Understanding

In 1966, on West 231^st Street in Torrance California, at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, if you turned on your TV you could watch Star Trek. It was an amazing thing to see: spaceships and teleportation and cutting edge social commentary packaged in wet glossy inter-galactic warp speed. I was ten, and my father was a Nixon supporter. But Star Trek was not on our TV, ever. Why, there was a Negro right there on the bridge next to the captain, but worse, there was some fruity guy with pointy ears and green skin. What is the world coming to? Batman had long been banished from our house as too violent, never mind that corporal punishment was commonplace for me. So I was left out, I was excluded from that common mundane suburban scene. Instead, at 9:00 on some Thursday nights I could be found dressed in the darkest clothes I had, slipping quietly through the streets and along the tops of the cinder block walls that separated backyards in our neighborhood. Dogs almost never barked, so adept was I at passing silently. I would squat on one of these walls peering through a window, hoping to get a glimpse of Captain Kirk, and the Enterprise boldly going where no one had gone before. I would walk the quiet streets wishing desperately to be in one of those ordinary homes watching the same thing that everyone else was watching. I wanted to be included in the great swarming hive of culture that was exploding and changing everywhere in every direction. But I was ten, and my father was a Nixon supporter, and I would have to wait until he died and settle for the seedy second-rate seventies.

           

            In the summer of 1978, I sat on the beach in Carlsbad feeling the warm, salty air on my skin. Before me the ocean moved like something primordial and alive, the pulsing blood of the planet. I had dropped acid some hours earlier and was into the middle high where everything is in motion. The sky and earth danced like pond water under a microscope. I saw life everywhere. Sitting there, smoothing the sand with my hand and looking into the distant pattern of glistening water, I felt, viscerally, that I was part of an organism, no more separate from other people and things than two cells in my body. I looked down into the sand and saw patterns there. It seemed that everything since that first sudden painful contraction of reality was created again beneath my hand. In minute detail, and in broad strokes, the patterns formed and changed, and within them the repeating patterns of life, death, fulfillment, creation and devastation were marked. I realized that I had always been alive, and would always be alive. The rush of suddenly feeling so connected, so part of a living thing, was unbelievably powerful. I knew then that I would never be alone, never had been alone, that indeed, alone was impossible.

            Summer 2000. I was newly married and had begun a new life after 12 years of 16 hour days with a partner who found sport in conflict. My new life was simpler and sweeter. We had a dog. We would have a family. We were out for a bicycle ride around the neighborhood, which was ordinary and mundane in every respect. There were no fancy houses, no porches, no gates, no walls; just good fences and good neighbors. The sun would be going down soon, and the stirring air was a gentle lover’s caress. A tingling of awakening ran across my skin. I understood in that moment that you don‘t need to die to go to heaven. I looked back at my wife and laughed. “I am home” I cried, “I am finally home.”