ONE NIGHT, ONLY A few days later, I get a call.
I've just been working at typing up a summary of my experience with the Void. I'd spent half the evening on the phone with Henry, who still wants reassurance that I won't go anywhere near the Void again without telling him, and who is intensely curious about what I'm writing. After our years of working together, he knows better than to ask. I never know what I'm writing until I'm through. I've had more contact from Henry in the last few days than I've had in a month, so I know the calls are really his means of expressing his affection and concern for me. So, I'm distracted by Henry and trying to get back into my Void experience, when a voice reaches out from the Void itself. On the telephone.
“Hello? Is this Babe Bennett? This is Duncan Robert. I'm not disturbing you, am I?”
I drop the phone, then scrabble to pick it up.
“What?” I say, wondering if any of the town folk are engaged enough for a gag like this. The voice is calm, serious without being cold, and respectful, I think, after groping for the right word to capture what comes across the line.
“It's Duncan Robert,” he repeats. “I'd like to talk to you about your recent experience with the Void and about my experience.”
“What?” I say again, like an idiot, taken off guard by what he says. “How do you know about that?”
“Would you like an interview?” he asks, not answering my question. “There are some things I'd like to say, and I think you and Miles are ready to hear them now.”
“Miles?” I say, seemingly only capable of monosyllables at the moment.
“Yes. We were waiting for you. Now that you're here, we can talk about it.”
“It?” I say, continuing true to my new concise form of interacting, unable to break out of it.
“I don't want to become anybody's idol or guru, or even their reason. I don't want to be the reason anybody jumps,” he says. “As you know, it's such a personal decision, a person has to arrive at it on his or her own. It's complicated, depending on what you're carrying.” He pauses, waiting to see if I'll actually join the conversation. When I don't, he says, “The Void is always there. People will feel its call or not. They will make themselves ready or not. They cannot do it through me. I want to make that clear. But we can talk about that when you two get here.”
That last part gets through to me, and I'm finally able to ask where and when he would like to meet. We agree that I'm to go to a place that's not far, the next day. Yes, I'm to bring Miles with me, he says, before I can double check. He seems to know that Miles doesn't have classes that day.
“What about Silvia?” I ask, suddenly remembering his mother and not wanting to leave her out of this.
“You don't need to worry about my mother,” he tells me gently when I ask. “I've always been in touch with her.” So that's why Silvia was able to talk about him with some ease and light heartedness, I think. She's known this whole time that he is okay. He gives a little chuckle. “I know, like any mother, she wants me to come back to life as it was, with her, and she hopes talking about me to others will help keep that possibility alive. She's saving my place. I don't begrudge her that.”
Clearly, he's ready for the call to end, so I make sure he has my cell phone number and verify the time again, and we hang up, having wished each other a good evening.
I sit there, at my little desk in front of the window, staring out at the night street in front of the bank. Not a soul in sight. I feel completely alone with this news, and just about bursting with it. But before I can call Miles, I need to sort myself out and get centered. This call will have much more effect on him. Miles doesn't need hysterical babbling. He needs someone who can do for him what Duncan Robert just did for me—provide an anchor and a calm focus. I make myself a cup of peppermint tea, am calmed by the process, and sit down to make the call.
The first thing Miles says is, “Why didn't he call me?” The news hasn't made him speechless, as it did me.
“He said you two were waiting for me,” I tell him, saying the first thing that comes to mind.
“He said we were . . . ?” That stops him for a while. He doesn't say any more.
I sit quietly for a few minutes, feeling my embarrassment, sipping my tea. I don't know what that statement means either, and I do not want to hazard a guess.
Finally, I speak into his silence, telling him the details of where and when. Apparently, he is silenced now, as I was. When he still doesn't respond, I ask, “Do you want to go?” I'm afraid for a moment that he doesn't.
“Yes,” he says. “I'll drive.” We agree he will pick me up the next morning, a little before 7:00. We hang up, without wishing each other a good evening.
