Bodies Unbound

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MOUNTAINS OF MIND

CHAPTER 7.

            I have stopped writing for two months.  What happened?  I got lazy.  I got scared.  It happened at the cabin.  I got to that place that can’t be put into words.  I got to that place I believe is not acceptable, that I am not sure is sane.  Some resentment began to chase around my brain.  Then my whole life began to crumble.

             I tried to get off caffeine.  I tried to push myself into more and more exercise, and then it was me doing it all again.  Me chasing God again.  Me thinking that if I could only do it right my life would be perfect, I would be perfect – and then I was dead in the water – AGAIN.  Then I became unfaithful to both the writer and the would-be mystic.

            I had one interesting thought at the cabin.  One night I was going to play computer games and read my novel.  I wanted to do nothing but eat.  I then had the thought, “If you are going to write tomorrow about what you are doing today, what would be interesting to write about?”  It stopped me in my tracks.  How do I live my life today so I can write something interesting tomorrow?

            I put on wonderful, soulful, sexy music and did every yoga pose I knew for an hour and a half.  I slept like a baby.   I did yoga every night I was there for the rest of the time.  Straining to get a strong body back, straining to hold a pose was  delicious.  Each day I got better.  I even went up onto the rocky cliff where I used to do yoga as a young woman, balancing on one leg over a 300 foot drop.  It concentrates the mind.

            The last full day at the cabin I packed a few things in my knap sack and headed for my favorite place on earth.  It is a steep hike out into the wilderness where I grew up as a child.  Along the way I prayed to the land.  Nature has a language.  When I first enter the wilderness I coax her as I walk.  I whisper along the paths, “bring me your bones and your feathers.”  From the rocks in the mountains I call loudly, “Bring me your bones and your feathers.”  It takes time for the land to respond.  The land watches you.  It reads your footprints.  You must travel a path over and over before it knows your name.  This land knows my name.  I have been walking her path ways for over fifty years.

When the land knows you it brings you dead butterflies and mice and watches you.  How will you respond to its creatures?  I always bury them with reverence, marking their graves with the feathers of crow, woodpecker or sparrow.  Always let whatever is caught or stuck, free.   Then the wild begins to give you its gifts.  Soon the trees lend you their strength when you are on a steep path, and the stream offers you its purity.  Soon you find the bones, whitened by the sun.  I have made jewelry of these bones and worn them around my neck.  I have placed bones on my altar, used feathers in my hair.  At times I am offered whole nests. 

People have said to me, “How do you find these things?  I never find anything.”

I told one friend who was visiting and truly wanted to know, “I don’t ever look.  I ask.  I ask for what I want over and over then one day, walking down a path I hear a bone saying, ‘Over here.  I’m right here.’”

I invited him to try it.

He asked for an owl.  As he walked around the bend of the path, there on the ground was a piece of wood exactly in the shape of an owl.  Later he found an owl in the road.  He took some feathers.  Through this I learned you may skip the long days of waiting if you can find someone to introduce you to the land.

            The place I was heading was a gorge where the river pounds fiercely through the rocks.  On the way to that place, the dogs tried over and over to convince me that we were too far from home.  It is a steep climb on narrow Sierra trails.  The dogs got hot and thirsty but were afraid of the loud water. 

            There were so many memories on that trail.  My mother and I used to trailer my horse, Star, for our summer vacations there.  The Packers who took people and their belongings up to high country allowed me to come along for the day.  At age eight I awoke before dawn to eat breakfast with the cowboys.  Then we mounted our horses, and with a mule train trailing behind us, we rode the back-country.  I remember the mist coming up from the meadows before the sun rose.  By ten o’clock the trails were hot, dusty places.  Once we came upon a woman wearing shorts and a bikini top.  The old cowboy I was riding with named Bishop turned to me, and in astonishment said, “Why, she didn’t have enough on to dust a fiddle.”

            Hiking with my dogs, I passed the place where, ten years ago, I met a hysterical woman on the trail.  Her husband had fallen into the river and she had been running along its bank trying to find him for hours.   People had gone for help but no one stayed with her.  I sat with her for a long time waiting for the rescue team to make it up that trail with donkeys, wetsuits, ropes and diving gear.  They found him trapped under a ledge beneath the water.  I held the woman as she got the news.  I gave her my body as she keened.  It was an important meeting for me as well.  I had gone to my favorite spot to meditate on whether I should have the operation that would keep me in my body.  The physical problems in my body offered me a way out of this world of sorrows.  The woman proved to me that I was a valuable person, whether I had a uterus or not.  Because of that meeting I decided to have the surgery.

