12: When magic becomes so obvious you can't even try to deny it

The day was hot. Ladies found themselves involuntarily waving their hands back and forth in front of their necks in the way of a human fan. Saturday. All along 5^th Avenue people were strolling along the street like it was just any other day. Laughing, exchanging glances, kissing on the stairs up to the entrance of the museum in front of me.

But it wasn’t any other day. Not to me. It took me a while to even go close enough to really see it; The building, massive columns, majestic arches, red linen posters emblazoned with the name as if heralding a conquering king of old: THE. MET. 

It looked daunting. And yet it felt like a kitten stretched in the sun after a bowl of milk.

Slowly I walked along the pond in front, where a couple of girls where collecting water in their hands. They looked like sisters. I looked at the hot dogs and the ice creams for sale and the tourists swarming around them.

When I finally managed to hoist myself up the stairs outside, and through security, I could already feel the hotness behind my eyes and the tugging at the side of my mouth. Tears. I bit my lower lip on the inside of my mouth hard.

Right inside the heavy doors that looked like they where made out of brass I took a moment. I was here. I was really, really here. This was the Met! How was this even happening? How was I here? How were people just milling about like it was any other day, any other building, and not a miracle of massive proportions??

To collect myself, I walked to the circular information desk right inside the entrance for a sense of anchor in a fellow human being. An elderly woman ready to help, she had an accent that talked of a life that had begun far from American shores. I admitted to her:

-    Hi, so it’s my first time here, I’m not entirely sure were to start. And also I’m so happy to be even standing here, I think I might cry!

She just looked at me with a confused smile, maybe crying was not the reaction of most people to a museum, even as magnificent as the Met:

-    Don’t cry (the c sounded like a k followed by a sharp 'rrr' sound), she said.

-    No. no, it’s good tears! I’m not sad! I’m very, very happy! I can’t believe I’m really here, I tried to explain. 

It didn’t seem to help, so I just smiled and said thank you to her for directing me to the photography exhibition. They had Irving Penn on. 

But. I just couldn’t concentrate. I tried to go towards the exhibition. But then I figured a rest rom might be prudent as a first action. That was in the other end of the ground floor. Over to find it, hidden behind Egyptian mummies. I didn’t pause to look at any of it. It was just overwhelming, artifacts everywhere, dimmed light, people talking, children around my legs.

But most of all: Just being in this place that I had dreamed of for so long was like suddenly realizing an elephant was standing right in front of me petting me gently on the head with it’s trunk; unreal. 

Why had I dreamt of this particular place? Because I was ill. Illness has a way of making you take a very sober look at your life. You find yourself asking the question: If this is it, what would I be really sad to have missed out on? Or put a different way: What are the things that are so impossible to imagine you could actually do that you have simply put them out of your mind? I was not in denial, I knew very well I had put so many things on the list of ‘not for me’ that writing them out would probably make a to-do list to reach the outer rings of Saturn. I knew why I had done it too: Lack of belief that I truly deserved the things that made me smile. So I withheld them. Mostly I never felt them at all. 

But this time illness had kicked my behind so thoroughly all of that fell away. For a while at least. Serious, long-term illness does that. It slaps you over the head and tells you; ‘Stop messing around you fool! Get real. Now!’ I guess you could say it’s cheap therapy like that.

And I realized that the thing on top of my very long list of things I was convinced I couldn’t do, because of things that could fill an even longer list, were two things. The very first, and so by logic the most important one, was to simply get to walk the streets of New York and look at art. And the place I really, really dreamt of looking at art here was the number one institution for everything beautiful ever made: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or for us fan-girls; The Met.

-    Honey, when was the tour?

Somebody was talking to a girlfriend. A tour? Oh, that might be an idea. Just to get grounded a little, get my bearings. I checked the paper I got at the information desk. The tour was in ten minutes; A tour of the high lights of the museum. Perfect!

A gorgeous woman in her 50’s with blond shoulder length hair and an air of confidence that told me, she had probably studied all the subjects I wished I had been able to, was our guide. With a graceful smile she lead us in through the museum. I had no idea where I was after one single minute, this place was so intricately laid out. I think I caught a glimpse of the fabled stairs where celebrities were photographed for the yearly Met Ball. But we passed by everything so fast, I really couldn‘t tell what we passed or where we were at all.

But suddenly I felt a change. A chill in the air. Or like the sounds around us had become slightly muted. Our guide lady had stopped walking and started talking – not about the place we stood at – that was just her gathering point for us, before we moved collectively to her first real stop on her tour. My heart contracted. But it wasn’t because of what she was saying, to be honest, I have no idea what she was saying. Because … I lifted my head:

Right there. Right in front of me. Literally RIGHT in front of me, centimeters away from the tip of my nose (or my fingers that I had to fight to not extend out to touch):

At the exact place the guide had stopped to talk to us before the actual tour started.