I spend a pretty much sleepless night, after laying out what I'm going to wear, packing a snack bag, printing a MapQuest map, taking a shower, making sure I have my interview materials, wondering whether to take my miniature tape recorder, deciding to take it, trying to think of questions to ask, and writing in my journal. Mostly, worrying about Miles's state of mind is what keeps me awake.
The next morning, he picks me up in his old pick-up, with cups of hot tea and muffins from the café. I note that the pick-up looks just washed. He reminds me of my older sister, Marla, who always begins a trip by washing even an already-clean car. He notes how much stuff I've brought with me and smiles as he makes room for it behind the seats. I get in, and we look at each other for a moment.
“Hard to believe,” he says.
“Yes,” I agree.
He has tears in his eyes, which, unexpectedly, brings tears to mine. He extends his right hand to me. I put my right hand in his, and we shake, solemnly. I feel the warmth and strength of his hand before I let it go.
“Let's go,” he says, and we pull away from the curb, the morning breeze freshening through the windows as we drive into it, the light spattering the seat between us as the sun travels through the trees. I can't help but feel good. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, with anyone else, at this moment. That's a feeling I often have in his presence, I note. I wonder if Miles feels the same.
The town is about two hours north of our village, the appointed location is an attractive old hotel on the original town square. The town square is appealing, with grass, flowers, and a gazebo large enough for a band. It's ringed by huge, beautiful old beech trees that shade the square and the street.
We park diagonally in front of the hotel and stare up at it. It's eight stories high and a good example of Federalist architecture, I notice, with its fanlight over the door, narrow, symmetrical windows with shutters, and elliptical window in the gable at the top of a roof complete with balustrade. I recognize this from yet another article I researched on colonial architectural style and the hold it has on this part of the country. The hotel is a bit shabby, making its style a little less imposing and a little more welcoming. There's no cadre of well-pressed staff to greet us as we walk in, only a slightly worn down older woman behind the ornately carved mahogany and marble registration desk. She points us to the old-fashioned elevator, complete with wrought-iron gate.
We go up to his room, which is on the seventh floor, facing the square. The hall carpet is plush, but worn down the middle. The wallpaper is burgundy and grey broad stripes. The lighting is provided by old converted gaslight lamps on the walls, so it's dim. I realize that I'm cataloguing everything as I see it, an old habit to distract myself from my nervousness. We arrive at his door and stand there a moment, looking at each other. Miles smiles at me, takes a breath and lifts his hand to knock. The door opens before he can knock, and there Duncan Robert stands, looking larger than life—robust, fit, glowing with health. Light streams out into the hall from the large bank of windows that overlooks the square behind him. He and Miles look at each other a moment and then grip each other in a bear hug. Miles has tears in his eyes again, and in his voice. When they move away from each other, the tension has left Miles's face and a smile has taken over. He can't seem to stop smiling. His eyes don't leave Duncan Robert's face. Miles is just so glad to see him.
Duncan Robert greets me with a hug, too, and ushers us into the room, offering tea and muffins as we settle in. Miles sits on one end of the couch and I take the other. Duncan Robert sits in one of the two large, wing-back chairs across from us, sharing the coffee table between us. “Welcome,” he says, with real warmth in his voice. “I thank you for coming.”
I've put my notebook and freshly sharpened pencils on the table and I look at them, caught between starting to take notes and staring at him. This is something that will plague me the rest of the day. I'm mesmerized by him. I mean, he looks as everyone and his pictures described him—medium height, medium coloring, a medium sort of man—but he doesn't feel medium. He felt different. I don't know if I can put it into words, but he felt light and clean and clear. He felt happy and at peace. He felt strong and certain of himself. Even loving and joyous, though I'm afraid of how those words might sound if I put them in a story—unnatural or phony. Or at least they would have felt that way to me if I'd heard anyone else use them.
