I will do what I know to—meditate, I thought.
I looked around the area where I sat. I picked up a couple pieces of the light crumbling rock and held one stone in each hand.
I would begin by praying.
First, I said the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.”
Next, I said the Ave Maria. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Then, I did a Buddhist chant I had learned. “Om ah hung vara guru padme siddi hung. Om mani pami hung.”
There, I thought. I sat for a moment. I was a lot dustier. The candles had melted some. Other than that, nothing had changed. I felt exactly the same as I had before I entered this mystical pyramid.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but the droning voices of two people talking outside the cubbyhole distracted me. I wondered how much these people had paid for this enlightening experience.
“Shhhhh,” I said loudly. “I’m meditating.”
Next, I tried some less formal prayers. I prayed for the people I loved—my daughter, my son, my family and friends. I prayed for the people I resented. I finished with some prayers of gratitude, counting and expounding on my blessings.
Then I opened my eyes and looked around. Nothing was happening yet.
I reclined on the ground, using my backpack for a pillow. Now I would “breathe my chakras,” an exercise my holistic doctor had recently taught me. Chakras are thought to be the energy centers, or openings in the body. Deliberately envisioning them and breathing into them during meditation supposedly clears out residue and opens us to power.
I visualized breathing a spinning circle of color for each chakra, starting at the bottom, or root chakra, and working my way up to the crown. I started with red at the bottom, at the base of my spine. Then I envisioned an orange circle slightly below my belly button. Next, I saw a spinning yellow circle in my solar plexus, then green for the heart, blue in the throat, purple on my forehead, and white at the crown. I went up the body, then down the body, imagining the colorful circles rapidly spinning counterclockwise. I did this for ten or fifteen minutes with my eyes closed, breathing deeply.
I thought I started to see “The Light,” but when I opened my eyes, I saw it was just the flickering from the candle flames.
I still felt exactly the same as I had before entering this tomb.
Now I was out of things to do. I sat there, looking around, feeling stupid, watching the candles burn. I wished the two men would come back for me. I wished I wasn’t wearing this ridiculous hankie on my head. I wished I had a shisha with some tobacco in it now.
I felt as if I had failed.
I sat, and sat, and sat, waiting . . . for at least an hour. Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. I wanted to leave. “Help,” I began to yell softly. “Please come and get me.”
The guides appeared instantly at the entrance to the cubbyhole. “What took you so long?” I said.
“We were just sitting around the corner,” the guide said. “That was us talking. We were waiting for you.”
I grabbed my backpack and followed the two men out the narrow passageway, through the hole in the side of the pyramid, out into the bright light of the Sahara Desert. I tried to give the pyramid guard the amount of money Essam had recommended, but the guard made such a scowling face that I immediately gave him some more. Then my guide and I rode the horses back to the sandlot.
I dismounted, tipped the young man who had escorted me on my journey into enlightenment, and went to find Essam to say good-bye.
I was thirsty, dirty, dusty, and disheartened. I was also done for the day.
“Did you get the powers?” Essam asked earnestly.
“Yes,” I lied, “I did.”
What a crock, I thought, in the cab on the way back to my hotel. I have really and truly outdone myself this time.
When I returned to my hotel room, I flopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
I felt cheapened, stupid, and betrayed—again.
I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I stopped thinking and began talking out loud.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I absolutely and totally don’t get it. I am so sick of chasing the truth. I’m so sick of the pain on this basically uninhabitable planet. I’m sick of trying to make a life and failing. I’m sick of getting back up again each time, trying again, just to stumble and fail again. I’m sick of going through pain, then calling it a learning experience, only to have neither the pain nor the learning ever end. I’m sick of trying harder, doing better, and being someone I’m not. The whole thing is a crock.
“What’s the point?” I screamed at the ceiling. “Why do we have to come here if all of life is going to conspire against us to make it as hard as it can possibly be?”
Life hurt. I hurt. My spirit hurt. My emotions hurt. And my butt hurt from horseback riding.
I felt as though I’d been fighting the devil every step of the way.
“Oh, I can keep doing this,” I said aloud. “I can keep going through each disappointing experience. I can keep struggling. I always survive, don’t I? I’ve done it for almost forty-eight years. I’m a strong woman. I go through whatever it is I need to go through. And I do it like a trooper. Yup, that’s me. I’m so good at dealing with pain, disappointment, heartache, betrayal, and problems. I’ve learned how to be grateful for every bit of it. I’ve learned how to breathe into the pain. I’ve learned how to get through, get around, make the best of, transform, and even turn it into healing for other people. Yeah, I can do it. I’ve turned it into an art . . .
That’s what this is about, I thought suddenly. I got up off the bed and stood in the middle of my hotel room. “Eureka!” I said. “I’ve got it!”
I flashed back to the summer before this trip.