            I continued walking up the trail.  When I stopped at a small stream to drink or a shady rock to rest I wrote every resentment, every thing I was angry about, every fear.

            Four hours later I came to the place with the thundering water.  I sat beneath a pine tree and read those statements and asked how to rid myself of these negative emotions.  From all I knew, read, and experienced I knew there was a place where the negative did not live.  What I longed to know was how to reach that place consciously?  I felt my body and mind alive with resentments.  I tried not to think any thought that would fuel them, just feel them as sensation.  Without thought, the sensations were bearable.  Then I had a sense of that blank field, out of which all thought emerges – was that the One Mind?  Did all creation come out of this place?  I sat in awe at what ever I was in touch with.  All I knew for sure was there was a deep, inner stillness inside me. 

            In time I went down stream to a quiet pool and took off my clothes and got in the water and prayed.  If you have not prayed in icy water you have not prayed.  You get to the point quickly with great enthusiasm.  The cold reaches into the tiniest crevices of you and finds every prayer.  It is like the heat of the sweat lodge.  The extremes get you past complacent places.  You scream out your woes and desires with all your heart.  It breaks through to the other side, that intense, raw, cold.  I stayed emerged until my body leapt out of that water by itself. 

            I lay on the warm granite frozen but thawing.  I sobbed from the inside.  The emptiness inside me contracted towards itself for a long time.  The dogs sniffed at me concerned.

            When I was still I began to think of Wyn, my friends with problems, the world at war and I knew I had to go in again.  I went in for my family, and all creatures.  We are one.

            The next day I packed my belongings from the cabin and left.  When I got to a place my phone would work I called Sacha to see if I could stay the night with her.  She is a friend who lives in the Alabama Hills outside Lone Pine.  “Come on.”  She said.

            I arrived in the late afternoon.  I stared into her brilliant blue eyes and burst into tears.  I was so happy to see her.  She made me dinner and we talked and talked about Spirit, and our path towards letting go of the human dilemma, aligning ourselves with Truth, our eternal beings, and of course our neurosis.  Sacha was the perfect half way house.  She lives between the two worlds.  She understands everything.

            She has a cabin out back that llamas come to meditate in and Buddhist teachers spend long periods of silence in.  She rents it out for silent retreats for months at a time.  Sacha shops and cares for them and holds retreats of her own.  Her life is one large retreat.

            I went to bed, knowing I was coming home to much chaos, but so happy to be with my dear friend Sacha.  On the back porch of the cabin I prayed.  I felt so grateful to be there.  I had made it through ten days – alone.  I had met my loneliness, I had met the mystic within.  How would I walk with Her back home?              The dark, starry night of the desert, and the awe inspiring rocks of the Alabama Hills seemed to be listening.  I was connected to the land, and the soft warm night air.  It seemed to tell me that I would loose the mystic in me, and find Her, a thousand times or more and that was just fine.  “Just walk your path,” said the night air.  “Just Love,” said the leaves of the near-by cottonwoods.  “Just be,” said the rocks, standing like statues forever over- looking the valley,

“God, I can not grasp my Spiritual Identity, or Infinite thought.  What is Infinite thought?  How can I begin to know the meaning of Infinity?  In my fallen state I feel no union, only loneliness.  You have made the game too hard, God.  I cry all day in pain from my limitations.  They are like wounds.  My heart breaks for my children’s misery.  I fear for the trees and the misery of animals.  I fear the very earth upon which I walk and my house is built is poisoned.  In every rock is the memory of war and torture.  How can I be at peace?  How will I realize this deathless state of “being” in which all my discontent and the restlessness of all the people will be in harmony? 

            “Grant me healing in my hands.  Grant me Love in my Mind.  May I walk harmless on the earth.  What must I do to carry the gift of healing?  How may I lay down my ego?  Teach me. I am listening.  Teach me to love.  I want to know the heart of divinity.  Show me what human sense has not seen.”

CHAPTER 6.

