I’ve been to three unrelated performances lately in which the male performers stripped down to their underwear onstage, not provocatively but to symbolically expose their hidden selves.
As theater it worked, partly because the actors were all young and handsome, but also as a metaphor for our real selves beneath the layers of social and political confusion that we wade through every day. They were there to peel away and get to the essentials, showing what life is really about beneath all the distracting details vying for our attention.
I learned something like that one day as a kid, getting the breath knocked out of me and stripping me down to nothing but that moment in time, as the world opened up and I saw something quite a bit larger than what I had imagined was there.
It hurt, but it was an ecstatic experience.
I was eleven years old at the time, and I’ve since learned that what I experienced is called a ‘threshold experience.’ It has determined my life’s path ever since. Roller-skating with my friends on our street in Brooklyn, I tripped and fell hard onto my back, leaving me breathless and stunned. In that moment of impact, it was as if I saw the world in its wholeness! In a flash of insight I witnessed a vast Space-beyond-Space, Time Everlasting vision. Then it all shrank down to the tiniest particle of existence, a kind of almost-nothingness as alive as the vastness. I saw it all – beginnings with no endings, all happening Now. I saw the intricate, interconnected panorama of our gorgeous world right here, right now and forever.
In that instant of enlightenment the universe was all of a piece, inter-related, every particle dynamic and in balance, vast beyond vast with nothing left out – the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, rightness and wrongness, now and forever.
And I was right in the center, belonging to it all.
My vision was over in a flash, but it initiated me into my life’s path.
I got up, still a little dizzy, and skated back into the game wondering what I had just seen, and if other people knew about this? I figured not, because nobody around me acted as if they did.
For one, my father didn’t, that was for sure. Just that morning he’d given me a tongue-lashing for refusing to go buy him cigarettes at the store. He was already coughing his head off and the house stank of cigarette smoke, so I said No and got smacked for it. I worried that if he didn’t stop smoking, he would die.
Sadly I was right; he did die and much too young, his heart in tatters and his lungs completely shot. I can still hear his last words from behind the hospital room door beseeching the doctors to not let him die.
It was a hard time in the world altogether – like now. Tragedies of war and loss, poverty and craziness were commonplace. In our family my uncle Leon – everyone’s favorite – had not come back from the war and the grown-ups were in perpetual mourning, so we children had to fend for ourselves. Already, by then, I was wondering if people weren’t all afflicted by some mental virus that was making them crazy?
I’m still working on it.
Does the word ‘wetiko’ mean anything to you? It’a a Cree word, new to me, but a concept as old as civilization as we know it. It means something like ‘a sickness of the collective soul that leads to evil; a normalization of insanity; a virus that requires a living host to flourish.’ In pre-Christian times the Gnostics called this virus “the archons” and saw them as actual, willful beings who were there at the Creation of the world, a kind of early slip-up in the Plan, committed to subverting the Earth’s vital purpose.
Right now we call this virus ‘Trump,’ but I think there is something much bigger going on. It’s more than just this man and his minions we have to worry about. My question is: whatever it is that wetiko represents, how do we take such mischief on? What is the best thing we can offer, given such a scenario?
I find I have a suggestion, and that is that we respond with joy, with our inherent joy in the miracle of life in the world no matter what.
It happened that, a few years after my vision on roller skates, I had a second glimpse of a joy-saturated cosmos and being a bit older recognized it and sensed it was the ‘truth.’ It came to me at Deerwood Music Camp during a chorus rehearsal of the Faure Requiem, the whole camp in the upper boathouse singing that gorgeous music as the sun set on the lake, the loons’ haunting cries echoing across the waters just as we reached the final ethereal chords of the Amen.
Again I fell, but this time with tears of rapture into the arms of Philip Eisenberg who sang tenor next to me and loved me. He was seventeen, I was sixteen. So filled with the power of this music, we wept together swaying, holding one another with those magical chords resonating between us. Then we laughed, hugging hard with a shared vision of a reality larger than we were, a felt enormity expressed first with tears, and then laughter.
Philip and I remained friends all our lives.
Variations of this joyous experience have graced my life again and again over the years, sometimes in response to beauty, sometimes as an innate reaction to fear, always triggered by strong emotion.
Strong feeling; strong energy; strong surprise.
My favorite way of finding myself in that mystical territory is, of course, by falling in love, and just yesterday it happened again on the farm with a fuzzy black cat. She rubbed up against my legs, needing some loving – I did too – and she rolled over, offering me her soft underbelly. I petted and caressed her, crooning a made-up ditty as she gazed up, purring her own song back at me. That little catface – mysterious golden eyes and perfect black nose, tufted, pointy ears at the top of her head, trembling white whiskers – suddenly were a miracle of nature too extraordinary to fathom, and my heart jolted wide open with gratitude.
An ordinary pussycat!
In an instant I saw the whole universe in her furry black self and was struck dumb. Again.
There are so many ways to find our way there, but however you get there, do get there! Find your friends, your cohorts, your chorus. Do it together, whatever it is: rollerskate, sing, get high, make love, laugh uproariously. Pet cats.
Feel strongly whatever you are feeling and share it! You’ll be surprised how politically effective that can be – just the energy of it, just the intention of it.
Ultimately, I believe we are stronger than the virus, more potentially potent than the fear, more creative than the spoilers. We probably cannot get rid of them – they’ve been here for a long, long time – but we can sing louder and stronger than they expect, laugh at them when they threaten us, and direct them into the pantry and shut the door before we go out into the ballroom to dance our hearts out.
Where the musicians are waiting for us to move, and the dance floor is gleaming.
