Melbourne Perfection (1)

Melbourne, Australia, June 2016:

I am here to teach a two-day workshop on mindfulness applications for worry, dysthymia, substance use, anger management, etc (through TATRA). I get set up: PowerPoint slides — check, mic — check, a glass of water — check, coffee — check… The conference room of the Darebin Arts & Entertainment Center slowly fills up with local psychologists and mental health clinicians. With fifteen minutes to kill, I step outside to check the grounds. The venue sits on a beautifully landscaped park that commemorates the Lebanese immigrants to Melbourne.

With a cup of coffee in hand I start out on a winding path through the park and I stop: ahead of me — to be more precise, under my feet — worms. It had rained and these silly little bastards crawled out from cracks in the pavement. I know the horror that awaits them — in an hour or two, as the Australian sun takes off the invisible runway in the sky, these worms will turn into bacon, fried alive. They somehow know it — they are hustling away from the pavement, towards grass. I hear the swooshing sound of bike tire on wet asphalt and I step aside — a kid on a bike plows through, oblivious to the tragedy down below.

I flashback to a similar moment in my childhood: the Arbat neighborhood of Moscow, I come out for a bike ride — meaning well, meaning no harm — and yet becoming an unwitting instrument of Darwinian selection as the tires of my own bike turn the asphalt below into a chopping board — as I plow through earthworms.

My mind returns back to its objective moment of now — the one in Melbourne, not in Moscow. I put the coffee cup down on the sidewalk and bend down to look for a tool of rescue — for a twig. I find a suitable enough piece of wood — pliable, gentle, gnarly enough to hook up a worm without doing damage to it (him? her?). To my right I see a tall guy come outside — a guy I just saw a few minutes ago in the conference room of my workshop. I turn to him and say: “I have a job for you.” He looks puzzled but open-minded. I hand him a twig and explain the tragedy of survival that both of us are in a position to witness. Still puzzled and still open-minded, he says “Sure” and puts down his cup of coffee on the sidewalk. And we both go to work — scooping up these silly little writhing bastards from the frying pan of the sidewalk, from the killing fields of pedestrian traffic.

His name is John. He is a handsome fellow, a kind of Crocodile Dundee with a touch of Bohemian intelligentsia in his looks and manners. But humble as hell and self-disclosing. Tells me that psychology is his second career. Tells me that he just succumbed to his kids’ plea to get a pet hamster and he has been suffering ever since as he watches the pet hamster “incarcerated” in a cage, as kids, of course, quickly lose interest in this little pet project.

John is a fellow sufferer — a perfect helper in this strange project of street-side salvation.

I tell John about my crazy notion of “neural tribe” — “a neuron is a neuron is a neuron… there is no difference between my neurons and your neurons, John, and the neurons inside these worms… we are neural diasporas — one of a kind — scattered amidst infinite body-forms, life-forms… body is but a house on legs… an RV — a recreational vehicle… neurons — the info-processing charioteers… all the same…”

He gets it. “Intriguing,” he says.

But time is running out — we can’t save them all, we go back in, to talk about mindfulness, to talk about the possibility of radical transformation — from fear and anger to compassion.

The alchemy of awareness…

The ordinary perfection of life recognizing the validity of life..

Just life on Earth, you know, amongst us fellow earthworms…