My Summer In London
My summer in London was one of the most painful, beautiful, disobedient, turbulent, and for all of the above reasons, formative summers of my life.
- My wings finally sprouted. I have joined my fellow pigeons on the wire about Rowen Ten Pin Bowling in Finsbury Park.
- I drank 37% of the Thames River with a straw but sweat it all back out on the Tube (Expect significant delays while they drain the tunnels).
- I became a tree by a river in Bute Park.
- I lifted an 18 Wheeler clean off the ground to rescue a baby clover sprout.
- I died three times and was reborn four (don’t ask… I don’t know what happens with my extra life. I’m hoping I can trade it in for a David Beckham Stamp collection).
- I picked up fox diarrhea with a Sainsbury’s bag.
No. For the first time in my life, my summer in London wasn’t a significant summer because of what I accomplished
(yes darling, I am a relentlessly, shamelessly, compulsively “productive”, and on particularly heavy-handed occasions (forgive me), an “ambitious” young man [not that young! Ha HA! I beat you too it, so don’t even try]. And by God, I’ll say it, I have capital A Accomplished things… and I have held onto that punctured life raft religiously for years. I was my middle school Student Council president after all, and that means something. It does!)
but because, in a more acute way than had yet happened to me, I experienced the joy of “being.” In some manners of speaking, I learned how to be. I learned in fact, that I had been, for the foreseeable past, an occupied territory - occupied by discursive thought and ego, by resistance and fear - and by the Grace of God I was able to slash my way a few meaningful steps forward through that dark, haunted rainforest.
I learned about time or more accurately (and sounding, I suspect, aggressively more pompous) the absence of it. Though it defies logical and intellectual reason, time, I have come to know, is a byproduct of human thinking and so is an impossibly convincing illusion. Don’t take my word for it. Words and thoughts play in the arena of time. They are Mind made and Mind serving. I won’t expound on this topic any further. I suspect for some this concept has evoked a flicker, a gentle ember of recognition, and for others it sounds ridiculous, and no amount of words will influence either party.
I will say however, that my flat was the only flat I’ve ever borne witness to in London with a palm tree adorning it’s front garden. A menial, if minorly pleasant detail you say? Nay! As I sit on the plane flying over the Atlantic on my way back to Los Angeles, teary and sick, hazy and tired (isn’t that always when insight breathes), it becomes abundantly clear that the Present contains both the living heartbeat of the past and the seedlings of the future. All of fate is folded into this God-given breath, right here and right now. And not just an embryo of the future and an echo of the past, but everything in all of the forms that it will ever inhabit coexist right now. The Los Angeles palm tree smiles in through the London window at the man you wondered in your youth if you’d be.
As a gentle aside, following this: what if you could love your inner child in a truer, more literal sense, because he was in fact right here with you now in a more real way than we are usually willing or able to admit? And what if the future You were here too, holding you up? What if our age and our wrinkles and our blushing children’s cheeks were just masks that we dawned all at once?
I also learned, this summer, about surrender. Perhaps I’m giving myself more credit than I really deserve. The lesson of surrender was thrust upon me, branded onto the sunset of my summer, tattooed onto the walls of my heart, by Life, that ruthless, perfect bastard. Everything is fleeting, being carried to and from us by the lapping tides of Life, or ripped from our grasp if we decide to clutch and hold on to it with our little human fingers and our little human hearts. Life is an impossibly vast, impossibly powerful ocean. At our best we are a drop that knows it has every corner and current of the ocean within it. At our worst we stand proud and afraid and wage war against the waves. And we lose. Every time. What is meant for you will be brought to you. What is meant to be taken will be taken.
This summer in London I glimpsed Heaven and was introduced to Grace. It didn’t resemble, however, the familiar incarnation of Grace I had known through our common colloquialism and definitions. How could it? Grace is not something that can be known in the head, just as Heaven is something that can only be known in the breath. No. It was something else.
When I (by no accomplishment of my own) glimpsed Heaven, I saw that it was right here, right now, eternally here, in the soft light smiling through the white clouds behind the chimneys flanking the back garden, in the thin shoots sprouting up in front of it all, only as thick as they can be and still resonate with the divine: not thick at all.
The slight, sensitive things.
Heaven comes through the gentle things - and everything - but sometimes it is easiest to see in the things that simply have no weight, no shield, no fortification against the cold winds and storms of the world; the things that feel those winds and those storms right in their very souls and that shiver and hurt and shine because they have no protective skin. Because they are vulnerable.
And I saw Grace in my moments of blindness, as I was picked up and whirled around the red, raging sky and in the rip-currents that drag you down deep inside yourself and out far from everything you’ve known and wanted. Grace was there. It was the freedom afforded by the acceptance of those tides and storms - of those foreign, deep, and scary places. Grace, as she explained herself to me, is the ability to recognize and accept the waves of the ocean, without resistance. Not without sadness, but without resistance. And without fear. Letting go and letting God move through you. You are Life moving.
My summer in London took a lot from me, and I thank God for that, because it was getting heavy carrying all my notions and preconceptions. And unburdened, I could hear whispers that had been there deep down for a long long time but had been drown out by my trumpeting and quarreling Ego, and I could see feint things that were very beautiful but had been masked by the brightness of unconsciousness.
My prayer, as the summer is consumed once again by the fall, to blossom again in its time, is that I may never forget the freedom and presence we find when what we are not but think we are is taken from us; the ease and joy and grace we find in this breath.
-- London and New York, 2023