Not A Spiritual Giant And The Orange

The idea that "we are not saints" is a common thread to those of us familiar with twelve step programs.  For some of us who are also adult children of homes less than loving and less than safe, the idea that we can be less than perfect is a huge marble to swallow.  We can't actually.  We can only attempt to catch ourselves as we try so very hard to please others who cross our paths.  For me, there is a Cadillac sized gong that goes off for me when people are authority figures or scary or both.  The trick, for me, is to hear that vibrating sound before I start running my hamster around her wheel.

That said, some people who cross my path in twelve step meetings like to perform the illusion that they are now elevated to a kind of Buddha like status by spending time with the rest of us down here on earth.  They speak a line that sounds as if they have arrived and it smacks of a deceptive kind of grandiosity that is also a profound character flaw.  I suppose one could say that is the other side of the same hamster wheel and yet, it feels as if some of those folks will never see the wicked web they weave.

Last night, before the speaker began, she made sure to give me the "frosty treatment" and I was not sure what that meant.  Ah, my hamster stepped onto the wheel and paused.  I lowered my head and breathed.  The Tibetan monk was about to wail on that house sized gong in my head.  I listened as best I could for about twenty minutes to the woman claiming she had become a spiritual giant while sharpening her skills before her pitch on the "frosty treatment."  More like spiritual troll than giant.

The funny thing about lessons is that sometimes they just show up when you have let go of a hurt or a slight or a direct hit.  I often imagine Pema Chodron in my head smiling her leprechaun smile and waiting for me to get the irony in a situation.  So today, as I was giving an eight by eight garden patch a big face lift, down on my knee pads sweating and pulling with alternate hands, hot and focused and determined, one of those lessons came out the back door of the library.

One of the men that I work with, a man who escaped Guatemala years ago and most recently stopped a jumper on the Golden Gate bridge by talking to him, came by and offered me half of the orange he was about to eat.  That's right.  He didn't just offer me a piece, he gave me half of his orange.  We stood there in the hot sun and I devoured it.  It was juicy and sweet.  His gesture was not just generous, it was real without any strings. 

I wished that our speaker last night could have understood that what was offered freely is not some kind of pedantic drivel about how evolved we can be. In fact what a spiritual giant really looks like is as simple as extending half an orange to a co-worker on a hot day in October without even thinking about it.