I'm attracting artists this week, I guess. I didn't want to get into the surreal experience I had yesterday wandering the empty streets of downtown Chico, but I guess I will.

Do you ever have encounters that change your heads pace (was meant to be "head space" but I think I like the typo better) even just remembering them? I just started thinking about yesterday's odd encounter and I started feeling buzzed and slightly altered, like a level of perception had just fallen away and one just a little higher opened up. It was like that when I was talking to the guy, too; it felt like I was dazed and lightly high during large parts of the conversation.

So, I was walking back from the greasy spoon where I go to read and had a near collision with a burly blond man on the sidewalk. Jovially, he asked what I was doing. Neatly ducking the question, I told him I sure could tell what he was doing by the smell of paint in the air. I'd gotten there just in time, it seems, to watch the creation of Cheerful Porcine Christmas Window Art for the downtown BBQ joint. He was delighted to have an audience and reeled me in with his happy enthusiasm and a patter that struck me as a cross between Bob Ross (of the happy little trees) and Steve Irwin (of the happy little crocodiles). No kidding. I simultaneously wanted to take a nap and pet him at the same time.

His guileless charm got me to linger long enough for him to sketch my portrait, a process much like photography, only slower. Between the two of us, he an artist and I a writer, neither could manifest even a single sheet of paper so I gave him the inside cover of my Buddhism book to draw in. It came out surprisingly well. It looks like a girl, a lot like the last self portrait I managed to crank out in a mirror, actually. I can't say it looks like me, but that's always an odd thing to try to determine anyway as I'm never quite sure what I'm supposed to look like in the first place.

The man is a little touched, I think. I could mean that in a snotty derisive way, but I don't. In fact, I kind of understand it, a little bit, now. I think it sort of comes with the territory of having found "it", whatever form that "it" may take for you.

It turns out that for him, that "it", the most important thing in his life, is his faith in Jesus, which he imparted out to me in bits and pieces around the stories of his art and the symbolism of the things he was painting in the window, like the prick of the holly representing suffering, a nice parallel since my reading for the day was on the cessation of suffering. He had funny little stories for everything, the red berries were blood of course, and the wreath was infinity, eternity won for us by Christ's sacrifice.

I heard a heavy fluttering at one point and followed the sound to some street birds, probably pigeons, in the awnings above. It made my heart soar and feel a strange pride in the resilience of life to see these birds nesting on top of these spiky things clearly designed to prevent them from doing just that. I pointed this out to my new artist friend which then inspired him to talk about and illustrate the most lovely example of how gentle and pacifistic doves really are.

This is a really strange story for me and I doubt I'm imparting the dreamlike quality of all of this. I don't like Christians, in general, and for years have been counted on to fly off the handle whenever I feel any push coming from that direction. But this time, I recognized something in this guy. He's found the truth, whatever form it takes to him, and it shines through as light for all to see. Gosh, I think there's even something biblical about that. And all of a sudden it no longer matters to me what form he puts on that truth or what words I'm using to hear it. We're suddenly on the same page, talking about the same thing, the same world, the same love, the same god, somehow. We know. We grok. We can talk.

And it's just him and me on a cold empty downtown street, him and me and the benevolent pink painted pigs while dead leaves and cigarette wrappers tumble by in the silence. Elsewhere, it's Thanksgiving. But right now and then, it was truth and beauty in childlike innocence and openness, a sharing of light and confirmation of love.