This same time last year I had the sensation that events were unfolding in carefully orchestrated ways. At the time I attributed it to the fact that I’d been doing a ton of yoga nidra practice and had recently finished a week immersed in it during a yoga nidra teacher training. Curiously, I find myself in a similar situation again this year on the heels of too much jet-setting and absolutely none of my usual practices of meditation, yoga nidra, and hatha yoga. Instead, I am called to one of my most powerful practices: invite unknowing. It sounds a little odd and possibly not even that useful, much less powerful, but bear with me while I ramble on about it instead of writing a coherent article describing my interview with a conductor.
In a lifetime long ago, a tragic and somewhat dramatic set of events upended my apparently stable life. This instigated a massive re-processing of beliefs and a re-formulation of my world view after which I enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts. During this period it dawned on me that, though my life was not what I had thought it was, NOTHING BAD WAS HAPPENING. It was a supremely (but quietly) joyful time and one which I did not want to disturb by actually going out on a date. I was walking around in a perpetual state of self-contentedness: working, rock climbing in west virginia, and cooking peach crepe breakfasts for friends on the front porch, so why rock the boat. It was with mixed emotions that I met Adrian, an inspiring & fascinating mountaineer who was out of the country more than he was in it. I considered it a deal-breaker that he was 12 year my junior and so was bound and determined to keep our developing friendship just that. Without recounting all the synchronous details I will simply say that despite my most earnest attempts, 6 months later we embarked on a relationship which, at the time, felt as if it was not my choice to accept or reject. Hindsight has only served to cement this impression. What did it mean? Of course I thought I knew - it felt like I was being rewarded for the hardest emotional work I’d done in my life but then there was even harder work yet to come when, in the summer of 2002, when Adrian told me that his future did not include me. Again I dug deep to find the gift buried in the emotional wreckage and it became apparent, over time, that while the most resonant realization I came to while rebuilding my self after crisis number 1 was that when there are harsh events in your recent memory and harsher possibilities on the horizon, there is still refuge in the present. What I still needed to grasp, and what I learned in spades while dating a mountaineer, was that though there are fresh and vivid memories of the past and incredible anticipation of future reunions, the present is still the only place to be. got it.
That was almost 7 years ago and the ways in which my continuing friendship with Adrian enriches my life make it unnecessary to wonder why we were brought together though it was clearly not what I had projected at the time. My flirtations with synchronicity were in their infancy at that time. Shortly after we broke up he reignited with his college sweetheart, Lissa. It was an incredibly challenging environment in which to heal from a broken heart. In a rare moment of true knowing, I awoke early one morning that fall to a certainty that she too would be a central character in my life (they have since married). Though it was much easier to invite unknowing on the nature of Lissa’s role in my life (after all, I’d not yet met her) I was not yet consciously practicing the invitation. As circumstances played out, Lissa and I met about 9 months later when she drove me from New York to Baltimore. I was returning from a solo re-empowerment trip to Asia and as luck would have it, she was driving down to visit Adrian for the weekend. The friendship we developed in the subsequent years has served to shape the direction of my life in hugely significant ways. It was with her encouragement and support that I resurrected the long-dormant artist in me.
Fast forward to October 2007, just a few days ago, when the gears of the universe seem to have picked up momentum, taking me on a path unintended. I was at a conference on the mysticism of sound in Vancouver that I rather impulsively registered for despite the fact that it would require me to fly home from a vacation in Spain only to stop-over for about 6 hours in my home town of Baltimore before continuing west. What drew me to this event were the Sufi contemplative chanting practices known as wazifas, which I learned of while on a silent retreat in May, becoming entranced by their simple melodies sung in swirling rounds. The conference ended, for me, after a jaw-dropping piano improvisation by a conductor & musician visiting from Munich. Following his performing I simply did not want to hear another note so I began my exit as the next musicians were setting up on stage. I noticed the German pianist grab his coat and leave as well and so wandered off to find the bathroom hoping to give him time and space to make his get away. I’m not all that clear why I was avoiding him other than I did not want it to appear that I was following him out to gush over what, admittedly for me, was a transcendent performance. When I left the theater about 10 minutes later he was still at the front door waiting for another conference attendee. Since he was standing right in front of me, I did my gushing, bent his ear for what I fear was far too long, said goodnight, and walked back to my hotel.
