Waiting
Dear friend,
I wasn’t much good at waiting on tables. I would have been nineteen at the time. The floppy fringe was a major setback as it constantly dislodged itself from behind my ears, so I was either always pushing it back or half blind and annoyed by it banging into my eyeballs.
I was slow. My mind seemed to live in some kind of a tunnel. The life I was trying to get to was like the arch of daylight at the end of the line, I knew it must be there but without ever quite reaching it.
Waiting.
I lived in my head.
Plans for the future were vague but consistent. Something around writing and playing songs, which I did do.
I lasted one summer as a waiter, when I came back the next year I was taken on again, but moved to the sandwich counter, where I could cause less disruption. I remember when they’d bring the sides of beef out of the ovens. I was a meat eater back then. Beef and fresh tomato with salt heaped on a fresh white roll, still makes my mouth water today.
It’s fun dipping back into the waters of my youth.
That summer one of the women I worked with told me about staying in Aleister Crowley’s house and seeing alien ships. I couldn’t really make sense of it, but it was impressive stuff all the same. I was reading Solzhenitsyn. I was in love with my girlfriend. I was waiting for my life to begin.
I was ambitious then. Anything I achieved was a stepping stone to something else. It took decades to drop the habit of living for tomorrow, or yesterday. The now did not exist, so thick lay the blanket of my mind on my little plot of ground. Smothered. Green shoots lay dormant in dark of the soil, with no light to call them forth.
The first time I read Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” I almost threw the book out of the window. It was indecipherable. I hated the stupidity of it. I rejected his notion of the pain body, I was not ready to face suffering, I was on the run. Suffering in my attempts to get off the planet. Like many I suppose, I wondered if I hadn’t landed in the wrong century or star system. Surely I wasn’t meant to come here this time around?
How brutal this world when you live only in your mind, hopping ahead into a future moment that either never comes, or when it does, slithers around you like a constrictor serpent, steadily and deliberately crushing the life within.
Eckhart Tolle is now one of my favourite people to listen to. If you don’t know him, he’s on youtube with hours and hours of talks. Here’s a link:
It’s the silence in between the words you’ll want to pay attention to. The slowness. The rush towards the next moment and the next running out of steam, coming to rest in the present moment. Here where it is real.
Let the mind fly where it will, just watch it go.
When we were kids Kevin and me had two plastic kites.
Mine had a red devil para trouper on it and Kevin’s had a green dragon. Those kites would really take off, the cord would get so tight it was like wire. One time down the shore I realised the cord in my hand had gone slack, had been like that for some time, but I hadn’t noticed. The kite was flying out to sea.
You can let your mind go by watching it.
You realise that you can’t be the thing you’re watching. Let the string go slack.
You begin to dis-identify with the thought self you made.
I was glad my kite had broken free. I wondered how far it would get. Maybe it would cross to Ireland or Scotland. Our time together was done. I didn’t want to play anymore. Anyways I usually wanted what my brother had, somehow his stuff seemed better than mine.
A pigeon just flew into the window and is perched on the sill. It looks like a young bird and I can hear the screech of gulls circling over head. The gulls have gone, but the pigeon is hanging around. I’ll see if I can give it some water. It’s been hot. Maybe there’s not so much drinking water around.
The bird is okay. Looking much happier preening itself in the sun.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey