Hunting for Sacred

When I was a runaway, I lived with a woman named Eve.  She was in her sixties with white steely hair and alert grey blue eyes.  Eve was crazy.  I don't mean funny "ha ha wild and crazy"  I mean crazy certifiable.  But I loved her, and I still carry her in my heart.  She was a new-ager in every sense of the word.  Incense, oils and the tell tale crystal hanging on a necklace round her neck.  Like many new-agers I had met, she spoke of past lives, aliens, the force and the like.  The difference with Eve was that she was truly committed.  She believed it with every fiber of her being.  It was her being.  Unlike the others who had glommed on to this community as a sort of crutch to elevate themselves from a world where they were seen as insignificant, or broken in one way or another, she was the real deal so to speak.   For the others it was one more affectation to put on or take off like a pair of pants: a prettier way to hide fear and pain.   When Eve picked me up from the airport and brought me to her apt, I was a complete stranger to her.  Her apartment was nestled in a wonderful park like setting with manicured creeks and stones and aviaries like something one would expect to see if supping with Bilbo Baggins.   She had hardly no furniture, a clean clothed mattress on her floor for sleeping and what she called "astral projection" paintings of her creation.  Of course, I knew she was crazy.  I could see it in her eyes.  They never seemed focused in the here and now.  She was kind to me though and I had great fun playing around with her scented oils and walking around in her world.  I always liked sci-fi and Star Wars.  It was a little like that.  Every morning Eve would find some indentation or mark on her skin that would prove to her that aliens had done corrective surgery on her each night, removing negative energy trapped in the tissues of her body.  At 15, it was fun to pretend with her. There was no media in her place--no money for such things.  But nature surrounded our little flat and that was a nice break to rest my mind after much hardship.  I first discovered the wonders of tofu and cilantro with Eve.  And we spent hours gazing at this enormous sculpture sized amethyst stone while dreaming.  I think my love of Geology started in the smooth cuts of that amethyst.  Food and money were hard to come by.  I went to our bed on the floor always hungry.

Eve's source of income was her "clients."  They were wealthy housewives that surrounded the local college campus.  Each session was fifty  to a hundred dollars.  Mostly, she would touch them on there hand, ankle or shoulder or belly helping them to release their guilt, pain, or emotional wounds.  They would cry, she would cry and they would come back again and again to be "cleansed"  They were cultured educated women.  I used to wonder what must their lives be like in those shining houses behind closed gates that they had no one to touch them, hear them, encourage them.  All the money, status and education in the world and they needed a crazed elderly woman's chants and "readings".   It was sad really. Equally, I wondered what Eve was like before she lost her mind.  What kind of pain had been so bad that one would need corrective surgery that only alien technology could heal?

We are compelled to  search for the sacred, for that fleeting connection with the divine.  We want to be known.  We want to connect with a personal God.  And in our journey, if we don't know where to find the truth, we will believe anything, pay anything to manufacture or re create that memory that knowledge of what we knew of the divine.  We somehow know that it is an unnatural state to be so divided from our Father in Heaven.  So people go out and try to buy some parcel of the sacred: an essential oil, a yoga room with a Buddha in it, a book or DVD promising to connect us with our inner power.  But the yoga will end, the scented candle fades, the great new motivational book is just the thoughts of another man afraid, alone and searching.  And in the end, so many are left to return to Eve again and again exchanging their silver pieces for a "sacred"  that wont last.  The seller and the buyer agreeing to  pretend staring into the "amethyst abyss."