One day Nichole stopped by the house. She was going through a hard summer—that transition from being a child to an adult. She had been groveling around in emotional muck for months. That day, she was complaining about her pain—about all the pain in life.
“You ought to be happy,” I said. “Today’s Friday.”
She just stared at me. “Does your pain end on Fridays?” she said.
We listened to Janis Joplin belt out “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Get It While You Can” on the stereo, then Nichole told me the story of how she thought life really worked.
“My girlfriend Jen and I figured it out over lunch,” she explained. “There’s two kinds of people in this world: the pigs and the vampires. The pigs think they’re going to be happy when they buy a new home, get married, get a new car, or get a new job. They really believe those little things will stop the pain. And for them it does, kind of. They just go bowling, or they golf, and that’s enough. The vampires are different. They’ve been through some kind of tunnel, some kind of experience that’s really changed them. And it’s not that they’ve never come out. They just get changed by it. They know too much. They do all the same things pigs do. They get new cars, they move, they get married, they take new jobs. But they know that these things are never going to make them happy. They know that life is going to hurt sometimes, at least a little bit. And sometimes, it’s gonna hurt a lot.”
It took me a while to realize Nichole wasn’t using the word “vampires” the way I usually thought of that word. She wasn’t talking about werewolves, monsters, bloodsuckers, or human parasites. She was talking about pigs and vampires the way a college girl would talk about two football teams. They were just terms, or names, for people on the teams of life.
“It’s not that vampires are never happy,” Nichole said. “But they’re happy in a different way. They feel all their feelings. And sometimes they have moments of pure joy. But they know those moments aren’t forever. They move right on to the next feeling and experience.
“In some ways,” Nichole said, “the vampires are even happier than the pigs because vampires know how they really feel. They tell the truth and people like that. People like being around them, even though, for the most part, vampires’ lives suck. But they take the pain and they turn it into something more. They do something with it.”
I flashed back to a letter I had received from a young man I met on Christmas Day, the day I first saw the crescent moon and star in the sky.
He was in his early twenties. He and his mother were friends of a friend of mine. They had joined Nichole and me and our mutual friend for Christmas dinner. In the year past, this young man had almost died. Then he had made a decision to come back to life, a decision that made him and his mother happy.
“My dream is also to be a storyteller,” he wrote to me in a letter thanking me for the day. “I sometimes wonder if that’s why I survived—to give hack something of what I’ve learned. I hope that one of my purposes on this planet is to use the perspective gained from tragedy to illuminate life. I think it is in reaching out to the universe and deeply within ourselves that allows us to transcend these experiences. It is what allows us to turn tragedy into a life force for ourselves and others. It is what allows us to transcend surviving.”
I flashed back to the beginning of this trip in Paris, when I had whisked through the Museum of Man and the Louvre. That’s what that was all about, I thought. It was the setup, the kickoff, for this adventure. It led directly to today. It was all right there. I had seen the eternal themes of life on this planet—birth, family, health, marriage, religion, divination, and death—and the art that results from all the anguish and joy of those experiences—the rich and treasured art that fills the halls of the Louvre.
Evolution wasn’t something that may or may not have happened once, at the beginning of time. Our planet, the life and people on it, continually evolve. As we grind through each issue and theme, the work and art we create embody these experiences for the rest of the world. Our creations help us evolve, but our lives and our work help others evolve, too.
We’re not just here to live our lives and to create our art. We’re part of the art being created.
For a long, long time—somewhere in the back of my mind—lurked the codependent exhortation that if I really loved God and truly wanted to serve on this planet, I would force myself to take vows of chastity and poverty and live the lives of the people I served. Now, in the hotel room in Cairo, I began to see that’s exactly what many of us had been doing all along. We were having the range of human experiences and emotions of the people we would later serve.
Lives without pain, comedy, drama, irony, romance, suffering, some foolishness, and a dash of unrequited love would be like going to see a movie without a plot. It’s not that life is only pain, suffering, drama, and tragedy, but those elements are part of it. And always have been.
From the raw material of these experiences came the art we would create—the art of living our lives and the art we create in our work. So often the experiences I wanted to deny were the raw material that had been handed to me to shape and form into truth and into art. Nichole had been correct. This way of living and creating art involves speaking the truth. My new friend, the one who had written me a letter, had been correct too. This way of living, working, and approaching our lives allows us to transcend survival and martyrdom, and it illuminates the truth for others. It’s not the art of living happily ever after. It’s the art of learning to live joyfully.
It is the walk of the Christ.
I have a friend, a diva, an opera singer from the East Coast. Early on in her career, when she was a beautiful young woman, she resonated to the Mozart Requiem. Her instructor at the Juilliard School of Music, Leonard Bernstein, asked her then why such a young woman with a brilliant future was so interested in such a heavy work. She replied that she didn’t know, she just was. Over the years, she continued to sing. Then she married and gave birth to two beautiful sons. When her youngest son was twenty, he was killed in a motorcycle crash.
