transform themselves into all the colors imaginable.
Disasters pull against those fragile threads, and at times these threads stretch and adapt and, as their resonance changes, alter their color. They may be cut with the quickness and sureness of the executioner’s axe – swoosh from gold to black - or, left to their own rhythms, they may slowly shift from gold through yellow, red and blue, then to purple, and finally to black. When that occurs, I suspect, there is a sense of completion and perfection, and the threads, bathed in infinite light and love return to white – the harmonic color of our source.
Then, of course, disaster strikes again, and we find ourselves shifting from white to gold, and on to yellow… the eternal dance, where we are our own light show, continues.