14: Home and the homeless

 

The sweat on my body had given up on arriving in single droplets. It just rose from my entire surface now, like mist on a morning meadow. Except warm. Ridiculously warm. And decidedly not something that would inspire deep feeling painters to get out the arsenal of rare pigments and oils. My body was the sticky, messy, flustered kind of a misty morning meadow.

It didn’t bother me. I was sweaty. So was everybody else. So what: It was hot for goodness sake. So hot you weren’t entirely sure if the pavement itself hadn’t taken on a life of it’s own, and was now moving right before you; the heat rising from it making it look like a den of slithering black snakes.

This was Brooklyn in the summer: Brown stones on tree-lined streets, even in the shade the heat was intense. Trash bags on the road side, waiting for the garbage truck. Around me people were jogging like it was any other day, maybe even a cool one. Most of the houses were in different states of disrepair; gentrification hadn’t arrived to every nook and cranny of Brooklyn yet.

I couldn’t help be thankful for that. Surfaces with cracks in them made me relax; they told med tales of how pretty didn’t always win the list of ‘most important thing in life’.

This morning a rat was scurrying away right in front of me as the trash truck came closer. Then I discovered a jacket hanging on a fence. Further down the road a dress shirt. And then a bowler hat.

Had someone decided to disregard clothes all together one item at a time during the night? Or was the entire street someone’s outdoor closet? No one had claimed the lost clothes yet. I smiled as I imagined the hat travelling the world as an independent traveler; one head here, a new one there. Who knows where it would go next? Panama? The Bronx?

I was walking in the shade of the trees now, the sun spilling through the leaves forming a pattern of shade with moving circles of sun in between them. I could smell the dust roasting in the sun like the rest of us. In a path of clear sunlight a simple cardboard box caught me eye. It contained books, and that always made me look twice. Books are friends, however far you are from a bookshelf you can call your own. I bend down to look closer.

“Free!” it said on the cardboard. Huh. Even more interesting seeing as I was broke. I bend down a little more. And suddenly one book felt like it was doing the moving; it came closer all on it’s own, like it was lifted up out of the box and into my hands.

“Home” the title said. The author my most favorite one in the whole world; Marilynne Robinson.

That second I felt like the world fell away. Like I was Truman in “The Truman Show”, that box office movie with the pretty out there message for a Hollywood production, that what if this was all unreal? And the solid things around us just a set? In the movie the point was that Truman had grown up being televised to the world without his knowledge. He thought his WAS the world; He didn't suspect for a second that he was living inside a television show. To him everything around him was normal, it was all he knew. Until he started discovering cracks in the tightly managed script. Until he broke free from the illusion of what was real. Until he found a way to know the difference between what looks real and what actually is. I had that same odd feeling now: What if none of this was real? The heat, the dust, the traffic, the half-dead leaves on parched trees, the people passing by in a pace fit for the tracks. What is just behind all of this, there was something else? Something that was more real than this could ever be?

I stood frozen in the height of the summer heat in the middle of the street, with the book in my hands. My favorite author. How was this happening? How did they know? The thought raced through my head together with the realization that I had no idea which ‘they’ I was even referring to. Someone had put it there by sheer coincidence. Obviously.

But. This day, this afternoon, in asphalt-melting, smouldering hot Brooklyn, only one thing had been on my mind:

Home.

I had been officially homeless for a month. I was uprooted, unsure, undone. What is home, if you have none? Is home a house? What if you have a roof over your head, but still do not feel at home?

Home is where the heart is, they say. But what does that mean? I carry my heart with me, so home should technically be everywhere. But can you be at home everywhere? I suspected the ‘heart’ part of that old saying really meant to be your people; Home is where your people are. Family, friends, neighbors. But what if you don’t really have any? Not enough to give you a sense of truly deeply belonging?

Belonging. That was at the core of it. When you sell all you have and leave the country you were born in with no planned end date, where do you belong? When you can’t answer, when people ask you for your address, where do you belong?

Is home a place? Or a person? Or a feeling?

All I knew was that I felt unsettled and unsure of what I was doing and why. I knew I had never felt at home in the apartment, I had been living in for 11 years. It had felt like a prison from the beginning. And I couldn’t get away, because the markets tanked. Sure, I could rent it out, and live somewhere else, and I did. But I was still tied to that place. The second I wasn’t anymore felt as close to ultimate freedom as I had ever come. Intoxicating. But as all kinds of radical freedom, it was a sensation tinged with sheer panic: Now what? Am I going to keep walking the streets of the world forever? Always passing through, never belonging to anyone or anywhere? Am I even able of settling down? Should I be? I felt lonely to the core of my bones, and every little thing around me unfamiliar. It was jarring.