He reminds me of some of the good psychics I met doing a piece on psychics and ghosts for Henry. The real psychics looked at me in a way I've never been looked at by anyone—with a directness and openness that took everything in and blessed it, before anything was said. And I sure knew everything didn't deserve blessing. But they had such a strong sense of good will that they made you believe maybe everything did. While you were in their presence, they made you feel yourself differently, too.
He told us some things first, before he got into the story of his jump. First he talked about Reggie. She was the most significant person in his life then, and they were creating their lives together. He never doubted they would jump together. He remembered her response to his decision to jump. His description is intensely personal but ultimately less relevant to his jump, so I summarize it here from my notes, to give the reader a sense of Reggie, what she was to him, and her decision.
Reggie was one of ten kids, two of whom had been adopted out because her parents couldn't feed them all. Duncan Robert thinks this still happens, more than we know. Relatives came and made their choice, choosing her and her brother, and when she was twelve, she came from Alabama to live in New Hampshire. She and Duncan Robert met in middle school, arguing fiercely over whose turn it was to use the soccer equipment after school. His friends had backed off because she was black. He hadn't noticed. The question of right and wrong had his attention.
Over the years, they became inseparable and spent many hours on a blanket at the edge of the Void, talking and arguing, a favorite place because no one ever came there. They were gradually creating their future together, sure they'd be in each other's lives forever. As they moved through high school they grew aware that they were tired of the established order of things, restless and wanting adventure. He told her about his philosophical conversations with Miles, and gradually his talk shifted to the Void as their adventure. The Void scared her more than he knew, and she made strong arguments against jumping:
“It's crazy! We could be killing ourselves!”
Or, “It's not something black people do,” she said one afternoon. “The Void is white people's stuff.”
Or, “I don't see escaping into another world as the way to go. I think we're meant to deal with what's here.”
And then one day, “It could be evil!”
That stopped them and made them both laugh. They stood there, near the edge of the Void, and laughed, knowing that their end was written in the laughing, because it meant they had nowhere else to argue to. There was a divide between them now because in her discovery that she couldn't jump, it was clear she would never understand how he could. She had been his biggest test. Once the question of her jumping no longer stood in his way, he was ready.
After the jump, they still stayed in touch from time to time, he said. If he still loves her, he didn't say, but I think he does. And always will. Maybe that's the romantic in me.
He paused at this point. I looked at him, and he looked at me and then at Miles. We knew he had to talk about the jump now, if he was going to. We could tell he'd been changed by it. He's not the person he was, as Miles would say. Miles later used words like matured and steadier, and more at home in his own skin. Duncan Robert's restlessness was gone. Everything I know about the Void and jumping is dancing around in my head, and now I'm trying to imagine Duncan Robert—his courage, his determination—facing down the Void. I'm literally perched on the edge of my seat, ready for his story to begin.
I write as the words fly out of him, describing the fall, the landing, and the return. I write fast and furious, without looking up, in a note-taker's trance, which veteran note-takers will recognize. Here are his words without further comment from me. I'd hardly know what to say anyway.
Duncan Robert:
Miles dropped me off that morning at the Void. Everything seemed the same as always. The light in the eastern sky was just beginning. The clearing was quiet. I walked through the damp, knee-high grass to the edge of the Void. I was nervous, hardly breathing. I was counting on the gravity at the edge of the Void for the final pull if I hesitated.
I stood at the edge, feeling the presence of the Void, and took a deep, shaky breath, breathing it in. The blood stirred in every corner of my body, and I felt something here bigger than my fear. It was an overwhelming eagerness for more, the same eagerness that had brought me to the edge. I knew this was the way.
I bent forward, arms outstretched, leaning into the Void, until I tipped, face forward into the fall, eyes open. It would have been a belly flop if there'd been a pool. In the first few minutes, I cried out for Reggie, because I wanted her to see this, too.
As I fell, fearing the ground was rushing up to meet me, certain I was making a jump I couldn't possibly return from, the exhilaration I felt still made me laugh out loud. I still feel it.
