Denied Entry
This new calendar year has started apace, with much in the way of happenings filling up almost every day so far. Mostly the happenings have been the run-of-the-mill admin of life stuff and not any groundbreaking personal or professional stuff. ‘So much the better’, chirps the dervish.
Despite our calls being mediated via screens, sketchy rural wifi and being subject to electricity availability in the holy land; she seems happier than the last few calls. Whatever cloud had previously settled on the dervish has clearly lifted. Bantering mid-dialogue, smiling broadly at the slightest provocation and generally popping and fizzing a kind of energy I’d not seen before.
‘Ohh you’re in love’, I blurt out before I even had the chance to complete processing the thought. She giggles, drops her gaze, then immediately lifts her face to reveal a broad smile. Her eyes have never told a lie. I tender congratulations and felicitations aplenty before I put my foot in it again and ask about the path of being a dervish and human relationships. ‘You asked if I’m in love and indeed, that I am. There is no conversation about relationships in the mix here,’ comes her smoky response. I try to read her face but she quickly closes herself off and I can’t quite tell if she’s serious or not. I let go and we move ahead into the usual reflections and shared reading of texts from the range of books we’ve been delving into recently.
It shouldn’t be, but it remains a rare thing that two very different people can find and share such a quick, almost seamless rapport over books, the depths of life and meaning itself and the humdrum events of the admin of life. Sharing time with the dervish has been a salve to the abrasiveness of engaging in the world for the daily bread. This time we have spent has also been a starkly clear mirror to my shame, fears, the crushing anxiety that I have been carrying without being able to name it, the grief and a host of the worst manifestations of my human-shaped form.
I have learnt more about being and being human in the last few years than in the last twenty. To say it has been illuminating feels dun. Still, as the dervish said in reply to my lavish praise, ‘and yet here you are, just at the start of your journey and know well that this time with you has given me so much more than I can articulate.’ I’m stunned, not by her unexpected praise but that the dervish can be inarticulate. January 2023 AD is truly one for the record books but I’m soon set to rights.
We run through some of the books, passages and texts we’ve co-read over the previous year and spend the next few hours lost to the world. Time passes in what feels like a moment while simultaneously I’ve felt every moment of it. It’s an intensity that draws me in again and again, leaving me drained and filled at the same time. Fully and generously nourished and also like I’ve had everything useful in my mind and soul taken out. And then everything useful in my mind and soul is returned to me; just made that little bit better, that little bit richer, deeper, more wondrous. It’s like holding a puzzled Rubik’s cube and getting it right in a handful of moves, I share. ‘You are the cube’ she chimes in, ‘only your cube is made of mirrors, all facing inward. All I have done is move a few of them around so they look outward, into the world you exist in.’ Like I said, articulate to a fault. She signals for me to go on.
I return to what I’ve been processing these past few years: ‘I wish I had lived this life I have been gifted differently; better, more meaningfully, more peacefully, more beautifully, being less of a bastard to the people closest to me. Being more patient, more thoughtful, more often sober, more often patient, kinder, more generous, less willing to rush headlong into everything that was ever put under my nose, within my reach and placed in my path.’ She waits patiently for me to pause, and says:
‘It’s possible that somewhere in another reality, the being trapped in this form you have made your own has never set a foot wrong, never wronged another being, never felt the sting of self-reproach, the stench of shame, nor stood in the dead water of anguish. That version of you might never have reeked of a soul rotting inside a body hellbent on self destruction, nor experienced the horror of seeing your being from outside your form, felt the anger and the madness that must surely exist to act counter to your nature; the searing pain, the constant hunger of regret, the endless desert of remorse and ceaselessly treading water in the ocean of your own torments. It’s indeed possible and in such a reality, you might have spent less time on begging forgiveness, making amends, spent less time on seeking repentance, and forgiving yourself. Your being might have also enjoyed a much less stressful human experience. In that reality, you might even still have a full head of hair’.
At this last line, the bubble bursts and I laugh out through the tears that have welled and begun streaming. The dervish has touched me on my studio. She smiles and goes on: ‘The thing is; in such a reality would your being be alive? Would what is alive in you as Gibran says still be alive? But even before I let you go there; let me remind you that it was this very journey of self-destruction and the litany of your misdeeds, wrongs and sins that have brought you, inexorably to this moment. To this space, face to face with the depths and ranges, the peaks and lows of your manifest human form. This very journey that you would eschew, that you would disown for shame, that you would discard for the scarlet letters it has written in bold on your forehead, has brought you here. To this moment now, with this realisation of your self being so much more than your present form. Now tell me again how your journey has failed you? If anything your journey has, for all its high costs to other human-shaped beings and yourself delivered you exactly where you needed to be. What you feel is not regret at your journey you’ve lived but shame that it has taken you so long to know again what you were born knowing.’
I’m mute, she goes on: ‘You’ve only gone a block from the door of your childhood and yet you would believe you have seen the world. You’re knocking on the front door of your childhood home while you know well the path that leads to the back gate and the sunny courtyard where a warm welcome awaits. Tarry no longer on the front step like a guest. You are home, and while your journey is significant and you must needs bear the dishonour to your human form as you have etched it; it does not define you, much less does that hold your form from its relentless onward journey.’
She continues and I remain mute. ‘You are staring into a poisoned well while a sweet clear stream flows behind your back. Face the sun, judge not your actions but your intentions and render not your sentence from upon high but bow with humility before the precious gift of your being unmasked, by your own hand. If you falter in the journey now, you make a mockery of the terrible human costs you have already caused and incurred. You’ve paid the highest entry fee to a park that other human-shaped beings have enjoyed free access to. Now you would stand at the gate and bemoan that you paid to enter while others have free entry. That you are unworthy to enter. That would be to deny G-d because s/he laughed at your expense after gifting you everything any human could ever yearn for. Humble yourself and keep going, your real journey has only just begun.’
I remain mute. These moments come up sometimes when the dervish just spills the gospel like she is being the voice of something greater. With time, I am able to see that is entirely what it always is. In word, in deed, in being, we remain nothing more than the manifest of life itself. In all its glory and horror.
She stares at me for a while and then waves herself off.
Denied Entry is an edited and condensed record of some of the most difficult sets of conversations I have ever had in my human-shaped form. I pray your path is littered with the most precious of all gifts, the acceptance of your self, in all its fullness and as few stuff-ups as possible.
© Jesh Baker, 2023 for Oppi Stoep
