Nostalgia

Last night we were watching on PBS the gala the night before John F. Kennedy's inauguration. It was an odd experience. I had experienced all of the entertainers in one way or the other in my youth (The Hollywood Bowl, The Greek, movies, television, etc.), and I had watched with interest during the campaign for the presidency. All but one of them at the Gala are gone from earth. Each one touched me inside in various ways - inspiration, humor, admiration, as a role model, etc. No one else knows those feelings and where the thoughts led me.

I thought how no one else could know my inner life. Then I thought, most of my life is inner - that is who I am beyond the surface is greater than the surface, my interiority is complex  - my thoughts, my aha's, my secrets, my deep spiritual moments, my questioning, my pain, my hurts are primarily within me. No one knows my inner life except God and me. It has never been there for others to know. Except maybe in the way Tagore spoke of Buddha (even though of course I am not he, I do aspire to enlightenment): They directly felt in him what he was preaching, in the living language of his own person, the ultimate truth of Man. It reminds me of Gandhi who told people if they wanted to know what he believed, simply watch him live his life. We show our consciousness to those who are awake and watching. I really like the way Tagore put it - in the living language of his own person...

There is the outer of my life - historically gone except for my inner knowing of it. There is no one alive that has known me since birth. Many of the places are gone (our 1st house removed, my 1st school now a MacDonalds, the hospital where I was born is gone, etc.).

So, I came to the conclusion that God and I are in some sense alone together. Others cannot possibly know the caverns of interiority that are in some deep place in the thing called me. That made me think of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poem "Conversation":

God and I in space alone 

and nobody else in view. 

And where are the people, O Lord, I said, 

the earth below and the sky o'er head 

and the dead whom once I knew?

That was a dream, God smiled and said, 

A dream that seemed to be true. 

There were no people, living or dead, 

there was no earth, and no sky o'er head;

there was only Myself -- in you.

Why do I feel no fear, I asked, 

meeting You here this way? 

For I have sinned I know full well-- 

and is there heaven, and is there hell, 

and is this the Judgment Day?

Nay, those were but dreams, the Great God said, 

Dreams that have ceased to be. 

There are no such things as fear or sin; 

there is no you -- you never have been-- 

there is nothing at all but Me.