The fall, well, the fall is what you might think, if you've ever fallen. I think if falls are shorter, people remember less—about the fall, about what they were thinking or feeling. In a longer fall, though, you have time. You begin to notice things. Not right at first, though, because I didn't know how long this fall was going to be. At first, right after my feet left the ground, I could feel myself start to panic. I don't think I've ever done anything as final as that jump. It's one thing to talk about and another to actually do. There was no taking it back, and I felt it in that moment. Einstein or some other physicist said the gravity force is strongest at the edge of a black hole. I can believe that. The force of it at the edge of the Void just took me.
I was in no way prepared for or expecting the helplessness. My heart raced up out of my chest and into my throat, and I couldn't catch my breath. I wanted to scream but only little gasps came out, like the sound a small child would make or someone in pain. I grabbed and twisted and turned, trying to get myself into some sort of protected position, until it became clear the force of the fall didn't allow for holding any position long. I never realized how much having our feet on the ground supported so many other things, like arms and neck and head—and stomach.
The walls of the tunnel moved past too quickly to look for hand or toe holds.
They seemed fairly smooth and unmarked in the beginning. I couldn't see what was down below me, either. It just was dark down there. I had no choice but to let the falling take me.
So, I fell.
Surprisingly, the tension and fear in me lessened pretty fast. That was the other thing I had no way of preparing for or expecting—how quickly we adapt, physically, emotionally, to whatever condition is thrust on us. I fell, and I accepted falling and the peace that seemed to come from not fighting it.
I fell, and my mind still worked, so I was conscious of the fall, and curious about it, too. How far would I fall? Would I be killed in the landing? When would it come? I knew the fall would end—I didn't believe this was the Void to nowhere. Then I noticed it wasn't pitch black and it wasn't freezing cold, two things I had expected. There was some sort of pale glow all around me, and it felt pleasantly cool in the tunnel, not cold, probably because of the air rushing by me that my falling body created. I was just falling now, at a reclining angle, with feet first.
I could see the walls were rock but not as unbroken as I'd originally thought. Now and then, I would see markings of some sort on the walls or I would fall past an opening, at times on both sides of my tunnel, and would get the sense there were other tunnels like mine, extending down. I'm pretty sure there were falling bodies in those tunnels, too, people and animals. It was a combination of hunch and sound. I heard no screams or calls; it was just the sense of wind-brushed, rushing solid masses, of varying sizes and shapes. I didn't know what to make of that. The openings came on too quickly and passed before I could think of calling out myself.
It sounds like a nightmare experience, as I tell it, but I can't say it was. Even though I was falling quickly, I felt suspended somehow, maybe because of my sense of falling and having an awareness of my fall, describing it to myself in my head as I went.
The truth is, falling added to my growing sense of excitement, which was different than my original panic-fueled resistance. Everything around me felt alive, and I did, too. Part of me wanted to whoop and holler. I was captivated by my own experience in a way that was new to me. Sure, I wanted to know where I was going. But I was the central character in my own drama now—I made this happen, when I chose to jump. In falling, I was carrying responsibility for myself in a way I never had. I felt more complete, more whole, more fully embedded in my own existence than I had ever thought possible. I may have disappeared from the physical world, but in this one, I got found.
I don't know how long I fell. It felt like a long time. But what's time in a tunnel? I can't say. I kind of feel as if I have an understanding of the relativity of time now, how it depends on perspective and circumstance. I know a bunch of it seemed to pass that I can't really account for. I can't imagine that I slept while falling (!), but I can't account for every minute, either. I know I had random thoughts, of Reggie, of my mother, of being a child, rolling down a grassy hill at twilight, with other kids, of hearing the call to come in, and not wanting to.
Then suddenly, when I was at my most relaxed, it was as if a gust of wind pushed me into one of the openings in the wall to my left, and I landed on my behind, rolling over to a stop, against a side wall. I had landed in a three-sided rock room. It took me a minute to realize I'd actually come to a stop—the sense of falling stayed with me internally for a minute, as my organs settled into an upright orientation. I wanted to hold onto ‘stop’ for a while, to believe in the ultimate goal of gravity again, which isn't falling but landing, as Newton's apple did. I felt intensely awake and aware, wondering what would happen next, knowing I had been stopped for a reason.