And then out of the blue on a day so hot it shut down your respiratory system with pure heat shock, here I stood with ‘Home’ in my hands.

I held home in my hands. I held home.

Home was here. Right here. I held it. I held it.

The salty sweat on my skin suddenly mixed with heavy drops of salty tears. Salt and sweat and tears and sun and dust and asphalt. I cried. Right then and there in the street, a hot Brooklyn afternoon.

Did I tell you, how I had always had this feeling that this place wasn’t real? The world, I mean. maybe that was why the message of 'The Truman Show' rang so true to me. When I was a child, I was sure I had been a Nazi in my last life. Before coming here. I must have done something so horrible, no ordinary punishment was enough. And being a Nazi was the worst thing I could think of, growing up in a country that had been under German occupation during the war. I was sure I had been reincarnated into this life. Not only sure, it was simply how it was. That wasn't even up for debate. I have no idea where that came from, I did not grow up in a home where such things were ever talked of. I just knew. That I had been a Nazi, though, I think might have been rooted in something else; A despairing child’s desperate attempt to make sense of something senseless.

That feeling, though; that this place wasn’t real, that something had been reality before coming here, and would be again, when one day we left this life – that stuck.

I can’t count the times the feeling of it all being nothing but theatre had made me look at people a second time, to see beyond the ‘role’ they were playing on the stage of this world in this time. It rarely failed. Which is why I had such a hard time with people who deeply believed they were something different than what was in their souls. Those were consistently the ones who would get extremely angry with me. They did not want to know.

It helped me to pay attention.

To know.

That people you meet aren’t just people. What they say aren’t just words.

In the end I had no doubt, that not only was this place all a play and we were nothing but either actors on a stage or spectators in an audience. The point being we could always wake up out of the illusion that the play was not a play, but reality. We could always wake up in the middle of playing on that stage and remember, we could simply laugh and leave. Or get up in the audience, excuse ourselves and walk straight out of the theatre all together. Into whatever was on the other side of the door with the green exit sign on top.

But not only that. The people in the play called life on planet Earth wasn't even people. We were all just different versions of the same. All the actors in the play, all the members of the audience, all the members of the staff of the playhouse; We were all just different versions of the same representation of one thing: God in the image of a human person. We were the Light, in the seemingly solid physical state. Souls with a thick wintercoat of meat and tendons.

In the end that was the only reality there ever was: We are all truly one. We are all made of the same building blocks as the world; Stardust and imaginary silver threads. We are not here. There is no here. But as long as we believe we are here, truth will be spoken to us from the most unlikely of sources.

Because in the end it is ourselves talking to ourselves from the mouths of a seemingly separate person. When it comes from someone unexpected, sometimes it makes us listen closer by sheer surprise.

What is the message?

In the end it is always the same: Wake up.

Just like I knew that people were never random, I had know forever that things weren’t either.

The entire world and everything in it; symbols. Like in a dream at night. You see a house in the dream, but dream interpretation reminds you, it’s not a house, it’s a symbol, another way of showing you what is inside of yourself. If you’re in the basement of the house in the dream, you have deep issues to work on. If your in the attic, you might sit in a moon beam talking to God from the parts of you that does not live in the symbolic gutters.

That’s how I saw the world, too. Nothing was ever random. Nothing was ever coincidence. You could easily walk through life and never see it. But once you did, you would see it everywhere; and discover you where surrounded by such light all along. You just didn’t know how to see it.

 *

Holding a book now with the letters H O M E in my hands on a sweaty afternoon in Brooklyn, I was reminded: 

Look closer. Maybe home is not a place at all.

I took the book with me and walked the rest of my usual 45 minute walk to the yoga studio. Today was day 2 of a weekend special. We did led classes of astanga yoga together in the mornings, and in the afternoon there had been Hindu blessings, my teacher being a trained Hindu priest.

This morning sweat was flowing from bodies throughout the studio, not as mist on meadows, but as full fledged rivers after the spring thaw. Whole lakes of salty water was covering yoga mats with impressive speed. Most of the men had just given up on clothes all together now, save a skimpy Speedo. I myself was not entirely sure I didn’t hear the voice talking us through the poses in stereo. Or seeing the bodies to my left and right slightly double.

