Dirt

Chapter 11

Galen read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, his most precious book, the one he studied when his attachment to the world became too much.

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Galen knew this to be true. He was greater than his mother, meant for more. She needed to understand that she had no claim over him. Or the illusion of her needed to understand that, or he needed to understand that the illusion of her had no hold over him, or something. It was all confusing. In any case, he needed to break her attachment to him, because she was holding him back. And his aunt needed to understand that she was free from her parents, that her life was her own. If only everyone could understand Gibran, there could be so much less suffering.

It was difficult to be in a family of younger souls. Galen was an old soul, nearing transcendence, learning his last and most difficult lessons, his final disengagements from family, but the rest of them were just beginning. They didn’t know, even, that they were on the road. They didn’t know the road existed, and it was tiring to try to wake them up and pull them along. It was a kind of service Galen was having to perform, a selflessness that was also one of the final lessons. At the moment, though, he didn’t feel up to the task.

He rested The Prophet on his chest and looked around the small room in lamplight. The slanted ceiling, exposed wood, the vertical planks of the walls, painted dark brown. He wondered whether he might be a prophet, too. Perhaps that was his role.

Jesus had been a prophet. An ordinary man, a carpenter, but an old soul who was willing to help others see.

Galen loved this room, a place to remember who he was. It was easy to forget during the rest of the year as samsara worked away at him. But the room felt too small right now. Galen felt on the edge of learning something. He felt his soul expanding.

So he got out of bed, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and boots, since it would be cold outside, the mountains always cold at night. He tried to sneak down the stairs, but they were loud and creaking, and he didn’t know which way to turn. If he went to the left, he’d have to pass his aunt and Jennifer to get out the front door. If he went right, he’d have to pass his mother and grandmother sitting at the kitchen table. He didn’t want to go either way. He wanted a third door, but that’s exactly what life never provided, and perhaps it was a good thing. This is how we were confronted, how we were forced to learn our lessons.

Galen went left, because he couldn’t bear to be in that kitchen again with his mother and grandmother.

Jennifer and Helen on the hide-a-bed, leaning back awkwardly. There was a big gap between the mattress and back, so it was never possible to prop against pillows. They’d be getting kinks in their necks.

Let me guess, Helen said. You’re being called by Father Granite to sing the pebbles into bigger rocks?

Galen ignored her and stepped outside. Down the steps quickly and into the dirt road, the pine needles. Clear, cold air, the smell of wood smoke, everything traced in moonlight.

“You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.” Gibran was right. Galen needed only to learn how to look, how to feel. The pattern of moonlight through the trees. Everything around him a presence and a sign. The bodhisattva in all things. The Buddha in each rock and tree. Each pine needle better than a church.

Galen stopped and felt his connection to the ground, took off his boots and socks, concentrated on becoming lighter. Let the energy of the earth come up through his soles. He stepped forward again but tried to let it happen unplanned, tried to move authentically, tried to walk softly but not think about walking softly. Authentic Movement was something he was just learning about. There was a New Age bookstore near his grandparents’ house, where he had spent most of his years after high school, but they’d told him not to come back, called him a stalker when all he’d been doing was aligning his aura with a young woman who worked there. She was a younger soul, lovely but afraid, unable to see. He had been trying to help her. The alignment worked best when he stood close behind her and put his arms out, but she didn’t like that. The whole thing made him angry still, something he was trying to let go of. They were letting him order books by mail now, and the one on Authentic Movement was his most recent, letting the body find its own way, letting it speak back, learning from it, releasing attachment to self and past and anger, welcoming the connections to earth and air.

Galen’s neck was slumped, and he could feel his lips heavy, like a frog’s. For some reason, that always happened when he tried to concentrate, and it was distracting. Why was he even aware of his own lips? He wanted to be focusing on his movement.

He held his arms out, palms up, opened himself to the universe. Tried to let the movement happen, but somehow that just slowed him down and made his hips feel locked. So he tried a different stride, tried to walk the way he had over coals, more purposeful, longer strides. Only one workshop, one evening, and he had missed most of the talk because he’d agreed to tend the fire as a way to reduce how much he had to pay. Always having to beg his mother for money. A large bonfire, and it burned his face as the others talked about fear and using your fear as a counselor. He heard bits of it. Then he raked the coals into a bed fifteen feet long and three feet wide, the hot red embers and his face stinging.