The next morning I made my way to the airport only to find my flight to Denver had been canceled so I was re-booked on a flight through Chicago. As pre-boarding began I heard a page for a passenger with the same last name as the visiting German who I was sure had said he was heading back to Munich. But no, it was he who responded to the page. In the few minutes before boarding I approached him and found that he’d made a last minute change of plans to stop-over for one day in Washington. After mutually arriving at the word synchronous to describe the strangeness of the mornings events I remember him saying it had snowed the day he left Munich and that it felt like fall which he liked since his birthday was in November. Mine too. What day? As I spoke the date I could almost see it coming out of my mouth and crossing space. His facial expression only barely revealed his surprise and he showed me his passport which you, no doubt, have figured out revealed that we share the same birth date.
After I explained that, though we were headed for different airports, we’d only be about an hour drive apart at the end of our trips so we made a tentative plan to meet for coffee in Washington the following day. I couldn’t believe my luck! I had pages of notes from the conductor’s talk at the conference and so many questions for him. I determined that a conductor, or at least this one, is really an experiential educator. I recently had the same epiphany regarding my own yoga teaching to which one of my experiential ed friends replied. “Um, yes and this is an epiphany why?” I suppose it was because my education both in art school and engineering could only be described as exclusively heady, nothing sensorial or emotional about either.
The conductor shot me a text message at 3p.m. as I was stepping out of the shower. An hour and 15 minutes later I pulled up to the National Gallery of Art as he was walking out. While driving down from Baltimore I considered the many questions I wanted to ask him but it occurred to me that maybe I should approach this meeting in the same way I met with a Tibetan Lama a few months ago (see Interview with a Lama - August 31, 2007), that is, not quite knowing why it was happening but knowing my complete presence was required. Our conversation was too short but resonant on topics including consciousness, philosophy, and music.
It is becoming clear to me that if I actually want to interview deep thinkers and write about it I’m going to need much more practice since I seem to digress into conversation while in their presence and meandering essays, such as this, when writing about it later. The fact is, I enjoy the hell out of plumbing my own depths. What is unique for me this time around is that I’m doing a remarkable job of holding at bay any attempts to decipher the meaning of these uncanny events, arguably the most unequivocally synchronous happenings of my life so far. Looking back on my old self I am reminded of a child watching a movie full of plot twists. They turn to you and start peppering you with questions of why and what will happen the only answer to which is “shhhhh. all will be revealed“. That question-peppering child is still in me but I now have a practice that has allowed me to relax into these real-life plot twists: to invite unknowing, a practice given to me during my emotional reconstruction in the aftermath of the Adrian breakup, ironically by his (and now my) friend Joyce. Joyce… the experiential educator. When I have shared this practice with others I have noticed that it is almost always translated to tolerate unknowing or something similar that implies simply suffering through the uncertainty but there is a different quality to an invitation - it is softly receptive.
Invite unknowing. Why? To practice getting out of one’s own way. When we think we understand the meaning of a synchronous event it often leads us to a projection into the future, as in, “because X happened it means I am to do Y”. Several years ago I cold-called a tea salon in Manhattan because Lissa thought it was a great fit for the art I was generating at the time. The owner invited me to bring my work to New York and subsequently gave me a show. I interpreted the swinging open of the door of opportunity as a mandate, though I practically sold my soul in the process of bringing both the work and the show into existence. The gallery owner was one of the most difficult people I have ever had to work with and though the work hung for several months in a lovely space in Manhattan, I did not sell a single piece from that body of work until the show came down. My only other show, one curated and hung by Lissa two years earlier, almost completely sold out. When we hear stories like these the urge to declare what they mean is almost overwhelming which brings me to the companion to invite unknowing… avoid declarations. When we declare, we enter the known zone, as Joyce calls it. No learning happens in the known zone. But I am discovering, in this moment, that it’s quite challenging to END an essay without a declaration and so it appears I am called upon to end it here, pianissimo. shhhh…
