Sleepless in Montreal

Last night, after failing to find a place to stay on Couchsurfing, Zil and I wondered the streets of Montreal.  When both of us were too tired, we found a bar that was open and both of us immediately fell asleep.  We were soon awakened by an extremely kind bartender who asked us to sleep upright after we explained our situation.  He didn't want to get into trouble with his boss, but it would be okay so long as we didn't lay down.  I drifted in and out of consciousness, my head propped against a wall next to the booth.  Once the bar closed at 3am, the bartender said he would put us up, but he was going to his girlfriend’s house.  His absolute sincerity and kindness made me feel that one sleepless night was well worth experiencing such compassion.

 

Feeling content and tired, we walked toward the park in front of Mount Royal.  Zil suggested we try to sleep in the portico of a beautiful, old church, but when we walked up the stairs we found it already occupied by other sleepers. We continued walking to the park.  My bag felt like one hundred pounds and my knees felt tight, the night was beautiful and the city was nearly silent.

The park had a weekly festival of music and dance, which Zil and I had attended on Sunday and because Monday is also labor day here in Canada, there was still trash strewn out over the grass.  Voices descended like whispers from the forest that borders the park and marks the ascent of the mountain. Every night, it houses countless homeless people and travelers. 

Zil and I picked a random plot of grass and lay down to sleep.  A while later, unable to sleep I was reading a Stranger in a Strange Land on my phone and listening to the distant conversations and the occasional inhabitant shuffling across the the park.  I was beginning to wish we were on the Appalachian Trail again, where the worst visitor to come interrupt your sleep was a mouse or chipmunk trying to get at your food.  I wasn’t too afraid, but sleep seemed like a risky proposition.  It was about 4am and I made the decision to stay awake while Zil slept until the sun rose in a few hours.  This plan was interrupted by the first few drops of rain.

Gathering our things, we quickly climbed under a large gazebo (I love that word, gazebo) in the park.  We climbed because the floor of it had been removed and we entered a  4 foot foundation supported by metal beams and filled in with gravel, riddled with trash and empty beer bottles.  Zil sat on her mat and I perched myself on one of the beams with my feet swinging.  Zil and I looked at each other and both of us acknowledged how tired we felt and how difficult the night felt at that moment.

One of the denizens of the park was walking picking up bottles and singing songs in French, occasionally interrupted by a short monologue.  I could see worry on Zil’s face as the clamor surrounding the person came closer.  I looked back and saw that it was a gray haired woman and I relaxed a little.  She approached us and after giving us a joyous greeting began wildly arranging herself on one of the beams across from me while launching into a monologue that spun between Spanish, French and English.  Once she sat down she began to focus her words into English as she read our incomprehension and one of the most precious moments of my life began.

She told story after story from her life, launching into huge backstories and adeptly returning to the vain of each story.  She searched for words, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in French before figuring out the precise English word.  She praised the beautiful night and what a miracle it was that we could be here watching the beautiful clouds crossing the moon.  She spoke about the disease of the world that called her manic depressive while people walked under such eternally changing beauty without realizing how exquisite beauty that surrounds everything.  She spoke about the men who had abused her and how she used to be a nurse.  She explained how she had found herself homeless 4 months earlier and the winter before when she slept on her mattress out in the snow covered in plastic.  She roared with laughter about the strange and dangerous things she had seen and nearly cried when she spoke about the kindness of others.

She described the circumstances of her parents.  Her father had committed suicide and her mentally ill mother and how her and her sister had ended up in an orphanage and foster homes.  She described the Pow Wow where her handicapped sister had fallen in love with the most beautiful Indian; how she was able to go with her mother to her confirmation.  She laid out the scene of her beautiful white shoes she had been wearing and the book of prayers she held with wonderful pictures of churches and priests.  She had wanted to be a priest and was told she couldn’t.  She said that men and women are inside each one of us and how the world cannot simply divide ourselves to support a wounded patriarchy.  She talked about sex and her desires without shame. 