Once class was over, I couldn’t help but feel a moment of pride. I had been sick with food poisoning for a week now. I hadn’t been able to eat at all for most of that time. I had no idea what was giving my body sustenance, and I was starting to become a little nervous. I wasn’t throwing up or anything (oh, come on, we all know what that means: No, no diarrhea). I just had violent stabs of pain in my abdomen, and it was literally impossible for me to even think of food without becoming really nauseous. A couple of days ago the sweet lady at the food place I had grown accustomed to visiting after morning yoga practise had poured some mama love over me:

- You just need this one thing, Pedialyte! It’s for babies, when they get sick, but it works for adults, too! That and crackers.

I had made her write it down for me. Pedialyte. Crackers. I could do that; I could make my brain work long enough to get two things.

- It’s just your stomach trying to figure out what is going on. Try not to eat anything else than the crackers. You’ll be fine in two days, I promise!

I wasn’t. But at least the Pedialyte, which basically was a solution of electrolytes, made sure I wasn’t dehydrating and that was a relief.

As the days passed with no food save crackers, Pedialyte and home made tamarind juice from my food place, I felt like my cells were getting lighter. Like something was shifting in me on a cellular level. I wondered if this was what it felt like to get very old and feel your body preparing to enter a whole different stage of being; death. It didn’t feel bad at all, except for the pain, except that too felt oddly unreal.

It reminded me of where this whole journey began; Oslo. And then the Camino de Santiago. In both those places I experienced the same thing as I did now; my body simply stopped accepting sustenance. I had a few theories on what was going on and they didn’t have much to do with actual food.

Right now I was simply thankful, that even with this thing going on, I had now managed to get to the yoga studio for a full week. It had been up hill. I would wake disoriented in the morning, sweaty and confused, and just hear this voice in my head:

- Just get to the damn mat!

Meaning the yoga mat, of course. Not thinking of how, not thinking of the practice itself, not thinking of feeling inexperienced in a sea of wildly bendable yogis and worrying if I were doing the poses right. Just.get.to.the.mat. The rest would follow. The man who brought this particular yoga practise to the Western world had been Guruji from Mysore, India. His simply instruction about yoga practice was similar:

- Do the practice and all will follow.

‘All’ being enlightenment. But honestly, right now the only thing I could think of that would ‘follow’ me doing my practice was honestly getting back home to sleep for the rest of the day.

So today, after surviving a whole week of daily practice while having food poisoning AND now a Saturday of classes on meditation + a led class without passing out – I was proud.

Showering after class felt like hearing God giggling; You were still sweating even stark naked as you showered – today there was no way around these bodies of ours, it seemed. When we all left for lunch it was safe to assume the rest of the group had given up on not being sweaty as well.

It was on my way back from lunch that I found the book. Or it found me. I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt like a gift. Like God reaching out and giving me a hug, saying I was not forgotten. Or a reminder: You’re on the right path. You left home behind. But that was never your home. Your home right now is just being. Reminding other people, too.

That afternoon featured a talk of life long spiritual teacher, an American of 70 years, dressed in all white cloth wrapped around him, guru-style. He led the room in a series of bodily movements, then talked long about the science of breath as a means to quiet an over-stimulated nervous system back into peace. And of how in the end, the only thing that mattered was enlightenment. That was the why of yoga, the true reason bodies moved on mats in steamy Brooklyn shalas and yogis taught breath-work:

- In the end this world is not the true reality, he said and I sat up straighter, was he really just saying the words that had been passing through my own mind a few hours earlier?

- Yoga is not about getting a strong body or competing about flexibility, that is all ego, he laughed now.

- Not the ego of Freud, that always end with someone secretly wanting sex with a parents and Oedipus complexes!

His belly was moving up and down with hilarity. The whole room was giggling with him. He went on to explain how in the end yoga was about one thing only: Waking up. From the deep sleep that is the thought that this world is all there is.

I felt my neck become sore with how much I was nodding, yes, yes, he was saying everything I knew to be true! But one thing was odd to me. How he kept saying that actually achieving this, actually uniting with the All that was behind all of this, that was just the stuff of dreams. Of rather the stuff of yogi’s in the deep mountain caves of India in the times of the Upanishads. He kept insisting on how a life long practice was necessary. Hours and hours of breath work and meditation and strenuous yoga. And yet he wasn’t there yet. He had done it all, but enlightenment wasn’t his.

I waited until he was done teaching and the room had almost emptied out. But I had to ask:

- So. I need to ask. When you say enlightenment, what do you mean? Do you mean awakening into this reality? Still being here, but knowing this is not all there is?

