The Unnamed

When change is knocking at the door…

Life then was very difficult; feeling strange in a new country, trying to communicate in a new language, struggling to stay on my two feet between my many family struggles.

I was making small bags in velvet, embroidered in French braid and coloured stones. That morning, in the Balmain markets, my stuff was looking just stunning!

By midday the smell of onions and curries was drifting through the galleries, mixing with the scented incenses and the mossy heaviness of the second hand garments. Everybody around me was busy. There were plenty of people passing by along the corridor, but no one was looking at my bags.

By 4pm my face was numbing  a plastic smile, hiding  monsters piling up inside;  monsters of failure, repetition of rejections, the sense of unworthiness, the morbid image of death laughing at me from every fiber of the velvet.

Immersed in the darkest night I started packing up. Suddenly this woman was coming along the corridor; her face seemed fascinated by the shining of the stones on the velvet. She came straight to my table… She was a “Homeless”, – dirty, untidy, contaminating the gallery with that strong smell of urine.

Now she was touching my delicate bags, playing with the tassels; I felt exposed to the biggest humiliation: My beautiful bags in the hands of a “homeless”, an “outcast”, a “social reject”. I was paralysed by the intensity of my feelings when looking at me she asked: “How much?”

My heart stopped. All the sounds stopped. The world stopped. There was only those blue eyes looking deep into mine, marvelling at the treasure she was holding on her hands… Still in shock I answered: “Twenty dollars”. She gave to me the velvet bag and a dirty and squashed packet of cigarettes containing some little 2 and 5 cents coins, and asked: “Is it enough?”

For some reason that I didn’t know, in that gallery of mixed scents, that woman was very important to me. There was no space for rationale, – no intention, no logic. Only those eyes in painful and hopeful expectation while I was counting the coins… I took them from the cigarette box and place them in the velvet bag which I extended to her with all the coins.

“Was it enough?” she asked again

“More that enough!”… I answered, and she left happily through the now colorful corridor.

But I, with tears in my eyes, and immersed in an unimaginable ocean of joy, was left with the richest treasure I had ever experienced in my life.

There was no possible way to explain how that little bag had made such an incredible miracle, in providing both such an opportunity to intimate at a Soul level. I didn’t know then about intimacy and Soul, and many times I have asked my self, “Who was that women?” And a vague drifting of incense and jasmine invaded my heart’s galleries… Was she the Buddha? Was she an angel?

“Have you ever experienced a sense of sacredness, of void and total surrender when presented with events where the mind can not longer grasp at any logical point of reference?”

When she left, I didn’t have the sense that I had given her something; I had the strong sense she gave me something. But what? The unknown? The place where the mind had no jurisdiction, a place without time, without space, without dualities; a place of love?

In order to own the resulting happiness, sometimes in life, we have to travel all the darkness of our disowned corners. We need to feel the numbness and the powerlessness. We are asked to touch the depths of our restlessness, expose our self to the deepest destruction; give ourselves up.

Today, as I am finishing writing this beautiful experience I had 22 years ago, I realise, the woman in dirty clothes, the smelling symbol of rejection, the wanderer, the one getting the velvet bag with coloured stones and ribbons, was no body else, but ME.

Because the homeless isn’t my property, but the property of human kind, a common place of meeting when change is knocking at the door with its falling, I invite you to trust and surrender to what is “here” and “now”, and feel safe in the perfection of each moment.