Those Acts of Engagement

JANUARY

A short sleep-night, ending alarmedly at 5:30 AM, turned into five hours of plowing snow at a church, two nursing homes, two retirement complexes, and more than a few residences, including a swipe down the driveway of “The House,” as we now called it. I enjoy the cool freshness of early mornings, of which there had been an abundance lately. These hours were part of my twenty-five hours of weekly work for Jake Bauma, which also included repair work at the marina and sales manual study time. 

Last year’s wildly white winter had driven me from bed early and kept me plowing late for endless days. Gripping the wheel and ramming gears had  almost obliterated other facets of my life. This winter had been more moderate. And this morning I had hardly been aware of the slam-bang routine, my consciousness constantly in gear with the new year stretching unblemished before me like an untraveled winter road. A year ago this day I had ruminated over the six hours of that  New Years Eve- and my leap ahead in getting acquainted with the Julie beyond trays, doorways and her family. In the past year intentional and unintentional happenings had brought us to the feelings and familiarity, knownness and tenderness, of last evening. Even so, uncertainties, personal limitedness and wonderments hung over this unlived year.

I have kept my hopes reined in, fearing them to be in vain- given the holes in my experience, the late arrival of any energy to live a real life, the drabness of my relational life, and the meagerness of my efforts to start afresh.  These thoughts rode with me behind that frosty windshield.

But the harsh scraping of the plow and whipping of the wheel had to stop! Right in the middle of a church parking lot. Recall hit. Of those monumental moments- weeks before Christmas - when I had tested out the new radio/tape recorder I would give Julie for Christmas- when that old spiritual had burst forth through the voice of a Black female singer - and the phrase “We didn’t know who you was” had penetrated the core of me! - provoking heart-rendered tears for my seeming nonexistence - for all those days of inner aloneness when I seemed not to exist even to myself - but the tears where not those of a child - but of a man! - keenly aware, supremely self-conscious of my individuality - and of what had  dominated, penetrated, controlled and clouded my life - and what had not  nourished, comforted, uplifted or stimulated me!

In those moments I had come to a mysterious-but-not-mysterious vortex of Being - inhabiting my whole body - which I could feel  like never before - knowing solely or soully that I lived!  - knowing also a scintillating isolation - an aloneness minus  loneliness - a separateness I must live from! - that I must maintain! - if I was to really live as a Self! -  which I had never been!  I knew then that consciousness was not Selfhood.

What had happened to me?!  What had become within me?!  Who could ever understand this? I  could not. But I cling to the vivid memory. Since those moments, only a few weeks ago, my life had at times become muddled, banal, numb, distracted as usual - and I had tried longingly to slip back through quiet thought - or heavy concentration - into those sacred moments of individual ascendancy! - to no avail! - and so I had simply hovered around the memory of - of what?  of a coming together  of myself?  I had once read a book - the title blank in my mind now - which had dealt with such an experience of coming together - a unifying moment  it had been called!  Was that it?  Ah, I remembered - the book had said that seldom if ever could that experience be recalled, recaptured, relived - but it could be treasured, fondled in the heart, rallied around - as a “pearl without price” - as a knowing only to be known once - but thereafter always a known!