Authors: Greg Kincaid
“Yes, in the beginning, me. Eventually you’ll learn to trust a different part of yourself.”
Ted knew students have little say in their course work, but he didn’t recall a solitary mountain hike being part of the syllabus. His attraction to Angel was pushing him in unwelcome ways, and he felt some disappointment in her for putting him in this position.
Ted got out of the passenger seat, stretched, and looked at Angel. She was still smiling and sitting in the driver’s seat, self-assured and confident. It occurred to him that if she joined him, this hike might be tolerable. It was the going it alone that bothered him. “Okay, I trust you. Argo and I will
hike to the top of that Kilimanjaro, sit around with nature, and spend the night in the middle of nowhere with the wolves and the rattlesnakes. I suppose this is the kind of thing that people do on vacation.”
“It’s your vacation.” Angel pointed to one of several piles. “Grab the two lawn chairs from under the blankets and meet me outside.”
Ted knew that he was agreeing, at least in part, to impress Angel. But he also felt she was touching on something important that he would never do on his own. He grabbed the two lawn chairs and then spoke to his dog. “Let’s go, Argo. It’s not nice to keep Mother Nature waiting.”
Angel plopped two cans, their “dinner,” onto the small folding camp table. “Help yourself.” The canned food was for emergencies, but she had been so caught up in her work with Ted that she had forgotten to buy groceries. Tomorrow, while Ted hiked, she would drive back to Pecos for supplies.
Angel dived into the can of enchiladas with a plastic fork. “Bon appétit.” Ted seemed uncertain about the etiquette for sharing food out of a can. Angel assumed he’d never done it.
A month ago she would have taken one look at Ted and said he was not her type of man. Being Ted’s teacher was a good opportunity for the Buddhist practice of equanimity—resisting the urge to judge all experiences as either good or bad. Now she realized that she was enjoying her time with him. Perhaps it was sharing all the teachings that were so important to her. Perhaps, too, it was something else. Ted had a softer take on masculinity that she found attractive. She had never considered herself lonely, but perhaps she was wrong. Whether a sunset over the mountains or just a walk around the monastery lake, good companionship, she reflected, enhanced every experience.
With the enchiladas consumed, Angel moved on to a can of Del Monte fruit cocktail. While she worked the handheld can opener, Ted asked her a question that had been bothering him. “How does religion fit into these realizations you’ve been describing? Are waking up and salvation the same thing? Wouldn’t it be easier to just join a church and ditch all this spiritual work? There are churches on every corner and only one Angel Two Sparrow, Native American spiritual consultant, traveling around in a bookmobile. Maybe waking up is just too much work for the average Joe.”
“Or the average Ted?” Angel asked.
Although he hadn’t intended it, he realized that his words might have come off a bit harsh. “Of course, I always thought church was a waste of time, and Spirit Tech is great, but that’s just me.”
Angel set the can of fruit down on the table for Ted to share. She answered in a detached way. “An individual who succeeds in the spiritual journey is fully awakened. The Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad are examples. Their followers understandably wanted to package and label their lives and teachings for consumption by a wider audience. This is religion.”
“So what is the difference between a spiritual consultant like you and your garden-variety preacher?”
Angel looked longingly at the mountains before returning to Ted’s question. “When I was growing up on the reservation in South Dakota, we were poor in ways you would not understand. We were often hungry. Our clothes were little more than rags. My brother and I would take turns drinking
this sweet juice at the bottom of the fruit can. It was a treat, dessert, for us.” She set the can down. “Now I get all the juice I want from the bottom of the can. This bounty makes me somehow rich. My brother and my mother, they are both gone, dead. My father, Larsen, is now far away in South Dakota. I wouldn’t mind being hungry again if it meant I could share this juice with my brother and mother. Being alone and having it all to myself is not so good, not like I dreamed it would be when I was a child.” She handed the can to Ted. “Drink some.”