I looked up just as a young man, out of breath, wearing what looked like a white space suit, without helmet, loomed into view over me. He had a great shock of kinky hair that was reddish in color, skin with the hue and sheen of dark, well-oiled walnut, and eyes that glowed gold. He had small gold hoops in his nose and ears, and they glowed, too. He greeted me enthusiastically, infectiously, reaching down to take my hands and pull me to my feet.
I gave him my hands without thinking, as I stared into his face. It's a beautiful, happy, open face, with a wonderfully wide smile. He knows me—really knows me—and is genuinely happy to see me. I notice I can see him in the dimness and think it's because he's radiating a gentle light. Then I think maybe there's a light behind me, illuminating us both, and I turn to look before I realize it's my light, a light radiating from me. I attributed it to being in his presence, which somehow upped the energy ante, making it possible for me to glow. I associate the light, the glow, with the feeling I'm feeling. I like him, really like him. I feel as if I've missed him, a lot, so much it hurts. I find that, without knowing why, I'm glad to see him, and I'm greeting him enthusiastically, too. Tears are on my face, though I can't even say who he is.
I felt the whole story of me, as I knew it, shifting and changing, and I knew I needed this story, this bigger story, to understand the purpose and meaning of my life. Anything else would just be a footnote or, worse, a fiction. And I suddenly realize I love this strange spaceman. I've never felt closer to anyone—not Reggie, not my mother, not Miles, not anyone.
The Void is something more than a pathway to somewhere else. It's a place of meetings, gatherings, like this one. A place you can meet your larger story, through people like this shining man. I'm overcome. Who'd have thought, when looking into the darkness of the Void, you could meet your own light in it?
I ask him, as I continue to hold onto his hands, who he is, where he came from, where we are. I'm so glad to see him. He continues to smile, moves away, crouching down to start a small fire, and says, “Well, you must have sent out the call.”
“What call?” I ask, surprised.
He gestures to me to come over and sit down by him; he has the fire going, in a low spot in the rock floor. He smiles at me and laughs. I laugh, too. It just feels good to laugh. He begins to answer my questions, looking sideways at me, as he produces a pan to boil water in and the water to go in it, from a thermos attached to his pocket. He seems to be watching me, to see if anything resonates with me.
“I'm Guy,” he says, looking to see if I already knew that, but I didn't, despite how well I know I know him. I'm so happy to be with him that I cling to his every word.
“We've had a team connected to Station 1 for as long as any of us can remember. Not that that's saying much, because time doesn't exist for us here. Not the way it does for you there. We just know that we come together here in this no-place place whenever any one of us gets a call. The call usually just appears in our knowing, and we direct our attention here, and everything else follows.”
He notes my confusion and says, “You'll just have to take my word for that.” He smiles again, and I feel lit from inside by his smile. “Sometimes the call goes out to the whole team, sometimes to just one or two of us. But we always come. Unless, of course, we can't.” He smiles mischievously at that last part, leaving me wondering.
“This time the call was for all of us. I thought it was to be a ‘production,’ for one of Lynette's people.”
Of course I didn't know but was getting the idea that he and his ‘Team’ were somehow engaged in looking after those of us currently on Earth. Who or how I didn't know.
“I don't know for sure how big the Team is,” he said, answering my question before I even finished thinking it. “It can grow or shrink at any time, based on people's progress, based on individual Team member challenges, based on need, all of which can then be telepathed, one to the other. It feels as if it's been the five of us core members, including you, for a while. We're part of the same cohort—we started existence together—and we've known each other for eons, literally.” He knows I'm not quite catching on yet.
“Known is not even an encompassing enough word for what we've been to each other. You tell me a word for it. We've been each other's midwife, mother, father, sister, brother, torturer, betrayer, lover, child, killer, priest, concubine, teacher, and more. We've breathed each other's breaths, died each other's deaths. We've been that close, and closer. Sharing skin and scent. We've been one. Remember?”
