Half way back to SoCal and Leonard Cohen sings through my ear buds "a cold and a broken" (but nonetheless exultant) "Halleluja." Sometimes on these trips, with so many people expecting something from me and seeing me through the filter of those expectations, I start to lose touch with who I am. Maybe it's because I'm on my way home, maybe it's because I touched base with Lise today, or Aimee and Maegan last night, or my sons yesterday morning, or maybe it's Leonard's voice in my ear, but I feel the light within me rise and shine through my fingertips and I think maybe I can be who I am, at least for a little while, after all. And, maybe that's even enough.
Ironically, at this moment I see an angel. She's across the aisle and two rows in front of me, in pink pajamas with footies. She looks at me, her blue eyes to my green, her soft smooth tiny pink face to my my big old blotchy one, and she gives me a squinty smile -- no guile so she expects no guile, no judgment so she expects no judgment, no hidden recesses so she allows me none. Her mother looks around wondering to whom her infant daughter is suddenly paying such rapt attention, sees the 3-year-old in the seat in front of me and makes the natural assumption. But no, she's communing with the old grandpa another row back.
Years ago, one night in Eugene, Baba Ram Dass said that he can always see God looking out at him from any person -- the checker at the grocery store, the pedestrian he's passing on the street, even the the helmeted policeman. So, maybe it's not an angel I see, but God looking out at me. And she smiles that toothless flush-faced clear-eyed smile, clasps her hands together and pulls them in to her tiny chest in a gesture of utter wholeness and authenticity.
Halleluja.
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