She quoted Khalil Gibran’s prophet and called Zil her mother for this evening.  Her name was Maria, but she was often called Mama2, first named that by her black sheep nephew who loved her and now by the other homeless people she took care of.  She told us places to go where the energy would help us and how to get food and what benches we could sleep on.

She had been in a coma for 7 years and awoke with her mind broken.  She mentioned her daughter.  Later she described an R.V. she had lived in, but when she had been re-united with her daughter, she had given it to her.  When her daughter protested, Maria told her she must have it, because she was a nurse and had worked with patients whose minds were falling apart like her own.  She told her daughter she must have it while she could remember she had a daughter.  She wouldn’t need it where she was going anyway.  As the sun rose, she talked about the slaughter of the buffalo across America and how her people (she was native) thanked the creature they killed and used the whole carcass of the animal.  We all began to cry when she described this because it felt like an ancient plea from someone who had ascended to our ancestors in this life.  The mind that took her daughter, her home, her career, everything that most hold dear, had given her a sight that allowed her to sing out in joy at 4am on Mount Royal while bare-footed, collecting bottles to pay for the necessities of the day ahead.  A mind that had brought her compassion and wisdom to the most abused and forgotten people.  That mind sang about the buffalo as a plea but did not regret anything.

She moved like all of my mothers.  Her expressions and gestures called forth my mom, my god mother Peggy, my adopted mother Georgette.  She looked at me with the same recognition and I knew she could see every part of me. Her words were the wisest part of every woman who had ever touched my life.  I loved her as I must love the one who first held me in her arms and loved me without condition. 

Maria called us angels with the matter-of-factness of someone describing the sky.  She left us singing, with a larger bag I had given her for collecting bottles and all the food we could fit into the front pockets of her red sweat-shirt.  I watched her leave, weeping I watched my own mother, Janis, become a small point of dancing red across a sunlit park. I wept as seagulls encircled the gazebo and the original clouds of that morning drifted past a nearly full moon.

This is Zil's account of meeting Maria:

I fell in love last night. In love with a person, a woman. A woman full of stories that flooded my soul that bled from one language to another.  Story into story. Poetry of a life lost. Poetry of a life lived. Poetry of a memory, of a self, that once was and couldn't be found anymore. Her eyes glittered with a light only she could find/capture, a light she found within us all. I could not tell how beautiful she was until the dawn of day broke upon us poor souls in a gazebo, in a park, filling with seagulls as the sky painted morning. I listened.  I listened harder, more intently than anyone ever listens. I became her stories as she filled me with the knowledge of a time lived and lost. A timeless time.  A time that was running though her bones and soul. A time she gave to us. This mystery being that laughed a t Kool-Aid packages and 7 years of no memories.  That laughed of beatings and lost children. That freed her soul from the bindings it carried by becoming the people she saw in us.

Addiction

“Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.” -Rumi

I recently "quit" smoking. My friend Zil helped me by being present for the arising urges. We were in a car for a couple of days and the craving voice really couldn't hide itself very well behind emotional states. What I mean is that when I had quit in the past, I would have days of extreme moodiness. Aggressive and bizarre thoughts would tumble through my mind and all of it I would label as nicotine fitting. The thought was that I just needed to power through these states until I could get past the chemical addiction, then I'd be fine. This time, I was beginning to understand that it was that place of extreme resistance where my truest being lay hidden. This time, I listened to my thoughts and words that spilled out of me, and at first I laughed. How funny that I crave this so much and how irrational and strange the thinking that arose to try to smoke again. My friend was immensely helpful in this process because she observed and laughed with me, and never gave much importance to the sometimes pleading rationalizations to smoke.

Once space was made for the addiction's voice, i began to feel what was underneath it, and found myself swimming in sorrow. Every thought, every word and experience was felt deeply. I cried a countless number of times and I felt so exposed and open. It was like discovering I had been shot and now instead of pretending i was fine and continuing on with life, all I could do was sit there and feel it, watch the blood flow out of me, and carefully begin to bandage it. What had in the past taken weeks to get over ended in less than two days. The chemical addiction felt like a small itch, barely noticeable.


