A THOUGHT FROM THE PARIS UNDERGROUND

A THOUGHT FROM THE PARIS UNDERGROUND

Erase the battle lines, my brothers and sisters. Today we begin construction of a new world.I see a pigeon stuck in a subterranean metro station.

Like the human heart, he frantically flaps his wings in an attempt to recover that awesome freedom he must have known before his descent.For now, despite his flapping, the cave remains his tiny kingdom.

Yet the bird is magnificent in his flapping, never using his temporary prison as an excuse to give up on his potential, or close himself to the hugeness of his tiny beating heart, the magnificence of each breath.Sometimes a chaotic reality breaks through into our personal lives.

In the external, as in the internal, there are unexpected explosions, suddenruptures of certainty, traumas—experiences we are unable to hold. Our old conceptions of normality are torn asunder, and we find ourselvesonce again in a groundless, unsafe place, uncertain, nothing to hold onto, scrambling to make sense of everything before it is too late, longing for a different moment, a different reality, another chance. Yesterday’s insights, joys, enlightenments,revelations, seem a million milesaway, like they happened in another life. Perhaps they did.

What do we know.Yet there is only this life. This day. This moment. And in the midst of the storm, we are called once again to remember and not forget our own presence, our ground, the changeless principle amidst this devastating change. And to know the presence of others as our own presence, brilliantly disguised, beyond race, age, religion, even belief. To never be fooled by appearances. Each one believing themselves to be “one” and separate, each one seeking One, each one on theirown perilous path toward the Sun, flapping in the only way they know how.

Love is like fire. It can burn, but it can also illuminate, and heal, and thaw our frozen fingers, and it kept us alive for all those years before the future came, when we huddled together at night incaves and told stories of loss and courage, and today must have seemed like an impossible utopia.Utopia.

The good place. The place that cannot be, until the disappearance of time.I am in love with the flapping and with the cracks that humble us and help us remember our shared warmth. You cannot get “there,” but keep on trying; love is present even in the flapping of tiny wings.

- Jeff Foster