He looked at me, trying to figure out how much he needed to explain from the basics of what awakening is in the teachings of his lineage. I decided to get straight to the point, circumventing him even considering that I knew nothing because I was just another yoga loving girl, who wanted a slimmer waist.

- I have lived this always, I said.

- I know.

- I remember where we came from before birth, I know where we go when we die. I remember prior lives, just like I remember future ones, because time isn’t linear, it is a point. And none of this is real anyway, not space, not time. Not of this is here, we’re just sleeping. But I remember what IS there; I call it the Light. It is immense, and has no form, no gender, no limit, no material existence. It is everything and everywhere and all of us, it is the only reality there ever existed. And it is good, it is smiling, it is playing – in us, around us, through us, behind all of what we believe is a time-bound, physical existence. We ARE it. This is not learned knowledge for me. I didn't read this is a book. I know this. So. What I also know to be true, is that enlightenment is not about waking up into this world. All I want to do is to wake up ALL the way. Wake up OUT of this world. Just like you would out of a dream at night; when you wake, you don’t wake inside of the dream – that is lucid dreaming, you’re aware, but your still dreaming. When you truly wake, the dream is no longer there. That is what I want. I just want to go back home to the Light. All I want is to go home.

I was on the verge of tears now. Next to us two elderly women were standing, listening, they belonged to the same teaching, they might even be living together, I believe he had a huge estate where people had been coming since the 70’s to learn about the beliefs behind the physical work of yoga. I looked at him, biting hard on the insides of my cheeks. He looked back at me from behind the eyes of an old man, but his soul suddenly felt like that of a young boy to me. The boundaries of what was him and what was me disappeared. We were no longer separate people, we were a field. In this field I felt his deep sorrow. He knew his time was coming to an end. And all he ever wanted was to reach this Light. Here I was, never having done any of his focused hard work, and I was already there. I felt his grief. The sensation of failure. Of knowing he might have to come back again and spend another life working hard on waking up out of the cycle of reincarnation. He wasn’t annoyed. He wasn’t angry. Not at all. He was just looking at reality; In this life it had been his work to talk about this wondrous thing he would never get to experience. He would die without ever having reached what he had worked towards his whole life. He also knew he was standing in front of one who had. Who lived there. But not wholly. Someone who was trapped in the in-between of knowing the Light to the point of it pouring out of the cracks of her physical existence. But still being trapped inside of this physical existence enough to believe it was real to the point of feeling it’s anguish very deeply. The purgatory of being torn both ways, the feeling of being a house pulled apart by the howling winds of a tropical storm. He was not fooled by the ordinary human tendency of judging a person by their exterior. He knew you did actually not need to be a man to have touched the divine. You didn’t even have to be in the physical appearance of an old, wise person. The Light comes into this world in all forms, and you will hear it speak the clearest from the most unlikely of sources. What matters is paying attention and knowing truth will reach you if you listen. Let those who have ears listen. He was listening.

I asked him again:

- So. How does this match with what you teach? With your lineage, with what your guru taught you? Is this what you experience the old texts are saying as well? That the only reality is waking up all the way out of this world? That none of this is real, it’s all illusion, the only thing that is real is God, and when we wake up, we finally return back to it, never having to come back to this world?

He looked at me a moment longer. All his bravado from before, his exterior of being the distinguished teacher, who pretty much knew all there was to know, was gone. I knew what he would say before he spoke. That field between us was still flowing back and forth. And I knew that just like I had gotten to land a little in this world through him, feeling a little less untethered in the in-between – he had also gotten to move in the Light a little through me. He had gotten to touch it, to know it, before this body of his stopped it’s existence here:

- Yes, he said. That is exactly it.

I thanked him. He thanked me even more. I think we were both shaken; it is not everyday you get to talk about the core of what is truly awakening, and not from a theoretical standpoint. While simultaneously feeling that immense freedom that is the Light flowing through you as you stand in conversation.

I stepped from the dark downstairs yoga shala back out onto the now no longer smouldering hot Brooklyn street.

All around me it seemed like the physicality of things was thinning. I had always known that no object was truly solid. Even as a little girl, I can remember seeing the space between molecules and the dance of the atoms in the huge expanses of emptiness between them, rather than I would see, say, a door. It was not a door. It was a collection of atoms that in the end was nothing but energy. It was not a door, it was an interpretation of the way this particular energy seemed to present itself at that moment. And the moment wasn’t set either. Time always an illusion just as much as space. Now that same knowing washed over me. It was like a veil not lifting, but becoming thinner. I could see straight through. And in cracks and at the edges of things, the Light was blinding. Beautifully blinding.

