Neale Donald Walsch's gift
A few weeks ago I met a man.
It was quite ordinary and remarkable how we met.
I had come to grab a cup of coffee from a local haunt, and on the way out my eyes spotted a man sitting on a chair reading the paper. He was a heavy-framed man in his fifties, wearing a toboggan over his long hair.
His aura struck me as familiar, a life-long old friend. But I had never seen him before.
I exited the cafe and sought a table on the patio and began to work.
A few moments later he walked out to leave.
“Excuse me!” I called out.
He looked at me and stopped.
“Are you an actor, perchance?”
“Yes I am,” he replied, a bit puzzled and delighted at the same time. “How did you know?”
“I don’t know, it just struck me…you look familiar somehow,” I replied. “I’m a filmmaker and something about you resonates with a project I’m producing.” I gave him my business card.
He looked at it and smiled, “your name is Iliad?”
“Yes, like the book. But I always say that by the time I’m done with this life there will be two Iliads in history competing for the name!”
“I believe you will succeed. By the way my name is Socrates…” and he extended his own business card to me. It described him as a personal yoga instructor.
We engaged in an impromptu and fluid conversation and I told him about Ashleigh’s Vengeance.
He told me about his eastward drift form LA, and the hardship he had encountered along the way…
And he told me about a book he was reading and how it had moved him…
I bid him good luck, and he me, and we parted. The name of the book he mentioned escaped me and I thought no further of it.
That was several weeks ago.
Since then my life has taken a turn for the macabre and surreal, laced with a heavy dose of nightmare and pain.
The clearer my eyes see the more horror I begin to discover in the fate of man’s will adrift as he is in the immense breath of darkness reigning over his destiny and futility.
Yet…there are the guardians of fire, floating in their rafts amid the massive waves in the heart of a raging storm, and how beautiful do their lights shine in the torrent of dark fury…
And that’s when it happened:
Yesterday, while holding on for dear life in my capsized raft, I headed for a cup of coffee prior to a meeting in Baltimore.
As I got up to leave, I saw him standing by my table, looking at me with a half smile. At first I struggled to place him, and then he emerged from the haze of my memory.
“There he is,” he said, looking at me intently, still smiling.
“Hey, how are you!” I recollected myself.
“Good. You?”
“Going through a storm, but still holding on to the light… How’s your business? Yoga was it?”
“Making ends meet… but it let’s me pass –
“Not going back to LA, are you?”
“I’m going with the flow man… I’ve been reading this book, and it’s just turning my whole world around…”
“You had mentioned a book to me last time we met…,” I tried to remember.
“Conversations with God.”
“That’s it! Now I remember, you told me about this a couple months ago…”
“It’s about the space between us. About the sentience in the void, and it’s as if our whole being is aware…constantly…”
I glanced at my watch. “I’m running late for my meeting, have to leave now, but I need to read this book Socrates,” I said, not wanting to end the conversation. “We have to pick this up at a later time.”
“Here…, I’ll walk to your car with you.”
As we walked to the intersection the light turned red for us, but I walked ahead regardless.
“You’re gonna take it?”
“Got to!”
He followed me. As we approached my car, he stopped one car short next to a dented old gray Toyota sedan, and waved goodbye. He was parked right behind me.
“Let me know how it goes,” he said with a subtle smile as he entered his car.
“I will…”
That evening, I headed for the bookstore and began to read…
-Iliad Alexander Terra
November 12th, 2009
