"Home"

Getting on the subway train, not paying any attention, after a seven day meditation retreat upstate, not expecting anything out of the ordinary -- all of a sudden I am aware of a flurry of openings to other people all around me.   So quick these are that I miss them.   Each is a momentary glitter of connection that flashes and is gone.   On the surface it seems it's only individuals turning, one after another, to check out a newcomer stepping into the subway car.   But I am struck with the felt sense something much deeper is at work.   I feel penetrated right down to the bottom of who I am with a flurry of interconnections.   And then, my attention brought forward in time, I witness it happen one last time with a black woman -- middle aged, seated across from me -- the sort of person I would never presume to find anything in common with.   Something between her and me flashed wide open for a brief instant, like the shutter of a camera -- "click".   It was wide open, then it was gone.   There was hardly enough time to see what it was -- I would have missed it entirely had my attention not been alerted by what went before.  

And I did miss it anyway, because it was too quick, and too complete an opening, really, between two people to "catch".   There flashed through me an awareness of seeing completely and being completely seen, of knowing completely and being completely known.   I looked up at this stranger.   I can't say whether she noticed what happened.   And I can't say she didn't.   Very likely she was a simpler person -- a cleaning lady on her way to or from work -- and maybe this sort of thing happened with her as a matter of course.   For the first time it struck me that it was fully possible there were people who went through life like this, so utterly connected with those around them that they never imagined it could be otherwise with anybody.   I realized what a rich life they must have and how impoverished in comparison was a life lacking this simplest and most readily-available of commodities.   For the two of us found ourselves so deliciously close in that instant, so naked to each other, so completely exposed -- that I could say what happened was an act of intimacy.   What a delicious wash to be so sweetly delivered into the bosom of another person like that and known and exposed and bonded-with so utterly and so completely that not even a stray tentacle of being or a subsidiary process of psychology went unmet, unanswered, unacknowledged.   Then, as quickly as it came, it was gone.