CENTERING

You are three people:

the one you think you are,

the one others think you are

and the one you really are.

Baba

For the seven years leading up to my 1980 interview with Swami, and for fourteen years afterward, we enjoyed less material security than before. Paul never did find a regular job again after leaving the Simcoe County Board of Education. I worked only occasionally. We took out no lease on an apartment, nor mortgage on a house. 

All that we knew was that Baba was at the helm of our ship as it was blown this way and that across the choppy sea of change. One of our favourite photographs of him shows him looking out like a Captain at the helm of a ship; we call it “Baba at the tiller”. His gaze looks into eternity, seeing all that comes between the immediate and the infinite.

When  Baba asked me whether I wanted spiritual advancement, he was closing the door irrevocably on other alternatives. It seemed that he was increasing the tests of our mettle, in intensity and duration.

One of the first things that he did was to untie our ship from its moorings. During the troubled period of 1981-2 we were abruptly estranged from elders in our families. Under their wings, we could not have spread the wings of our spirit.

Birchholme on the St. Lawrence beckoned, as a refuge where we could, again, lick our wounds before the next onslaught on the job market. Unfortunately, or so it seemed, my father refused to let us stay at Birchholme longer than a long weekend because of impending guests invited by my cousin. 

Eventually we were reconciled with our elders, and our relationship was actually improved - thanks probably to what we had learned in the meantime. Our spirit was stronger and happier. Our elders never did understand our affinity with Swami. Yet he knew them well. He made them into teachers who, by kicking us out of their nests, forced us to fly.

Baba had also said during my 1980 interview, “You have friends there. They are waiting for you.”

Our “Man from the Ministry” and his family took us in, thanking us for telling them about Baba. We lived in tents in their North Toronto backyard for the summer, then they found us a house-sitting job when the weather got colder.

For many months, as material advancement eluded us, we often pondered what Baba meant by “the middle”. Or was it “the centre”? Ontario contains Canada’s largest city, Toronto. Businesses in Calgary open their offices as early as 7:00 am to be in touch with that city, which is, after all, not in the very east of Canada, but closer to the middle. Quite apart from cold geographical considerations, or the economic weight of Canada’s largest city, I was born in Ontario and knew it best as my home province.

A deeper meaning also unfolded, as I remembered Baba’s advice given in many discourses, to stay in the centre, our own spiritual heart, deep within, wherever we may go.

Meanwhile we had to survive. As a serious job-hunter I took whatever courses, seminars, workshops and tests were available. It became clear that I was overqualified for most clerical work, and not very good at it either. It seemed only right that I should be able to qualify at managerial level. That could be the solution.

I took home armfuls of books from the career section of public library. Books like Games Your Mother Never Taught You and How to Dress for Success. I learned how important it is to climb the corporate ladder until you can grab that heady symbol of success, the key to the executive washroom.

All those courses in Public Relations and conference management were packed with bright young women,  glamorously dressed, many with more and higher university degrees than I, and still, like me, unemployed. We all enjoyed our classes. I suspect we had begun to give up doing things we didn’t like, and were ready to follow our dreams.

Eventally it dawned on me that I did not want the key to the executive washroom, and that “Dressing for success” would mean spending huge sums of money on a wardrobe that would set me apart from ordinary people. It would take away all the fun of shopping for second-hand clothing; that fun was the only privilege that I was prepared to enjoy, thanks to still having savings to fall back on.

I remembered that as coordinator of a community project called “The People Pool” I had been unable to pay myself more than the rest of our team after the first week. Throughout the rest of the project, each of us got the same pay of an even one hundred dollars a week.

One evening our instructor in writing for public relations  at Ryerson University told us to write a short piece on a subject of our choice. It would appear that the Subject of my choice was far overseas:

O to be in India now October lengthens,

where sounds of conches mingled with trumpets 

blare wild, wedding music, 

and multi-coloured saris, like a million butterflies,

dot burning sands under azure skies.

