Category: The Community of Beings

I have heard that an old friend may be dying today. If this is his day, I hope it is a good day to die. I am filled with love for him. My heart goes to sit beside him. My love is tinged with regret for all the times I could have contacted him, all the times I wished to contact him and did not. But love is not regret. It is present.

The first day I met him sometime in 1979, I went with my husband to his office on the campus of American University in Washington, DC. On the recommendation of a dear friend who knew the work my husband was doing in alternative energy policy there in the capital, we had called him and made a time to meet. Abdul Aziz was from Syria and his work for many years had been to bring peace to the Middle East. He was a highly respected academic and an expert in the politics of the Middle East. He was the only such expert trusted by all sides in the conflict. Known only to his friends, he was also a Sheik of the Sufi Order of Rafai with many followers both in the US and abroad. In Washington; these students included officials from the World Bank and people working in all aspects of the federal government. We were very curious to meet this man. I was a young woman. I had no idea what to expect. My whole being was open, delicate tentacles waving in the ocean of experience, sensing, tasting, hearing.

We entered the little waiting room to his office and knocked on the inner door. After a moment, the door opened a bit and a man with a great shock of dark hair and dark lively eyes under strong, dark eyebrows greeted us with energy, saying, in a voice deep, accented and rhythmic, “I’ll just be a minute. I have to finish a phone call. Please sit down. Be comfortable. Then we’ll make some tea and talk.”

We sat together in the outer room, making comments about the hangings on the wall, the Ababic calligraphy that conveyed something just out of our understanding, yet speaking something on a level we could almost grab. Soon, the door opened fully and Abdul Aziz Said stepped out, his hand extended as we rose to greet him. His strong face, more handsome and alive than that of Omar Shariff (who he resembled), was lit up. His whole presence emitted a kind of elegance and grace that seemed to come from another time, another place. He was dressed in a tweed suit jacket and tie and seemed elegant down to his neatly turned shoes. As we passed through the door into his inner office, I brushed against the coat rack where he had carefully hung his aristocratic-looking Burberry coat. As I turned for a moment to make sure I hadn’t disturbed it, I saw, as if in a moment of peeking behind the stage, that the lining was worn, threads hanging, and the inside of the collar a bit threadbare. It was remarkable to me at the time and remains indelibly in my memory–these things did not detract in the least from its genuine aura of elegance. They were a part of his skin, his presence.

I don’t remember what we talked about during our time in his office but I remember that after he had made us some stong mint tea and we had spoken for some time, he told us he had to get to a class on the other side of campus and invited us to walk with him in the lovely spring sunshine. “I have time to make it a nice stroll,” he said as he put on his coat and we followed him through the outer door. 

Partway across campus, we came across some lovely cherry trees in blossom. He pointed to a wooden bench and invited us to sit down. After we had been sitting for a moment enjoying the wonderful fragrance, he turned to my husband and asked, “So what’s your cover?”

My husband’s eyes widened and he cocked his head in question. “I’m not sure what you mean;” he responded.

“Ah. All of us doing this work have to have a cover. It’s like being a spy in a foreign land. My cover is that I’m a professor, a peace maker and to some, a Sheikh. But that is just the cover over the vastness, the real secret of who we all are.”

As time went on, we joined the group of unusual people that gathered every Thursday evening in a small hall somewhere in DC. Sometimes we would stop at his house to pick him up. One evening, as he climbed into the car he said, “Would you mind stopping at the grocery store on the way? I said I would bring hummus for our sharing this time. I haven’t had time to get the ingredients. “

On the way, in all the traffic, we seemed to be lost. Laughing, he said, “Shall I tell you an old Sufi trick for finding your way at such a moment? It’s reserved for really difficult situations.” We both said, “Yes! Of course!” poised to hear some rarified esoteric knowledge about the use of intuition.  He opened the glove compartment and, rummaging around, pulled out a map of Washington. “Ah, yes! Here it is. A map!”

We stopped at the small neighborhood grocery on the way to the gathering. He looked through the shelves of canned vegetables until he came to the chickpeas. “It’s better to make these from the dried beans; but this will do.” We got garlic, lemons and a small bottle of olive oil. “Now we’ll have some hummus!”