As the world fell away, the love became stronger. There was no separation, no me, no you. ‘I’ was all. And all was love. Never have I seen anything more beautiful than that dark, dirty night time street. I wanted to walk forever.

Every time I came to a crossing the light shifted for me. Always green. Because it wasn’t real. No reason it wouldn’t be green the second I needed it to. On the side of the road I saw a homeless man leaning up against a fence. He was vomiting. Again and again, black vomit, in the space between the fence and his walker. He looked 6o and like life had beaten him up over and over again. But all of his clothes were impeccably clean, and his shoes pearly white.

I went over to him, and just stood there until he could catch his breath a little.

- That looks rough, I said. 
- Is there anything I can do to help?

He was so bent out of shape, he couldn’t answer at first. I picked out a few options for him to either nod or shake his head at:

- Would you like me to call an ambulance?

He shook his head.

- Do you need some water?

He shook his head.

- Would you like me to leave?

He shook his head.  

I stayed. I had absolutely no better place to be right now than at this mans side as he shivered with cold sweat, wave after wave of vomiting tearing through his body. One cascade after the other of deep black liquid fell out of him like a dismal version of a back country waterfall.

I took hold of his shoulder, letting him know I was right there, that he was not alone, and that also he was not judged. I knew this wasn’t good. I knew black vomit meant internal bleeding, the black was blood that had passed through his stomach.

When the worst of it was over, he wiped his brow. Then his shoes. I asked if he needed to sit down. He was ok just clinging to his walker. A wave of complete love moved through me and enveloped him. It did not come from me. It was for him. He started talking, when I asked again if he wanted water, and motioned to a bottle on his walker:

- That is something else, he said apologetically.

- It is why I am this sick. I tried to stop, I really did. I was just at the hospital. It’s my liver, he said.

I told him how sorry I was he was this sick. And that I was fine staying with him. And how incredibly impressed I was with how he was handling this. That last part he did not get.

- Look at your shoes, I said.

- You are so very ill, you could have given up on everything a long time ago. But the first thing you did, was to bend down and make sure your shoes where completely clean. That tells me a lot about a man who did not want any of this. A man who has fought really hard. Who still is trying his very best in circumstances that most others can’t even comprehend. I admire you, I really do, I explained.

And I did. I was under no illusions that I could have been him. I had never had a drinking problem. But I could have been on the street a thousand times over. Heck, I WAS on the street, I had as little of an address as this guy had. We were just two people, each of us trying to do our best with what we had.

He looked at me.

- It’s like you’re an angel or something, he said.

- No one else would have stopped to be with an old black guy being sick like that.

I just looked at him. The love flowing from somewhere inside of me and beyond me felt as tangible as his walker that he had tricked out with stickers.

If an angel was what he needed, I was there to be it for him.

- Just know, I said to him

- That if this really is your time, you have nothing to fear. You are not going to be judged. You don’t have to be afraid of going. If you fear being beyond forgiveness, don’t.

Now he looked at me like he was really getting afraid that I was not just a random person on the street stopping to be with him, but a fully fledged psycho that he needed to asses the level of danger from. 

I quickly reassured him, I wasn’t saying he was dying. I just sensed that this fear was what was holding him back. He was afraid that all of the things he had done in his life that had not been particularly great would be judged when he left this planet. Basically that he was off to hell. 

I asked if I had a point a little bit. He nodded. Still weary of whether or not I was a Jesus nut out to save him, he told me about his life. And that he knew he actually was indeed dying. The doctors had said there was nothing left to do. But he wanted to stay here, he was going to fight this to the end! I smiled and said again how impressed I was at his tenacity. And that when he was ready to go, he would meet nothing but love.

When I left him, he was shuffling steadily along on his walker. Pristine white shoes, immaculately clean clothes, the only thing that gave away a hard life of alcohol and drugs was his ashy skin and crumbling body. He smiled and waived at me as I turned the corner. 

I felt my book in my backpack as I made my way back to my bed for a few more weeks, before this now almost familiar place would make way for yet another bed in yet another house that wasn't mine.

My cells felt lighter than air, I felt myself falling away, and right that second nothing could be less important than where this body lived. The only thing that made any real sense was the letting go of the expectations of what a life should look like. Home, or no home. 

When expectations fell away, a space opened up. An empty space with no judgement, no hope, no preconceived ideas, no dreams - just space. The soul that filled the space was all that mattered. It was beauty beyond anything that ever existed in this dream we call the world.