Tag Archives: Buddhism

Disconnected

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Image

All I had to do was one thing, the right thing, and this post may not exist. But instead something else is gone. And in it’s place we have this.

Last night my friend Johnny Meyering took his life.  Before he did so, he changed his Facebook profile picture to an image of the ocean and a warm beach.  A line of footprints traces the line of the surf.  I would like to think that he wanted to find peace.  And that he cared enough that he wanted people to know that.

Twelve of his friends liked the picture.  Two posted comments. One said, “Beautiful!”  The other asked if he was alright.

The problem is that he’s no longer there to receive it.  The line is now disconnected.  And no one will be there ever again to pick up.

Every thing in Johnny’s life up until last night could have possibly been fixed. And for some reason he couldn’t see that. And so he did the one thing that in fact could not be taken back.

This morning I looked at his Facebook page, that strange 21st century totem that is all about memory and memorial.

I wanted to Message him to tell him to please stop, to please not do it.

I wanted to Poke him to let him know, hey, someone is out there and cares.

I want to Post on his Wall and tell him to come up and stay with us for a while. I know some kids who are struggling to stay in school.  If you just go and sit with them for a little while and help them a little bit with their writing and math, you will immeasurably change the world.  And you alone can do it.

But he’s no longer there to receive any of it.

I look at his Friends.  I see faces from Seattle and from Japan and San Diego and Chicago. I know a few, but by no means all.  But the person who is friends with every one of those people?  The one person who bound all those people together into a circle of friends has made himself gone.

I look at his Likes.  The movie Gerry, and the movie Samsara, Jazz, and The New Yorker.  The Wire, Raymond Chandler, David Sedaris, Art Spiegelman, Taberna 1931, The Bill Evans Trio, Langston Hughes, Paolo Coelho, Huruki Murukami, The Urban Land Army.  And more.

This is the filagree that composes a person.  There is no one in the world who liked exactly the same things as Johnny.  And there never will be.

When the person becomes gone, the Likes and the Friends lose their life as well.  The thing that gave rise to the Likes and the Friends has gone away and in turn they have become a dry and intractable husk.

I remember decades ago a crazy Thanksgiving dinner we held in a small walkup apartment in Golden Hills in San Diego.  Anna and I weren’t married yet and a good handful of Meyerings were there and Johnny was too.  Anna’s high school English teacher came and left and got a DUI.  All the rest of us probably could have been in the same boat.  And Johnny was there, he had been studying Japanese.  He was looking youthful and handsome – he always, for as long as I knew him, looked youthful and handsome.  And his manner was funny and dry and he was as gentle and brilliant a person as I’ve ever known.

And that’s the weird part.  Even now, on this Memorial Day morning, I can feel him.  Which is to say that he had a feeling, a presence that was unique unto him.  No one else in this world ever has, nor ever will, feel like Johnny Meyering.  The feeling was so special.  And so precious.  And such a great gift to the world.

But we never recognize it in ourselves.  And we fail to understand that it will actually matter when it’s gone.

It’s so wrong.  And now nothing will ever bring him back.

That’s what I would tell him.

 

 

This Life We Were Born Into

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I just got off a crackly broken phone conversation with my friend, Bill Scheffer.  It seems that more often than not that’s how they are these days.  He was taking his lunch break from his work in planned giving for Planned Parenthood.  He was somewhere amidst the cacophony of midtown, walking between work and Chipotle’s searching for a salad.

I was sitting in the sun on our back porch in Sebastopol looking out toward the oaks and overgrown garden beds.

I thought to myself that Bill should move to California and do development and planned giving work for Spirit Rock, a Marin mediation center that may be mid-stream in a large capital campaign.  But I shied away from suggesting it to Bill, thinking to myself that “that’s not the life he was born into.”

And it’s not.  At least I’m not sure it is.  For Bill, family and friends are very important.  And for several generations his family has been deeply steeped in Manhattan.  He has lived there, and he’s grown up there.  His rich network of friends and his spiritual life are centered in New York.  Most of the lines tethering him to this world are anchored there.  Moreover, like many of us, his parents are near old yet and it’s more important than ever to remain close at hand.  That larger body needs him.  It doesn’t matter how nice the job is:  I might as well suggest that Bill move to Mars.

What then of the rest of us?  I once dreamt of entering the foreign service. Or something like that.  I studied Russian.  But it was never going to happen.  I wasn’t well enough equipped coming out of the starting gate.  I didn’t have the temperament or the know how.  No matter how much I wanted to escape, I had my own wrecked family tying me to California.  I had my own past tying me to my own brand of dysfunction.

My classmate Fareed Zakaria was born to be Fareed Zakaria.  I can safely say that I was not.

Which begs the question as to what life I was born into.  And to that, I unfortunately don’t have much of an answer.  An array of weird experiences and encounters that if not culminating in, have at least deposited me here on this sunny morning in California, not knowing even which way is up. Which is a strange state of being for 47.

It begs a larger question:  For all of us, that disparate and manifold and brilliant sparks of sentience that we are, what is this larger life that we all more or less were simultaneously born into?  What hope that we ever truly will divine the texture?