THE VERY FIRST THING I REALLY SAW AT ALL IN THIS MUSEUM THAT I HAD DREAMT OF FOR SO LONG:

A 15^th Century statue of the pilgrim Saint James. So: Santiago. MY SANTIAGO. The very saint I had hiked 1.000 km across two separate mountain ranges in France and Spain to see. On the Camino de Santiago, last fall. Santigo = Sant Iago = Saint Jakob = Saint James. The pilgrimage that had led me here. The pilgrimage I was still on. There he was. The emblem of a pilgrim – the scallop shell - on his hat. I'm almost sure he was even smiling. 

I felt paralyzed. Like I had accidentally walked into an invisible electric fence and now couldn't physically move. I just stared at him. I read and re-read the caption under the statue maybe five time to make sure I wasn't hallucinating:

Saint James the Greater

Date: ca. 1475–1500

Geography: Made in Burgundy, France

Culture: French

Medium: Limestone, originally with paint

Dimensions: Overall: 37 7/8 x 15 5/8 x 10 1/8 in. (96.2 x 39.7 x 25.7 cm)

Classification: Sculpture-Stone

Credit Line: Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/463970

 
Sure, it could have been a complete coincidence. Maybe 20 years ago I would have brushed if off and gone on my merry way. 

But not today.

I had no idea this museum wasn't just a museum with canvasses on it’s walls. I had no clue about all those Egyptian artifacts I passed without seeing them on the way to find a rest room. Or that apparently they even had a whole department on the Ancient Orient.

And I HAD ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA that a statue of the man whose shrine I had touched back in Spain would be here. Let alone that I would be lead straight to it by an official museum guide.

How could I know? It's not like he was exactly featured on the front page of the museum website or figured on any of the man-sized banners outside.

And yet there he was. Humble. He used to be in color, you could still see some red on the lower parts of his garment. But today he was the original lime stone, maybe even slightly dirty. Well, that is very pilgrim like, dirty you could always count on when you hiked all day every day. I had to bite my lower lip even harder now to hold back the tears. They were burning my eyes, I’m afraid I was turning red a little.

I have to admit I had been in turmoil for a while. I had been so ill, my chronic concussion had pummeled me completely and depression had hit me with violent strength. Being stripped of all that gives people a sense of safety and familiarity had been jarring. I had been in doubt about the wisdom of doing any of this. I mean. Who am I to think I could just take off like that and leave everything behind? Who was I to think I could just travel with no end date? 

But I was also feeling just how untethered I had become. I mean. I never had a home anyway. But this made it glaringly obvious just how homeless I was in all senses of the word. I had felt like a ghost passing through the lives of other people, real people, the people who made real lives work. I felt as so often before like the wrong kind of human. Like no matter what I did, how hard I tried, I just missed the mark. I just couldn’t make a good normal life work. 

I was weird for Heaven’s sake. And I so desperately didn’t want to be. I just wanted to belong. Like everybody else. And now I had gone and done this, this strange journey, placing me even more on the outskirts of normality. And - was I just throwing good money to the wind? Was I being stupid? 

I know I had heard a call so deep in my bones it felt more real than my bones themselves. But my rational mind was fighting very hard to ignore that call. It was working most of the time. It also made me feel so utterly empty I might as well have been made of pure air. 

So I followed the call. I couldn’t not follow it any more. Not following it might have been the safe and wise option. I would also have been the thing that killed my soul. I might look like I would have been doing the ‘right thing’, saving my money, staying put. But I would have died on the inside, a shell all full of empty. Like those beautiful conch shells on beaches that once housed a little hermit crap, but now were just containers for nothing. 

Still following the call was not easy. And this day I was feeling the heaviness of it all. Why was I doing this?

And then ...  there he was. My why.

On the very day where my dreams about being at the Met in New York came true, I was greeted by the very saint my pilgrimage had led me to eight months ago - the pilgrimage I now continued. 

I couldn’t hold back the tears. For the rest of that tour I kept sneaking to the back of the crowd, fighting hard to pretend my cheek was just itchy, when I was wiping determined tears away.

After the chock came the love. I felt wrapped in such a magnitude of love. And the pure wonder that is synchronicity. That unreal coincidence. God whispering; ‘Child, I've got you’. 

And then I realized just how much larger this was than little me living out the thing I had thought I wasn’t deserving of – only to be met by what mattered most to me, the symbol of how this journey of mine was always about the soul:

If this kind of magic could happen – truly anything was possible. 

