Time is a blur…,
I’m driving home in rural Africa, nursing a very, very broken heart,
A Greek goddess called Diana is responsible,
I stop at a petrol station,
Suddenly, I became aware of a presence next to me,
I look up, a young African man, with both his hands out, in the traditional African manner, begging,
He’s dishevelled, dirty, poorly dressed,
He’s mumbling to himself incoherently,
Schizophrenic, borderline?
The sight of his plaintive condition, touches me,
Through my numbness, I feel the pain of his existence,
Yet, the sight is so common in this part of the world, I’m about to turn him away when I chance to look into his eyes,
What I see stuns me,
A childlike simplicity and yet, a powerful, burning intensity and on his face, a radiant smile,
The pain of it is too enormous for me to bear,
Through the fog, I wonder if I will ever, in this lifetime, have eyes as soft and beautiful as his,
or if my smile will ever speak with such resignation and humility as his,
A smile that has suffered a million set-backs and humiliations,
I look him in the eyes and say, "Hello, how are you?”
He looks right back at me and says, in a cosmic voice, that I know was not spoken by the young man, "I’m O.K."
In the resonance of that one phrase, was a spiritual message for me, that seemed as if it had forcefully been driven through the locus of all eternity, just for me,
A message that stated:-
“Though things look terribly unfair and painful at times, in the eternity of our evolution everything is fine, even though it is impossible for us mortals to comprehend why that is so.”
Right there and then, I realized I was talking with an angel who had come in the young man’s body to comfort me,
and, right there and then, I loved that young man,
I gave him all the money I had in my pocket at the time,
I was distraught, I felt a great sense of loss, that I could not do more,
I know my few hundred bucks probably did very little for that young man, but it helped me enormously,
It helped me to grieve for the loss of Diana, and for the innocence I lost several decades ago.