Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
to the repetitive beat and he would have a seizure. The pounding and
chanting had become a communal heartbeat.
With a single last bang of the bronze drum, all the souls in No
Name Place were jolted out of their bodies, my friends’ souls, too.
Were they dead? Had they been shot? They did not feel wounded.
They felt bigger and lighter. They seemed to see themselves, not their
physical bodies, but their own thoughts and truths, as if there were a
mind mirror that could reflect such things. They all had those mir­
rors. Now that they were outside their bodies, they could hear with­
out the distortions of ears, speak without the tangle of tongues, see
without the blinders of experience. They were open portals to many
minds, and the minds flew into the soul, and the soul was contained
in the minds of everyone. They knew this was not normal, and yet it
was natural. They struggled for words to describe what they felt,
that they were every thought they had ever had and those of others,
an open repository containing bright particles and endless strands,
microscopic stars and infinite trajectories, endless constellations that
were holograms within holograms within themselves, the invisible as
visible, the impossible as obvious, the greatest knowledge now ef­
fortlessly known, and the greatest knowledge was love. Just love.
And I knew this, too.
“Amen,” Loot said.
With another jolt, my friends instantly returned to their separate
bodies, separate minds, separate hearts, leaving them one among
many and no longer many in one. They looked around, at one an­
other, at Loot and Bootie, waiting to see if the sensation would burst
through again. But the experience began to fade as dreams do, de­
spite their trying to resurrect it or grasp at it as if at motes of dust.
They had their senses back, yet never had they felt less sensible.
The light from the television flickered. They walked over and sat
on the rattan and bamboo stools, waiting for the morning news from
New York. Among themselves they slowly began to talk. Had they
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