About 40 years ago my friend Ralph said to me, "For somebody so perceptive you sure are shallow sometimes." I imagine I made some sort of glib reply, but what he said stung. Ralph was 3 years older and had begun a spiritual journey. He meditated and did yoga and talked about stuff that didn't seem shallow.
Living with the sting of those words (and the reality they described) moved me along a kind of path, a path of dissatisfaction. Maybe the path had some dogged curiosity in it too.
I've not really left that path. Somewhere along it I discovered I wasn't shallow at all--just hadn't yet gone deep enough to discover what deep places we humans have in us. There's a psalm that says, 'deep calls to deep.' Sometimes the deeper places in our friends remind us just how deep wisdom and compassion go, and sometimes there's something like a tidal pull we feel somewhere in ourselves. It's a kind of recognition that we ourselves go deeper than we've yet discovered.