The juice at the bottom of a can of fruit cocktail did not sound like a treat to Ted, but he knew this offering meant something to Angel. He took a few sips of the heavy syrup. As he did, he pictured Angel as a small girl living in some rundown shack, sharing high-fructose corn syrup from the bottom of a can. It was difficult to imagine such poverty. He felt an echoing sensation around his heart. It seemed to vibrate, thick and low. It was dull and sad, neither quick nor joyful. It was as if Angel’s sudden melancholy were resonating within him. He was owning some part of her sadness.
Before he could fully experience the sensation in his chest, Angel returned to Ted’s question. “You see, Ted, I want to share the spiritual juice with others. Sharing makes everything better in life, don’t you think? It’s no good having it all to myself. That’s not how it is supposed to be.”
What she said rang true for Ted. He realized that his lack of sharing—after the divorce, after his grandfather’s death—had left a hole. The hole hurt. “I agree.”
“There is more to sharing than we realize. Do you remember when you asked how you could become more awake?”
“Yes, you said it was not easy.”
“I should have said it’s nearly impossible to do on your own. We’re human—we’re wired to empathize. It’s another part of your awareness that waits to be more fully realized. We’ll meditate again later, and this time I’ll do it with you. You’ll find it easier. Much easier. It turns out that, to some extent, through something neurologists call mirror neurons, you can graft onto my consciousness and use it like training wheels until you find this more awakened state on your own. This is why the world needs some variety of spiritual consulting. It’s very problematic trying to wake up on your own.” Angel stood up and gazed at the mountains as the sun lost altitude in the evening sky. “I don’t want to spend such a beautiful evening sitting here talking and analyzing any further. Let’s walk among the mountains. You’ll be able to see how your brain can resonate not only with other humans but also with nature herself. Try to listen and hear with something more than your logical-thinking left brain. Everything in nature talks, some things even sing, but very few humans listen. If you are interested, I can help you to hear this music.”
Ted had no trouble laughing at himself. “You mean quit knowing so damned much?”
“That would help.”
Ted stood up. “I don’t think trees and rocks talk, but …” He shrugged as if to say,
Who really knows?
“I’ll do my best to stay open on the subject.”
“A good place to be.”
Argo began to wag his tail and get fired up, spinning excitedly. “Argo loves to go for walks. The strange thing is, he seems to be able to sense that I’m going on the walk well before I actually grab the leash. As soon as I form the intention, he seems to know it.”
“Argo, thank you for demonstrating my point. Dogs
know
very little, but they get along marvelously, sensing and intuiting their way through life.”
Ted snapped a leash on his brave, furry yellow dog.
Hugging the old terrier, Angel whispered in his ear, “You can hear nature’s music, can’t you?”
When she leaned over, a strap from her black halter-top slipped off her shoulder. Ted gently put it back.
The two humans and the two dogs set off on an evening stroll up the steep mountainside. The sun was beginning to set, and its horizontal rays illuminated the wildflowers that were spread across the meadow, adding sprinkles of red, blue, and green to the rocky landscape.
Ted’s question about the nexus between religion and spirituality was difficult. Angel had tried on churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques as if they were shoes, but she had not been able to find her glass slipper. Angel also knew that her upbringing and education had profoundly affected her attitude. She saw herself as a welcome guest at many destinations but at home in no place in particular or at all places in general.
Angel grabbed Ted’s elbow to make sure she had his attention. When he stopped, she sat down on a large rock and motioned for him to sit beside her. A wisp of spiderweb was stuck in his hair. Angel reached over to remove it and said, “You asked a good question at dinner. The relationship between religion and spirituality is confusing. My mother used to say that religion was for rich folks that wanted to avoid
going to hell, and spirituality was for poor Indians that had already lived there and wanted out.”
“You mother sounds interesting.”
“My father used to tell me and my brother that our mother was like a rainbow. She had many colors. It was his way of asking us to forgive her dark hues. He knew that little girls should not grow up waiting for their mothers to sleep off hangovers.” Angel’s voice cracked slightly and she paused. “She was absent from my life in that way. So when she died, nothing really changed. The absence just persists.”
