Healing is Possible
Sunday morning early. A day off, a chance to sleep in, but I can’t. We’re here in NC, working on the new project, and I’m a jumble.
We shot for seven straight days.  Three hours or more each day. Plus two hours of driving. Plus setting up camera and lights and sound. Plus the hours of background work each day. Exhausting. A couple of those nights we stayed and made dinner and played games. Robert and Kate are amazing. It is a joy to be working with them.
The shoots are as much deep, intense, therapy as they are interview. And mentoring. And coaching. And training. Robert’s story is horrifying and moving, and yet strikingly inspiring. He is so open. He stares right into the fact of his life, and at the ego that was constructed as a reaction to that life, examining the inner workings of human beingness with his sharp mind and his welcoming heart. He’s walking a path through insight and feeling to find new heights of clarity and peace. In just one week, the healing we’ve seen has been astonishing. And it’s showing up in his life, where others can see it too. Healing is possible. This cannot be said loudly enough.
But it’s more than that. We’re looking together at every aspect of Robert’s life, from where he wants to live to what he wants to do next. We’re looking at every angle we can think of, researching housing and jobs and live-in possibilities, the types of assistance that might be available through social security, disability, and the military (and whether it makes any sense to struggle with these over-taxed systems), the types of assistance that might be available through our local community of friends and relations, alternative healing modalities that might control his epilepsy and get him off the pharmaceuticals that seem to have become part of the problem, and other health issues and forms of healing that might make a difference in his life. And we’re helping Robert hook up with a couple established drummers in the area here, to help him begin to scope out the music scene and his place in it.
We’re focusing on stability right now (which is ironic, given the changing nature of the universe, and the pace of these times), the stability Robert needs as a foundation for finding his true work in the world. And though we’ve brainstormed everything from finding a place for him in VT to a monastery to an organic farm internship, it feels like right now Robert wants to stay in NC and see what’s possible in Chapel Hill/Carrboro. The music scene here continues to thrive. And we’re told that there is a need for good drummers. The town is compact and smaller, making it more accessible by foot and bike, and the buses here are free. And we were here for so long that we have a wide system of support that might be able and willing to help.
Robert is an extreme example of a widespread reality. There are millions around the world in similar straights, chewed up and spit out and left stunned and confused by the dominant culture of abuse and destruction that is destroying the planet. People have been falling through the cracks for a long time. The cracks are getting bigger. Who will we be in this matter?
The good news about cracks, as Ran Prieur observes, is that that’s where the grass grows…
The human world of economies and machines continues to unravel. It may take a while. It may not. I don’t know. But everything we do now happens against that backdrop. None of us know where this is going. We just know that it’s good and right and real and worth doing. Robert teaches me of my ego as much as we teach him of his. My assumptions get challenged and questioned every day. My cultural conditioning continues to fall away. We are one, Robert and I. Two aspects of the same quantum hologram, two thoughts in the mind of the Cosmos, fellow travelers on the spiritual journey we all walk. And of course it’s not just we two…
We are all well, dancing in the mystery and growing in the sun. Healing is possible. Ain’t that a kick?
TTG