I went to Laguna last night with a couple of work buddies and did a stroll down the main street and hit a couple of watering holes. I was sitting at the bar, nursing a beer, when I heard “You have a transformer in your backyard that is really hurting your energy” addressed to me. I looked over, a black haired, older woman sitting close by was talking to me. “Hmmm…interesting pick up line,” I thought, “I wonder how often it works.”
The odd conversation started. She was in ‘energy’ business. In other words, she was a spiritual teller that made a living by talking to Mother earth who gave her an afflatus every so often, such as the backyard transformer hazard. She ventured to tell that I had two children, sons. No, one of each. No, daughters, but one was a tom boy. Alrighty then. She kept giving me stark warnings about the transformer though. The remedy was for me to buy a bag of tobacco, sprinkle it on the ground beneath the transformer and tell mother earth to be at peace.
I looked for my friend, Bill, who was standing a few steps back and signaled him to come to my rescue. I excused myself to go to the restroom. Before leaving she told Bill “Your mom is here!” He grinned and said “She is?” “Yes, and she has a message for you. She loves you very much. And there is someone else here too. Another close person to you. Maybe your brother.” Bill’s face went dark. His brother died of cancer a couple of years ago. He talks about him often. Bill seemed more annoyed than awed. I left; he humored her for a few minutes and excused himself too.
Yes, there is a transformer in the woods in our backyard that blows up every winter and takes the neighborhood power down for days. Bill has a deceased brother. I guess in this game, if you throw enough noodles at the wall, some are bound to stick. I always humor the spiritualist who talk about being in the ‘energy’ business. “I am too.” I say “electric cars.” “Oh don’t be so closed minded and skeptical.” I always hear back.
I am not uncomfortable with ignorance. After all, I am ignorant of about 99.99999% of what goes on in the universe and how it all works. But I hope mine is an enlightened ignorance that understands that there are things beyond our current level of comprehension. Heck, it understands that perhaps there are things beyond our total capacity to comprehend. The problem with the ‘spiritual’ ignorance is that it gives up any attempts to understand and uncover the mystery of how things really work; it simplifies everything to mundane and cliché levels of mother earth and father time. As we find out more about our world on a micro and macro level, we realize that the real ‘material’ mother earth and father time stuff is far more strange and mind boggling than the unstudied and lazy spiritual renditions of them.
No I don’t think I’ll be sprinkling tobacco under the transformer in the backyard anytime soon. I will not mediate to levitate either. Though Niel DeGross Tyson qualifies this by saying “…you could perform this stunt if you managed to let forth a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulents.” An astrophysicists with fart humor, how great is that?!
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