Your one precious life
I went not once, but four times to the Fortier Park Festival yesterday. It’s a block from my home in a triangle park that Bob McGuire (aka the Mayor of the neighborhood) brought back from the depression of the 2005 Federal Storm by using $2000 his company donated — he gave $500 to his son’s school and took the $1,500 and turned it into $15,000 by throwing the first annual Fortier Park Festival that now is so strong Allen Toussaint and Walter “Wolfman” Washington play the fest as if it were the Superdome.
I went to the Festival with Tin first, but he’s been feeling peaked and so the music was “too loud” and the crowd was “too much” and he had a frown and grunt for everyone who greeted him with “My how you have grown.” Oh, to be 4 and say it like it is: “Go away!”
Tatjana came to pick him up and so I went back to the Fest alone and ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen in a while and I have been wanting to address a situation that he and I were witness to with another friend – let’s just call it a very racist moment. I was finally able to have my say on what happened that afternoon, which I seemed more bothered by than him, but we both at least had the same reaction. Circle closed.
I then met someone looking for a lot to develop – land that is – black gold – and since that is the topic of every conversation I seem to be having we bonded instantly on real estate matters, but it was later walking towards the bayou to show him the LaLa when I saw the prayer flags someone recently put up on the Magnolia Bridge and I remembered that my prayer flags are on their way to go up in anticipation of the Dalai Lama coming in May, that I saw behind the facade of a man wanting to succeed in life and saw the man in the throes of finding life.
Dalai Lama posted this after the Boston Tragedy:
All living beings have experience of pleasure and pain, and we are among them. What makes human beings different is that we have a powerful intelligence and a much greater ability to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Real happiness and friendship come not from money or even knowledge, but from warm-heartedness. Once we recognise this we will be more inclined to cultivate it.
My new friend shared his photo from Nepal, with the prayer flags strewn across the mountaintops with the prayers carried in the wind. We are not here on earth to make more money, we’re here to connect to the divine in all beings. Mary Oliver’s question came to my mind and kept resurfacing -“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Later, coming home yet again from the Fortier Festival, a neighbor walked me home and at some point, with the music from the festival still in the background, he stopped and said, “Don’t we live in the greatest place in the world?” Yes, I said. Yes, we do. Then he told me the story of how he had saved for two years to go to Belize with his late wife and she wanted to come home after a week to see her daughter play baseball and he refused to leave. So he remained behind, with $50 to get home on, and someone suggested he take the $5 ferry instead of the more costly flight and so he did; he showed up at two in the morning, and the boat was delayed, by the time it set sail at five in the morning, he found himself on the deck surrounded by Mayan Indians, all of them sound asleep. He turned over and woke to the sun bursting forth from the water with such magnificence that he was struck by the enormity of it and of his life. He said to me, “$5.”
This morning, on my way to meditate, I passed all the prayer flags in people’s yards and I felt my friend was right, we live in the greatest place in the world and our prayers are flying in the wind, and we are breath by breath connecting soul to soul with others like ourselves who are transitioning from knuckle dragging (as my friend described the racism we had both witnessed) to enlightenment.
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?