The (unwitnessed) Magnificence of Man

For the first few years after I returned to Vancouver from the Kootenays, I walked and shopped alone. Having been on my own since I was 16 arriving from Toronto at English Bay in 1968 to join the sand mites, I was accustomed to my aloneness and park benches. What I didn’t expect this time in this new millenium was the indifference of everyone I encountered. Perfected indifference. Zip for progress in the spiritual zone.

From my perspective as I strolled by these people who thought they were tuned in, they were just i-puddled, completely under the human climate, almost subterranean in their awareness of their fellow human beings. And they think that’s cool. To me it’s cold. Very. The only time I heard a human voice aside from someone taking my money at a counter was when I heard, “Sawhee,” or something similarly spoken by another disinterested neighbourhood shopper who manages to bump into me with their human lights turned off.

And the house I’ve lived in for years is populated by isolated individuals whose show of politeness borders on seething contempt. And they’re all depressed from what I can gather. So I’m escaping. The property janitor acts like a Lord while he mumbles about the property unintelligibly and the security guards who live here spy at my quiet-as-doormouse visitors imagining that we’re all cooking up crack every night. And they report this slander to the arrogant bully of a property manager who took over control of the house from an 82 year old female owner who sells her long-dead husband's clothes on the sidewalk and keeps the lights indoors turned off to save ten cents. Sometimes, the tenants here have gone without shower services for three days because of this unabashed greed and fear of paying plumbers. Yawn.

It's all in keeping with this 'new age' of unadulterated greed and self-indulgence. People in this mass media age are throwing off words like the sensationalist newscasters they listen to every day. Meaningless, and resulting word by word in the unravelling of any sense of civilization.

Sneermeisters in their super-cars pumping and braking at every little light in the west end (raging?) and urban pet owners with their stretcho-leashes pompously hogging the sidewalks are all wasting their humanity as they overlook that vastness of the individual who walks by, head up, and looks them in the eye, to absolutely no avail. The doggie-freaks preoccupied with being bent over as they are scooping the excrement of their little precious.

In the case of that individual where his charitableness is automatic, he is the one of true wealth, who upon each encounter with another human being will detect beauty, the depth of God’s love and mercy and the magnificence of man. Upon every encounter joy and the full wind of freedom will reach him.

And who would know if the one passing you by was the Righteous Teacher? What do we do? We sweep past them grandly gazing at the sidewalk, pondering, ever pondering. How would you know? Keep staring at the sidewalk listening to your bizarre, self-chilling tunes. Another animated corpse, "...less than a scratch on the surface of the earth."