xray I's

It was a beeline to the Tibetan specialty store when I hit the air conditioned leviathan.

Swallowed whole, I looked for any sort of wayfinding post that would help me navigate the belly of the beast. Without it, surely, I would be lost.

There was a bookstore within reach - but this place was beyond book knowledge. A surf of humanity cresting into fashion stores I didn't understand; plastic and paper traded for a surfeit of goods that I intuited would be cupboarded, unopened on arrival home.

An image - all the masses in the mall gelling into one body; all the chattel in one gelatinous bag umbilical-ed to them and dragged around store to store, looking for That which would make them happy. For a time.

Fade right, and there, bless the gods, a directory listing, and reaching out in an almost sensual oracular embrace, the Tibetan Specialty store.

Quick bee-line there - not without a triple americano, even mystic-wannabees have their needs - and an exhale as I entered.

The place reeked of home, maybe not my root-home, but spiritual foliage I was somehow familiar with.

At the counter, paying for an Aum Mani Padme Hum bracelet, I inquire about what appears to be an electronic prayer wheel beside a picture of the Dalai Llama. Turns out it was an electronic prayer wheel beside a picture off the Dalai Llama, threading the syllables from the source to the market back to the source over and over and over again, as long as the leds and lithium ion innards held out.

Senses overwhelmed, I didn't notice the seed that had been dropped in my heart before I left the store. Now, several days later, I notice it regularly: a prayer wheel turning continuously in that space. Where there was contraction with others, now, there is a quite pull back to the turning in the heart and the mantra. Where there was discomfort, boredom, or quite simply too much thinking, the heart-wheel-mantra.

And now, when I look at you, and you, and you, and my own thoughts, the wheel picks up and the exteriors vanish.

On deeper examination, it's not the exteriors that have vanished, but the realization that there are no such things as interiors and exteriors, just This.

And This is forerver churned and imossibly moved from Source to Source by the prayer wheel and mantra; an initiation from the most unlikely of places.