Infinitessimally Small
Sometimes when I wake up alone in the mornings I lay in bed and think about all the other people out there laying in their beds, starkly by themselves, or clutching someone or something to make themselves feel safe. I think about them and I leave myself for a moment, rising above the world to travel from room to room and life to life. There are so many people so many places doing so many things... and I'm unsure whether this makes me feel more or less alone. I am safe, I have what I need. In fact, I have so much of what I need that I am free to expend energy on thinking about things this way. If I were laying in a gutter somewhere, naked starved for food, this philosophy would be lost on me. Even now, there is so much I don't see, so much I don't understand.

This weekend has provided me with a great sense of displacement. I have been drawn closer to my loved ones, to the life I am building here and have also been shown that my life is not everything, that my problems are miniscule, and that what I know is far from being a complete picture of the world.

I met the Tibetan monks on Friday. Eleven of them were visiting campus on "tour" to perform the sacred arts of Tibet at the Willamette Valley Folk Festival. Since Wednesday, they had been creating a sand mandala in the EMU international lounge. Justin and I went to see the mandala and happened to wander in while it was being worked on. The work itself was incredible; bright and intricate- layer upon layer of carefully designed patterns. The monk working on the painting was leaning over it, propped on a pillow and drawing sand lines with a metal funnel. It would take him, like it had taken the others, hours to complete the work.... all so it could later be destroyed.

Later, on Saturday, Cat, Emily and I got together and watched the monks perform at the Folk Festival. Their music was strange and disharmonious but somehow incredibly beautiful. If you've never heard tonal (throat) singing, it's strange to hear a digiridoo sound coming from a human. I wished, while I was listening, that I was in more of a spiritual mindset so that I could harmonize with the monks... but just listening detachedly was enough to blow the floodgates of my mind wide open. I swear to god some of the notes they were hitting really must have serious spiritual resonance. Some of their music and dance was very sad, others was happy and comic but I was simply struck by how *foreign* the whole performance was to me. It was so non-western it was almost eerie. Here were a people right before my eyes that I know absolutely nothing about... their lives are so completely different from mine, yet we are somehow, quintissentially the same.

Sunday morning, the monks ceremoniously dismantled the mandala. The mandala is a sacret ritual in two veins. First, its creation summons deities to bring harmony and peace; second, its destruction releases the deities and represents the unity and impermanence of life. Granted, the monks have been making many mandalas since their "tour" started, but it was still sad to see something so beautiful and so colorful completely eradicated. First, it was blended inward from four corners one way, then four corners the other way, and then all the rest was swept into the middle of the table into a mound. What had once been intricate designs and strikingly different colors all blurred together into a mass of sand almost the color of beach sand. Everyone that was at the ceremony was given a bit of the mandala to take home for peace and happiness. The monks then took the remaining sand to the Willamette river and dispersed it into the water where it will become one with the earth and sky to spread peace... or so they hope.

These alien rituals reminded me of a side of the world I don't often remember exists. I was too afraid to really talk to the monks, I desperately wanted to, but I had no idea what I would say. I felt like an "anthropologist on mars" (to borrow the phrase), like I was completely out of my league even talking to them. I know that they must have been having a strange enough time in our world. So I only bowed politely, took their offering and made my own. Watching them, I felt both peaceful and disturbed; sad that their culture is being destroyed by others but envious of their great peace. I enjoy being mortal too much to let go my hedonism.

Still, I am pleased that I'm capable of seeing both sides of the coin as it's being tossed. I know people who are too detached, so abstract that they can't seem to understand real emotion- anger, fear, love.... I know people who are too gounded, mastered by their concrete emotions, who don't understand dreams or feel wild magik, who would just as rather get a latte than talk about life. I think I'm lucky that I can walk that line and understand people in either mindset. It doesn't earn me a whole lot of friends because they either see me as a sellout or someone with whom they can't identify... but it does help me find some true brethren.

I do have a tendency to be bogged down by the little things, the things that don't matter. I only think they matter. What matters to me might not matter to another; what matters to me doesn't matter to the universe. I might feel whole and spiritual sometimes, like I understand myself and I know my place and my power. But I'm only one human on a ship full of souls adrift in an endless sea. I don't think we're alone, but we might as well be... there are no beacons for us for a hundred million miles. So I am alone and I cling to my loneliness with both arms. I cling to it with my fingertips, with my eyes and ears and lips, with every pleasure I find and with every friendship I meet.

I have this life on this boat (and perhaps many more lives here?) and I plan to learn as much of it as I can. I cannot jump ship, nor hope for enlightenment after I die. For all I know, the blackness out there is infinite. We are our light. We are what sinks the ship and what keeps it afloat. We are the light and this light is God. Together, we are everything and we are nothing.

Alone, we are infinitessimally small.