Bodies Unbound

     It is an interesting time, this economic depression America is facing.  Because my husband and I were invested in real estate the effects have been devastating.  Six months ago we were living on a hill in a house worth over a million dollars.  Today we are living in town in a house we rented out for the past five years.  It abuts a park where baseball games are held every night. 

            While at my beautiful house on Signal Street I remember one night waking up, every cell in terror.  Wyn was angry and sleeping somewhere else.  I wanted to check my bank account.  I am dyslexic so Wyn has always been the one entrusted with the money.  I found my way through much effort to my bank account and discovered I had $103 and a credit card debt owed to the bank of $800.  The fear in every cell cranked up to the level of needing a root canal.

            Wyn had forgotten to put money into my account, it was overdrawn and the fees had escalated.

            I thought of the homeless and, of course, the person with a shopping cart. I had always thought these people were stubborn, angry people who had made their families lives so miserable they had been thrown out.  Perhaps they were dyslexic and slightly bi-polar like me who had fallen in love with a person who mismanaged their fortune and lost it all. 

            Recently I went to the store for coffee.  I no longer buy coffee in a coffee shop.  I didn’t buy number 2 coffee filters.  I knew I had paper towels at home.  I bought one banana.  It was a dollar.  I went home and sliced the good part of the two rotten bananas that were lying in a dish on the counter into my oatmeal.  I didn’t use honey or the soy milk.  My neighbor, Dick Payton, a man in his eighties had brought me those bananas from Vons.  He goes most mornings to see what they are throwing out then distributes the food to various charities.  His trunk is always full of food a little past its prime.

            I have snubbed his previous offers of food.  It was not organic.  Saturday I said, “Bananas?  Tomatoes?  Eggs with one cracked in the box?  Thank you.”

            As I stirred my oatmeal the dogs and cats swirled around me.  Romeow and Casanova were wondering where their canned tuna went.  Marco Polo and Dorjé, my middle aged Tibetan Terriers, were looking for their homemade chicken and rice lunch.  I cooked them each one of Dick’s eggs.  They seemed grateful.

            I have heard there are working people all over America living in campgrounds with their children.  They sleep in tents, shower in the public restrooms, use stall toilets and go to work, or look for work, and send their children off to school.

           

            Last week my husband came home with divorce papers.  We had not been getting along for a long time.  I asked him if he truly intended to get a divorce.  He said he felt he needed to be alone in order to put all his energy into healing his cancer.  The problems between us were not healthy for him.  How true.  They were not healthy for my either but I never could have left him. 

            I have been out of my mind with anxiety.  This morning, giving someone a massage I settled down.  I asked my highest, wisest self what I should do.  I got the answer, “If the love is gone then set him free.”

             

            This book keeps adding themes to itself.  It is like a snowball rolling down hill.  It is about going wild, finding God, loosing everything on the material plane and being a sixty something woman going through a divorce and trying to figure out how to stay off welfare.  It is a wild book, though right now it looks like an out of control book.  There is a huge difference.

             In this mess of anxiety and disaster I dragged myself to see Danny Castro, an elder, a wise man, a teacher from Santa Fe.  Danny believes we draw relationships to us to show us our blind spots.  Relationships reveal what we don’t see about ourselves.  From Danny’’s point of view I had to loose all the money to see my greed, to see that I wasn’t a business person, and to set me back down on the path of being a mystic.  If I needed this experience to show me something inside myself it couldn’t be Wyn’s fault.  Rats!  It was a million dollar lesson.

            Danny is an untamable man.  I lay my dilemma at his feet and watched him take the parts of it through his mind.  He speaks in tongues.  Sometimes I can’t understand a word he says.  His rhythm of speaking is like music.  Two hours later listening to the sound of his voice, the cadences that are more like instruments than speaking; listening to his tuba thoughts, drums, piano and sax I was on fire at what he presented.  He laid before me the possibility that I had entered this marriage for safety.  I had married this man to take care of me and my fortune so I didn’t have to face something inside of me.  It was doomed from the start.  “Of course this man had to strip away your safety, turn your life into a nightmare, take away your house, turn every dream into mud in order for you to find your broken heart again.  This ache is what you tried to leave, what you gave yourself away for to avoid.  Now you are free to get it right,” said Danny with all the love and compassion of God.