I just look at him, mesmerized by what he's telling me. He looks back, in no rush. “I remember,” he continues, “when I was a person once on Earth, late at night, staring at a clear sky full of a million stars and feeling one with all the world, and every single person in it. I was nothing, and I was something, and all of it felt immense. It's like that for us, here, but multiplied a few thousand times.”
He laughs, rubbing his face, stirring loose tea leaves into the now-boiling water. “I know you and you know me, inside and out, in a way that is much more intimate than you know yourself.”
It makes me think of Reggie—how she was me and I was her, while still being ourselves—so close we knew each other's thoughts and feelings, yet so respectful we didn't touch that knowing, just accepted it. But that seems a pale shadow of what he's talking about.
“In between being people on Earth, we come here or a place like this—an agreed upon gathering place with a set of coordinates, and we've reviewed lives, laughing and crying, deeply moved by our own and each other's performance, by how hard we tried, how much we messed up, how much we meant well, how painful it all was, even when we thought we were having fun or being successful or were at the top of our game.” He shakes his head and laughs again.
I'm trying to keep up and focus on his words, when I suddenly realize he's not speaking—he's directly communicating inside my head. He's sharing what he knows and answering questions I'm not aware I'm even asking, so I stop trying to keep up and just let it come.
“We've plotted and planned lives together, and then gone and lived them, together or in opposition to each other. Or we've done this—offering the best, most heartfelt kind of support we can think to offer to those living the life, as forcefully and strategically as we can from the other side in this no-place place. We're reminded, as we watch our people how unutterably, unendingly hard it can be to be a person. And how heartbreakingly hard it is to try to reach them. Most of us think of Earth as the ultimate trial. We know that we ourselves have been broken by it over and over, crushed to nothing before we began to even gain a toe hold on the essentials.
“Having pulled the necessary and legendary ‘wool of forgetfulness’ over ourselves when we enter Earth, we face the assault of being human alone, in a human body, sure we are ultimately ‘born alone and die alone,’ or even that it's all ‘dust to dust.’ We weep, we moan, we fornicate, we lie, we steal, we sell ourselves, we run, we hide, we commit all sorts of sordid, unspeakable acts, all to avoid actually believing the untruth we've created—that we're born alone, die alone. The truth is we're never alone—birth, death, whenever! How's that for irony?” He laughs loud at this, his breath fanning the small fire.
I watch as he stirs the brewing tea. He pours some into the cap of his thermos for me. I take it gratefully.
“Most of this kind of talk makes your fellow Team members here laugh uproariously. It's so ridiculous to us, while we're here, that all of us are capable of veering so far off our carefully laid plans while under the influence of life on Earth. And we do it over and over again, despite our sober, sacred oaths of allegiance to the plan.
“But we're all up against Earth's strong and long-established institutionalized thought when we're there. Established Earth thought stands in direct opposition to all that we know to be true. And people on Earth, mostly, won't stand for what we know, not for a single minute. On Earth, what we know to be true is all dismissed as delusional babel, at best. At worst, it's treason, sedition, or even evil—crimes punishable by death. Think about your own American history. People have been hung for just talking the way we talk.” He grins and continues, before I can think of a reaction to that.
“Anyway, I do digress, a habit across many lifetimes, I'm told. Don't hesitate to call me on it, please. To get back to your questions, I'm the one who refers to this place as ‘Station 1,’ and I do it on purpose. I do it because it reminds me of watching Star Trek on Earth. Watching that and seeing that vision of the future allowed us to see reality ahead of schedule, to know that there was more to come. That was terrifically heartening. And, as we've all learned the hard way—by ignoring them—we come to know everything through these kinds of connections to what we like, to what matters to us, even if it is a television show.” He laughs again. “Yes, television is a distraction, but like almost anything else, it's not all bad. You all spend so much time with it, we've come to know it better, too, through your references.”
