The barn, the mice, and the shakuhachi

They were trudging through the snow towards the chimney smoke from the house. David spied the old barn through a thick stand of aspen trees. The sign over the old wooden double doors read “Comfort Thomas”.

What’s that barn?” he asked James.

“It’s where Ellen stabled her horses. Only mice play there now.”

“Maybe I’ll stay there one day,” David said hopefully.

James stopped, turned to look at him, and shook his head.

“Never happen. You just said as we got out of the car you’re not sure this was a good idea because there’s no electricity. Or hot shower. I have a feeling you won’t be spending the night in the barn one day.”

David smiled back.

“Plus, I hate mice.” He added.

Seven months later one day arrived. David had become easy with the darkest moonless nights. Bathing in the frigid cold water of Seal Cove at the bottom of the hill had become a weekly ritual. Light by kerosene lamp and firelight felt normal, the soft hiss of wicks and crackling of wood peaceful.

It was time for the sleepover with the mice.

David sat at the edge of the hay door, his bare feet hanging down. He had made a bed of old straw, borrowed Hudson and Navajo blankets, and his green sleeping bag. There was a single kerosene lamp holding back sundown, fresh batteries in the boombox. He looked out across the winding dirt road that fronted the barn. The Japanese Shakuhachi , a wooden recorder, played “Silk Road” adding a mellow movie soundtrack as a flock of late summer geese flew a perfect V in the cloudless sky. He always wondered how they picked their leader.

“Maybe the leader is the only one who knows the way home.”

The thought made him smile. The new moon cast enough light to see the reds, yellows, and burnt orange in the trees. He felt that there was magic in the night.

Staying alone in the barn was an act of bravery he could not even consider when he came to the Comfort Thomas. But that was then, and this is now. After all, how many chances do you get to give your bed to Baba Ram Dass, one of the weekend visitors to the commune. David’s worn copy of the purple-covered “Be Here Now” that Ram Dass had written waited to be opened on the green makeshift bed.

The page bent and broken spine coffee-cup-stained book was the only one David carried in his backpack when he came up from Cambridge. It taught him the three great lessons he always tried to remember. First was to be here now, in other words, be in the moment. The past and future are the same illusion. there is only now. Second, we are spiritual beings on a very human journey and not the other way around as he had been taught in Catholic School. The third was the most important of the three. Remember to remember.

The colors of the fall woods were disappearing into a muddy impressionistic painting. The honkers had flown out of earshot, the Shakuhachi played softly, almost sadly that the night was minutes away. He stood and stretched and went over to sit in the circle of the lamplight and read.

He had devoured “Be Here Now” the first time. Since then, he always played a game. Close your eyes, turn to a page, stick a finger on a passage. This time it was a passage he had not seen since the first reading.

“We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”

David once wrote a graphic poem saying “Words are best when they lead to silence …” done in black block letters that got smaller and smaller until the “ce” in silence began to break up and disappear.

He thought about the idea of being here now. The past and the future were the same illusion, only mind movies. You could go backward to the future or forward to the past. The thought made him smile. He picked another page.

“Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code.”

F. Red laughed out loud. 04609 he thought. His hope was to see that divine light, experience waves of bliss in conversation with the gods and goddesses in the barn.

He was tired of using words to explain a hot bath or actually immersing yourself in the steaming water. He knew it was a full-on pre-frontal cortex overload, when you talked to the angels, and forgot your zip code. He leaned over and cupped the warm opening of the kerosene lamp glass and blew hard. It was the kind of dark in which children see and hear monsters. He sat on the edge, held his hand in front of his face, saw nothing, closed his eyes, and squirmed into his mostly zipped sleeping bag.

Without any warning, he was suddenly immersed in a flame-colored cloud. There was no searing heat just a fiery-colored fog. The light was coming from inside himself. He and the light were the same, inside, outside had become one.

Almost as quickly as all this happened – and it felt timeless on the inside – he had a moment of illumination quite impossible to describe. One momentary lightning-flash of what he later labeled “the Brahmic Splendor”. Upon his heart fell a single drop of Brahmic Bliss. It left him with - since being raised and baptized - what he imagined to be a taste of heaven.

He could only smile as the mice came out and began their sprightly dances across his outstretched legs.