Immediately I also knew what that impossible thing was:

A kind voice reached me from a place so deep within it wasn’t me at all, it was the source of everything, my higher self, impersonal love, God:

Love thyself. 

That was the thing that would break me. The one thing I couldn’t reach. I could find understanding and love for people around me – almost everybody, I was working on finding it for all. But for myself?

No dice.

Which, when you think about it, is such hypocrisy. Right? What made me so much more of a horrible sinner, that I as the only living thing around did not deserve the compassion I deeply believed all other beings not only deserved but had never lost?

The truth is I don’t know. I don’t know why I should be exempt. But that is how I felt. Love couldn’t possibly be for me.

There. I knew I had just found a new item on my Pilgrim To Do list. Because here’s the simple truth: If you really find the deep love that comes from not faking it at all – for yourself? That love will touch all around you with no effort at all. 

We are all one. That is why Jesus said love your neighbor as you love yourself. You can’t want different things for your neighbor than you want for yourself. Only – what if you don’t love yourself at all. Right? If you don’t love yourself, then speaking strictly logically that will affect your neighbor as well. Of course it will.

Now then - what comes first? Loving thy neighbor, meaning your fellow man (or woman)? Or loving thyself? 

And not in the egotistical, self-involved way, obviously. But in that way that let’s you live a life, where you don’t constantly have to fight the little voice putting you down all the time. Leading to all the horrible things we do to ourselves on a daily basis. Like eating too much. Or spending too much. Or drinking too much:

All the things that drown out that insisting little voice constantly telling us how we are not safe, not loved, not worthy. How we will be left behind any second now, laughed at for thinking we were loved, ridiculed for thinking we just might get this life straight. 

That little voice of pure terror. We all have it. Unless we’re enlightened masters. I’ve even heard they still have it – they have just mastered the ability to simply not listen to it.

But so - what is that little voice trying so hard to sabotage all our good efforts?

Simple: It's not our enemy, it's just the ego. No, not the Freudian one. Not the one that leads to long scholarly discussions about how all weirdness of the mind ultimately is repressed wishes to have sex with a parent (yuck). No. This little voice is the ego as defined by such illuminated beings as Eckhart Tolle. It is that odd part of our beings that wants us to think, that we are in grave danger. It wants us afraid. It wants FEAR.

Why? Because it knows that the second we truly realize we do not have to be afraid – it will die.Basically it is simply fighting for it's life. I even do believe it thinks it's doing good work. That it is just trying to keep us safe. 

But. It got that all turned around. Holding us hostage in all of that fear is not keeping us safe at all. It is keeping us docile. It is keeping us quiet. It is shutting up the soul and all of those disturbing yearnings that make us itch to do things that seem disruptive to polite society.

I guess on the level of whole countries and states, government in itself could be seen as the ego (again, not the Freudian one, mind you). It is trying to keep us in line. Because if too many of us discover that we do not have to follow all of those rules at all, it is afraid it will all fall apart. Which it might. But then - maybe it should?

That, people, is what enlightenment is all about. It is the deep and final realization that the little voice telling us to be afraid is lying. It has it’s reasons. That does not mean it is right.

And just on the other side of that realization lies freedom. I know; I’ve seen it. For longer and longer stretches I’ve lived there. And I know you know it, too. If you have read this far, you know it, too.

On the other side of Fear does not lie Courage. No. On the other side of Fear lies Love.

Not human love. Not the love between people, although it can be found there as well, but it is not the goal.

No, the deep, all encompassing, universe-expanding and -enfolding, eternal love that is beyond this realm and reality. The love that is of a quality like silk so pure it hasn’t come into existence yet – flowing through the unknown Universe like waves of aurora borealis of a light and material no living person could ever hold in any mathematical equations.

In the end the choice is always simple: Fear? Or love. Ego? Or God. 

That does not mean it is easy. Mystics from all religions throughout time has written about this. I do not claim to belong in their ranks in any capacity. All I know is that this is the exact thing my soul calls for. In the end it is all that truly matters to me: Enlightenment. 

I want to get there. I do hope I will this life time. I do hope this life will be my final one. That I will not have to come back here and work on all of this yet another life time. I want to get though the veil, I want to know once and for all what is on the other side.

And of course I already know. Now I want my human vessel to know as well. Together we will walk each other home; To the home beyond this place, the home we never left at all. 

Are you walking with me? Are we on this pilgrimage together? 

If you are don't be surprised if you start seeing scallop shells the oddest places. It's just the saint welcoming you on the way home.