Everyone gathered on the lawn in a ring around the coals, the grass cool and damp but the coals glowing. Galen felt afraid, but he was buoyed by the chanting around him, everyone with their arms out and palms up. Then they crossed the coals, one by one. Many of them jerked, a little hop after a few steps, burned. But some just crunched their way across.

When it was Galen’s turn finally, at the end, he felt the most beautiful faith, a sudden rush of knowing that the universe would take care of him, a feeling that his fear had become something else more powerful, more pure, and he walked across with only a curiosity. He could feel the coals crushing under his feet, could feel their heat, even. He could feel each piece of wood, how fragile it was, how the fire was a kind of net that had pulled the substance from the wood, and he didn’t burn. He walked across and was on the lawn again and felt he had received a great gift.

He helped clean up afterward, and he watched the woman who ran the workshop tend to her feet. He hadn’t seen her jerk or hop as she crossed, but the bottoms of both her feet were outrageously burned, long puffed areas of red skin like on a hot dog. She applied a white cream, then wrapped in bandages and stepped into large slippers. She popped a Vicodin.

What? she asked, and he didn’t know what to say. She was making probably $20,000 in an evening, so that was perhaps the motivation, and he felt cheated.

Walking now on the pine needles, though, he tried to remember what he had felt as he’d crossed the coals, because something about that had been real. Something had happened, and there was no reason he couldn’t enter that space again.

He tried to feel himself strung like a hammock between earth and moon. Wavering and catching the ethereal breeze, the wind from the shadow world. His body almost a tuning fork. His bare feet heavier on the road than he would have liked, so he tried to release them, tried to let them not carry any weight. He could feel sharp pricks from stones and needles, and he tried to ignore that, too. Ceremonial steps, a smooth movement, and he realized he was being pulled toward the wide, shallow water near the bridge, the open pool. He was being drawn there, and he didn’t yet know why, but he was following that.

The road a corridor, laced in moonlight and shadow. A journey. He kept his eyes half lidded, tried to see without looking. Felt the energy gathering. His crown chakra wide open.

He chanted. Heya hey hey, ya eh oh ee, ya eh oh ee, heya heya hey hey hey hey how. A song he had learned once in a sweat lodge, a beautiful song, meant to do something. A ghost dance or sun dance or something like that. Heya nico-wei, heya nico-wei, heya nico-wei hung-ee hei hei hei hei how.

He hopped a little as he sang, arms raised up, but then went back to a slower stride. That felt more real, more ceremonial.

And then suddenly he was in the open, in the full moon, the dirt road white and luminous and the wide pool of water shining before him. The moon straight ahead, beckoning. He felt pulled toward it, felt acknowledged by the moon, recognized. The song had become a moon dance, and the moon had listened.

The moon was offering him a gift, this water. This was why he had been drawn here. The surface of the water always in motion, the light never still, but evolving in pattern. This is what Siddhartha had seen. In the passing of the water was the passing of self, of attachment, and in the shapes on the surface one could find the face of all things. Every longing, every pain, all of it would form for a moment, a trick of the light, and then dissolve. It was when we looked at water that we dreamed, and remembered the tug of previous incarnations, and what we longed for was our true form beyond this body, beyond this incarnation, beyond this world of illusions.

Galen understood now what he was meant to do tonight. The moonlight a path across the water, the proof, finally, of what he was. He walked toward it, or was walked toward it by the universe. The stream of beautiful sounds, the bubbling and coursing, a voice reassuring, the light soft, and he had lost his feet. They had become one with the light and would cross the surface in the same way that the light lay upon the water.

Galen ecstatic, his entire soul rushing with love. His foot at the surface, cold, the breath of the water, and that was all right, it was happening, but then his foot plunged through and he tilted, trying to keep his palms up, trying to save this, trying not to lose faith. The next step could hold, so he threw his other foot out there, but it plunged, also, and his ankle twisted on rock below and he was falling forward, hit the water face-first in an icy shock, all his air gone. He breathed water and pushed against rock and sand to get up, thrashing with his arms. He was coughing, stumbled and fell again, his ankle twisted and too difficult to stand on, so he propped on his butt and arms and pulled himself backward toward shore. He crawled out of the water and just lay in the dirt. What the fuck, he said. When is it going to happen?