One Person

I am sitting in the airport, and I don’t know who I am. I would like to say I am you, for you, stranger, wear a suit of the most beautiful black fabric, which is silky and soft, and you carry a strong, black bag. Your shoes are black and matte and your belt is, too, and despite of all the dark clothing you wear, you give off an idea of lightness and current the way a window in a quiet, dark space cannot help but illumine. I might not talk into my cell phone as much as you do yours, but I would like to say I am you, because as you talk hands-free in this crowded airport you pace, calmly gesticulate, look out the grand airport windows with your sky blue eyes. I would like to say I am you because you are conducting business while hundreds around you have nothing to do with what you are doing, and that seems to be all right with you, for like the gray light coming through these large airport windows, you seem completely at home. I would like to say I am you because you are a professional person likely associated with an organization of some importance in which you share an intensely vested interest, and I assume they are invested in you, or at least this is my hope as I watch you bow your head to dial another number on your phone and listen for the ring, because if I were you, if I were you, I would want to know someone on the other end of this phonecall had me in the palm of some caring hand, or hands. As it is, now, though, I wish I were you simply so I could call someone on that cell phone of yours with some answers, for I am walking through he airport, and I don’t know who I am.

I am seated in the auditorium, and I don’t know who I am. I would like to say I am you, for when the curtain rises, you, dancer, are alone on the stage. You are a dancer, seated on a backless bench. On a bench alone. You are seated on a bench, alone, dressed in stretchy fabric, stretchy fabric that makes for you not a tunic but a tunic with a seamless hood, which, really, makes a tunnel. You are dressed in your fabric tunnel, and it is solid in color, and somber. You start slowly moving to music that must be, I feel right away, the song of unceasing pain. I would like to say I am you because the world watching can barely see your face, but as you begin to dance, you stay seated, and its sees your limbs beginning to move, stretching the fabric, and your shoulders moving in concert with your awkward, unwitting arms, and your head is turning and your torso is contracuting within the cocoon costume that you wear. I would not be able to turn my head or contract my muscles as deliberately as you, but I would like to say I am you because now as you dance, still seated, you are dancing both the dance of tightness and pain and at the same time the dance of surrender to pain’s holdings. If I were you, I would do my best to offer that to those watching me, just as you are: kick up a foot or two or, like you, stand up for just a moment in order to offer the whole body to the dance, to the audience, to the theme of unlimited lament that it suggests, like you. And I would add to the dance the elemental query: Am I you? Do you see me in you? If so, do you know who I am? because I am sitting here watching the dance, and though I am a member of an audience, and I am watching you, and when you stop I applaud for you, and I cry for what I have seen and felt, I still don’t know who I am.

I am a guest in your monastery, about to enter the meditation room for early morning sadhana, and I don’t know who I am. I would like to say I am you, for you arrive at the door and be-drape silently, taking your gray robe from a wooden rack on the wall that holds at least a dozen other robes just like yours. Because it is cold here in this monastery this early morning, you are wearing white socks, and you take several soft steps in them as you dress. It is so quiet I can hear the effect of your cotton-covered feet padding peaceful, as opposed to my barefoot-stick sonorousness, which is my situation, across the floor. I would like to say I am just like you because as you passed me in the hall moments ago and put your hands in prayer position at your heart and bowed your head to kindly and silently greet me, and I did the same, I felt welcomed, both by you and by this place, of which there is a seamless unified breathing. I wish I could be just like you, for as I watch you in the meditation room making preparations, I note clearly you are incapable of distinguishing between the hierarchy of what and for whom more everyday people reserve their smiles: human beings, great ideas, art, and love. In any place, really, real or imagined, I would like to be like you, in other words, for you walk around with a nearly continual half-opened eyed smile of serenity on your face, offering said smile to plants, ceilings, rugs, bells, and cushions you are placing on the floor around the room in a semi-circle. I might not shave my head as you have done, but I would like to say I am you, I would like to say I am you, for the wooden mala beads I see you are wearing around your wrist as you pull up your sleeves and sit now for Zazen are something I own too, so in a way, I feel I am resembling you. And that makes me smile. And that makes me humble, and still, but still, I don’t know who I am.

I am walking through the past, and I don’t know who I am. I would like to say I am you, for you are sitting, reading a book. You are eight years old, and the chair you sit in is too large for you. I might not pick the same book as you to read, but I would like to say I am you because you have a look on your face that I admire, of soft, innocent peacefulness: not a care in the world, as goes the cliché. I would like to say I am you because you have not lived long enough to know the deep waters owned by time, its currents, its crashes, but I feel that by watching you, I sense its first mighty encumbrance in your life (however well you plan, you, like everyone, young one, shall not avoid it) shall not tear down the break wall of your being, young as that break wall is, and I would like to say I am you because this scene—you, reading, quiet--suggests such shored-up strength. I would like to say I am you without hesitation now because as a man walks into the room and comes to you and says your name, I see the origins of the break wall’s composition: You look up and smile instantly, shockingly energy-shifting swiftly, and jump out of your chair, your now-irrelevant book crashing to the irrelevant floor, all signs of peaceful passing passed. He picks you up and hugs you and swings you around, and you are saying hello with joy to a man who is probably your father. I would like to say I am you for I would like to know the feelings such an encounter renders. I would like to say I am you so that I could grow again, re-grow, an orchid under such exotic conditions, under such a lucky star as this situation seems to suggest, that you are the child of something that is a child of something, and that in all that passage of all that is right, it is all right.

I don’t know who I am. What am I to do? What am I to do? I am a piece of this and a piece of that and came from this but not from that, and I stand here in the moment, all moments, alone, going through the plethora of my perturbations and longings, going through myriad, happenstance tableaux, formed pictures in my life, of my life. A borderless bounty extant somewhere in the frontiers of not only our minds, hearts, and memories, but also of our souls, beckons us all, they say, eventually, and sometimes I feel I am at the shore of that beckoning. Would that be the call of the wild? Is that the song of angels? Is this the ‘yuj’ in yoga? I don’t know who I am. I only know: I am.