No Darshan?

Lily was eight and her babysitter was the 12-year-old daughter of the owners of Healing Earth Resources, Chicago’s premier new age emporium at the time.

Karina was a daytime babysitter, a young babysitter for times when I was not too far away, for not too long. As a mother, I liked her because her parents were well known, and because she went to the Chicago Waldorf school, where Lily went. Ultimately, I liked her because we didn’t seem the least bit weird, compared to her crystal-selling family. I loved their store. Plus, Lily was crazy about her. One summer morning, I picked her up at her parents’ shop, where they both worked for a good ten hours a day, and her mom was excited when I said I was going to go see Ammachi, the hugging saint, who was known at that time for having given 23,000 hugs--it is now said to be 43 million.

Karina’s mom assumed I would be bringing the girls along, and enthusiastically told her daughter to go run and get her Ammachi doll. (Who knew?) I hadn’t actually been planning to take the girls, but my babysitter’s mom said she had taken Karina annually for years, and that it would be an unforgettable experience for Lily. While I had my doubts, and craved alone time in my car, it felt a little bit selfish to refuse, so I drove us out to a west suburban hotel where we easily found our way to the ballroom doors, only to see that the event was already in progress.

“You’ll have to come back this afternoon,” one of the volunteers said, “Get a number at that table over there now, hang onto it for a few hours, and that will be your place in line for your hug.” I had no choice but to agree, disappointing though that was. You sit in a room for quite a while apparently, as long as it takes, so that you can then get in a line to get a hug while the hundreds of other people sing or chant or just soak up the energy of being around Amma. Sometimes it lasts all night. That’s why I was there in the morning. We had gotten there around 10, but apparently it had begun at 6. Everyone who’d ever done this had told me it had been a lifechanging experience…but they weren’t toting 8 and 12 year olds, who were going to need to do things like eat, and pee, and drink water, and then ask to pee again. I was thinking we’d just leave. I don’t like lines. And a hug is nice, but. Maybe we’d go to Barnes & Noble instead.

While I pondered the options, a different volunteer approached me and said, here, I’ll sneak you in. I surprised and thrilled. After preparing the girls to possibly get right back into the car and go to the bookstore, they happily shifted into “never mind, let’s go inside” mode. We stood in the back of the room for a few minutes, wondering where to settle, when that same angel of a volunteer came back and steered us across the packed ballroom. “If you stand right here,” she said, “you’ll be able to touch her as she walks out.” I probably wouldn’t touch her, but I liked the idea of proximity. We stood in her suggested place and watched people one by one walk up the two steps in the middle of the room to the throne on which Ammachi was sitting, receive a hug, and return to their seat on the floor. There were no other chairs, besides hers. You could sit or stand. This process of being recognized by a guru, or a saint, is called Darshan. I had never seen anything like this, and it was pretty cool just to be in the same room with all these spiritual people, and certainly I felt good about giving my daughter a diversity of experiences. Before I knew it, the hugging ceremony was over, literally I didn’t realize it; there was no fanfare. Somehow, I guess had spaced out or something, but with no announcement, Ammachi, a tiny Indian woman in white, and her entourage, also all in white, were walking down the aisle of the crowded ballroom toward us and would indeed have to walk right past us—just as the volunteer had said! Everyone was now standing.

When Ammachi and her entourage were about to pass us, she stopped, looked directly into my eyes, and said, “No Darshan?” 

I was shocked that she had just hugged 800 people yet somehow realized I was not one of them. How on earth?! Maybe it was the little girls, maybe it was Karina with her Ammachi doll. I didn’t know how to reply. “No Darshan?” I didn’t realize she spoke any English, but I didn’t know how much she actually spoke, and as I was mentally composing a reply to the effect of “Well, I didn’t realized it started at 6, I had no idea there was a protocol for this, we don’t even have numbers, and we are not actually even supposed to be in this room, but someone snuck us in,” she opened her arms to Karina, and then to Lily, and then to me. 

In Ammachi’s arms, time stopped, my brain stopped, and I knew nothing. I knew nothing except that my Divine Mother, my real mother, the mother of the entire Universe loved me beyond measure, and that there was no greater love than this. I disappeared into the love. I don’t know how long I was in her arms. It felt infinite. But based on Lily’s and Karina’s hugs, it was probably about ten seconds.

The tiny woman released me and continued on her procession out the door. I could have wept, or sung an aria, but I couldn’t actually do anything. I couldn’t move. I was standing in a magic spot, and I never wanted to leave. This peak life experience seemed to be about being in the exact spot where I was standing, in the right place at the right time. But I was in a hotel ballroom in Naperville, Illinois, the most ordinary place ever. Eventually most people had followed the procession out of the room, and the girls were ready too. Volunteers were making Indian food and serving it on paper plates, so I got each of us one and we sat down to eat. It was heavenly.

I asked the girls how they liked their hug.

“It was good,” they both replied.

