Business and the Deer
Originally published December 24, 2013
My path has been a long time missing. Or, more honestly, I have been lost for a long time. Twenty years, in fact.
Oh, there have been times when I’ve wandered back out of the woods and trod that old familiar trail again, but it seems there was always something- or somebody -calling to me from the shadows of the forest, and I, far more willing to be the pleaser than I cared to admit, too often left the path to satisfy my belief that I was supposed to do this, supposed to do that. To settle a score with my past and negotiate a deal with my future.
I didn’t consciously choose the adventures I’ve had in my life, but on some level choose them I did. Passionate to discover what colors lay beyond the rainbow, I overshot opportunities and missed summons; ran from those who loved me and ran after those who didn’t. Ran just because there were meadows and skies and roads to run. Ran reckless toward the cosmos, let my spirit free fall and tumble with my eyes and mouth wide open, heavenly choirs singing, chanting, guiding me toward souls I knew, souls I didn’t, souls I needed to know and who needed to know me.
Which is to say I’ve been in school for a very, very long time, learning slowly- much too slowly -that while relationships are not random, they are, as K. C. Tewari said, “business.” And you must take care of your business.
A relationship is, after all, a relationship. That is, it is the state of being between two things, two people, relative to each other. I go to the store and buy a jug of orange juice, I create a relationship with the clerk at the checkout lane, albeit a brief one, in that I am the customer and she is the attendant. I pay my money, she takes it, hands me a receipt, and I take the juice home. Perhaps, as the transaction takes place, we exchange pleasantries: she says, “Have a nice day,” and I reply, “You, too,” and our relationship ends.
Or does it? Once the clerk and I made that connection, our relationship came into existence and, like a memory, it cannot disappear. Over time it may be ferried off to oblivion to be forgotten by the conscious mind, but because the relationship came into existence, it continues. The exchange that occurred when I bought that jug of orange juice cannot unhappen, even if a thousand billion years go by.
How much more valuable, how much more powerful and meaningful, then, are the relationships we consciously seek, the relationships we deliberately enter into and deal with? The relationships we want, and those we don’t. These are our business, our life’s business.
Mr. Tewari was Hindu, and as Krishna Das tells the story, Tewari said to him, “My boy, relationships are business. Do your business. Enjoy!” But Jesus said it too. He said, “I must be about my Father’s business.” Didn’t you ever wonder what “business” Jesus was referring to? It was the business of relationships.
Every now and then, not always late at night (I’m nocturnal, I confess) but often in the small hours when the rest of the western world is asleep, a face or a name will fade up into my mind’s monitor. Often it is someone I have not given a thought to for many years. Sometimes it’s someone who, as far as I know, never had any significant impact on me or my life- someone ordinary. No love, no conflict, just a person who was in the room. And I wonder why. Why him? Why now? Or it may be someone who did have a serious impact on me. For me it is always a female, but even so, I ask again, why her? Why now? Moreover, I wonder, if her memory randomly pops up in my mind after so many years, surely the memory of me must bubble up to the surface of her mind unexpectedly from time to time as well.
And therein lies the business of our business: once, maybe a lifetime ago, a relationship was created, and like energy, it cannot be destroyed. Why, do you know, children from my own past, when I could not have been more than four or five years old, still haunt me at the most bizarre, unanticipated moments? Never mind those people I’ve known in all the years since and their unpredictable visits.
Why does this happen? Because spirits unite, they join like spirits. And the deepest, most amazing thing about this is that all spirits are like spirits. How else could Jesus have told us to love our enemies, and to love our neighbors as ourselves? How could Buddha have been so patient and tolerant? How could any of the enlightened beings throughout human history have seriously expected us to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us” unless they knew that the only way a human could forgive and show compassion and tolerate was if he was aware intuitively that the spirit inside him was the same as the spirit inside the other person? Unless he understood that it is good business?
Yes, but then what of those special someones we are particularly attracted to? What of the ones we love, or think we love? What of those we are drawn to and who are drawn to us, without even knowing why? That woman you meet for the first time at a cocktail party; that man you’ve seen a thousand times in the lobby at work but never really thought to speak to until today? How do you explain that inner pull, the knowing that the two of you are not meeting or talking for the first time, though as far as your senses can inform you, you are? You shook her hand at the end of the evening and simply said, “It was very nice to meet you, I enjoyed our talk,” and she says, innocently enough, “Good luck with your writing,” but there is a look in her eyes that tells you she is as captivated by you as you are by her. It’s not romantic, though, it’s not physical, nothing like that. It’s . . . what? Reunion? Longing? A memory returned in person? A piece of the puzzle suddenly, comfortably in falling in place?
Anyway, the path I was on so many years ago, and that I am once again walking (though tentatively and with lighter steps), looks and feels very, very familiar. I sense with every fiber of my being that I am headed toward home. And this idea of recognizing familiar and remembered souls, as well as relationships that exist eternally, while not new to me- for I was sailing on that breeze even in my early teens -has taken on a fresh and invigorating scent. It is the perfume of incense; it is the bouquet of enlightenment.
Here, though, is what is new, to me anyway: Relationships- romantic, sexual, professional -whatever form they take, are and shall always be, business. But Love exists always and forever, twenty-four/seven, inside me. It is not outside me. I cannot fall into or out of Love, because Love just is. I can be drawn to someone, I can lavish affection on her, I can miss her, feel secure with her, but the truth is, when I “love” someone what I really want is self-love. I want to be seen in a certain way by her. I am in love with the idea of being in love. So when- if -my significant other loses interest in me, I am crushed emotionally because she has pulled the rug of self-love out from under me.
On the other hand, once I realize that Love exists for now and forever inside me, and that if I depend on others to make me happy I will stray off the path again, I will have opened my eyes wide for the very first time. I will understand fully that the happiness I’ve been seeking all these years is and always has been inside me.
There is a story of the deer who caught the most amazing, alluring scent of musk he had ever smelled, and he had to find where it was coming from. Obsessed with locating the source of this intoxicating aroma, he ran through fields and woods for days and nights on end trying to locate the origin of the fragrance that was driving him crazy. Eventually, though, he became so exhausted and so hungry that he could run no more, and he lay down in the middle of a beautiful meadow and died, lonely and unfulfilled. Sadly, what he didn’t realize was that that incredibly powerful aroma he had been chasing for all that time was coming from him.
God forbid we should miss the lesson, at Christmas of all times: the Love we all seek is inside of us. It has been there all the time.
