The Plan is Bigger Than You Are
spiritual overspray, bromeliads, and joy (and Ponce de Leon), from the archives
Something brewed in my week supporting Tommy Rosen, punctuated by Stephen Jenkinson's thick ruminations on elderhood and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's joyful quips cast into the front row – bumperstickers of joy and simplicity.
How is this my life?
I suppose that like yours, my life is what I've made it. I've spent a great amount of it planning – in fact, most of my meditations are simply 'strategy sessions' solving a problem much smaller than the solution, and what I didn't spend planning, I worried about – anxiety dressed up for dinner and a night on the town, respectively.
Life resists My Plan (and worry) and instead follows it's own path, which has certainly included a significant serving of chaotic events and mishaps, mostly illogical and unpredictable.
These things make sense in the rearview, but not looking forwards. It's not possible to make sense of the future that you're planning, because the plan is bigger than you are.
And it defies sense.
I learned that this week, somewhere between Stephen and Sri Sri and whoever spoke through Tommy Rosen. Sometimes I think it's Socrates or Yogi Bhajan, or other incarnations of the gratefully departed. Someone named Eunice, and even sometimes my late guru Hunter, the whale spirit who rests among the stars. Sometimes I think I'm tuned in to the same channel that Tommy is, or that maybe I'm hit by the spiritual overspray, or maybe I'm standing in the puddle of wisdom at his feet.
The plan is bigger than I am, than I could imagine or paint it, and that's how it's supposed to be. I'm also much bigger than I think I am, my mothering instinct, my intellect, and my neuroses. But the only time those beauties get me into trouble is when I try to grab the wheel and go off-road a bit. My constitution was built for smooth pavement, or sandy trails with shallow water crossings. I was raised in the narrow pathways between the over growth, except in my case it was basement piles of “just in case” things that might be needed again one day, not orchids and jungle boughs and bashful ferns.
My flight home was delayed by weather – epic rains and lightning that made it unsafe for us to push back from the gate, so I sat in the blessing of my upgraded first-class seat with lessons from Stephen and mantra, and a woman next to me who found herself firmly rooted in the anxious place – loaded and distraught that she would miss her connection to Alaska.
“What takes you to Alaska?” I asked, wondering if it was a family emergency.
“I'm a hunter,” she said.
Hunter.
Who never planned, but suffered nonetheless. I remember the night I flew through the red lights to the hospital, saturated with sweat from a terrifically hot yoga class, and rode next to him on the gurney as we traversed the hospital hallways from his room to surgery. The Syndrome, the “angelman's” spared him language but not torment. More accurately, I rode on top of him, holding him still-ish, or at least containing his eight year old body and his eight limbs as we made our way through the maze of elevators and back hallways. From hell to agony, or the other way, fighting and laughing as I hope to do on my own journey down the miles of my life that stretch between these lands of anguish, separated by the long, cold, linoleum desert.
He was an angel then, and I suppose has no choice now that he's in the after.
And he has ridden with me, through the full course of my sobriety, his physical expiration a slow-moving and wily hurricane named Otto. In that great exhalation, he has inspired me in the most basic of ways, when the suffocation of alone-ness holds my breath.
I read a book once that described the interplay between hurricanes and bromeliads – orchids reproduce via hurricane, not skybirds or insects. When the Colonists tried to keep the orchids for themselves by taking what they could find burning the jungle behind them, they were thwarted by the wind, who had spread those very orchids across oceans and into secret jungles.
(The plan is bigger than you are, Ponce de León.)
And all of this is what swirled in my mind, the primordial soup nourishing the great teaching that I hope comes from this drivel.
I like to think that even though he died across the gulf from me, that some aspect of his spirit brought over on the wind, entrusting me with seeds of wisdom to carry forwards, to water with the spiritual overspray, to nurture and grow into something of worth and value.
It doesn't make sense yet. It may never.
Maybe it isn't supposed to?