Reflections from a sub

I haven’t been sleeping well recently.  I get by in my day to day with cat naps.  Mostly I sleep in the cafeteria of my schools during lunch or my prep period.  Alas, sometimes my naps can spill over.  I mean, as a sub it’s not like I have a lot to do anyway, but I do, at a minimum, need to stay awake.  This can be easier said than done.  I was proctoring a class in a middle school a few weeks ago.  I was streaming, through my ear buds, Haydn’s Opus 33 string quartet number 1, a masterpiece (Haydn wrote virtually nothing but masterpieces in the string quartet genre).  The music lulled in me into a daze, then a deep sleep, and I started to dream that I was at a live performance of the piece!  At the end of the performance, along with the rest of the audience, I clapped thunderously.  I clapped so hard I woke up!  All the students had paused taking their test and were looking at me.  “Why was the substitute clapping in his sleep?” was the question on every kid’s face.  I gave them a serious look and they returned to their tests.

The other day I was at the gym at a local college.  I met a man in his late fifties in the locker room.  He told me his name was Jared.  I assumed he was a professor and I asked him what he taught.  He said “Mathematics”, and then he asked me my field of study and I told him that I’m not a professor but that I study poetry.  He asked me who my favorite poet was, and I said among the American poets I probably love Wallace Stevens the most.  And then and there he recited the entirety of “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens!  “Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one…”  We recited it together, word for word, and we were so happy and thrilled that we both knew the work.  He asked for my interpretation of the poem, and why it is so brutal and reductionist- and I said that the poem is about the author serving ice cream in the house of his neighbor, who has just died.  She is lying in one room, stretched out, her friends preparing her body for the viewing, and he is in the other room serving ice cream.  He reflects that she has lived a whole life, but it is finished, and now she is just a thing, but he lives, he is serving ice cream, he matters more, even though all her friends are streaming in to say goodbye to his neighbor.  It’s really a poem where what you see is what matters, the reality in front of you.  How you interpret it is up to you- but facts are facts.

I told him what I love about Stevens’ work is the mouth feel- your tongue and lips love to shape the words of his poetry.  He liked that.  Then we recited An Idea of Order At Key West: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea…” and also the last lines of Sunday Morning: “And in the isolation of the sky at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink downward to darkness on extended wings.”  (One of my favorite passages in all literature) It was such a thrill to meet someone who loves Stevens as I do, I said, “We are a small fraternity” and he finished, “But we are proud!”  Any fan of Wallce Stevens is my friend.

It’s funny- Wallace Stevens made his money as a life insurance executive.  His co-workers never knew he wrote poetry- they described him as hard boiled and all business.  In the same way, Charles Ives, America’s greatest composer, was also a brilliant life insurance salesman.  He made a fortune!  There’s something about selling life insurance that turns people into creative geniuses.  Maybe it’s the constant going from door-to-door and seeing how different people live, or maybe there’s something in explaining complicated policies and benefits that triggers something in the brain.  I don’t know.

The other day I was going for a walk, and I got an “inner message”.  It was an encouraging message, so whether it was real or not doesn’t matter.  It said “Identify your best quality and then intensify it enormously until it overshadows all of your so called bad qualities.”

Yesterday I had the day off so I read Guru’s books for five hours.  When I read Guru’s books I become a different person.  St. Augustine said to Christ, “You are more deeply in me than I am in me.”  In the same way, I can say that Guru’s books represent me better than I represent myself.  When I dive into his writings, all my bad qualities disappear, or they become meaningless.  Guru’s words are my true existence.  I feel this also when I recite Guru’s poetry because I become a different person.  That consciousness is not my usual waking consciousness, but Guru’s writings- especially his poetry- are ladders to an exalted consciousness that I can inhabit and claim as my own.

This morning I was reading Guru’s book Perfection and Transcendence, and I started reading some pages aloud.  After twenty minutes I stopped, but I heard a ringing in my ear, and that ringing soon spread throughout my body.  Everything in me was ringing, ringing, humming, vibrating.  I get that feeling when I chant AUM, also.  This means that reading Guru’s writings is the same as chanting AUM- the seed sound of the Universe.  We can enter into a deep, universal harmony and get enlightenment just by reading Guru’s books, meditating on these ideas, and chanting his mantric utterances.

I’m not always happy with myself.  I have a lot of attachments.  I’ll spare the reader the details.  But yesterday I was sitting in a small park near my house, and I sang Guru’s immortal song on forgiveness- “Jiban Debata”- six times.  And the sixth time I sang it, I sang it with more feeling than I ever have, and I saw that each note had a color, and I dived into the meaning of each note-color, and I felt the song wash over me like countless waves.  I sat there in silence for a few minutes and just offered gratitude to God and to my Guru for this experience.  As a seeker, I need these experiences to feel spiritually alive.  My friend the mountain climber slash English channel swimmer slash Celebrations housing Lord once told me “We are people of high moments.”  Other people live for nice clothes and status and fast cars- we live for those thirty or forty fleeting moments in our lives when we connect with something higher and deeper.  Guru says that “Even an iota of progress in the spiritual life is much more important than the so-called success-life” (Seventy Seven Thousand Service Trees).

It’s interesting when I read the Bengali lyrics to Guru’s songs- and I see that when he honours spiritual figures he gives them epithets.  For example, he calls Krishna “Bhangshid Hari” or “Flute Lord”.  He calls Christ “Khama Amarar”- “Embodiment of Immortality’s Forgiveness”.  For the Buddha, in his song “Namo Namo Buddha Deber” Sri Chinmoy took six or seven different names of Shiva to identify the inner divinity of the Buddha- “Ashutosh” (the one who is quickly satisfied), “Bholanath” (Lost in self forgetfulness), “Sthir” (“Firm” or “Eternally unchanging”) and the epithet that Guru applied specifically to Buddha is “Karuna Maitri Nir” (Compassion-Friendship Fountain).  He gives these names even to other Masters, to honor them, their supreme greatness.

I remember once, many years ago, I was washing dishes at Victory’s Banner, our long-gone divine enterprise restaurant in Chicago.  We had a Transcendental, embossed, in the dishwashing area, and I mistakenly sprayed it with the spray gun.  I immediately got a clean rag and wiped the picture down, and the Transcendental gave me the most compassionate smile.  Again, I remember once seeing Guru’s secretary on his knees before Guru, telling Guru all the important recent news, and Guru was looking at him and gave him the same smile that that the Transcendental gave me.  It’s as if our devotion feeds something divine in the Compassion aspect of the Master.  Maybe it is regular devotion-practice I need to stay spiritually healthy?

Well, school is out- which means I am out of a job temporarily, so I’m going to hit the pavement and look for work.  Geez, I wonder if there’s an eighteen-wheeler TQL truck out there with my name on it?

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