It Hides In Everything

IT hides in everything. In unfulfilled expectations and heartbreak. You know that ache beneath the ache beneath the ache? You know that movement? The reaching, the part of you that still wants to be met, held and understood. That longing is IT. IT hides in the whisking of matcha, my small circular wrist motion seductively suggesting that IT’s there. Last week, I looked at the green powder disappearing into water and the froth gathering along the edges of the bowl. There was the life moving the hand, the attention watching the movement, the pleasure of making something and then offering it to strangers. IT was hiding in there. IT hides in arguments. Particularly in disagreements. You and I standing across each other defending our positions, saying the same thing in different words but not even knowing we are saying the same thing. We both want to be understood. We both want the other to cross the invisible distance and meet eachother where we are. And yet we don’t notice how underneath our opposing statement and warm fuming breathes, we are signaling the ‘see me, hear me, come closer’. Ah! It was a wink wink nudge nudge that IT was there. IT hides in my desperation. In my grasping and bargaining, when I am convinced something outside me must change so I will finally finally eventually be okay. Spoiler alert: that deceptive nudge was always there like a bug added while the human was being built. That bug has been the yearning for wholeness. You know what’s weird? The yearning for wholeness is literally happening within Wholeness itself. And IT is the wholeness too. IT hides in the baby! Shhhhh! Wait for the baby to cry. You’d see it then. Notice how this baby has no theology or language or words for ‘mother, hunger, burp me’ and yet it reaches thorugh fake tears and piercing sounds. Something is missing, the baby signals! Hold me! Feed me! Make this separation disappear! IT hides in bodies and in sex. Ah! Even in this! Don’t you see IT? The unbearable wish to disappear into the other where the border between one and the other disappears so IT can be known. But sometimes IT is overlooked. And that happens even with grief. It hides in grief. Hey, did you know that the reason grief hurts so much is because love has nowhere obvious to go. Grief is love encountering a form it can no longer touch. IT is that too! Oh, how IT hides in jealousy. I know how ugly jealousy can be. But look at it too, and see that jealousy is the fear that love is scarce. Isn’t it wild to realize that’s what it is? Being in an ocean and thinking water is a scarce commodity. That someone else receiving it means less remains for me. Like thinking because a candle borrows the fire from another lit candle, the fire is now less! Oh!! Even there, beneath possession and comparison, something is searching for what cannot be taken away. It just doesn’t know IT yet. IT hides in anger. Underneath my clenched jaw and my raised nigerian-accented voice, I find there’s something guarding itself, guarding a boundary, a wound, a longing to matter, a desire for the world to be different from what it is, for change to happen, damn it! But IT creates change! But IT hides while it creates the only thing that ever happens: change! IT hides in boredom. The restless hand reaching for your phone, pre-programmed to hit that Instagram icon. Oh, look how your thumb scrolls even though it knows not what it has seen. The opening and closing of apps, the vague subtle undetectable sense that somewhere, somehow, something interesting must be happening. Look! Look at it! Did you see it yet? See, even boredom is searching! It’s searching for IT. And in ambition too! You, who are looking for title and next position and next big business idea and next accomplishment and next this and next that! Don’t you see it? It’s not the success you want. Maybe what you want is to have a positive answer to the question, “Will I be enough when I get there?” Oh, you know where else it hides? In prayer! In folded hands and whispered petitions, in my beads passing through my fingers and the mantra that curls and winds itself in the inner secret chambers of my prayers. It hides in the person asking God for an answer, unaware maybe and perhaps, that the desire to find God is already occurring in God. Ah! It hides in doubt too. Most especially doubt. But the way doubt is, doubt is a sneaky sneaky camoflaging snake. You know how? Okay, see this: the person that says, “I do not know if any of this is true,” is still turned toward truth. See! You see what I mean? Doubt itself is contained in the sacred and so I can apologize to doubt for accusing it of cowardise. It was just trying to refuse to settle for counterfeit. So then doubt dresses as IT. Okay, how about science too? Does IT hide in science? Yes! Look at that damn scientist leaning over the microscope curious about what ‘this is?’. Isn’t it just laughable that IT camoflaged itself as mytochondric diatomasis ** insert some scientific latin name for something a scientist will look at under a microscope ** IT hides in philosophy asking, What does it mean? And religion that asks, Who made this? IT hides in the mystic who’s asking, Who is asking? In fact, we totally wake up when we laugh so freaking hard realizing that IT was in the question “Who is asking?”. I am laughing so hard typing this and IT hides in my laughter too. IT hides in the child who keeps saying why. IT hid in my grandmother, picking the egusi shells(melon seeds) saying nothing at all. Music too! IT HIDES SO PERFECTLY IN MUSIC. Ah! THe way IT hides is incredible. In fact, notice how when the music notes catches beneath your ribs and you hum, you totally get hypnotized so deeply that you don’t see IT. Remember when you listened to an a cappella harmony and one voice bends beneath another and several separate sounds somehow become one sound without losing their distinction and you just shook your head sideways like “Chai!! did you hear that??”