“Now I know why I was so passionate about the Requiem,” she said. “It was my destiny to sing that song from the depths of my soul. The problem was,” my diva friend said, “by the time I learned to sing the Requiem with passion and understanding, I was so embittered and broken-hearted I no longer wanted to sing.”
My diva friend told me another story about a composer who lived in another time. This composer considered himself a craftsman, someone who diligently worked at the job of composing music each day the way a shopkeeper goes to his store or a dressmaker fits and sews dresses.
The craftsman-composer had hit a wall with his creativity and his work. He was stuck. He couldn’t write a note. One day, while feeling tormented over his dilemma of not being able to write music, the composer opened his window. Outside, he heard three notes being played beautifully on a horn. The notes seemed to be coming from a barn nearby. Each day for days, when he opened the window, the composer heard these same three beautiful notes being played. Finally, the composer left his room and went in search of the origin of these three hauntingly beautiful sounds. He then discovered a young boy hiding in the barn playing a horn.
The composer talked to the boy for a while. He learned that the boy’s father beat the boy terribly and refused to let the boy play music. To avoid the daily beatings and have the freedom to play his horn, the boy hid in the barn and played the only three notes he knew.
The craftsman-composer went on to use these three beautiful notes as the inspiration and foundation for the next piece of music he would write—the lovely, lilting “Strauss Waltz” by Johann Strauss.
Some of us hear and learn to sing a wide range of emotional notes in our lives. Others learn to sing or play only a few. It doesn’t matter how many notes we’re called to sing. What matters is that we sing them the best, the purest, the finest we are able. When we do, our lives and work not only bring healing to the world, our work brings healing to ourselves.
In an afterword to the stories she told me, my diva friend told me something else. If we struggle and work to learn our craft of living and creating with emotional honesty and joy, we will train our voices and our souls to sing the final, high, resonating sound that is the purest note in the scale, the one divas work so hard to achieve.
It is the full, rich tone of peace.
In less than half an hour, in my hotel room in downtown Cairo, a lifetime of dissatisfaction had shown its grim face for what it was. It was as though a vortex had whirled through me, cleansing me of these dark remnants from my past.
These grim emotional secrets that had been buried in me were not necessarily news. I had lived with, through, and in spite of them for years. What was an innovative thought was that I could be healed, or freed, from these beliefs and emotions that had colored my vision and spirit for so long.
I wasn’t elated or euphoric. But my emotional state had spun around distinctly for the better. In the whirlwind that followed my excursion into the pyramid, my skepticism had dissipated. So had my contempt. In its place, I now felt excitement, a rush of joy, and a sense of purpose that had been missing for a long time.
Something had happened inside that mysterious tomb. There was a power there. I could feel and see it now. This journey, this grueling excursion, was leading someplace. It had a point. Even though it hadn’t felt as if anything was happening, something important and magnificent had been taking place all along.
Mysteries, secrets, ancient wisdom, and special powers had been buried in these tombs. Now this wisdom and these powers were being released. I had touched the edges of a world unknown.
The mystery of my life was being revealed.
UNTIL NOW, I HAD
BEEN LIVING out of an unpacked suitcase in one room in a downtown Cairo hotel. I had been indecisive about how long I would stay in Cairo and exactly where I would go next. I had originally planned to finish my trip by flying to Greece and writing my book there—but that leg of the trip still hadn’t materialized.
Despite the language barriers, the unbearably chaotic traffic, the overcrowding, my great caution about the food, my lingering stomachache, and the large number of people who wanted gratuities whether or not they had performed a service, Cairo—and its suburb, Giza—had become my home.
I immediately decided what to do next. There are times and places of heightened and accelerated spiritual growth. I had just entered one.
I would stay in Egypt and write my book.
WHAT IS WRITTEN ON THAT piece of paper you’re hiding from me?” demanded the interrogator in Tel Aviv.
I sheepishly showed her the two words scrawled at the bottom of the sheet. “Vampire Art,” I said. “That’s all it says. It’s a note to myself.”
“I see,” my interrogator said.
“Open your computer,” she said. “I want to see what you’ve written in there.”
“I would gladly show you what’s in my computer,” I said. “But there’s nothing in there to show. I didn’t get around to writing. Something happened that changed my plans.”
She looked at me as if she didn’t believe what I had just said.
I began to stumble through the next part of my story. I didn’t completely understand the shift yet either—the one that had wrested me out of Egypt and propelled me into the interrogation first in Cairo and now here in Tel Aviv.
What I couldn’t yet explain was about to become clear.
chapter 11
The Pounding Continues
Essam had given me the address of a small hotel in a residential neighborhood close to Giza. He had been gently harping at me for days about moving to a less expensive hotel, one where I could feel more settled and at home. Now I decided to explore and make that move.
Stop Being Mean to Yourself Page 12