Bodies Unbound

Oh my goodness.  The flood of replies to chapter three have been amazing.  I thank you all for your overwhelming concern for my welfare, my marriage, my financial situation, my broken heart.  I even had friends come to the house to see if Wyn and I were okay.  They told him about the chapter containing information about us getting divorced.  I forgot to send him that chapter!”

            He promised to get me back when he blogged his search for a cure for his cancer.

              The first person I told about Wyn bringing home divorce papers was my spiritual Practitioner.  He said, “You and your husband are inseparable.   Don’t focus on the anger or your differences; focus on the Love between you.  How can the one Mind be incompatible?  How can the one Mind make a mistake?  There are no mistakes, only the misperception of mistakes.  You are believing a lie at the moment.”

            Hummm.

            I looked at the gifts being given as a result of loosing my parent’s money.    Our life is simpler.  Wyn has gone back to making pottery.  It is his soul work, akin to my writing.  He has just been made manager of the entire pottery part of the company this week.  His salary has doubled.  He is happier than I have ever seen him.  I am going back to writing like I never have before.  I am teaching, doing cranial sacral work, going back to school, going out into the world with my talents.  We have started a garden and are raising lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli and chard.

            I look at what I love about Wyn’s and my story.  I remember Wyn coming by every day after work at Kinko’s and sitting on the sofa next to my mother, holding her hand and asking her about her day.  She was off and talking for an hour or more.  One story would remind her of another.  He would have been there ‘til midnight if I had not intervened, or Mom had not needed her respirator.  I remember him holding me up as we entered the church for her memorial service.  I remember him creating the programs for my one-woman show and taking money for the tickets at the theater.  I remember our wedding and the blessings of all our guests.  Someone had placed thousands of rose petals on our car so they flew off as we drove towards our honeymoon.  There are millions and millions of memories created over eight years.

            For the three weeks we were barely speaking, sleeping apart, I slept like a log.  Now, trying to connect again I am experiencing emotions that should be medicated.  I have feelings of abandonment by his staying in the office until midnight and not coming home until midnight from meetings that should have been over by seven.  “I know he has met someone he loves more than me,” says the pain.  I pace, work myself up into a ball of pain Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body.  I try to understand this is not me, this is some habit of the ego that I identify with. 

            Yes I do identify with this pain.  It is so familiar.  It is the pain of being abandoned by Smoky, my father leaving at age eleven, and countless other endings.             

            Wyn comes home, happy, smiling, wagging his tail and I am curled in a ball of pain, with drawn, unable to respond in any loving, spiritual, kind or generous gesture.  I hate him.  I hate me.  I am sunk by feelings of abandonment, resentment, anger, grief. 

            “Who is having these feelings?” asks Gangaji. 

            “Only love is real,” says someone else.

            In minutes Wyn is snoring peacefully and I am up trying to reason with the poison left in my system by the negative emotions.

            My ghost gets up and heads with glasses and books to the lamp in the living room.  I read my spiritual books. 

            “This is not me, I am love, I am Consciousness,” I read.  I try to reach in myself, grab the thoughts, but the poison blocks every thought of peace.  If there were a cake in the house I would eat it all.

            “Why does he stay away from me?”  I ask no one in particular. 

            “He isn’t staying away from you he is processing.  He has cancer, he has been floored by his feelings of inadequacy.  You could go in to his office and get him.  He would love that.”  But the feelings won’t let me.

            My father ran off with a redhead named Roberta. The day my father was served with divorce papers, my mother and I stayed over night with friends to give him a chance to get his things without our being there. 

            When my mother and I returned to our house the next morning, everything in the house was gone.  It was like no one lived there.  We walked through the rooms in shock.  We opened cupboards, drawers, and closets. The piano, dishes, sofa, Mom and Dad’s bed, the China, dining room table, the chairs - everything was gone except my bed and Mom’s and my clothes.  On my pillow was a note.  It read, “I will always love you.  Love, Dad.”  What a lesson in love.  If you love me I will take everything.           

One night I asked God if Dad was ever coming back to please put a sign under the water trough in the stable.  I filled this very heavy, tin trough to water the horses each day.   I waited for the next morning to give God a chance to do it.  The next day I went out to look.  I had to empty out all the water to turn it over.  There wasn’t a word.  Nothing.  The next night I asked if there was a God, to please put a scratch under the water trough as a sign.  Maybe a word was too much for God.  Again, nothing.

 When I was a child I used to cut my bangs when my parents would leave me with a sitter.  When my dad left, never to return as part of our family, instead of cutting my hair, I dyed it with Henna which turned it the same color as Roberta’s.  It looked well on me. 

Recently sitting with my books in the middle of the night I wrote to God, “Beloved, I know you have made me different that I am behaving.  I am covered up with negative emotions.  I am lost.”

“What rubbish,” God says.  “You are no more covered than I am.  You are believing a lie.  Stop it right now.  You are a child having a tantrum.  You are going to awaken from this nightmare of your own making any minute now.  Stop piling one hideous image after another on you.  Go right this minute into stillness.”

“The human dilemma, the ego, is trying to seduce you back into the drama.  The ego thrives on negativity and has found your weakest spot to grab you.  The ego is worried you might escape.  The moment you seduced Wyn back you started making demands on him he couldn’t understand or fulfill.

“What is freely given?  Peace, love, soul, life, Mind, and Principle.   Nothing physical, material, mortal is included in these gifts.

“You pinned your hopes of saving your house, taking away your fear of loneliness, taking the pain of egoic existence away on a man.  Wyn was escaping those demands and you called him back.  Now, just days later, you are demanding he carry those burdens again.

“You must learn to be true to yourself.  Trust yourself.  Take care of your own needs financially, emotionally, spiritually.  No man is going to do this for you.  For eons you have believed someone was going to save you or give you something that would relieve you from the work before you.

“It is not easy being a mystic or a writer.  It is hard work to escape the human drama.  Don’t give up.  Remember Buddha under the Bodhi Tree.  Every trick of the mind came at him.  What did he do?  He didn’t move.  He didn’t use one philosophy, didn’t say a mantra, didn’t pray a prayer.  What did he do?  He saw the nothingness of all those fears.  He saw the illusion behind every pain – the no-thing of it.

“When you see the nothingness of the human dilemma what is left?  Only what doesn’t change.  That’s the Truth of you.  Do nothing.  “Doing” is the work of the ego.”

Many of you might be asking, “Does Cynthia really believe she can get answers from God?”  The answer is yes.  I have found that a sincere look for the highest truth is always available.  I have found that I never like the answer.  The answer I want is always “Leave the bum.  You deserve better.”  Invariable I find the answer is, “Stop thinking those negative, fearful, painful thoughts.  They are not the truth.”

            My belief in a connection to this mystery began with Smoky and continued throughout my life.  The next incident was in the mountains when I was fourteen.  Every summer Mom and I camped by a river at Kennedy Meadows high in the Sierra Mountains where Smoky went wild.  We had been going there since I was two, either renting a cabin or camping by the river.  Later my mother bought a cabin there and I still have it to this day.

            My father came to visit us in the mountains when I was fourteen.  Mom and I were camped by the river.  I believe he was trying to win my mother back.  The three of us drove to a spot on the Sonora Pass to hike.  I hated hiking.  If I couldn’t ride a horse somewhere or hop rocks down a stream, I didn’t want to go.  They let me out after much complaining so that I could walk down the stream and back to camp. 

            It was only about five miles but it was not an easy walk.  Bushes grew near the stream.  I had to choose whether to walk around them or swim down white water.  I fell several times in steep places and my legs were skinned and bruised.  I wore a pair of shorts, a bathing suit top, and tennis shoes.

            It was morning when my parents and I separated.  When the sun began to set and I was still not at a place I recognized I panicked.  It gets cold in the mountains at night.  I was exhausted. There was no sign of the road or that any human being had ever been there.  I looked on both sides of the stream and saw only steep mountains.  When I came to a waterfall I couldn’t get around I climbed the mountain on the side I knew the road was on.  When I reached the top I saw that down in the valley and way up on the other side of the next mountain was a line that looked like the road.

            I climbed towards it without any hope of reaching it.  The mountainside was covered in thick buck brush covered with inch long thorns.  They tore my flesh as I worked my way through them.  Thoughts of rattlesnakes went through my mind.  I listened to my breath getting larger and larger.

            Somewhere during this ordeal I became my breath.  I became an animal with large lungs.  It was my lungs that pulled me up the hill not my legs.  And then all awareness of my breath left and I was no one.  I wasn’t even there.  I was oblivious to the brush scratching me, the steepness of the mountain, the cold, the sun going down, or my fear.

            It was with the greatest surprise that I heard a car drive by not far from my head and realized I had made it to the road.  I screamed for help and heard the car stop. Doors slammed.  Before I knew it my father was over the cliff crying and pulling me the last ten feet to the road.

            Dad and Mom had been back to camp frantically looking for me for hours.  There were people looking for me all over the mountains.  Search parties came up from Sonora and were riding the backcountry on horseback.  There were reports I’d been seen riding off with a ranger.  The story hit the newspaper in our town and I was teased about it for weeks when school resumed.

            When asked I talked about being lost.  I talked about the stream and the sun going down.  I talked about falling over the waterfall.  I talked about seeing the ribbon of the Sonora Pass way, way, way down in the valley and up the other side.  But I could not talk about what had happened climbing the mountain.  Something had taken over, something whose power was larger than the mountain.  There was a power in me I had reached more powerful than my fear, and stronger than my body. 

            That late afternoon on the mountain was a glimpse into the limitless potential of life.  I knew it happened.  I never forgot it.  It lived in me without words, like the beating of my heart.  Like a wordless song for humming.

            When my father was 101, I picked him up from the rest home and took him to lunch.  During this time I asked him why he and mom divorced.  He couldn’t remember.

            “Was it because of Roberta?” I prompted.

            “Oh I hope not,” he said with such feeling, such remorse.  “We should have never divorced.  I loved her so.”

     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.

I got up this morning and found Wyn, my husband, on the sofa.  He looked like he was meditating.  Then he grunted and I knew he wasn’t seriously meditating.  I had awakened hours before and found he was not in bed.  There was a light on somewhere in the house.  He had been reading his novel.

            Usually it is I creeping around the house at all hours.  Two days ago, though, we had been to the oncologist to see if all this raw food Wyn had been eating for the past eighteen months had had any affect on his prostate tumor.  No it hadn’t.  The blood flow to that region was so great the doctor took a biopsy.  We are waiting.

            “What are you thinking?” I asked

            “About the bank,” he said. 

            “What about the possibility that you have cancer?”

            “No, I’m waiting to think about that until after we get the results of the biopsy next week.”

            “What if he says you need radiation, or to freeze it, or to remove it?” I asked.

            “I don’t know,” he said.

            “I want to discus what to do,” I said.

            “How can we know what to do until we know what the biopsy says?” he said.

            “We can decide whether to go the medical route or the spiritual route,” I said.  “If we go the medical route then you need to get a job that will give you insurance so that you can pay for your treatment.  If you go the spiritual route, we probably need to leave the country.”

             We have recently lost our beautiful house on the hill, over-looking everything.  It went into foreclosure and nothing we could do reversed that down ward spiral.  I know I blame Wyn for losing the house on Signal Street.  He had the capacity to get a job that could have saved it.  But there was the possibility that the remission of his cancer was over and he didn’t want to go back to corporate life. 

            I loved that house.  There was beauty from every window over looking the Ojai Valley and the mountains beyond.   The sky’s always changing nature thrilled me.  Sometimes, walking through the rooms at Signal Street I looked out the window at the sky and gasped.  The dawn has made me weep from the view through those windows and from the deck.  The glory of God was in my living room in the form of sky, clouds and color.  The Truth of God was present in the wind.  The sun coming up and the pink moon rising, storms, and bright cumulus cloud days, rolled in and out of my living room, bedroom, and dining room.  How can I live without them?  I felt at home there with the sky, the reflection of the pure and vibrant, ever present and ever changing God. 

            Being close to nature brought out the wildness in me.  That wild land connected to the part of me that has been longing to go wild since I can remember.  It began with my first love, a cat named Smoky.

             Smoky came into our family when my parents took me to a home where there was a new litter of kittens.  I was told I could pick one out.  I picked out Smoky.  Mom said they tried to interest me in prettier kittens but at first sight, Smoky won my heart.  Smoky slept with me at night.  I took off my pajama top just to feel his soft fur on my bare skin. 

            After about four years Smoky began spraying my room.  I was told he was marking his territory.  It was a sign to outsiders that I was his.  My parents were not amused.  They decided to give Smoky to relatives in the country where he could be himself without being a problem.

            Nothing I said, no amount of pleading, threatening, or begging would change their minds.  Smoky must go.  Uncle Jim and Aunt Edna came for him.  Smoky and I hid in my playhouse but they found us.  Smoky fought with all his might. but they overpowered him, put him in a gunnysack and threw him in the trunk of their car and drove off.

            That night we called Aunt Edna and she said they put Smoky in an abandoned chicken house so he would get used to it there.  I went to bed alone and thought of Smoky.  I missed him desperately.  It was not the same without his purring.  I imagined Smoky in the dark, bewildered, not knowing why he had been banished.  I imagined him sad and lonely, missing me and our warm bed.  I imagined Aunt Edna pushing his food under the door of his prison without a kind word or pat. 

            Three days later, Aunt Edna called to say Smoky had escaped.  I could not imagine anything more heartbreaking happening.  And for the first time, I did not forgive my parents.  I was furious.  I hated them.  I would never smile again.  I marked my mother’s best dresses with color crayons and hid her finger nail file.  I stole candy at Sprouse Ritz, a near-by all-purpose store, and didn’t share it with anyone.

            I lay in bed at night and imagined Smoky coming to me.  I tried to smell him.  I could see his nose and whiskers clearly.  I had the idea that if I thought of him hard enough, it would send out a signal for him to come towards.  I thought of his feet walking, the little soft pads bringing him closer and closer.  To concentrate I imagined him walking towards my breath.  With each inhale I imagined him being pulled across the space towards me.  After all, if Jesus was invisible and God was invisible and they could send us help, I could help Smoky on the same invisible plane.

            It was at this time I heard the operetta, “Carmen Jones”.  When I heard the music from Carmen it was a turning point in my life.  I felt rushes all over my body.  The passion, desire, suffering and anger of that music and those songs was like a mirror in which I recognized all the feelings I previously had no words for. The haughtiness Carmen expressed to the prison guard and to José was my model for a way to treat my parents for taking Smoky.  I memorized the whole operetta from start to finish.  I came home from school and sat by our hifi, booklet in hand, singing along.  My favorite song was, “The Harbeniara”.  These were the words:

            Love’s a baby that grows up wild

            And he won’t do what you want him to.

            Love ain’t nobody’s angel child,

            And he won’t pay any mind to you.

            One man gives me a diamond stud

            And I won’t give him a cigarette,

            One man treats me like I was mud,

            And what I got that man can get.

            That’s love, that’s love, that’s love

            One Sunday afternoon, a year after he was banished, Smoky walked into our backyard.  I was hanging upside down on my trapeze and Dad was pruning the peach tree.  I ran to tell Mom.  She was in the kitchen cooking.  I said, all out of breath, “Mom, come look, Smoky came home.”  She said, “No, it isn’t possible,” but she rushed out all the same. 

            Mom and Dad weren’t sure it was Smoky until he walked to the place he usually got fed, ate everything he was given of our chicken dinner, then walked to my bedroom and sprayed it thoroughly.

            Even my parent’s strong sense of tidiness could not banish Smoky again.  He was our hero.  Something truly remarkable had happened in our family.  We told the story to everyone.  Mom even became willing to take him with us to the mountains on our vacation.

At first, the mountains scared Smoky and he was miserable.  He spent the first three days under the bed.  Then he began venturing out.  It wasn’t long before he stayed out all night, then he was gone three days.  We were certain something had eaten him.

            One night there was a sound of scratching at the door of our cabin that woke us up.  It was Smoky.  He came in all wild eyed, jumped on my bed, licked my face all over and demanded out.  We never saw him again.

                        If your love bird decides to fly

                        There ain’t no door that you can close

                        She just pecks you a quick good-bye

                        And flicks the salt from her tail and goes.

                        That’s love, that’s love, that’s love.

            Dad said Smoky went wild.  What does that mean to go wild?  I imagined all sorts of things; something taking over his body, something he came to love more than me.  I imagined him turning into a bobcat or a mountain lion, but Dad said he’d look just the same but something changed inside him.

            When Dad left us a few years later for another woman, I asked Mom, “Did Daddy go wild?”

            Many years later during a writing class I took with Deena Metzger we were given the assignment of writing about an animal as if we were the animals.  Everyone chose wild animals; bears, wolfs, coyotes.  I choose a house cat.  When I read my silly piece about this spoiled creature I was embarrassed.  But on my way home I remembered Smoky.  I was almost forty.  It had been over thirty years since he left.  I hadn’t thought of Smoky for at least twenty years.  I had to pull the car over to the side of the road and sob.  I could not see for my tears.

            That night I wrote a letter to Smoky.  I told him what his leaving had done to my life.  How I had found one man after another who abandoned me in one way or another.

            He wrote back, “When I found the mountain stream I could no longer drink water from a bowl.  After I had caught a mouse and crunched his skull and ate it all I could not eat Puss ‘n Boots.  I had to go wild.  I had started to change on my way to you from your Aunt’s house but my love for you kept calling me.  When I got to the mountains the thrill of the wild was more than I could resist.  Even though I was cold and often hungry, it was better than being in a lifeless house.  I had to follow my own true nature.  Use this as a teaching.  Find your true nature and go wild yourself.  Untame every bit of you.”

            At sixty-one, though I have touched the wild many times, my love of safety, the known, comfort, security, all the human thoughts that hold me to this plane of existence through fear and desire still has me in its grasp.  I drink coffee to drown out unwanted feelings and to force myself to do social activities I am too tired to do.  I play solitaire on the computer to numb my mind. 

            There are moments, though, late at night, I stand outside and feel my whole body at once, without words, feeling the nameless presence of the Universe.  I feel my soul reaching out with love towards the all-Loving presence of God.  At that moment I feel fully alive.  In that moment I long to let go of this body, this mortal mind, everything I know, and walk into the unknown.  I would leave that Carmen, siren song, leave the shelter of my house with its hot water and pantry, but something stops me.  I turn, when I get too cold, and head back to my warm, cozy bed.

            How would a person go wild?  How does a person leave the human world and join forces with the enlightened ones?  In my study of spiritual teachers I have read that it doesn’t help to make a better human condition – just know God.  Walk in the awareness that we are all The One, the great I AM.  Let your life happen from that place.  Breathing in and out with great awareness – walk the dogs, water the garden. 

            Perhaps by losing every material thing, all my money, my house, my “stuff,” life is gently pushing me out towards the forest, towards that mountain stream.

I have two loves that I am unfaithful to.  One is the writer.  The other is the mystic. I tell myself that they cannot live together so I live a shallow life to avoid choosing.  Not choosing is the way I learned to never be disappointed.  Not choosing is killing me.  My choice at the moment is to write about my mystical experiences.  Perhaps in this way they will serve each other.

            Perhaps the mystic in me can calm the writer when she is certain that nothing she says is important.  Perhaps the mystic will have compassion and suggest she meditate until an original thought comes.  When the writer thinks no one will ever read a word she writes except for her husband with her holding a gun to his head, the mystic can suggest a mantra. 

            I want to buy a rope and a knife and keep them on my desk to remind myself of the Marathon Monks.  These determined beings set a goal of running a thousand marathons in seven years on the slopes of Mount Hiei in Japan.  If they fail, they vow to hang or disembowel themselves.  I want to make a vow like that.  If I haven’t written this book in three years, I will just end it all. 

            What is the writer to me?  It is that ambitious part that still wants personal recognition for my talent and wisdom.  Somehow I think that name and fame will bring me fulfillment.  What is the mystic?  The one that knows that all the striving and attempts to be happy and content by becoming rich and famous are futile.  When I touch the Absolute, I long to be in that truer home.  I long to give up the mortal world, I long to be at one with God.  I long to go wild into the unknown, to be a wild person like Jesus, breaking all the rules of the Sabbath, breaking all the laws of physics; to walk on water, to calm the seas to heal a leper.  I want to be as crazy and alive as Jesus, Lao Tsu, and Bodhidharma. 

            The mystic was awakened in me one evening in Cambridge, Mass.  My son was three months old.  I was twenty-two.  My husband was going to Harvard.  Every Monday night I would trudge through the snow to a “Sensitivity Group.”   One night, instead of doing exercises to promote higher consciousness, we listened to a three hour tape by Ram Dass.  He had just come back from India.  It was 1969.  I believe there were only two people left by the end of the tape.  I was one of them.  His tape eventually became his first book, Be Here Now.  In it he described his journey from becoming a professor at Harvard, to becoming a crazed, acid taking counter culture leader, to going to India and meeting his guru.  Ram Dass stayed in India, studying meditation and living the life of a saddu (a holy man) until his guru sent him home to tell his story in America.

            A few months after listening to the tape, I attended a lecture in Cambridge given by Ram Dass.  I asked him for a book to read that could give me a better understanding of what he was talking about.  He told me to read The Bagavagita.    

            Through this chance encounter with Ram Dass, the Bagavagita, mantra, chants, the Jesus prayer from The Way of a Pilgrim, the ‘60’s, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the drugs, my tendency to be bi-polar, alcoholism, and my longing to belong, a life was molded.  All these human, disoriented, tortured, incompatible, desperate parts of me cried out to an idea I and many others call God, (if you’re Jewish or Christian,) or the Absolute if you are Buddhist. Only the Absolute, or God if you will, knew anything that could bring these parts together.  Only a miracle that is general fair for this state of consciousness could help.

            My knowing that the Absolute existed was the only glimmer of hope while at the mercy of my discordant parts.  There was a part of me that knew from experiences I had as a child that when I got desperate enough there would be a shift and I would be motivated enough to seek God again.           

            Why, once I came into the realm of God would I leave?  Why would I stop saying the mantra, chanting, praying without ceasing?  I don’t know. What keeps us coming back to this existence?  What is so irresistible about teaching, mating, chocolate, relating?

             I could understand if you could make a living in this world and find some satisfaction in a family, or enjoy knowing if the Dodgers won the pennant.  Why would you try to find freedom if fate blessed you with such an ability for contentment?  Or perhaps you simply don’t believe in God or the Absolute.  This book is not for you. This book is for those who know they could find freedom if they went on a forty day fast but can’t make it through the first day.  Or, know they could find happiness if they left their abusive husband but they are terrified to be alone.  Those people who know if they meditated four hours a day they would be at peace and all their warring selves would become harmonious, – but they can’t sit down.                           

            Perhaps the writer and the mystic are the Absolute’s way of drawing me closer to It.  Writing I can pretend I’m not sitting still.  By recording the events of experiences trying to reach the Absolute perhaps I will arrive less bloody at It’s door.