… you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.
— from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Where is the smell of a banana?
As always when he asked these things, Jacob had a look of wild-eyed revelation. This question was proof, to him, of a vast and irreducible spiritual plane. If everything boils down to material, where are experiences?
I turned this over in my mind, looking at the ground as we shuffled our sandpaper feet over the concrete. He stared up at my profile through tendrils of curly brown hair that poked from underneath a safari hat, sunscreen still slathered on his pale face, which glowed in the orange Waikiki street lights. The beach spanned the darkness to our left, and the city buzzed to our right.
I’d only been in Honolulu one night, and everyone I met still seemed like a door into their own blissful dreamworld – a magician named “Mystic,” a tight-rope walker waving rainbow lights, a man juggling flames.
Jacob was the strangest and most alluring of them all. He was the founder of my brother’s company at the time, and he slept in my extra room during my first week on the island, just before their company retreat. After a night riffing on oceanic energy, telepathy, and the Tao Te Ching, I was flattered when he decided to extend his stay. For a moment, the darkness that haunted me disappeared, I hoped forever.
I was wrong.
—
“When the student is ready, the teacher will come,” he would say. After a year at home, Jacob seemed like a harbinger of spiritual freedom and maturity, childlike and eccentric as he was.
He showed me a book called Engaging the Movement of Life, which helped me see health through the lens of alignment – pain as a signal for attention, rather than a pathology. I had just finished Krishnamurti’s Total Freedom and found in it a similar message – to openly attend to your own suffering:
You must know the prison in which you are living, how it has been created; and in examining it without any self-defense you will find out for yourself its true significance, which no other can convey to you.
Of course, I did the opposite. I ran away from home toward the sublime – only to find that it was all around me, that I had nowhere else to go.
—
During his last night, after a day of surfing and a few hours of lively conversation, there was a silence. We listened briefly to the stream of cars wooshing along Highway 1, cutting a horseshoe along the island’s southern shore. It was enough space for that feeling to return, sudden and devastating – a strangling sensation in my throat.
“Are you ok?” he asked, his wide, intense eyes softening a bit.
No words.
What was it, Jacob, that gripped me? This is for you, for the person I thought you were then – my teacher and friend, who loved me and wanted me to be free.
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
This was Jacob’s favorite zen kōan – a question or story meant to provoke a state of pure, unthinking attention.
Mine is a story called “The Tiger and the Strawberry.” A man is chased by a tiger and finds himself clinging to a vine off of a cliffside, dangling over the hungry jaws of yet another tiger. A mouse starts to gnaw at the vine.
At this moment, he sees a beautiful, plump strawberry. He pops it into his mouth. It’s delicious.
—
The week I left for Honolulu, I too was terrified. After graduating during COVID, I spent the year wandering the dry yellow hills of my parents’ home in San Ramon with wild thoughts, no job, no direction.
When I started designing websites, my brother said I should move near him in Hawaii; my father agreed. Looking back, I never made the decision. I relocated swiftly into my apartment, which was owned by my dad’s friend.
Embarrassing, that my subsidized year in Hawaii was the hardest time of my life. And revealing – not just of my own failings but of the elusive structure of joy and suffering. I took my prison with me across the ocean.
Every day I surfed, or hiked, or both. After Jacob left, and my later roommate George left, I made no more friends. Sometimes I would go days without talking, shuttling myself to and from the beach alone, using my voice only to check in with clients over Zoom. It was a hard lesson in the misery of privilege, lying in my underwear after a day in the sun, crying over the rough twine carpet of my apartment.
The sound of one hand clapping.
—
“Money is Qi,” Jacob would say. “It needs to flow through you.” He was a natural at raising capital, my brother told me – just the quirky Silicon Valley genius type that investors lose their shit over. Perhaps it was this exact indifference to money that made him so magnetic toward it.
And perhaps it explains his flippant treatment of the company’s funds. When he stayed with me, he would pay hundreds of dollars an hour for Qigong lessons with reknowned masters. Over time, my brother and the others at the company would lose faith in his good sense and leave.
Every once in a while I get a text from Jacob, saying that he misses me, that he wants to connect me to someone. He means it, in his own way – but he never responds. He’s like a ghost, appearing as he pleases, out of touch.
—
Money: if not the root of evil, the indifferent undercurrent that pushes it along. I hated my family’s obsession with it. I chose to study art, and I resolved to live at home painting and writing until it worked out.
