Intimacy, Rapport, Connectedness

We human beings yearn for it.

“Please … there has to be someone who truly sees me, the uniqueness that I am.”

“Please … come close, hold my hand.  Let us walk together.”

“Please … say ‘yes’ to me as I say ‘yes’ to you.”

In the pages of Tricycle magazine, I found such a one: Curtis White.  He rides a bike.

I was cycling down a steep hill on a road through Fort Townsend State Park, in Port Townsend, Washington, when I saw below me an older woman on the right side of the road with a dog on a leash and a man on the left side of the road walking unsteadily and drifting toward the middle of the road.  I didn’t want to frighten him, so I slowed, and called out loudly, “Coming up!” hoping that he would move farther to the side of the road.  Unfortunately, my shout only startled him.  He stumbled forward, lost his balance, and then fell face first onto the road.

I stopped to make sure he was okay.  His face was still on the road, and his arms reached out helplessly, uncontrollably.  He could not stand up on his own, so I put my bike down and tried to raise him.

I assumed that he had had a stroke recently and was relearning how to walk.  We needed to get him off the road as quickly as possible, but his wife was insisting that he get up on his own, saying, like some zealous personal trainer, “Come on!  Get up!  Use your arms!”  That wasn’t happening.  I said to her, “Take his arm and let’s get him up.”  We slowly got him to his knees and then to his feet.

The extraordinary thing was that when he stood and I looked into his face – glasses askew, dirty, humiliated and in pain – I felt this profound sense of love for him, and I said, “You’re okay now, brother,” and I embraced him. 

Stranger yet, I felt incredibly happy and grateful to him for this chance.  It didn’t feel like my actions were a consequence of being a “good person” acting out of ethical duty.  It felt more like the man and I had stood together, in communion, “lost in a shaft of sunlight”, in T. S. Eliot’s words:

For most of us
There is only the unattended Moment
The moment in and out of time
The distraction fit
Lost in a shaft of sunlight …

It was a moment of complete connection.  Did he feel this connection?  That isn’t possible for me to know in any objective sense, but there was something in the depths of his face.  He was offered compassion and he took it in, drank it down, water to wine. 

Who was he?  Who was I?  Didn’t matter.

***

Love comes quietly
finally, drops
about me, on me
in the old ways

What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way

(Robert Creeley)