Sacred intersections
This evening on my walk I met a young man picking berries. He was joyful. “Blackberry season!” he said, holding up a half-full jug of his treasure. “That’s quite a haul,” I said, wanting to connect, but feeling a bit confused and tongue-tied at his enthusiastic presence on my normally silent route. “I have another full pitcher in my backpack. I’m going to make pies, or wine — I can’t decide.” “Delicious!” I said, still struggling for my language.
As I walk, I aim for these moment, these ’sacred connections.’
I am not all that good at relationships, frankly — I’m sensitive, a bit self-absorbed, full of a passion for ideas that sometimes overwhelms my sensitivity to people’s attachment to their own. I love my own company, and the peace and safety of it. I never hurt my own feelings or misunderstand anything I say, and I have to admit that I’m a bit lazy — I like to retreat into the comfortable company of me.
That said, people delight me in small doses. So while I am not a particularly social person (having turned down two party invitations to sit at home and be with myself tonight, for example) I am awed and made ecstatic by brief connections.
That boy, for example — I hope that he takes with him the memory or even the idea that a middle-aged woman was interested in him, and admiring of his accomplishments. I love the little boy I saw later in his stroller, pushed up a steep hill by his loving father, who burst into ‘Hello!’ and a beaming smile when he saw me, a stranger.
There has been an awareness in me lately that those brief moments between strangers, and those who are not strange to us but who we do not yet think of as friends, are sacred — precious in a way that we cannot fully comprehend.
As I participate in them, I try to bring myself fully — rested, calm, relaxed from my yoga, meditation and sleep practices — to bring what I can. A few words of extra, unexpected greeting, “How are you?” without an expectation of return. (For I know from experience how surprise can tie the tongue.)
I wonder — how much of the whole of life, the sum of all experience of all sentient beings on this beautiful planet of ours — is elevated or diminished by the consciousness we bring to these sacred intersections?