I once worked in a restaurant where a Dutch Masters box sat above the coffee machine. It had been there for years, a catch-all for earrings and lost keys. I looked at it every day. On a side panel were those six men in pilgrim clothing. One of them—the fellow seated behind the others—lacked a hat.  In response, somebody had drawn him one. The improvised hat appeared as spare and inexact as a constellation, but you could no longer say the man had been overlooked. I suppose this doffing might be regarded as the neurotic imposition of a conformist, but I sense that a more tender sentiment inspired the gesture; it seemed to me the blessing of a person back into community.

I’ve been thinking about community lately. Not the civic sort, important as that is, nor anything you can construct. I refer to that existential sense of belonging that simply reveals itself and then passes on. It always comes as a surprise, like a strange dog that lopes in from the trees to find your hands. For its brief duration the awareness travels right along with you as intimately as light around your shadow on water. 

Years ago, I rode a motorcycle on the road from Mount Rainier down to Tacoma. It was Sunday, summer’s end, and everyone was going home. I fell in among a line of cars; for the longest time we pierced the fog of creek bottoms and rose through fir shadows into grasses curved against the twilight. There was no braking, no sense of urgency, only the delirious pleasure of our smooth and unified undulation. It seemed that none of us were driving, but seated within the lighted skin of a serpent sweeping us along into the deepening evening. As we approached the city, the moment ended. A few cars, veering to side roads, gave a toot in parting. 

Such a moment. But what to make of it?  The American in me looks for a little utility in his mystical experiences. Buddhism asks as much. A practical religion, it gives more weight to what we make of these sorts of things than the thing itself. It does so because our interpretation flavors the moment we are now in, which, as every wisdom tradition tells us, is all we ever have. Conjecture, of course, is a tricky thing. The instruments of science cannot resolve the facts of spirit: the soul’s authority evades grasp. It hovers like a vapor in a blackberry thicket. Most of my spiritual life seems to involve sitting beside that thicket and dreaming of rabbits.

Last summer, while my family visited friends, we went to view a waterfall. It was a pink evening, the clouds piled high, and we strolled along a cinder path: my younger son and I, the others ahead of us deep in conversation. As we walked along, my son forgot he was ten and took my hand. Gradually that strange awareness of my membership settled over me; for a time my skin was the skin of the moment.  As we approached the opening into the woods, my son and I discussed the fireflies. The others were farther in. We couldn’t see them nor hear the falls. Yet I felt the excitement of coming upon places they’d just passed, our common journey. Afterwards, driving home, I remembered the motorcycle ride and wondered about it all once again.

Have you ever watched deeply spiritual people order coffee or shell a bowl of nuts? Their attentive kindness never leaves the moment: their smile accompanies the waitress all the way into her departure; their fingers, without sentimentality, let the shell fall into the bowl as if it were a flower that could bless a grave. To witness such presence awakens in us our longing for a generosity half hidden in the tangle of lesser impulses. Go ahead, it seems to say, put constellations on all the hatless places.

Published in Orion Magazine, June|August, 2015