The Date

CIIS – SF, California, 23-4-2015

Imagine one day waking up and somebody telling you the size of the cosmos. Imagine thinking for the first time in galaxies, the sun and star explosions, and imagine somebody telling you that you live there; that you live right there, in the midst of it.

Imagine that before that day you did not know. When you woke up you already lived in a pretty awesome world but less big and magnificent. But no… after 6:00pm on that Wednesday, after that class that only lasted a couple of hours, something huge happened. Because then you knew… You really knew. You knew that the size of your life, of your history, of your universe, and it was all of unfathomable proportions. “What!?”, “Yeah, that happened to me! That is still happening to me”… After a year I am still processing the idea that we all come from star stuff, that the universe is expanding and that flowers took billions of years of creativity in evolution to appear.

Fish… my relatives. Really? Trees…my ancestors? Wow! And then this guy, this professor, saying all these metaphors about galaxies leaving their home to shine in beauty and life, leaving where they were born to be creative and spontaneous. And let me remark that when I am talking about their coming to being, I am, no metaphors, referring to the flaring forth!

Galaxies finding who they are in expansion and communion? Really? And I, there, feeling just like that, like a galaxy! It sounds funny, but it is true, I felt like a galaxy! Being away from home discovering who am I, having all this new friends and experiences… and then in that process I discovered not only me, but also that who I am has all to do with the whole universe, with the whole process of life unfolding, that I come from that, that I am it and it is me. What!? Really! I was in shock, but so excited! Life can be so exciting sometimes.

This time it was not a class that remained on my notebook, this time it was not a story that you I listened from afar, this time I felt it in my bones, in my heart and in my soul. That time what the teacher was saying resounded in every little aspect of myself… it is true, I felt it… I felt it as the most beautiful and profound truth I have ever listened and felt. Life, emotions, everything… everything surpassed me and I felt completely overwhelm by it. That day my whole life was different!

After class I needed to share it, to process it, and I needed to drink wine and beer, everything, and tell the story, this amazing new story. My mind was bursting with connections to poetry and facts, everything was making sense, and my joy possessed my body and just I wanted to dance the cosmos out, from itself to itself in an I SEE YOU dance[1]. I was of out of control.

But how could I know that that day was going to be like that… I could never imagine it, so… so I had a date; a blind date just after this event.

I went home, took a quick shower, put some nice clothes on and with a smile of the size of my face I arrived to dinner. He was tall and handsome, he just moved to California from Sydney and loved to run and surf. He had a nice job and was looking for a nice girl to share his life with. All was good and fine until the moment when he asked me to tell him about myself. Because then… even if I doubt about it I could not help it, I could not hold it, I could not behave… so I told him everything!

I talked passionately about the stars exploding and becoming everything we now know, and then about the process of life unfolding in mysterious ways forming animals and plants and rocks and how life was bursting in creativity and then how the human was trying to find its place and the stars, the stars again calling us! Calling us into the mystery! And how we could not stop so we develop myth and religion and then science, all of it to try and make sense of it all, and to find our place and to answer the question of what does it mean to be human. And how here we were now, in this century knowing that the universe was that big, and expanding! And how galaxies were still creative and how they had to go away from home to discover their own beauty, just like me! And then, I said a poem, and kept talking about the amazing life we lived in and about the mystery of it all and my luck of being in San Francisco in that class, ready to listen, ready to listen to the cosmos speak to me, and… And I really don’t know at what point I lost him. But I did…

He paid and very gently said to me that he was very sorry but that he had to go study, I knew he was lying because he just told me that he worked and was not studying anything anymore… but I did not care, how could I? I was the universe that day!

It was still early and I couldn’t go home with so much inside me, so I called some friends and we met at the bar and we talked and talked and marveled and talked about life and about the universe and the stars, and the galaxies, and our past and our homes and everything felt completely sacred, extremely beautiful and it was all very exciting… Then the bar had to close, and we had to go sleep, but at the same time we, that day, just felt a little bit more awakened.

[1] The I SEE YOU is dance that I invented that day. It is a dance that you do with your whole body while acknowledging in reverence and complicity with the cosmos that she is you, and you are him. It is an “I and I” dance, based in an I-Thou relationship, where you just marveled about the cosmos own dancing and you just want to let him/her know that you know it is awesome and that because you know that, and you also know that you are part of its own awesomeness, that you will also dance in the unique way that you are.