Hummingbird Magic

PART ONE

Last year at my friend’s birthday party, I recognized a guy from the tennis club, a guy who always played on court one (my deepest aspiration), so I went over to introduce myself, and as I approached I heard him say the words, “…feeding the hummingbirds.” When I had found myself living in California three years ago, practically by accident, I had entered a mini romance with hummingbirds, stopping to gaze longingly at them and even take their picture if possible, which was fairly rare, because hummingbirds are constantly in motion. I had glimpsed one or two in Chicago over the decades, but in California they were plentiful, and in Palm Springs they were ubiquitous. I found them gloriously captivating and mysterious. When I had arrived in Palm Springs, Amazon magically recommended a hummingbird documentary in which the birds had been slowed down so that the human eye could truly see them, hanging there in midair, beating their wings 70 times a second, while their bodies swayed…in midair. It was mesmerizing. Speaking of magic, the videographer had placed a tiny camera inside a flower, capturing the hummingbird’s beak entering, from the flower’s point of view. 

So I was intrigued to hear that court one tennis player Jason feeds the hummingbirds. Faithfully. Every night. By hand, he said. 

“Wait, so they land on the feeder while you’re holding it?” This just seemed preposterous. Hummingbirds are elusive. After all, they’re birds!

“Yes, I use a hand-held feeder,” he said matter-of-factly.

“And they land on it.” 

Yes, they land on it. 

“When can I feed them?” As part of my fake-retirement (I am indeed still working, but my life in Palm Springs has taken on a retirement vibe), my entire social circle now consists of gay men. Their presence has a joyfully un-inhibiting effect on me, so it seemed absolutely fine to invite myself over to Jason’s, even though we had just met that second.

The very next evening, I went to his house to feed the birds, and while none of them landed on my feeder, a gorgeous purple-headed hummingbird did drink from my feeder, hovering before me in midair. Mind. Blown. 

Seriously: it really did blow my mind. Because the second the hummingbird hovered over my feeder, I sensed that even one thought would be felt by the hummingbird, one thought might cause it to dart away. I cleared my mind, almost involuntarily, and slowed my breathing. The beating of its wings fanned the hand that held the feeder, cooling it off like an actual fan and making, yes, a humming sound, quite a loud hum for such a tiny creature. We made eye contact. I could see its individual feathers, gorgeously defined, and its improbably long and seemingly fragile beak, hovering before me looking just like it did in the slow-motion documentary scenes, except that its wings were a blur as they fanned my hand. It tipped its beak forward so I could see the top of its shining purple head, then it sipped with what seemed to be a long, transparent tongue, like a tiny straw the diameter of a thread. It was arresting. Jason took a picture. He said it was a male.

At any given time, at least ten hummingbirds were flying around us that evening. Actually, they were impossible to count, unless they landed, which they never did all at once. Jason had a dozen feeders strategically arranged around his courtyard, and he had offered me the best feeding spot, the chair he sat in every night, the chair from which the hummingbirds were accustomed to being fed. Simply being in the midst of so many hummingbirds was exhilarating. It was an incomparable sort of paradox to experience that level of internal exhilaration while sitting absolutely still, so my little yellow feeder would seem inviting.

I thanked Jason profusely when I left and then proceeded to text everyone I’d ever met to proclaim that I had just experienced a peak life moment, like the time I stood beneath a 100-foot waterfall in Maui and time stopped. The next day, when I told Jason I’d had a peak life experience, he responded: “But you have to come back, you have to see what it’s like when they land on your feeder!”

As a yoga teacher and longtime practitioner of presence, I was amused. He wanted me to want more?! But I’ve trained myself to be happy with what is! 

“Jason,” I protested, “Just let me enjoy the moment! I don’t want to feel aspirational!" 

But in truth, I did want more!

I reflected on the mental state the hummingbirds had elicited in me. But wait, did the hummingbirds elicit that state, or did spending my adult life learning to be still and breathe simply kick in habitually? I was excited to explore that question the next time I fed them. Later that day, I texted to ask him when I could come back.

PART TWO

The next time I saw Jason at tennis he proclaimed that we needed a secret hummingbird signal, like a couple of fifth grade girls, so we invented one that second, and we have flashed our little hand signal across the tennis court ever since. That’s how we say hi. I have no idea whether the other players notice our secret greeting, and I don’t care, and I bet he doesn’t either, and I suspect that if I ran into him anywhere else on earth, we would flash our secret hummingbird signal. 

“Does it seem like he’s maybe on the spectrum?” asked my daughter, when I told her about my hummingbird playdates and secret signal with Jason. She pointed out his extreme daily dedication to the feeding routine, which seems totally normal to me and not on any kind of spectrum (even though I’ve left out the boring daily prep and cleaning of the feeders, as well as the week he spent trying unsuccessfully to get the first one to land on his handheld feeder in the first place). I mean, if I had cultivated the attention of that many hummingbirds, I’d have to feed them every day, too. How could I sit in my house focused on my own dinner, while the hummingbirds were thirsty? I said his obsession seemed totally normal, and she said then maybe I am also on the spectrum, after which we agreed that it was, at minimum, in extremely poor taste to diagnose other people. So I prefer to consider it a daily act of devotion.