              Danny swirled me with his song down down down to the core of me.  In his presence I felt that ache that was me – raw and screaming, on fire,  – but now free. 

            Now I was free to try what again?  To try to find that place in myself that would not fall prey to safety, to dullness, to deadness.  That would not believe the lie.  That would find that love that is so great that it would burn up every false place inside me.  I want a love that will annihilate the false self.  Whether this love comes in the form of a man, God, a purpose, writing, I vow to be that alive.  No more tepid water from a bowl, no more Puss ‘n Boots cat food from a can.

           

            Wyn and I did not talk for weeks.  The Divorce Papers were somewhere in his office.  I gave someone a massage and took off my wedding ring and never put it back on.  I felt free without my ring, naked and sexy.  When I next looked at Wyn’s hand his wedding ring was off too.  I liked him better without that ring.

            Finally Wyn asked for a meeting.  We sat on the sofa and talked.  Months ago I planned to go to Pasadena to take a metaphysical healing course so I could be a nurse and practitioner.  I had gone back and forth about taking it.  I was afraid to leave the nest of Ojai.  I was afraid to leave my animals.  What was I doing going out in the world to study something new at sixty-one?  More and more the nursing course pulled me towards it.  It had become loud and clear, like a calling.

            I had found a room to rent five days a week in L.A. with a woman named Mary, whose husband had died a year ago.  I could come back to Ojai on week-ends.  But how to pay for the house?  Rent it?  Sell it?  I couldn’t bare it.            

            “So, are you moving out?”  I asked.

            “I don’t know.  I don’t think I can make enough money to pay the mortgage on this place.  I’m not making enough money at the pottery studio.” 

            Wyn had recently taken a job making pottery at a place in Ventura where they made pottery for hotels.  He was making large pots for plants, lamps, and large plates they would hang on walls.  I had been to the studio to see where he worked and was amazed at his skill.  He hadn’t done pottery in fifteen years.  He stopped making pottery because he needed to make more money to put his sons through school and had gone to work at Kinko’s.  After we came together he quit Kinko’s to do real estate.

            When he was courting me he tried to show me how to make a pot.  My hands wobbled on the lump of clay on the wheel in front of me. Wyn placed his hands on my hands and the certainty of his hands alit something in me.  It was as if all my charkas aligned and a bowl on the wheel emerged.  It was the first inkling that this might be a man I could live with.

            Wyn continued to talk about all the money we owed.

            “Maybe you could get a roommate.” I said.

            “I don’t want to live with a roommate.”

            “Well, I don’t want to loose my house,” I said.

            I bought this little house in 1998 for $i80, 000.  When I met Wyn I owed $100,000 on it.  Now, having taken the equity out of it and a Pick and Pay Loan, there is an outstanding loan of $400,000.  I know I know, how stupid can you get.

            Wyn didn’t know what to do.  He didn’t want to leave me in a mess, but his cancer . . .

            Anger welled up in me.  This brilliant man was making maybe $300 a week.  When we met he was making $70K a year.  If the cancer doesn’t kill him I might kill him myself.

            I was so frustrated I got up and watered the parts of the yard the sprinklers wouldn’t reach.  As I watered the garden I cried.  The cats came to sit by me while I watered; the dogs came out pushing the gate open with their noses.  They were so sweet.  They always like being with me where ever I am.  We are all in love.

            I sobbed and sobbed in the growing darkness, and then I went into my bedroom, blew my nose and wrote in my journal, “I want to keep my house, my cats, the dogs and do the nursing program so I can support myself for the rest of my life.  I want it all.  Not one more thing may be taken from me.  I will not allow it.”  I envisioned myself as the God of my world where my word was Law.

            With this clarity and resolve I marched into Wyn’s office and told him he couldn’t leave. He had to stay here, earn more money and help me pay off the house.  “You may not leave,” I repeated.

            If this book is about divorce it will be a divorce that ends well.  It will be a divorce where the needs of each other are honored.  Wyn may not throw himself into the unknown with cancer.  If I am going to go to L.A. to learn how to heal through the power of Mind based on Oneness with God all my needs must be met and all that I love must be well cared for.  That is the law of my universe.

            I went to bed feeling happy.  A relationship to my own needs was emerging.  I was glad to have heard the demand from my soul that I could not loose another thing and to see that a solution was so immediate.  A Wild Woman was alive in me.  I could feel her behind my eyes.