Meeting the reclaimed man

I had come to the house on the hill in South London to see Lou.  Lou was a fellow student of Chi Gung and Tai Chi Chuan and he was preparing to go to St. Lucia in the Caribbean to teach there.  I had been earmarked as the next to be promoted to teacher and was beginning the training to follow him six months later, but that´s another story!

I used to attend the `Mind, Body and Spirit Fair´ each year and I filled my rented room with books, icons, trinkets, pictures and smells discovered, bought, received or otherwise collected from those early investigations.  The few things I was certain of were that, in this world, mostly, the blind lead the blind; motive, edict and action of spiritual leaders seldom correspond and that true spiritual teachers are small in number and often intentionally hard to find among the hypocrites and egotists, snake oil salesmen and gold diggers. 

Meanwhile, back in Lou´s kitchen, it seemed to me that this curious person was listening intently to the sound of peeling and chopping parsnips, carrots and cabbage, and despite sharing the same space together for an hour or two, he didn´t utter a word, or even glance over at me once.  I did not even see his face during that time.  The sound of his listening was deafening while I sat watching him while pretending to read a book at the kitchen table. 

At last, he served lunch.  A simple miso, bean and vegetable soup with sauerkraut and rye bread.  It was a simple and wholesome meal although there were no second helpings, which, I admit, I was disappointed by.  I had become accustomed to “stuffing myself to the gills” on those cold October days in England in an attempt to keep warm.  In any case I was training intensely and that was my main reason for eating such quantities of food.

However, in hindsight, the dubious pleasures of overconsumption would have come a very poor second to the experience I had as I rode home on the top deck of a London Routemaster bus and watched the big autumn afternoon sun moving gradually down behind Dulwich Park´s rust coloured trees, emitting its last bright yellow stripes of warm light over the cold and shiny metal bars that ran along the tops of the seats.  The sun was beautiful, but not strong enough to take the chill out from the late afternoon air.  Those old Routemaster buses are open to the elements at the back, allowing easy access to both passengers and sharp icy winds alike, they were much colder than modern London buses where passengers enter at the front of the bus and the doors close when leaving each stop.  That day though, I did not feel a chill at all. 

As I took a blinking look at that big orange sun, a warm and beautiful sensation, spontaneously arose within me.  I experienced what I can only describe as a deeply beautiful and loving feeling emanating from the very core of my being.  Sounds like a piece of ´hippy-speak´I know. Nevertheless, these are the best words I can find to describe the sensation. I had never felt anything like this before.  It was such a powerful feeling and so far away from my usual daily experience that I had not even been aware that a human being could feel this way.  I felt more alive, more relaxed, more loved, and more blessed than ever before in my life.  I was moved to tears of gratitude right there on that bus.  I was deeply grateful just for the gift of being alive.  I felt connected and exhilarated. 

That afternoon, I had a glimpse into a new dimension of experience, and a deep connection was established between my centre and the sun and the new feeling had left me overwhelmed and feeling loved completely and unconditionally.  Whether that had been caused by the sun, or the light lunch prepared by that reclaimed man hardly seemed like a relevant question, they felt like one and the same thing at that moment.

The feeling stayed with me into the early evening and left immediately when I ate again.  The whole experience left me feeling a sense of longing.  I knew right there and then that evening that more than anything else in my life, I wanted to return to that warm and beautiful place and if possible, to find a way to stay there.  I felt a strong desire to find a way to engineer another meeting with that mysterious fellow in Lou´s kitchen and to find out what he had put in my food!