Angel did not cry, but it was clear to Ted that she was going into a sensitive area. Before, the chronic problem with alcohol on America’s reservations had seemed very abstract. Now, with Angel sitting beside him nearly in tears, it felt immediate. “I’m sorry.”
Angel regained her composure. “I will say there was no shame in my mother. She believed that the only way to climb up to heaven was to fall down on earth. In many ways I owe her a great deal for that insight.”
Ted turned his head sideways, slightly surprised. “How is that?”
“Even with all of her drug and alcohol problems, she had a certain spiritual wisdom. My brother and I played on the floor and listened to the sobbing confessions of broken and healing souls at AA meetings. One day I heard my mother say to the group that she was glad she was a drunk and an addict.” Angel knew Ted would find her statement hard to understand. “She believed that we are all broken and it’s only when our
brokenness reaches a certain desperate point—the AA people call it hitting bottom—that we can accept our fundamental brokenness and do something about it.”
“With all due respect to your mother, I don’t want to think I have to crash and burn before I can wake up. Is this the third realization: only broken souls can ascend?”
“I think what she was saying was that addiction is a most acute version of the first realization. To varying degrees we are all unawake, but for my mother and others the drowsiness descends to a drunken stupor.”
Without warning, Angel got up and slowly began walking up the trail. She wanted to leave this discussion of her mother behind. It was too painful.
Ted fixed his gaze on her, admiring the grace with which she moved. Then he got to his feet and followed her.
Knowing that their lungs had not yet acclimated to nine thousand feet of altitude, Angel went slowly and tried to gather her thoughts, hoping to find the best way to communicate the third and final realization to her student. She and Ted were now to the marrow of their first day of work together. Whether he kept at it for another week or even a day might turn on this next lesson. She wanted to do it not just well but perfectly. She found a large log by the path and again sat to rest.
Angel’s confidence was faltering. She wasn’t sure that she was doing any of this right and felt ridiculous for thinking she could show anyone else a way, a path, that she could barely find herself. It was not her message that she was trying to
pass to Ted. She was just a medium, a go-between, a spiritual Gutenberg trying to get the word out with the only printing press she had—her heart, her soul, and her mind. All she could do was try. She would have to follow the old adage: fake it until you make it. That would have to be enough for now.
Angel broke the silence. “Ted, if you’re ready, I’ll introduce the third realization. After that, I’m going to let Father Chuck take over.”
“Guest lecturers at Spirit Tech?”
“Father Chuck is first on my list of teachers; he’s been a great teacher to me. You’ll be better off getting the lessons directly from him. I don’t want anything to be lost in the translation.”
Ted was surprised at Angel’s apparent lack of confidence in her own skill. For his part, he felt differently about his guide. “I’m very pleased to meet some of your friends, but Angel, you’re the best spiritual consultant I’ve ever met.”
“I’m the only one.”
“True.” Ted knew that there was nothing in the world logical about driving around in a bookmobile doing whatever it was that Angel was trying to do. However naive, he also found her extraordinarily charming. “You’re just the first one that had the guts to try it. Most of the rest of the world is peddling pots and pans; you’re trying to sell something of true value. What could be wrong with that?”
Ted’s acceptance was like a cool, steady rain falling on wilted flowers. It was exactly what Angel needed to hear. “Thank you for understanding.”
Energized, she began the last teaching of the day. “I have stumbled across a way of thinking about the third realization and how religion ties into all of this. Hopefully, I can get it right.”
“Give it a shot.”
“For our purposes, let’s assume there are five major religions in this, what we might call the modern era. Two are culturally based and three are creed based. To be a Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, you simply adopt a belief system. Let’s restrict my discussion to the three creed-based religions and throw in a little Native American spirituality on our pilgrimage together. Is that okay?”
“Four religions are more than enough for me,” Ted said. He smiled and added, “Besides, I don’t want to deal with a turban or a yarmulke.”
“As I suggested earlier, our work together builds one realization on top of another.”
“Sounds like math,” Ted observed.