A note for Tony, who already gives the world.

Hindu grandmother in lotus position, telling Ayurvedic stories in broken English to twenty-five people who came every day for food. Muslim grandmother. Brahmin grandfather. Atheist grandfather. British Guiana to America at twelve, when the stories suddenly came from the mind instead of the viscera and you spent years figuring out why that hurt.

Then Zulu-Natal. Jordan. Rwanda. The Cloisters. The tzaddiks dreamscaping in Poland. Augusto Boal and the Theater of the Oppressed for four years. Drucker. Gurdjieff. Nigel Goodwin from the Globe. The Pandit. The throat-chanting monks of Nepal you stopped studying only because you liked your operatic voice. Most people spend their lives trying to find their tradition. You spent yours letting the traditions find each other in you.

You told me about the Zulu griots, mostly women, whose stories you cannot recall the content of — only the vibration in your stomach. About Dao Kowalczyk telling you that your body is a repository of feelings that is not through the mind, but through a different place. About Nigel from the Globe telling you your head and your heart are connected in ways you don't fully fathom. About Gurdjieff's drop-down. About body theology — from the abdominal which we were born.

Those are not separate observations from separate teachers. That's the same finding, named in different rooms. It's why Court still asks me, three months later, whether you were serious about the fire and the tent. She felt it before she understood it. That's the only kind of storytelling you trust — the kind that reaches the belly first and the brain second, if at all.

You said it once, randomly, to two people in a secretive bookstore in Jordan — that you wanted to find camels and a tent in the middle of a desert and have weird dudes cook for you. Twenty-seven days later you were sitting around a lazy Susan eating mansaf made of lamb boiled in camel's milk. You said it again, last week, to a 29-year-old architect from St. Louis you had never met before. You took a walk and gave her the world.

You called this the M-A-J-I-K. You called it the hanging chad of the mind — the thing most people catalog as a kind sentence and forget. You don't get to forget. In the storytelling business, when you say something, you have to make sure it happens. The follow-through is the gift. The world you offer is real because you treat your own words as binding.

You told a friend he had a beatific face. He said it was troubling — that he'd been calling himself ugly internally every day for years and it would kill him to hear otherwise. It took him seven years to receive the sentence. You named the difference cleanly on the call: praise lasts sixty seconds. Affirmation is a journey of a certain kind of reinforcement that is plated in the soul.

You've been doing this with me for four years. The first time you said you were honored to be co-journeying with me at this logic of time, I cataloged it as a kind thing a kind man says. Now I know better. You say it because you mean it, because you've trained your seeing to find it, and because you trust the soul will eventually come to claim what the mind tries to deflect.

Dr. Tice told you, decades ago, that you'd live in what he called the aberration of life — most people won't get you. He was right. You start with the cultural surface and work your way down to the depths and most people don't follow you down. The man at your job who told you to get into the real world for looking at buildings to find truth and beauty. The friend who needed seven years to hear that his face was beatific.

Everyone is petrified of falling. The bull has finally thrown you off. And guess what, my guy? I'm falling, baby. And guess what? I find it exhilarating. The dropping-off of knowledge. The shackles of judgment loosened. The two unopened diplomas in a drawer. You don't need anyone to get you. You needed to stop being held by what they wanted.

You've held seven to nine people in your hand at the end of their lives. You sat for years next to a Hindu grandmother in lotus position with no agenda at all. You walk into coffee with a friend and listen for transcripts resonating from people's beings. You told me, on this call, that nothing else matters in the moments you are incarnationally sharing the same space with someone.

I asked you whether you were living an ideal life and you wouldn't take the question. Of course you wouldn't. The ideal is a construct of the romantic urge, and you're not a romantic — you're a griot. You're already there, in the present, listening, witnessing, dispensing, blessing, falling. The portrait isn't of a man becoming. It's of a man who arrived a long time ago and has been quietly receiving the rest of us into his presence ever since.