We each wait, as in a receiving line, to hug the woman who composed our meal.
She is late 40’s/50ish, round, silvery short hair, folded into a white apron, standing in the foyer of her tucked-away establishment. It is after midnight. As per usual for this trip, we have yet again closed out a restaurant.
I pull her close in to me, and she embraces back: fiercely, delightedly. Extraordinarily close for someone I have just met.
I am theatrical, but deservedly over-effusive, my praise worthy of her other-dubbed “last authentic” Portuguese culinary masterpieces. Her hug is maternal, genuine.
What passed my lips was uncompromisingly fresh and simply prepared. I tell her,
“That is the best fish I have ever had in my life.”
No small praise from this foodie princess. (and one who strives to be vegan, at that.)
She beams. Beams.
Our gaggle luxuriously strolls, brimming with food imbued with love, tummies swimming from carafes of the house wine, and we settle into bean bag chairs on an open air piazza framing the Lisbon waterfront: “Seven mojitos, please.”
Later, we dance until 5am at the best club I’ve been to in my life: cabanas, riverfront, outdoors.
I consume everything I want to and never do:
Coffee. Meat. Cigarettes. Cheese. Wine, vodka, mojitos, beer, whisky.
All with great love. I know I will head back to the States unapologetically voluptuous, into the arms of someone who wouldn’t want me to have it any other way.
We are the only Americans I have seen. This pleases me to no end.
The next day, our six scooters whip along Portugal’s coastline on a drive so beyond picturesque, it causes one to wonder why anyone lives anywhere else in the world.
At lunch, again on the water, we are blissful and laughing. Our waiter is thrilled with us and begs to meet up in Algarve where we are synchronistically all traveling the next day.
The groom to be’s brother says to me at lunch,
“This trip is a once in a…” He pauses, not wanting to limit his future potential experience, “I don’t know about once… but definitely one of a kind.”
It couldn’t be more perfect.
As I scooter up the coast, the weather terrifically sunny, Portugal’s colors and history and beauty sweeping by, I am bursting with gratitude and I am there for every moment of it. I am happier than I have ever been.
Ten hours later, we are lost, I am frozen, terrified—more frightened than I have ever been in my life—zooming down a four-lane highway, a row of six scooters that should have been “home” hours ago, in a dangerous light rain, darkness, shaking at 65 kilometers per hour, I clutching on for dear life, deep breaths alternating between a Sanskrit mantra and desperate prayers of “you can do this.”
When we pull over to do a check-in, my nervous system is shot. Ironically, it is not the doctor, the rabbi, our host, or the retreat center owner that ask if I’m ok—it is the New York City comedian, who looks me straight in the eyes and says, “I don’t feel that’s safe, do you?” Relief. Saved. It couldn’t be more perfect.
In my trip of the last few weeks: Lisbon, Portugal’s coast, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, I experienced everything. Everything. The highest highs in my life, the lowest lows. It was not spectacular only in its breadth and scope but because it was everything. I don’t think there is one aspect of life that I did not experience, all with people I deeply care for: bliss, terror, ecstasy, nurturing, pride, honor, irritation, boredom, anger, frustration, longing, silliness, resentment, humility, connectedness, oneness, gratitude, bossiness and more bossiness (that extra bossiness was for me.)
This is why we do spiritual practice.
To LIVE.
I would not have been able to have these experiences five years ago, because I would not have been able to truly experience them. I would have been lost, somewhere else, in my head. The veil of illusion: maya, that filter of inauthenticity, a barrier to life.
I’m not a sage or a saint. I don’t claim that the veil is lifted permanently, but oh, good god. It’s on its way. Not just for me. You can feel it too.
You’ve noticed everything is shifting rapidly. Of course you have, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. Too rapidly to hold onto anything, right?
There have been moments in the last few weeks that have been the most heart-wrenching of my life.
Some of the most beautiful, intimate as well.
I watched as others close to me and I went though experiences that overstretched past adventure into drama, if not trauma. Experiences too private to list here… The vicissitudes so extreme they would require a serious suspension of disbelief if laid forth in film format: homelessness, hospitalization, assault, hurricanes, crashes, ranging to: seedlings of new love, marriage on the horizon, creative successes and new births.
One of my dearests Brian quoted Thoreau today on Facebook:
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”
Being present when someone really annoying is talking to you about some really annoying thing, and all you want to do is change the subject…
being present here is practice for when life falls apart.
Making eye contact with the barista is practice for allowing presence when you get the phone call that your father is in the hospital… again.
Meditation, yoga, is practice for the moment you see on facebook that a natural disaster may be sweeping your business, your dream, your livelihood, your life away in a flood.
Our structures are slipping away so we can see where we hold on.
This is the speeding up. It is time to let go.
There will be more. I can’t promise you anything, but I can promise you that—there is more upheaval arriving. It will subside and then it will rise again. Always.
I am such a cheerleader for these practices, this truth because I see myself weathering unfathomable storms. With reverence and respect, but no drama. Not always gracefully, but with no residue of attachment. People might call it being with what is. In a crisis situation, semantics may cause us to switch the term to ‘surrender,’ but truly? They mean the exact same thing.
The amount we can handle is in direct proportion to how big our life is. It’s a pretty simple equation really. It’s a natural law.
So, how much life do you want to live? Do you want to play big or play small?
Do you want to practice now, so that when the storms come, you are prepared? So that when the storms come, you are not even affected?
Let go. Let it come. Let the storms come. They will. They always will. Your choice is how quickly you get to let go and how full you want your life to be.
That’s what you get to choose. You get to choose whether you want to live.
