the faith healers

I’m walking crosstown, through Times Square, and T is on the line telling me a story. A while ago, he worked in a bookstore and an old man died on him while he was trying to help him find a book on Buddhism. The passing of this man in T’s presence brought him a renewed sense that life was too short to not be doing what he wanted to be doing, and it also left him with a book on Buddhism – a book which, oddly enough, addressed death and the earthly plane within the first few pages.

T has been trying to make sense of this life altering experience, and while I’m not much of one to believe in fate, I do believe that the people we encounter are here so that we can learn from them. I can say, beyond a doubt, I have learned something from everyone that I have spent time with, even if that person questioned whether or not he or she had anything to offer. So I tell T maybe the meaning of all this really just came down to he was supposed to get the book. Maybe the old man was a messenger.

I’m not what I would call a religious person – organized dogma sort of makes me twitch – but I do consider myself to be a spiritual person and my beliefs are as much based on philosophy as they are on a hodge podge of world religions. And I’ve been angry with God for a while. I walked into an empty St. Mary's after work on Valentine’s Day and sat for a minute, but left because I was too angry to sit there, feeling unloved and unheard. Why talk when nobody was listening, when nobody was answering?

I was on the usual crowded rush hour train yesterday morning and there was a man standing in front of me. I never looked up at his face but could tell he was dressed for work, black leather jacket, and he was holding onto the subway bar above me with one hand. In his other hand, by his side, he was holding a strand of what looked to be obsidian prayer beads. Every few beads there would be what looked to be a bit of bone or ivory, and every few seconds he would work the necklace of beads backward a bit, bead by bead, with his thumb.

I found myself wondering where I could find prayer beads. I didn't ask anybody, didn't mention it. I know five years ago everyone had those bracelets in fashion colors and it seemed, I don’t know, a little irreverent, like Madonna running around in rosaries and ripped fishnets in the early 80s. What the man on the train had was a meditation tool, not an accessory. And again I wondered if it would even matter, if anybody was even listening anyway.

I like to walk a lot. It’s sort of an act of meditation in itself, where I tick off blocks instead of beads. Usually I just spend it in thought, but after work I wound up having a good hour-long cell phone conversation with one of my oldest and best buddies back home as I walked through Central Park. I have to explain that I really hate the phone and yet I wound up having major phone conversations yesterday with not one, but two different people, both of them dealing with life altering experiences. And it was good to talk, to listen, to get some damned feedback. I hadn’t been getting any feedback from God, you know. You can go on faith for a while but without a sign every now and then, it can wear you down. So give and take was feeling good. I was feeling vindicated.

I get home and open the mailbox. I find inside my one and only hardcopy Valentine that I received this year, from a dear friend of mine in Austin. So I open it up, and I’m reading the card and I’m laughing because she’s just funny, and her handwriting reminds me strangely of my sister’s. She even writes about having hung out with my sister that afternoon, and she picked this up for me while the two of them were hanging out in this store, and she wants to go ahead and get this in the mail.

And out of the envelope falls a bracelet of Tibetan prayer beads. Rosewood, with a red tassel.