"When the lights come on in the kitchen of our house, and when behind the closed door and closed windows you know their Mother is cooking the evening meal, and that the children, Anna and Nicky and Maddy and Pete -and Berry the big dog as well- are gravitating towards the table, and that soon it will be time to head inside-  but not yet, not quite yet- that's when you seem to remember what you’ve always known. That it’s your own perfect self you see in everything you turn your eyes to. That there’s nowhere you can look where you won’t see your own perfect self. And that your own perfect self is not just you but it’s me as well, and everyone else, every creature on this Earth. That we’re all the same single, perfect self."

golden flower      I had fallen asleep in the front bedroom. It was a nap before dinner. Our house was a two story house, and outside the bedroom windows the tree branches were shaking violently. You could hear the wind. I was just waking up, and I was in that perfect peaceful state you sometimes find when coming out of a nap. The late afternoon, early evening summer light was flooding the room. Everything was completely golden. My mother’s voice pulled me out of it. She was downstairs, at the foot of the stairs, and she was calling me to dinner. When I came into the kitchen I felt a tremendous darkness all around me, as though thunderclouds were gathering over my head. I knew I wasn’t fit for human company. I had finished the collection of short stories which I had worked on for two years, and I wanted to start something big, which would take a long time to complete, a really large work. I felt like lightning was crackling around my head. I went outside after dinner and some of my friends were already hanging out. One girl, who we called Wacky, shivered and said, “Oooh, sweater weather.” It was mid-July and yet there were these strong cold winds. But the sky was clear blue, completely clear. The slanting light was so bright, and it seemed like the winds were blowing the light through the leaves and giving it a green gold glow. I absolutely loved it. I never would’ve considered putting on a sweater. It felt like the winds were blowing right through me, chasing away all things old, all things borrowed, giving me the chance to fill up with things completely new.

I left Wacky and the others and walked down the street, towards Ritner Street, and then crossed 21st Street and knocked on the door of my friend Sonny's house. I was twenty four years old. It was 1978. Sonny was several years older than me. He was working as a school teacher but he was unhappy, was looking around for his next move, a way to change his life. He was living in his parents’ house but his parents had moved out, had retired to Florida, and he was living in the house until he decided what to do with himself. In the meantime, the house was a sort of party house for Sonny and his friends, who were older than my crowd of friends. Most of them were unmarried but had careers and, like Sonny, were looking around for less conventional ways to live their lives other than settling down and marrying. Sonny answered the door and he said, “Joe, your Grandmom is looking for you.” When he saw me hesitate he said, “Go see her, Joe.” My mother’s mother, Grandmom Esposito, lived across the street from Sonny in a first floor apartment. It was only half a block down from my parents’ house, on the same side of the street. They had moved her there when she could no longer take care of herself in the big house in which she and my grandfather had raised my mother and her brother. Grandpop Esposito had died many years ago. I would run chores for Grandmom. When Sonny told me to go see her I hesitated because Grandmom Esposito was a very eccentric hypochondriac who could hold you for long periods of time in rambling conversations. I didn’t like the fact that I was always trying to escape her clutches, I felt guilty, but I couldn’t help myself. I crossed the street and went to see her. Then I went to the store and got her some trivial things which she didn’t need but which made her happy, and then I managed to get away fairly quickly.

It was dark by now. The winds had died down. I went back down the block to my house and my friends were already standing around my porch. Out of that whole bunch I had two or three close friends who could easily see what I was feeling, and they knew right off the bat that something was going on with me. Very kindly, they simply let me be and just carried on with their conversations. Though the winds had died down it was still a little chilly, especially considering it was a mid-July night, and it felt like Autumn. Later on that night five or six of us left the others and went to the backyard and sat in our chairs under my big sycamore tree. Sometimes the winds might kick up briefly and wave the big branches which were over our heads. Donny was there, and Franny, and Greg, and maybe one or two others. We all had our usual chairs. Mine was a sort of outdoor rocking chair with pads. One or two of the metal slats on the seat had come off, and I had tied on some rope to replace them. It was definitely my favorite chair. Everybody always just let me sit in it, nobody ever tried to jump into it and claim first rights. I was sitting there flicking my Bic, flicking it over and over, watching the spark, then the flame, then watching it die out before beginning again, while my friends talked back and forth. It was right around midnight when everyone broke up and went home. I decided to stay a while. This sycamore tree was around fifty years old when we first moved here to 21st Street. I was four years old then. All my life my brother and I and our neighborhood friends had played around it. When we were small we had little football games right there in the yard, or wiffleball baseball games. Once, when I saw some sap dripping from the tree, I asked my Dad to call a tree guy and the tree guy did some things to make sure the tree stayed healthy. Now that I was grown I had my weights set up right under the tree, and in the evenings my friends and I hung out there. After my friends left I sunk down into a sort of meditation. I wasn’t asleep but I was totally peaceful and my mind got real quiet. I was happy beneath my tree. 

And then something happened. I felt like I dropped down into the earth, and I was looking down, maybe ten feet beneath me, at a scene which was incredible to me. I saw four things arrayed around a circle, like they were on the four points of the compass, and in that moment I knew just what they were. I knew that they were the four things out of which everything else in the world is made. And then they started to rotate, slowly at first, and then rapidly, till they were spinning fast like an airplane’s propellers, and then just like a propeller which is rapidly turning they became one thing. And the four things which had joined into one thing raised up from their position beneath me, and I was looking at a blood red circle, and in this circle there was a golden cross, equal armed, and around the arms of the cross there were green roses. And I guess I said “Ohhhhh!” I completely lost my cool, I was awestruck. And that’s when I came out of my meditative state. It’s almost as though, if I hadn’t been awestruck, if I could have just kept a cool head, then I wouldn’t have lost that vision, I could have maintained it, at least for a little longer. I never told anyone what happened to me, not for maybe thirty years, except for one fellow I met at a meditation conference a few years later. That October I started work on a book which I wrote for the next five years. I always felt like the purpose of the book was to find a way to put that vision into context. To help somehow make it real by tying it in to everything else that was happening to me. Now, nearly forty years later, I’m satisfied when I tell myself that I went down to the crossroads that night, and whatever decisions I made afterwards as a result had life-long consequences. It was an hour of decision, and I gave my life in service to what I experienced that night in the backyard under my sycamore tree. Right or wrong, that simple fact stands.