Gurus I Have Known and Loved

My friend Peter has made a suggestion to me....that I write a bit about the effect that certain spiritual teachers have had on me. I said immediately that seemed like too big of a job, to review gurus."No," he replied, "just talk about the effect they had on you." And so I begin with Peter himself.

Peter came into my life a number of years ago. I had begun my website to write about my husband's multiple myeloma. It quickly turned into a place where I began posting spiritual essays that I wrote. I posted them on Jerry Katz's Nonduality Salon as well. One day Peter posted something there about spirituality and illness. I wrote him privately and thus began an instantaneous friendship. It was based on nothing but hands clicking away at their respective keyboards. And Peter apparently has a hard time with his, given that he has been ill for many years. He prefers that I not discuss that part of his life. He has overcome the illusion of having a separate self. As far as he is concerned, it is all the same...suffering or enlightenment are indistinguishable.

Peter's statements about life are inherently simple and therefore effective. When you can not do anything but sit in the sunlight with a cat on your lap, then that is what you do. Capice?
He once sent me a sound bite of himself playing the bagpipes in earlier days. I sat at my computer listening, tears winking in my eyes. I have seen his picture and he is an incredibly handsome man. I do not know his last name or where he lives. In that way he is a perfect mirror for what is beyond words and thoughts.

When my husband decided to die slowly, enduring chemo just to keep himself on the planet as long as he could, Peter would say, "For what it is worth, I hold your hand in this." Indeed. What verbiage printed in ink or online can match the clarity of caring. I knew that Peter's days were just like mine....hardly endurable. But we were both choiceless in the matter. My job was to care for my husband and his was to get through the day as best he could without falling. "Ho ho!" he would say, after confessing to aanother episode of crashing into tall grasses.

So Peter has come to be a guru for me. He lives in the moment as a matter of course. If coaxed, he will admit that at some point in time, he lost his "me." That should be a profound relief, but given that he also lost his balance, strength and career, etc., things have not been hunky dory for him. It does no good to try and figure it out.

I go long periods of time without hearing from Peter, understandably so. If I write about him, the love is activated as I click clack the letters on the keyboard. He vows his cat holds the key to enlightenment and I am not at all sure about that. Maybe it's even simpler and he is just using words to keep me from experiencing cosmic bliss. I mean, somebody is keeping me from it. I might as well blame Peter. That is how much I trust him.

People whose lives have been drug down to the baseline of existence and kept there for many years grow clear or crazy, one or the other. Having lost a child, I know what baseline feels like. It is forcing yourself to put your body through the motions while your heart is scattered all over the universe. You cannot call it home; it justwon't come. It is stubbornly holding out on you. Mine wanted a little girl named Laurie to come back. With Peter, it was his ability to use his body.

But Peter and I found each other serendipitously. Forget enlightenment, gurus and every word written about them. Loving what is does the trick. When you can love the lost things in your life and stumble forward knowing they will not return, good for you. Good for Peter and good for me. We know the essential truth of life. It will not change at our whim, but we can change in the moment of our suffering. It's called love.

Vicki Woodyard