When we reached the hall there were several people already gathered, talking and arranging the room. Cushions were scattered around in a circle. Abdul Aziz greeted everyone with a kind of genuine heartiness that, unlike the American “gusto” that surrounded us in this political city, seemed to come from a place deep inside him. Genuine, balanced. He embraced everyone with a firm clasp, then, putting them at arm’s length, still holding their shoulders, he looked each on in the eyes for a brief moment.  As he greeted one or two of us, he asked something quietly, directly. Each question had to do with something he knew about that person’s particular endeavors: There was usually a brief answer and a squeeze of the shoulders as he moved on, a “Yes” or perhaps a laugh. After a few minutes of sharing news he said “Let’s begin!”

We all took a place in the circle. We clasped hands and raised them up to our shoulders . He said an invocation.

He began the Zikr. 

These moments or hours (it is hard to know) were of the most powerfully transporting and transforming of my life. I will say no more since the rest is well beyond words.

In the summer of that year, Shamcher Bryn Beorse, who was then eighty-three years old, came to stay in our apartment in Maryland for a few days. It was the first time we had met. We somehow had volunteered to take him to a spiritual conference we were all attending in the countryside north of Toronto. Little did I realize what an amazing human I had invited into my home.  A Norwegian by birth, he had been part of the Norwegian secret service during the war. He studied in France to become an engineer. There he had met the Sufi teacher, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He travelled widely, meeting spiritual teachers of many traditions, experiencing, transforming, knowing. Heading a United Nations mission to Tunisia in 1964 to study the feasibility of a saltwater conversion plant, he encountered the idea of using the temperature differentials of the ocean to not only desalinate the ocean water but to also create electricity that can be harnessed to do work.

He continued to work as an engineer in the Civil Service until almost the end of his life, tirelessly advocating for the creation of OTEC plants. While he stayed with us, I went with him to the halls of Congress where, like a white-haired, blue eyed sprite full of energy and light, he button-holed Senators coming out of Committee meetings and actually managed to engage them in prolonged conversation.

After he’d been with us for a couple of days, I decided that Shamcher and Abdul Aziz must meet.  I boldly invited Abdul Aziz to come to lunch one day in our spare apartment. I probably cooked curried lentils and rice with vegetables, something Shamcher seemed to like. Abdul Aziz rang the downstairs bell and I ran down with great anticipation to see him up. As he walked into the apartment, he seemed to tower above Shamcher, the spare old Norwegian. They embraced. 

Having no table, we sat and ate from plates on our laps as we talked. They shared a lot in common, these two intensely committed men, steeped in spiritual practice. From time to time, I saw Shamcher glance at Abdul Aziz’s plate. Seeing he was observed, Abdul Aziz said,

“I think you’re interested in the way I’m eating.”

Shamcher acknowledged he was curious. “I notice that you begin eating at the bottom of the plate, go clockwise around the edges and then to the center.”

Abdul Aziz responded “Yes, exactly. You observe well. It gathers the energy of the food so that little is lost;”  Shamcher said, “I supposed so, but I wanted to make sure. It seems like a good way to eat.”

They talked of a few things–OTEC, their origins in Syria and Norway, their ties to universities and much more I can’t remember.  As we all stood to say our good-byes, it was clear to me they were really both the same size, the space within each being expansive beyond knowing.

And there were the other meetings when, there in the heart of the seat of the National Government, we worked together–women and men who were making decisions about financial policy, energy policy; people making decisions in the law, in social work and healing–to form what we called “The Center for Cooperative Global Development.” Out of that work came a Declaration of International Interdependence which, at the end of 1980, we managed to have read into the Congressional Record a.

I left the DC area in July of 1981 when the Reagan administration dissolved the Senate Energy Committee. My then-husband’s pink slip arrived quickly. The message was clear.  The ascendency of alternative energy solutions was over and petroleum was to be the only sovereign. I was nine months pregnant as we travelled across the country to Los Angeles County to start a new chapter in our lives. I don’t know if the Center ever got off the ground.  Until my recent move to France, I was able to put my hand on my copy of the Declaration. Now it, too, seems to have disappeared.

Who knows what influence such efforts have as their perfume disperses through the atmosphere and through the years. 