Immaculate white dhotis worn by men 

fleck crowds eager for festivals,

thronging toward sacred fires

that burn seven days long. 

Pundits feed the yagna 

by pouring melted butter into it, 

intoning holy writings.

Nine gems fall from an avatar’s fingers, 

gleaming before destruction through flames; 

ashes become their lot. 

How blessed those holy gatherings, 

whose memories I treasure. 

Will my steps soon turn eastward around this globe? 

This longing increases ...

Paul, Mary and I each struggled with our own identity crises, and, inevitably, with each others’. Hard-working Paul was reaching official retirement age, after several years of unwanted early retirement. It seemed that every endeavour to support himself and his family reached a peak, and then faded away. I had turned fifty, without finding my vocation. Mary was thirteen, and rebelling in black leather, cascades of safety pins and an orange mohawk hairdo.

The day came when I reached such a depth of discouragement that I cursed my spiritual Lord. I was driving our wonky old Volvo away from the hideous house that we were occupying in the east end of Toronto. Heavy clouds hung over the most depressing city landscape I thought to inhabit. There was no hope in sight of anything better. Yet we could not even be sure that this misery would not evolve into something worse, something more unimaginable. How could we have sunk so low? “Goddamn You, Baba!” I roared, hitting the wheel of the car with my fist.

There was no one around to see, in those back lanes, and so I let myself rant on. “You’ve got us in a horrible mess, saying to go to Canada. I hate living in this ugly house, not knowing when I’ll have to leave, and or where to go when I do. This is the dregs. I hate this part of town. I’m desperate about Mary; she’s disappeared again.

“We’ve tried everything. I go west to get work and people ask me if I’m not ashamed to come from Ontario. I lose my job two days after I get it, and meanwhile Paul and Mary are on their way west.

“We come back east and Dad throws us out of "Birchholme", and I'll never see that dear island and house again. We live in tents in our friends’ backyard, an object of pity to all the neighbours ...

What more are You going to throw our way? Have You finished toying with us in this cat and mouse game of Yours?” 

Suddenly Baba appeared before my inner vision, smiling sweetly. “Feel better now?”

He was the last person I expected to see, even though, if you think about it, I had called on Him personally, to damn Himself. I hung my head, but His next words made me look up and lose myself in the compassion of His eyes. They had their Mother Look. “I’d rather hear you curse Me than pretend to adore Me when you are fed up with everything. Go ahead. I can take it. Take your anger to Me, not to others. That’s what I’m here for!” 

There was no escape from Love divine, once He revealed His roles in the play that is my life. Several years would go by before I would realize that the roles that I play are not the same as who I really am. The label that I wear shows the person that I think I am and the way I wear it tells others what to think I am. Who I really am - it seems only God knows, so far. Finding out is my path and my goal.

I soon found myself back in the teaching treadmill, going out into the high schools of Toronto as a supply teacher. The climate of the classrooms, and staff rooms, had changed since I last ventured there.

In one senior class our reading assignment was on the subject of suicide. From the discussion I could tell that several of the teenagers had seriously considered it. I pointed out the implications of that choice, if reincarnation were a fact: “You’ll just have to come back to face the same problem, perhaps under better circumstances, perhaps not.” At least freedom of speech allowed me to risk that comment. 

In junior French classes the pupils born in Canada fooled around, while more recent arrivals waved their hands eagerly and asked me whether I’d marked their tests yet. In the staff rooms, young teachers with brilliant qualifications were afraid of being declared redundant. Older staff members ranged from dedicated to disgruntled, as ever. I had never felt comfortable in staff rooms anyway. I didn’t seem to fit in, no matter how I wished that I did.

With beautiful irony, my temporary Alberta teaching certificate arrived in Toronto in February of the year following my application. I could not feel any pull to return to the west, or to pursue that profession in my native Ontario.

It was not until 12 March 2007 that it dawned on me that for the past twelve years I had been living in Central Ontario.