I sit, mesmerized by him, my tea forgotten. Our conversation is happening in my head, as if he's inside it. To describe the closeness of that—as close as your own thought—is impossible. It's as much about having a feeling as it is about having a thought or a dialogue.
“As for the call, like the one you just made, it usually just appears in our knowing and then we will ourselves here, to Station 1. What kind of call, you're asking? It's a call for services. Our services, to be specific, because we're cohorts, having started out at the same time, and because we've discovered why we've survived and we know how to use that hard-won knowledge. If you combine all of our experiences on Earth, we've survived most of whatever you're going through there, along with stuff you couldn't now imagine surviving, most of it more than once, and some of it with you.
“The difference between you and us, in this moment, is that we can access full awareness of our experiences—what to do, what not to do—but you're not usually privy to that awareness where you are. Sometimes, you exist here, right where we are now, answering calls about us.”
He looks over at me. “You still want to know why we come. We come because the call means there's an opportunity. For service. Let me tell you what I mean by that archaic old word ‘service,’ because I don't mean what you people on Earth often do. I don't mean that we go into your personal business uninvited or that we try to ‘fix’ things for you, so you don't have to. We don't try to spare you any of your own experience, or tell you what to do, even if asked. We're only allowed to provide hints, clues, and opportunities, so you're reminded you have choices.
“You're not a victim of someone else's choices, you're not caught in pre-determined anything, but at the same time nothing is random (pretty much nothing—hah!). So, we might try to point out the obvious in a situation: ‘Hey, remember when you did this before?’ Or remind you of a connection: ‘Um, this person you consider a perfect stranger has been your child.’ Or state the obvious, to us: ‘Don't forget that you know the inner workings of most anything, even if you think you've never seen it before.’ We do this out of love, for those we love, hoping they get the love.
“Say you're the reason for the call,” he smiles, “which you are. This time. But say you're someone who is experiencing a trauma or a vacation or a significant anniversary or birthday or loss—some kind of trigger. Something big. That's our opening to get in there and engage with you on a connecting level. You're shook up, whether you're consciously acknowledging it or not—due to turning 40 or 60, or realizing you've stayed in a relationship too long and don't know how to get out, or you just don't know what to do with yourself without all your usual distractions. Shook up in a good way or a bad way, doesn't matter. You're off balance, not tied down as tightly as usual, and that attracts us. However you see it—as disaster or confusion or euphoria—we see it as opportunity. It's provided our window of opportunity to serve. And we know we have to act fast. Your attention span while you're there is usually short when it comes to things like this! You can be pretty quick in creating a distraction for yourself. After all, you're living in a world of distractions!”
He laughs again and gives my shoulder a push. I push him back, delighted to be playing with him in this way. He acts as if I've given him a powerful push and rolls over to his side and then back up. We laugh again.
I can't argue with him. I remember all the times I decided to have a cigarette, or go for a run, or watch an old movie—anything to shut out uncomfortable feelings. How does service help, I wonder.
“Why service?” he asks. “Without service, no progress is possible, for anybody. If we don't offer help to each other, no one gets ‘past’ anything, or achieves understanding of it so they don't have to do it again and can stop suffering. We're all each other's burdens!” he said with a laugh.
“No matter how stoic or how much of a John Wayne anyone is, their progress is not made without our help. Even ‘accidental’ help, a movie or a book or a phone call out of the blue, originates with us and our service.
“Once you recognize the importance of service, you're no longer in opposition to anyone else. You understand that when we become aligned with each other in this way—one for all and all for one—there can be no more war, no more violence toward each other or any other living thing, no more human-caused suffering in the world.”
“Service brings about necessary change in the world and in us. From service we learn understanding and forgiveness. So, we come to your call—see, that wasn't really an endless digression—because we have an abiding love for you that permeates our being. This is what we all do for each other. It can be no other way.”
He looks at me and then says, “And, yes, we do come for ourselves. Because there is no separation. It's a bond stronger than life.”