Perhaps I should set this in context. I am an ordinary man who for years has sought an extraordinary experience. For as long as I can remember, I have had one ongoing desire, to have a mentor, a teacher. I am by nature an unsettled personality, almost constantly moving from one place to another, physically and otherwise, prone to experiencing life as a seven note scale, always restless until I can sound the eighth note which will complete it. Always looking for the root. And always looking for someone to help guide my search. With the right teacher, I felt that I could begin to piece together the bits of understanding that would result in an integrated way of living issuing from a center point of assurance and rest. Yet, finding myself in a culture that redefines the goal as soon as it is reached, where "rest" has become an action word as author/teachers now challenge us even to excel in becoming spiritual, I have moved the marker out again and again. Nothing achieved could sustain its value, no understanding gained would retain its significance or satisfaction. No rest.
I began to suspect that I am excited by the chase, but
not the catch, that the value I really find is in the challenge, but rarely in the thing achieved., and I realized that I had approached understanding as an achievement little different than any material or career challenge, and often with the same empty results. How to break out of this? Perhaps a guide. Any book, any movie that portrayed a mentor-student relationship would set me yearning for weeks afterward, wondering if that would ever happen to me. As I have looked for wisdom, I have felt there was a gulf that kept me from it. Always aware of the irony of working hard to find rest, of struggling to gain peace. That split between knowledge held and knowledge lived that makes all the difference in the world. I thought that the right teacher could help me with that, help me to find balance between my many diverse and often wildly alternating desires. To be a simple man or an accomplished man, to pursue a career or study, to be the poet or the analyst........mix that into a pot of philosophy, theology, history and contemporary self help and you can see the problem. (Well, perhaps you can. I certainly couldn’t at the time. In a nutshell, I was being childish as it was later explained to me. At any rate, I was the living embodiment of "always learning and never understanding the truth".)
The effect of all this was that I would get up each morning feeling as though I was already late, and move through my days pre-occupied with the vague feeling that I had forgotten something. There had to be a way to integrate all that I was studying into a life view and practical working understanding that was cohesive, complete, validated and uncomplicated.
As I looked for a guide, I contacted ministers, authors, philosophers, theologians, and others who I thought might be able to help, to ask whether they would be willing to be a mentor to me. None would. Most said that they were simply too busy to be involved in a relationship such as I described. I would tell myself to stay hopeful, and continue to watch for that someone who stood still ahead, obscured by time and events which had not yet unfolded. In time, though, I began to have serious doubts whether there was anyone willing to play the part.
It was against this background that I first met her, and by that time I was so sensitive to what I was searching for that I almost physically felt that she could help me, immediately wondering if she was the one who would agree to mentor me. In a sense, my decision to see more of her was not made during our initial conversation that first day at the playground. It was made many months, even years before. Made over and over again as I waited for someone I was not sure would ever come. I am old enough to have met some remarkable people and see how quickly they can move into my life and out again. I was not going to miss an opportunity when it was sitting in front of me. When we met the next time, with no more reason than that, I made my request. Her answer came after a moments deliberation, and after my many years of searching, of waiting, it was somewhat ironic..."If that's what you want."
