Gurus

The Fly Guy appeared last night. I had made myself put him out of my mind because he was supposed to be going to earth at a Thai monastery for the next six months. I was absurdly happy to see his IM.

The whole going to a monastery thing seemed like a really good idea after all the stuff that had been going on this spring and summer. Following his unspecified activities for "our side" during the "war" this spring, he had been invited to take some contracts for some of the reconstruction folks out there in the Middle East. After a bunch of tense conferences in London, he decided not to "dance with the devil," as he put it. But back in Mombassa, he was not getting a lot of work, so he started poking around for other sources of income. This climaxed, in midsummer, with him and a crew of four crash landing somewhere near the Congo border on what he finally admitted was a hunt for a rumored cache left behind by murdered ivory smugglers. (Wouldn't it be easier to just fly drugs at this point?) After junking the plane, they ended up walking for something over three weeks before they got to a big enough road to hitch-hike back to Mombassa.

I think he finally found something that convinced him this is not a good way to live.

Since the Fly Guy is all about extremes, his response to this was equally extreme. He found a teacher he liked, and around the middle of August he decided to turn the business over to a second-in-command and go to Thailand to be a monk. I actually thought this was a great idea.

I have a really strange connection with the Fly Guy. I have known him online about two years now. He has such an oddly disconnected life that his conversation is very essentialist. It goes from "Hi, how are you?" to complicated koans in about three minutes. Of course a lot of this is the spurious intimacy of disembodied Web communications, but I feel oddly aware of him on a psychic level most of the time. He disappears for weeks and months, but I usually know when he is about to turn up. Throughout the "war," I had a persistant mental image of him in a bubble of white light. It becames one of my principle meditations on the war, since making it personal helped me focus on the people actually doing it, and redirected my thoughts toward them and away from my anger at the people in Washington.

But since he went away, it's like the link has been broken. Partly, I worked at making myself think about other things. If his purpose really is self-transformation, I should have no expectation of being part of his life when he comes back. Heck, if he truly empties his mind the way he is supposed to, he shouldn't even remember my screenname or even his AIM password. But partly I think I relaxed my sense of vigil. I told him this, saying that I trusted somebody else was taking care of him. He said "Yeah, me for a change."

So there he was in some town he did not know how to spell, getting up at 4:30 am to walk up and down the hill, chanting, and to sit for two hours every day, and to unplug from daily life. He said he started out taking notes, but the master tore them up. He said the big message was to stop trying to plan things. That was how he far he got in 34 days, when the telegram reached him. He was proud, he said, that it was six days old when it finally found him. It called him back to England to renogiate a lease and sign papers.

"So," I asked, attempting neutral language, "Do you think you'll go back?"

"I intend to go back," he said.

I liked that nuance.

I keep intending to do more spiritual work, and I keep getting side tracked. I did go see the Dalai Lama last month, and found that very energizing. He did not say much of anything specific, but it was exciting to see him in person, something I will remember for a long time. As much as anything, it was a magical day in the sun with a crowd of peaceful people gathered for a common purpose. That sort of thing gives me hope.

I have also signed up for a retreat with the Cathedral congregation next month at Holy Cross Monastery up on the Hudson. I went last year and loved the crackling cold and the chanted psalms and the way it created inner space for me. The unexpected thing for me was how much I loved the bells. Not just the sound of them, but the hourly ringing that signalled time changes, like school bells. People usually depict bells as being a negative, controlling influences, symbols of regimented life. For me they were strangely freeing. I spend so much of my life keeping track of time, making sure I catch a bus or get to a meeting, that I always know what time it is, always have a little clock ticking in the back of my head. But having the bells made me free of that. Free as a school child who just immerses herself in her activity until the bell tells her it is time to do the next thing.

So these are the things I am intending to build on: hope, inner space, and freedom from time. I am really hoping I can make some progress on this without having to go to Thailand. #