I am beginning to see all addictions, even addiction to a perception or world view as nothing more than protection from my own vulnerability.

Fear or why you ought to perform better in school.

I had parent teacher conferences at my school on Friday.  In one of them, a student and his mother came in to speak to all of his teachers.  The room immediately turned into the feeling of a smirk. The student hides his face in long bangs and has often looked for ways to cause upset at the expense of his own self image.  Racist, sexist and "inappropriate" statements flow out of him at every turn, but the ruse is paper thin. As a counter to this ruse he allows another side of kindness and authentic respect to peak its way out and often accompanied by the tipping back of his head to reveal smiling eyes.  It felt like the smirk in the room which played across a number of faces was a kind of reflection of what he uses to protect an extremely vulnerable and sensitive heart.


The conferences began with the usual lectures and platitudes.  Repeated themes of needing to work hard in school so you can have choices.  Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do to achieve something.  If you want to be such and such you need to...


Then from a very honest and sad voice, "Sometimes you will have to work with people you absolutely despise, but that's just the way life is."  All of it reiterated again and again each taking to the soap box as the student's head tips lower and lower hiding those happy eyes.

I found myself saying something.  Looking at him and saying his name this is what I remember, "I don't agree with anyone at this table.  You've heard all of this before and it isn't going to make any difference. First of all, you do not have to work with people you despise and in fact you never have to do anything except what brings you joy.  If you actually want to become a computer engineer then become one. You are more than capable. What I really appreciate about what you have shown me is your authenticity.  Your indifference is your resistance to the unhappy destiny that others are pushing onto you.  Trust your joy over and over again and you will be more than fine."

His head tipped up as I spoke and those eyes were not just smiling.  The smirk left the room and for a while it lightened as others agreed or defended their motivational offerings. At one point a question was asked of him.  I could feel the pressure of everyone's gaze building on his face.  Suddenly, he leaped up.  "I have to go to the bathroom," he projected, a joke still hidden somewhere in his words.  Snickers from the adults erupted as he left the room, but my heart had leapt with him and I found myself to guarded to share the genuine laughter I felt having finally gotten his joke.

Alone

I was at Trader Joe's looking for a particular gluten-free bread that I like.  My mind imagined a lover finding it for me and thinking to herself, Brenden loves this kind of bread, and handing it to me with absolute compassion.  Warmth burned in my chest for an instant at this vision and then followed by the thought that you don't have this.  The warmth was immediately replaced with a cold sinking loneliness.  I imagined her more fully and the sinking feeling rose and then fell again at the thought that it wasn't real.

I found the bread that I like and took it off the shelf.  I suddenly realized that I was giving it to myself and warmth again, accompanied with the thought, "Here you go Brenden, I love you." I stood there unable to move and overcome with emotion as I realized that she's right here.  She never left me.  She is me.  With that thought I looked at the people around me and again I was overcome with emotion as I realized how much I loved every person around me.  I could see them and look at them without fear and for that moment, I was not alone.

Imperfection

When I tell someone who trusts me that they are whole and perfect, that there is nothing they could ever do that would change that, I am often met with tears of sorrow springing quickly from their eyes.  In that moment I can feel the softness of their being.  Their hands often move quickly to catch these tears that betray this softness inside and  soon the story of their sadness rises up to protect them.  The same is true for me when something or someone helps to remind me of my wholeness.  But sometimes we don't construct a story.  Sometimes we allow ourselves to rest in the sorrow and find trust for it.  What would have been a moment of release, like a release valve for the pressure created within the pipes of self definition, becomes an opening and everything we held on to dissolves into that soft place.

Here we discover that all imperfection is actually perfection.  That the only tests that we encounter in this life right now are born from the moment we leave the softness of our own being for the hardness of structure and the illusion of certainty.  It is from here where we are able to and will in many different ways, tell someone that they are perfect and whole and be a witness to their own trust.