am I in your light?

I went to the Lyric Opera House last night. The performance was both spectacular and grueling. Spectacular lighting, set design, and choreography. The movements of the bodies and the way the forms were lit and positioned on stage was mesmerizing at times. There was one point where a couple of women upstage held hands and arched back, heads thrown back, legs collapsing between legs until their bodies alighted on the floor where they gracefully and fluidly writhed and circled one another, head over head, around and around still connected at the hands, the surge and swell of curves cast alternately in slices of light and shadow. Behind them, downstage, were a couple of men mirroring their movements. When the hands of the two couples let go, the bodies were stilled and four quiet impressions of the dead were all that was left of the stunning spectacle they had just been.

Another time, toward the end, morphing colors offset silhouettes of what seemed to be hundreds of bodies on the floor on their backs with their limbs stretched up and reaching, reaching.

For all the breathtaking glory of these aspects of the performance, the music itself was tiresome and repetitive, sounding like the score of a bad horror film. The story (or lack thereof) was also quite weak, with at least one half of the entire time spent on the weather conditions at the test site for the A-bomb in 1945 and the remainder of the time spent rattling off nonsensical technical information or borrowed poetry from John Donne and others. There was one part of the script, one line actually, that jumped out at me. It was when the wife of Oppenheimer, lying in bed next to him, sang sweetly the words: “am I in your light?”

I was sitting next to my friend and had to hide my face because I was embarrassed by the tears that welled fast and without warning at the instant and automatic dual understanding of this question: am I blocking the light that illuminates your path and am I in the path of the light for which you are the source? Each one applies to my human experience of relating to both the divine and the other (ultimately one and the same) as well as to myself. When asking such a question, either answer can be interpreted either way, which means essentially that the questioner already has the answer. I know this is abstract, but it is clear to me. Maybe I can illustrate it with a story.

This morning, I woke up to the tap tap tap of my dog’s nails on the hardwood floors. I sat up in bed and looked at her, catching her in the act of stealing a sock from my dirty clothes pile. With it clamped in her teeth, she looked at me, ears flattened back, eyes flooded with guilt and simultaneous defiance. Her body hunched low, as though I would no longer see her if she could just make herself small enough. I glared back at her, trying hard not to smile or laugh, feeling more insane love for this ridiculous tiny creature than I can justify with reason, and we were caught there, eyes locked, suspended in a moment of wordless, language-less communication. Slowly, she released the sock from her jaws, turned, and tapped back out of my room, little shoulder blades rising and falling with each step, small hips swinging, itself a communication in the form of a strut, an attitude.

The natural highs of daily life are the infinitesimal occurrences such as this that signify something much greater, where questions are the same as answers and they all occur simultaneously, without words or anything like them.