Professor Said has created a huge body of academic work. There have been innumerable students of International Relations whose path in life he has influenced in his fifty-eight years of university teaching.  His influence has spread heart to heart–soul to soul as he advised governments and worked tirelessly for peace among religions and countries, taught about peace making and international relations and strove to create avenues for cooperative global interdependence. He has been a deep friend to so many.

May the peace you spread in your lifetime continue its own life. Your love and joy will remain with us forever.  

Jean is a man in our village. Tall, with wide shoulders, a broad chest and a belly that knows a balance of both good food and a life of walking and tending to his horses, he lives with his wife in the house right next to the one remaining sawmill. He strides with long legs. He has a bushy white beard and long white hair that forms an aurora around his clear and open face, ageing in skin only since his eyes are bright and alive.

He is an anomaly in this village of smaller, quieter people. It is said he is not well-liked by the other old-timers. Who knows. He is part of the as-yet impenetrable French community around me that I will never really be a part of, though many may open themselves to me along our way. We met Jean in the fall when a portal into his life opened in front of us. But I will tell you that story later. First I will tell you about this morning.

Walter has been heavily pruning the old apple and plum trees in the small orchard on the strip of land next to us that we bought last summer. This strip is, in turn, next to the land owned by Jean. All these pieces of land run down to the little river that flows through the village. There are a few old apple trees on his strip and grazing land for his horses.

Walter and our friend David had just been spending several days with David’s chainsaw and Walter’s expertise as an orchard pruner, opening up the ancient trees, giving them another life. They looked as odd and wounded as the pollarded Plane trees lining the village streets did last spring when the town crews went to work on them. It is a radical method employed for hundreds of years to revive old trees and give them more years to leaf and to florish. Walter’s long experience pruning had shown him the results of his work. He was looking forward to the flush of apples in two years time.

Everyone from the village passes by our place to get to the outside world. The trees of the orchard are a well-known sight. As with much in this area, tucked into the foothills, such a place seen so frequently, so familiar to the villagers, carries the emotions of more than just those who own it on paper. The apples of two of the trees are famous to the locals in the village for their flavor. They were the trees planted by the grandfather of a woman just the other side of the bridge whose family has lived here for generations.

The old inhabitants have their own way of pruning. Neglect of the trees is not necessarily considered a bad thing. They provide apples anyway till they begin to die, more than what is considered enough. Pruning, when still done, is an act of allowing the branches of the trees to lean down and put the fruit in your hand rather than a way to open the tree to the light.

As I sat at my desk on this early Saturday morning, writing and reading, I watched as Jean, returning from an early morning hike, perhaps a visit to his horses in a field at some distance, staff in hand and small pack on his back, stopped for many long moments to look at the apple trees, so starkly different from a week ago. I was ideally positioned to watch his face, the dim light of the room and the partially opened shutters shielding him from the magnetic pull of a focused pair of eyes. I indulged my curiosity.

He looked into the trees as they parade down the soft slope, studying the whole scene. He too was curious. Even as I sat, trying to plumb his thoughts, no judgement seemed to appear. There was nothing in the line of his mouth, the direction of his eyes, the plane of his forehead that expressed either approval or accusation. He stepped forward as if to see some detail more closely, noting the last of the pile of dirt that the village workers had dumped on our land for Walter’s use in the garden. He stepped back into the road, looked ahead and then back for one more long look at the trees before walking on more slowly down the road towards his house in the center of the village.

In those moments, unseen, I had picked up the subtle transmissions from inside another organism. His thoughts, though well protected, the same in any language, transmitted a color, a flavor, a texture from the subtle energy of his mind, his emotion. Some receptors in me had awakened to listen, to see.

Still in my nightgown, I suppressed an urge to run down the stairs and out the front door to talk with him, to ask him what he thought of what he had seen, why he had stopped. I wondered if he had been thinking about how he, too, could give his trees another life. Or perhaps he looked at this cut and that, analyzing what he would have done differently. Or perhaps he was recalling a conversation with the last owner of the house years ago about the pruning of the trees. He would have been speaking, then, with a man respected and loved in the village, a man who would have been his senior by many years. Perhaps he was comparing that advice with what he saw of the work of this American, surely an upstart and a radical.  The energy that had passed from one human to another was not really about the content of the thoughts, but some other more subtle quality.  Whatever passed through the obvious concentration of his mind, it occurred to me it was likely colored by the empathy of a bond made months ago.