I did this until I couldn’t. After a few months I could no longer look my father in the eye, across the dark brown wooden table of our home in San Ramon, under the hanging lamp. The strangling sensation began to haunt me.
Jacob would say that my throat chakra – the center of communication, self-assurance, and truth – was blocked. Maybe he was right. Without money, I had no words, no voice. My dad would ask me a question and I would freeze. Writing stopped, painting stopped.
—
There are tigers in my dreams. Last night there was one in my kitchen. It looked into my eyes and approached me.
It wasn’t rushed. There was no anger.
I backed away toward the window. I had no choice but to exit and climb the façade. The tiger wouldn’t go further, stuck its head out of the window. It observed me as I clung to the bricks.
D-d-d-did you see the frightened ones?
Over time, Pink Floyd’s The Wall became my anthem, an ode to the manic loneliness that consumed me. I loved its moments of dizzying bliss and deep despair, the snarky wit that runs through it all like barbed wire.
I would listen and walk the streets aimlessly past the homes where locals dilly-dallied in their flip-flops, sun blaring overhead. “Goodbye Blue Sky” would come on, starting with a bright guitar riff and descending into heart-dropping darkness:
D-d-d-did you see the frightened ones?
D-d-d-did you hear the falling bombs?
D-d-d-did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?
On cue, an airplane tore a white scar through the blue. I focused my gaze on it, shocked by a sudden awareness of distance. Here, on this rock in the middle of the ocean.
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye blu-u-ue sky
Goodbye…
What could your life be like in 10 years?
When George moved in, we would sit by the table and puff cigars with the windows open, talking about our dreams, blowing them around like smoke.
He liked to visualize: what could your life be like in 10 years if you had everything you ever wanted? In his vision, he’s sitting in the living room of his home in the Hollywood Hills, musing with his friends about how grateful he is to have fulfilled his dream as a musician, that they’ve fulfilled theirs as actors, founders, writers.
A few months later, he went back to L.A.; I stayed.
—
Maybe it was too many drinks to drive, but I had to swim. I stumbled into my dirty silver Corolla and bombed it down the highway with my windows down, blasting George’s house music.
At the beach, the Hawaiians, gathered in loud groups around their barbecues, looked at me strangely as I exited my car. I galloped past and jumped into the warm water, swam away from the shore. I swam past the old man picking for clams, past the giant buoy, down the length of Ala Moana.
—
Sometimes I would go back to my apartment and drink more, dancing over the rough carpet of my room and the hardwood floor in the kitchen, my body sticky with humidity, the roar of the highway coming in through the window slats.
I would dance like no one was around. Because no one was around.
Who is this boy,
… this sick spirit, dancing alone in paradise? Who is this, lying his wet cheek on a surfboard in Waikiki, gazing into a billowy sherbet of clouds, invisible fingers gripping his throat?
Now, in the cold fog of a San Francisco night, I feel distant from him. That time and place, where is it now? Those warm nights, that endless summer of Kirkland whiskey and cigars, sweat and saltwater, tropical mangoes and pineapples and bananas, sweet loneliness in the never-ending breeze. Where is the smell of it?
—
It’s still with me. George and I are sitting on my balcony in San Francisco, reliving our time in Hawaii. Different now, a little colder, mezcal instead of whiskey – but the same: the closeness of a friend, the distance of dreams, the road busy with people sliding along the cool math of their lives.
Time, too, something that flows indifferently through you. What can I say now about the water under the bridge, that year of intense darkness? When the beauty of the world was obscured, barely visible, barely experienced?
—
In my last afternoon on the island, my stuff packed away into quiet boxes, I went for a final run. It was my typical route, down the little houses on Likini Street, toward the jungle. No music this time; I wanted to hear the sprinklers, the whooping of pigeons, the rough pidgin chatter.
I stopped in my tracks.
Over the brutalist highrise, over the parking lots and the men smoking cigarettes, over the jungle-covered mountains, there it stood, cutting an arc across the whole sky.
It was the widest rainbow I’d ever seen, thin and delicate, wrapping around the landscape. It beamed through the cold coming rain, coloring the darkness, as if to say, You were loved here, too.
✤
Really enjoyed this one. Inspires me to stop and be more present with my life.
So beautiful, Miles, thank you for sharing this! Were you able to leave the strangling sensation under that amazing rainbow?