Bill Lear, creator of the Learjet, the 8-track tape, and the first practical car radio, the man who coined the name “Motorola,” was an extraordinary human, brilliant inventor, great raconteur. He was also a complex, dangerous, and damaged individual. His sons and daughters had different but equally harrowing challenges growing up with his dark side. He died in 1978. This is still my prayer for him. For me. For us.
May my father awaken to his true nature, the inexhaustible love, compassion and wisdom that ultimately is our nature, too, all of us. May he see the many ways in which he obscured it, ran from it, tried to extinguish it.
May it happen suddenly one morning, while he sits at the breakfast table, drawing solutions to engineering problems with a felt tip pen on a napkin.
All in one moment, may it dawn on him, for real, the darkness he has visited upon his family.
May his heart break with the irredeemable wreckage of it, May he drop his pen, take his glasses off, put his head in his hands, and let her rip, sobbing, not anymore even for our suffering but for his own.
May he remember his innocence, how it stumbled into the many bear traps of cruelty set by his mother. May he grok the hopeless lineage of pain all the way back to who knows when.
May he feel the piercing, blue-flamed blowtorch of remorse and desperation. May that fire somehow burn off everything Not Him.
And may he become, to me, just another bodhisattva, working out how to be human in this world without turning everything to shit.
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