It was at the height of summer, just as a second heatwave was due to hit and just before a long holiday weekend. Four horses appeared in the field next to our land.

They were the beautiful horses I’d admired in another field on the opposite side of the river during our first summer in the village. Three were large-chested and heavy, as you would imagine a destrier to have been, carrying a knight in full armour into battle. These were a chestnut brown, each with a white blaze down its long nose,  with blond manes, blond tales, and blond feathering above their heavy hoofs. The fourth was smaller and black, more agile-looking and lively.

The next afternoon we were working in the garden when we noticed that one of the biggest chestnuts horses had been lying on the ground for a long while. Walter mentioned it as we sat outside having a break from garden work. It was unusual for a horse, he said, to spend so much time on the ground. As we watched, it seemed she was having trouble lifting her head from the grass.

“It’s an old mare. She’s really ill,” he said.

I hope the owner is doing something about it. It wouldn’t be good for her to just die there.”

Soon, the man with long white hair and a white beard we had seen driving past from deeper in the village arrived in his familiar turquoise van. Clearly the owner of the horses, he opened the gate and petted each one in turn before quietly approaching the big chestnut on the ground. He knelt beside her, clearly stiff himself, and spoke to her softly. She tried again to lift herself on her knees, but, failing, let her head drop again into the grass.

After a few moments, the man stood and turned to walk back to the van. Thinking he might be leaving, I went to call to him over the fence. “Elle est malade?” I enquired. “Oui,” he said “elle a tourne un pate (she twisted a foot)”

I was so sorry to hear that. “Desolee!” I said, in empathy with them both. I wondered aloud if there were anything we could do to help.

“Non. Merci.” he said, smiling slightly. He thought, he said, that he would try to help her up as the vet had suggested. It would take pressure off her big chest.

“If they lie too long when they’re in pain, they may never be able to rise. “

I went back to join Walter with the weeding, noting that Walter’s attention, as he hoed, was both on the weeds and on what was unfolding in the next field.

Soon the man, carrying what looked to be a length of heavy rope, was heading back to the downed mare. Kneeling for long moments beside her, he seemed to be wrapping one end around her front leg, close to the belly. He stood, grabbing the rope, and walked back several paces before he leaned back and pulled with all his strength, moving her top leg over toward the ground so her body would follow.

She moved a bit as her leg came down towards the ground, dramatic in her heaving enormity. Almost, almost, but not quite.

Walter, a man of action, propped his hoe against a post where he was working and quickly began striding over to the road where he could go around the electric fencing. “Come over to the fence!” he called to me as he walked away.

Rounding the fence and going down through the trees, he approached the spot where Jean stood near the mare, considering his next move. I watched as Walter said the obligatory “Bonjour” and shook hands. He then motioned that he would help turn the horse. The first effort had come close. It just needed a bit more weight.

Understanding immediately, Jean smiled as he took up the rope again. They worked together with a mixture of English and French, knowing the necessary motions without speech.

Walter took hold of the rope behind Jean. I watched as, with two, the task became possible. They pulled together and over came the leg, followed inevitably by the enormous weight of her huge body. Walter stood back, deferentially, watching to make sure she had settled.

Jean helped her arrange her legs more comfortably. Then, kneeling by her head, he stroked her neck and spoke to her quietly. After a long moment, he pushed himself up and, looking like a biblical giant, walked towards Walter, aextending his big hand. Walter, a big man himself, took it in his. They shook hands firmly, both, as I could see, with large black patches of sweat spreading on their shirts.

I walked to the end of the fence to meet them and translated Jean’s thank you’s to Walter, who, as he does, nodded them off and, looking briefly at Jean, said

“Good! Of course. I’m glad we could do it! It just took two,”

and motioned that he was going back to work in the garden. They shook hands again in good-bye. I lingered to talk to Jean for a moment.

