The Green Green Grass of Home

 

The email says: "Miranda, don’t you remember when we used to lay on the grass at lakefront park between rehearsals and talk about every feeling and it felt like we’d known each other for eternity?"

Such questions. Memory, well that’s not an easy topic now. Do I even remember the face of the girl--- the woman, as that was over a decade ago in human years and we are both past 30--- who writes me this message? Ostensibly to let me know about an opportunity at our old dance company, but also to, as she says, “re-connect.” Such words… as if there was ever anything connected or not connected….

Nonduality speakers sometimes say this is death, and in a way they are right. For some that death is a gift, a mercy killing. Life was so painful they wished to physically die rather than continue to suffer. But for others, who deeply felt the delicate intimacy of imagined reality, something appears to be lost, something that was never truly there, but a bit like waking in the morning and realizing that the sweetest dream you had ever had was gone for good, and with it all the things and people and places you loved…even you…or what you thought you were.

This is simple and yet it is impossible to comprehend, so perhaps simplicity is not the word for it. Someone from an imagined past story writes to me, and what is remembered in images and snippets that flash across the mind’s eye screen was that sense of sharing so deeply what we believed was in our hearts. A most personal intimacy, nothing like the way it is now; an intimacy born out of the story of me and you and us against the gaping void of a world that seemed always in opposition to our dreams and desires, or at least indifferent. An imagined intimacy born of imaginary separation.

Now it is that entire appearing world, not even a world at all, that is so deeply intimate that words like intimacy really don’t come close to it. And all the once loved dream characters are no more personal and real to me than those in a nighttime dream, including the Miranda thingie character who seems to be writing these words, but is also only being dreamt.

Nonduality speakers often tell seekers they wouldn’t want this, and while I am aware of many seekers who would cut off an arm and a leg for “this,” I know they are mostly right. Almost every human dreamling I have ever known would find this something out of a horror movie--- they would see the beauty as so strange and so far from their perceived experience and understanding that it would be like looking into an alien world.

Sometimes I’ve lamented that most nonduality speakers avoid the apparently personal story, the way they react and interact with the world of appearances, lovers, family, friends. Life is no longer personal, yet it is alive with a love few will ever comprehend. But I get why they don't talk about that aspect of this. Kyle Hoobin once told a roomful of his followers, who had the sense they were sharing a deep friendship, that he was not their friend, but that he was them,  and that was not the same thing. They never returned. So that part of this message may be the hardest to hear. People can listen to the abstract language like "there’s no me," etc., but what that really points to is not often understood. If it was, like Kyle’s audience, the path to the exit door would be the one many seekers would be walking.

So... I lie on the grass. Flashes of lying on grass by Lake Michigan float by, I can say inside my brain, but I can’t find any location for the images. But then again, I can’t find the location of the grass that I seem to be lying on right now. Even the simplest question about perception ends the certainty of any reality.

The email from that sweet girl---woman---remains unanswered. I can’t very well send her this. The Miranda thingie who would remember her is a shadow fading at twilight, and the emotional triggers of events and people and places in the imagined past are only dreamstuff.

Maybe I’ll just send her a pretty photo and let her know I’m so busy here that I couldn’t possibly entertain the idea of returning to what she calls “home.” When people try to ”re-connect” with something or someone from their “past,” they’re really only looking for the imagined story of what they think they used to have.

But no one can find what was never really there at all. 💓