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.”