The vet would be coming in a little while, he said, and he would wait to meet her. They would decide together what was possible. With emotion evident in every part of his face and in the stoop of his shoulders, impossible to hide even in front of a stranger, wanting to talk, he explained that the other two large brown horses were the huge mare’s children, all of them Comtois, an old French breed of draft horse.

He had bought her as a yearling, he said, some thirty two years ago. They were family. He had never ridden or worked them, just cared for them. The fourth horse was a Merens, a breed of the Ariege, hearty and small. He had come later, rescued from a friend. He spent time with them every day.

I went back to the garden. Walter, having grown up around horses and cows, was clear the old horse would never stand again. It was not good to let her suffer, he said. He wondered if Jean had yet accepted that fact and planned for it. In the heat, the body would not do well. I nodded. The heat was extreme and it was predicted to get even hotter over the weekend to come.

Later in the day, the vet came. We watched briefly as they talked, gathering our tools at the end of the day. The next morning, the horse was still there, a mound under the tree now completely covered with a blue tarp. And Jean was there, clothes looking rumpled, an arm around the neck of one of her children. She had died in the night, whether helped by the vet or on her own.

After breakfast, I went out to the fence and waved hello. Jean walked over and said bonjour.

“ We gave her an injection last night,” he said.

“She was suffering too much.”

Tears came to his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “She was so much a part of your life. “

For a short moment, he didn’t turn away. Somehow, with some sense of what was at hand, he was allowing this stranger whose partner had known, without asking, what to do to help, allowing this woman from another place, to see the pain, the depth of it in his eyes.

When he turned, it was to look at the mound of her and say,

“I’ve wetted her down to keep her cooler. I hope the men will get here before the weekend with the truck.”

The practicalities.

Small moments. The distance from one human to another is as great as the infinite distances of the universe.

Yet when we are truly distant from each other in our own space, our own time, this sense transforms. Every day of our habitual lives, we pass alongside each other, touching, contaminating, exchanging hosts of molecules here and there in our attempts to see ourselves in another, to question the isolation of the flesh.

Yet, in flashes, there it is. The truth of our condition. There is no inside and no outside. We are all in that same infinity–exploring.

Remember this.

I am in Lavelanet, the town down the road where the white tops of the Pyrenees sparkle in the near distance. I sit in the kinesiology clinic, lifting my weighted leg over and over, strengthening the places that had been weakened by the surgery for my broken femur, my mind opening out into the void as I listen to the music of the French conversations floating around me. 

M. Paradis banters and jokes with all his clients as he juggles the needs of the six to ten people present in his modern, new clinic at any given time, striding back and forth, manipulating the arm of one old man wincing in a chair, gently calling out directions to a young woman, telling a long, funny story to a man on the stationary bike, heating up the warming compound he applies to aching joints, calling out, “Ca va, Madame Lyons?” “Oui, ca va!” I follow his directions. Sometimes he peppers his French with excellent English, corrects my French unabashedly and jabs me mildly about the leadership of the US.

In such a setting, I understand about half of the conversations drifting into my ears over the cubicle walls or from the open gym. The vocabulary becomes local, flavored with Occitane, fast- paced, colloquial. I begin to feel like a child who hasn’t studied enough at school, ashamed, small. When M. Paradis speaks with the old men and women who come in taxis from the Residence down the road, with  their wheelchairs or their canes, the conversations become quickly obscure as he flows into the flattened accent he grew up with, the particular way of kidding and the obscure usage of the Ariege. 

As I stretch out on a therapy bench in a cubicle, lifting my weighted leg over and over, counting to twenty each time I lift,  waiting for M. Paradis to say, “Madame Lyons, vous pouvez terminer quand vous voulez!” a bit of conversation becomes distinct. 

The old man with his canes is making his way from the recumbent stationary bike in the big room, following M. Paradis’ direction to move to “un box”.  M. Paradis is saying, “No not that cubicle. Here, over here, there’s one with an ocean view.” The old man, slowly making his way responds, “Will I be able to hear the waves washing in and out? Will I smell the salt air? Will I be able to go out for a swim in the morning?”

In that moment, I experience the opening of all minds into one. The way in which there is no barrier to the flow of imagination. We imagine each other.  We create the languages that express those thoughts drifting through like clouds. We create each other. Time and culture have no meaning. There is only the expanse of mind that encompasses everything.