A great man was coming to visit, was going to step inside our walls, walk inside our rooms. We had prepared ourselves as best we could–put on clean clothes and shoes, combed our hair, opened our faces into smiles. Some us stood in a line at the door with palms held open, expectantly waiting. All eyes turned toward the light streaming into the narrow passageway from outside where the man would step into the room we prepared for him decorated with white satin and gold colored cloth draped from the walls. His foot paused in the doorway, and one thousand four hundred of us fell silent. We knew it was a rare moment.
At last he walked in, wearing his red robe and glasses. All rose in unison, except those who could not. When the 98 year old woman sitting in her wheel chair saw him, she threw up her arm and called out “Where have you been?” into the expectant silence.
“Right here in the world, with you,” said the Dalai Lama, as he bent and bowed before her, holding her hand.
When he turned to the receiving line where I stood waiting, a voice inside called out silently (as I’m sure happen to all those near me) that he would look at me in the face, reach out his hand to mine, touch me, and in that touch somehow know me. Bless me. I didn’t want to press myself in front of others to be noticed. If he touched me, I reasoned, it would be his choice, and up to fate. Some people he did look at in the face and greet. Some, he touched their hand or head as he passed by. Others, faces glowing with the light of happiness, ended up in photographs.
Though he glanced at me briefly, he didn’t touch me or look straight into my eyes as I hoped for, however. Neither did I appear later in a photograph, though those on either side of me did. There is no photographic record of this encounter. No one will later know I was there unless someone later tells a story, as perhaps I’m telling you now, that includes my name. Though I was close to him, I was one the Dalai Lama passed by.
Why does that matter? Why did I want him to touch my hand? What did I, or any of us, hope to gain by his touch? What kind of connection or knowing might have occurred through that brief moment? I remember when president Obama visited Delhi several years back, how he and Michelle shook my hand. Though it was an encounter I never dreamed I would experience, I couldn’t exactly say after that that the experience had changed my life. Still, I felt somehow connected to my country in a more concrete way that I wasn’t previously aware of.
We all long to be known, to be visible, to matter. There is a kind of knowing when someone looks directly into our eyes and when we hold in ours the hand of a person we care about. Similarly, rather than merely gazing at photos of the home we love, we like to walk the land, hear the sounds, smell the earth. There is a felt presence and an exchange that occurs with physical reality, with touch. A thousand faces may stream by us in a subway tunnel, and we will not feel seen or known. A different kind of encounter occurs, when we gaze out at the world with an expectant heart, waiting to receive. We long for connection.
People recognize that the Dalai Lama is a man of integrity, someone who seeks to live in honesty and who has given himself over to be a living presence of peace. That is difficult, and we all know it. We want to listen to such a man. He might have something to say that will help us understand how to live. We want to look in his eyes, to touch us, because in some unspoken way, we recognize that our lives connect when we touch. Maybe something of that peace will enter into our own lives and change us.
We know when a loved one is present in a room when we first open a door, though we can’t see the person. When I was injured in college, my mother half way across the country woke in the night and knew something had happened to me. She also knew her brother had died before she was told. The body has a kind of knowing that moves through the heart.
We’re told of how when he was here on earth, people clambered around Jesus, hoping to touch him. Perhaps you recall the story of the woman who amidst the crowd reached to touch the hem of Jesus’s clothes, believing that if she did so, her life would be changed. I picture her threading her way through bodies, stretching her hand to reach the hem of his clothes from a stair below as he passed by. Though the crowd pressed in around him, Jesus noticed her, and turned around to see who it was. He must have looked into her eyes directly, recognized her in the vulnerability and longing revealed in her face. “Take heart,” he told her, her faith had made her whole. There is an interconnection, an exchange of energy, when hearts open. Some door opens that isn’t there otherwise, some liminal curtain is pulled back. An exchange happens. Lives connect. Perhaps this is how miracles are able to occur.
Where have we been all our lives? We are here in the world with each other. We have something to give one another, and the world around us in the open heart of our presence. The evening I first went out with the man who is now my husband, he told me at dinner as we watched rain dripping down the crystals at the now burned down Triton restaurant in San Diego, “The world is held together by strands of light.” We are more than the sum of our bones, body and breath, but through these, we touch life.
What we are living is mostly a mystery. We need containers to allow ways in to experience. But the real knowing spills over and out of these. That is why we need art, poetry, dance, literature. E.O. Wilson speaks of how in the future humans will be more and more integrated with machines, and that is why we will need literature and the humanities more than ever–to help us explore that territory of what it means to be human with all its difficult questions.
Words can be a way of finding how to be present in the world, a pathway into letting the invisible become visible to us. Words are strands of light we make to help us see the world and who we are, what it is we are living. Here is my poem I wrote several years back, “Seen and Heard,” that appeared in my chapbook, Saudade about this practice of presence. We don’t have to be the Dalai Lama. Everyone we know and encounter, wants to know that somehow inside the press of the crowd and busyness of the day and its multitude of priorities, that it is still their presence matters most. In our look, we can bless. In a pause, the tone of our voice, we can bring peace. With a simple gesture or touch, we can lets others know they are seen and heard. Perhaps that, too, is the light that holds the world together.
Seen and Heard
As a child, I stared long at the hidden pictures
in children’s magazines, looking for the lamb
inside the cloud, the face inside a pleat or tree,
the button or missing bow that made one figure
different from another. What satisfaction
when I found them. How affirming it was
to know that all those little details, the small
realities of the world that begged to be seen
could be found, recognized, known.
Today when I peer out at the world, the picture
I see is workers, day after day rising with the sun
to start their tasks. They feed the fire or prepare
the mortar for the brick. Some lift bundled
branches to their shoulders. Some hammer nails
or paint the walls. Others sort through files, prepare
documents, answer calls, gather round tables,
or read books deep into the night.
We do our tasks, we make the rounds.
Still, things hide there inside the walls
and trees, pressed inside the body’s quiet
folds of those we meet, waiting
to be found if we know how to see.
Cezanne looked for them, the hidden forms—
the cylinder inside a tree, the sphere inside
the head, the geometry of nature, and though
his eyesight was weak, or perhaps
because of this, he found the hidden shapes
and painted them in plains of color
so the rest of us could find them.
Goya, too, painted the secrets others meant
to cloak, the fear inside the peasant with arms
uplifted, his white shirt glowing against
night’s darkness, the hidden faces of the men
turned away from view, their guns that showed
the world in thickly painted strokes the torment
of a deaf world.
We turn through the pages of time
and off we go each day to make our story,
paint our picture, lift our bricks, do our work.
Our eyesight is weak, our hearing faulty,
but we stare at the pages anyway, trying
to make sense of the world, hoping to find
the forms inside of forms, to hear the unspoken
voices or even our own voice inside
the night sky darkness we might be standing in.
There we are with our boards to nail, bushes
to trim, our books piled beside us—
with whatever it is we discover and make
and love our world with, our arms
thrust up to the heavens, hoping someone
will see us. Hear us. Hoping someone has looked
long enough, hard enough to recognize us
hiding there inside the pleats and paint of life.
Anna Citrino---Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage 