wisdom from elijah

As you all know, I have a tendency to attract some strange people to me. Tonight was no exception. After having dinner and a manhattan with the brothers at Lasalle Academy, I wandered over to Washington Square Park. As I'm chillin' & listening to beatles songs this old man with a walking stick, white braids, no shirt, and a denim bottom that didn't exactly resemble pants sat down next to me and started talking.

Of course, Elijah had spent some time in jail. A self-described nomad, he often gets in trouble for trespassing and generally not fitting in. He told me that he spent three years in one prison in Lousianna, and apparently much of it in solitary confinement since he would share his radical values with other prisoners and make the guards job much harder.

I asked him how he could be by himself, and he said something really valuable. He said that when Jesus said "love your neighbor as yourself", we miss that we really need to love ourselves. And that comes from spending time alone with ourselves and really being comfortable with who we are. How true, how true.