And yes, a hummingbird did land on my handheld feeder the second time I went to Jason’s. Mind. Blown. (Again.) I watched its little landing gear emerge and hang there vulnerably for a moment. I could hardly believe I was lucky enough see the tiny hummingbird feet emerge tentatively, as he ascertained whether my feeder was a safe place to land. That long moment of watching and waiting was, again, a brief meditation. My mind stopped, in awe. I have never been more still than when I quiet my mind to match a hummingbird’s vibe.

As I got into my car after that utterly improbable feeder landing, I thanked Jason for the even more significant and downright amazing peak life moment, and before I had time to revel in it, he exclaimed, “But you have to come back again soon, so one can land on your FINGER!” 

PART THREE: 

Driving home after the magnificent feeder landing, excited for the day that a hummingbird might, improbably, eventually, land on my finger, I reflected on how fully the hummingbirds and their increasing proximity were a mirror for my human mind and for my human tendency to desire more. And more! It’s what addictions are made of. And it’s what meditation addresses. Despite and beyond the grasping nature of my mind, I was called to be unwaveringly present and truly non-grasping before the hummingbird would release its landing gear and land on my feeder. They are just so very careful about where they land. 

I felt it, in my body, on night three, the first time I wished a hummingbird would land on my finger. It was a childlike excitement, but I could also feel that it was not the most helpful vibration for attracting a hummingbird. Being present for a hummingbird invites a quiet unlike anything I’ve ever experienced with my eyes open. I confess it’s been a long while since I’ve done an hourlong, seated meditation. But that’s what hand-held hummingbird feeding is. It’s about being still. And it’s been one of the highlights of my Palm Springs existence. It’s my new favorite activity that, like yoga--and like tennis before it--instantly drew me in, despite the inactivity. 

And because I must sit still for uncomfortable lengths of time, hummingbird feeding shows me what’s going on in my mind and my body, and I imagine, by extrapolation, the bodies and minds of most of humanity. Because aren’t we all like that? I just want a hummingbird to land, now! Aren’t most of us pretty impatient? Don’t we all want what we want when we want it? And hasn’t that very—merely—human feeling become even more acute in a world in which we can order a hummingbird feeder this second on our handheld device and have it in our hand tomorrow? 

Over decades, I’ve learned to address my human impatience as it emerges, a minor but inevitable hurdle. Finally, these days, the first moment of feeling impatient has become a reminder to be patient. So, there is a way in which waiting for a hummingbird to land has been a version of yoga, to the extent than anything else can “be” yoga. It simply points out the impatience inside me, so I can let go of it.

The sweet satisfaction of feeling a hummingbird grip my finger is one of those things that simply can’t be rushed. I have almost no control whatsoever over whether one lands or not. That’s why it was such an unexpected, etheric blessing on evening three to feel Purplehead’s minuscule toenails grab onto my index finger, his wings stunningly still and silent while he briefly dipped his beak into my feeder. Afterward, I was thrilled to find that Jason had captured it on video. And in case you’re wondering, as I left that evening, Jason insisted I come back soon so I could experience a double finger landing! 

Over the past year, while feeding the hummingbirds, I’ve had the urge to check my email, check Instagram, photograph the hummingbirds, video the hummingbirds, text a hummingbird photo or video to a friend, and FaceTime my daughter--and yes, I have succumbed to each of those urges at least once…while feeding the hummingbirds. And yes, they are utterly captivating. But I've fed them a lot, so it's no longer new. These impulses are unremitting, always out there, requesting a response, whether or not I’m feeding the hummingbirds, and it is my choice whether or not to let them distract me from that fleeting, priceless moment when that tiny spark of life finally hovers before me, checking me out, discerning whether I’m friend or foe. But it’s not just when I’m feeding the hummingbirds. I can be driving, doing yoga, teaching yoga, or playing tennis. I can be anywhere on earth, and there will be an impulse to check to see what’s happening somewhere else on earth. 

A new experience, whether it’s in your backyard or a foreign country, is so much easier to be present for. So is a new person! How long has it been since you gazed into your longtime partner’s eyes? What does it take to actually be present in daily life? My phone always holds the promise of something new. It’s the product of an entire industry that masquerades as essential, beneficial, but is actually an ongoing distraction that lures us into anything BUT the present moment. Having acknowledged that, as a yoga teacher, I can’t blame my phone for adding distractions any more than I can blame Jason for fanning the flames of my merely human desire for more.

To quote myself: “What yoga does--if you’re truly doing yoga as opposed to merely stretching--is teach you to recognize the thoughts that keep you from fully experiencing any given moment.” 

With or without the magic of hummingbirds.