. And the goosebumps just raised just to ‘praise the lord’? Oh, how even in us we recognize this IT but don’t know it. Oh, all the symbolisms in a capella. The many, yet one, distinct, yet inseparable. Oh, IT hides in trees turning toward sunlight and in the next breath after a deep laughter. Yeah, you were too distracted by the joke you didn’t catch it. IT hides in the bad news too. Sadly, yet somehow joyously. Especially when IT demonstrates itself in the first bit of silence after the news. IT hides in our leaving and in our returning too. In our wanting to stay and in our wanting to be free. IT hides in the most ridiculous things! Like yesterday, when I scrolled through Facebook Marketplace looking for a replacement for my air purifier. Little did I know that my search was a search for IT. Oh, I didn’t know at that time. Follow almost any desire far enough and you’d see the object of desire begins to disappear. Oh, you gotta see it for yourself! You have to! Okay, look at the air purifier one as an example. Why do I want the purifier? So the air will be clean. Why do I want clean air? So my home feels better. Why do I want my home to feel better? So I feel comfortable. Why comfort? Peace. Why peace? My gosh, how the air purifier was a symbol of Wholeness, of IT, of the Unspeakable. How you, my secret lover, the Jibaro and Jibarajera, the Seeker are also the Sought, my fascination is yours too. Oh, see how IT hides. We acquire one thing and then IT attaches itself to something else. I laugh so hard when I am awake to this hide and seek! In giggles, I want to scream in frustrated excitement, ‘just stop!’ But I can’t stop IT. Maybe because IT is too big to be in one thing. Maybe it’s because IT is not a thing at all. IT could not be a thing. A thing has edges. A thing begins somewhere and ends somewhere. A thing stands apart from another thing. Whatever this IT is has never presented an edge. IT could not be a pronoun, though I keep calling it “IT”. Some may call it “HIM”. IT could not be a noun because a noun would turn it into an object. IT could not even be a verb because IT is not a ‘what is happening’ alone. IT is not action. IT is not inaction. IT is not presence, if by presence we mean the opposite of absence. IT is not silence, because noise does not disturb it. IT is not stillness, because movement does not leave it. Oh, the Zen Buddhists would call IT emptiness, the Christian mystics would call IT fullness. Oh, what a sneaky sneaky little Sneaker. IT is not emptiness, because everything appears IN IT. IT is not fullness, because nothing has been added. IT is not oneness, because even “one” still has the possibility of two. Oh, don’t even say IT is God. IT cannot be God if by God we are talking of a being somewhere else watching all this happen. IT is not consciousness, if consciousness becomes another concept I carry around in my head. IT is not love even though love seems to come unbearably close. Maybe a sort of manifestation of IT. IT is not mystery, though mystery is one of the words I use for approaching IT. Every single word places a fence around what has no boundary. You see why that’s a problem? How can we solve this though? Okay, let me try this: What do you call what becomes the lover and the beloved, then aches across the imagined distance between them? What do you call what becomes the seeker, the seeking and the thing sought?What do you call what becomes the question and then spends a lifetime searching for its own answer? And even sets up panels as Richard Dwakins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris against all the concept warping apologetics? What do you call what opens its eyes as a newborn baby, forgets itself in a name, gathers a history, falls in love, gets frightened of a job loss, builds a life, loses pieces of itself, grows older, complains of backache from sleeping on the wrong side of the bed, and one evening sometime soon, looks at a sunset and becomes quiet for reasons it cannot explain? Tell me! Find the words. I will wait! Really, tell me, what do you call what becomes billions of faces without becoming divided? What do you call what looks through my eyes and yours without belonging to either of us? What do you call what becomes the wave without ever ceasing to be the sea? Okay, those are even too easy questions to answer. What is incredibly difficult to answer is how IT is only THIS VERY THING THAT’S EXPERIENCED AND EXPERIENCING. IT is the matcha, the movement of the hands, the baby crying, the prayer itself, the doubt, the heartbreak, the search for my airpurifier. Nothing whatsoever needs to be peeled away to reveal it. There is no like hidden chamber behind this very ordinary life that somehow the veil of the sacred will then so magically be lifted. Maybe that’s why I miss it all the time. We sometimes expect revelation to happen with the neon sign that says ‘revelation’. We wait for the ‘trumpet to sound’ so we can finally be ‘raptured’. When that delusion ends, we wait for enlightenment. Or we wait for God. And we wait for some kind of experience that will so suddenly finally remove all of our doubt. Shhhhh! Look! Don’t you see that the spoon is touching the bowl? The rain is gathering against the window and someone is laughiing so hard they can’ t breathe. Someone is whispering, “Please stay.” Someone else is saying, “I have to go.” And this IT, whatever this IT is, refuses none of it. IT becomes none of IT because becoming would imply that IT was something else before. IT contains none of it because there is no container separate from what appears. IT hides in everything. No. That is not quite right either. To hide, there must be somewhere else to hide. Maybe IT does not hide in everything. Maybe everything is how it shows itself. No wonder, no freaking wonder, my heartbreak doesn’t conceal IT, the Seeker was never even on the way to finding IT, the baby could NEVER reach toward IT. There has only ever been this strange, intimate, unnameable fact. What poetry! I remember here a passage in the Christian gospels where Jesus said to the disciples, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. Then the righteous will answer him, ‘when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Before I called it life, or God, or Consciousness, or Love, or Me, the Self(and quickly preface a ‘capital S’ for Self), or King before I called it anything, IT was all there is. And all of these are just too many words for NOTHING. I have not been writing as frequently as I thought I would. At this time, Life has called me to be more present with other things. But if you’re new here, Contemplative Currents is to be a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. 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