the indescribable moments of your life

title: tonight, tonight – artist: smashing pumpkins

Several of you requested more information/details/insight on the whole "Spiderman" thing [woman, you are oh so awesome!]. And I was subsequently stingy with them, I admit. But that’s mostly because there’s only a night’s worth of them, really.

Sometimes you get to have this perfect bubble with a person. It’s just as fragile, fleeting and amazing as one of the literal variety. Trying to hang onto it or turn it into more is likely to leave you disappointed, with soap in your eye. And this was one of those moments. It was glorious and perfect and encapsulated entirely in that night.

So…

He’s a glass artist, which is why he’d come to Corning. When I first saw him, he’d come outside in his socks. Later I would find out that he’d forgotten that he wasn’t wearing shoes when he’d come outside to smoke. He had taken them off out of respect to the musicians playing that night. I didn’t catch much of their performance, but I did see them seated in the floor in the back. As I recall, they were billed as playing traditional folk music from India.

It was learning two things early on that set the pace for the whole night. For me, at least. One, he was going to be leaving for Oregon sometime between that coming Monday and Thursday. Two, he wasn’t at all shy about his spirituality, and that’s actually what I connected to the most with him. The former let me relax my guard. And the latter let me relax it entirely.

I have to admit, most Rastafarians that I’ve been exposed to have been white guys looking for an excuse to grow dreds and smoke weed. It’s not to say that they don’t connect to some of the tenets of their professed belief system. But it’s pretty obvious that’s not the driving force for them. And, really, had I just seen him in passing and somehow been informed of his religious affiliation, I probably would’ve assumed he was just like those other guys. Minus the dreds (though he’d been planning on sporting them before he moved to the area, he just hadn’t grown his hair out long enough yet, so he cut it instead). And I so would’ve been fulfilling the cliche regarding "assume." It was something that he’d truly connected to and that had transformed his life. But, under different circumstances, I could’ve missed out on one of the most stunning experiences I’ve ever had.

He was rather peculiar. But it wasn’t just that he wasn’t shy, he was open. And in this really beautiful way. He was openly curious. And he was open to making a connection with you if you were willing. Not in that needy/demanding heart-on-sleeve way. But if you were good and genuine and you made yourself available, even if it was only for a moment, he was there.

Throughout the night I got to see people come up to him, either from inside the coffee house or walking down the sidewalk, that stopped to give him a hug or a hearty handshake and tell him they were going to miss him, hoped he was coming back and demanded he stay in touch.

As more people filtered into our little group, some splitting off eventually occurred and I wound up sitting at his table. And over the course of the evening we bonded over things like having lived in California and the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and a deep-seated love for the West Coast and DFW and shared life views and beliefs. I got to hear a lot of his life story. I got to reconnect to the beauty of being alive.

And that’s what that night was for me. This year has been a remarkably weird one. By that point, I had gotten so far inside my own head, trying to figure scads of things out, that I’d begun to lose touch with… well, living. I was feeling disconnected, not just from life in general, but even from my life, specifically. And it was like thinking too hard about walking, analyzing it to the degree you can’t figure out how you ever did it to begin with, let alone how to start now. I was all siezed up in my inspection and analysis and I couldn’t figure out how to get out of it and get back to the being. So I wind up outside the coffee house on a Friday night, beneath a street lamp, in the presence of a truly amazing man, under circumstances that allow me to just be, discovering what a rebirth feels like.

Okay, I’m sure I could’ve been more detailed, still, but I think that covers the broadstrokes and some of the finer details pretty well.

What do you think? 🙂

[there were a few other questions, besides "more, please?" – and thus those answers shall be forthcoming in the near future. I loves y’all!]