THE CABIN RETREAT

May 28, 2008

            This morning while still in bed Wyn asked if I was feeling married again.  I said yes.  He asked if I wanted to stay married for another year.  We always decide each May if we are going to continue.  I said, “Okay, sign me up for another year.”  We put on our wedding rings and a half hour later waved good-bye.  I was going off on a ten-day retreat at my cabin with Marco Polo and Dorjé, my two beloved Tibetan Terriers.

            It is always exciting heading towards the cabin.  It is my favorite place on earth.  There are seventeen cabins in the area though you can barely see them from our cabin.  There is a river that runs dramatically over rocks and through the woods, crashing and thundering during the spring, demurely in the late fall, always a part of the singing sounds of the wild.  I have done Qigong by that river, trying to merge with its movements.           

            I inherited the cabin from my mother.  I was Mom’s sole caretaker for several years before she died.  My mother and I had not resolved many of our most painful issues before I moved in with her.  We always said we would never live together, but Life intervened.    The last five days of her life, on Christmas morning, 2000, her heart opened and the block that formed when her mother died when she was four years old, washed away.  For a few days I had the mother I had always wanted.  Then she left.  I would not have missed those few days for the entire world.

             The summer after her death I went to the cabin to be alone and to recuperate.  It was a disaster.  It is very isolated there.  I thought I would turn this vacation into a meditation retreat but in no time I was filled with anxiety. There is no phone reception at the cabin and no heat but a Franklin stove that requires you to fell a tree, saw up the wood and split logs into small pieces.  Mom stayed there all summer long until she was eighty.

How did Mom do it?  I remember letters from her describing every cloud in the sky and the leaves of the cottonwoods turning yellow and falling off the trees and floating down stream like happy little boats.  My mother, whom I never respected, was at heart a contemplative.  Why did I only realize that after her death?

After five days, (I had planned to stay a month), I packed up and went home.  I needed a retreat center with a bell, or a reading room to go to, and a phone nearby to call Wyn with my insights.

About 8:00 A.M. I started calling friends from my cell phone to say I would be gone for ten days.  I spoke with my daughter-in-law.  She and my son are separating.  She’s having anxiety attacks.  Tiger, aged seven, is angry, confused, heart broken, and scared for his mother who is beside herself with grief.  Crack goes my heart.  My son is falling apart in his own way. He has lost his cell phone, his wallet, has gotten sick, and sleeps in his office.  The very roots of my hair ache for all of them.

After speaking with my daughter-in-law I took deep breaths while speeding down 99 Highway.  I tried to remember how a metaphysical nurse would think.   She would not see the problem, which is the human condition ruled by a belief that the physical situation is what needs changing.  As a nurse I would look at their true identity – the very image and likeness of God, Spirit.  That thought is like a piano tuners tuning fork.  It holds a strong middle C and allows the out of tune string to come up to its vibration.  I would accept that my son, his wife and my grandson’s true identity could never be touched by their human problems.

My family was riddled with unhappy marriages, divorces and multiple marriages, way before it was popular.  My Grandpa George divorced his first wife when he discovered she was trying to kill him for his property.  He then married my grandmother, Della, from a mail order bride service.  They had three children, the middle child being my mother.  Della died at 38 one night while ironing.  My mother, Uncle Ernie and Aunt Grace were farmed out to relatives and orphanages for years until Grandpa re-married.

I had a huge realization the night before I left for the cabin.  I was meditating and I couldn’t stop thinking about men breaking in to my house to hurt me.   I saw their faces through the windows with haunting eyes filled with malice.  Holding the feeling of these fears their reason revealed itself.  When I was eighteen I was working and living in a small town for the summer.  One night a friend was expected and I left the door to my apartment unlocked.  I was awakened to hear the door open, and, thinking it was my friend, I wasn’t worried until I felt a knife in my back and a man telling me not to make a sound.  My going hysterical thwarted his attempted rape.  The neighbors called the police when they heard me screaming.  The police told me that it was my fault for leaving my door open and was fired from my job.  My employers could not have someone working for them who had been involved in a sexual scandal.

After nine hours of driving, shopping, getting gas at $5.49 a gallon for diesel, walking the dogs, and getting coffee – I arrived at the cabin.  It was pouring rain.  It was cold. 

The dogs were overjoyed to be out of the car.  They raced around the woods, barking their heads off, getting soaked, bringing dirt, sand and crud into the cabin.  In and out we all went, me unloading the car, back and forth in the wet, wet rain.

The first thing I did was make a fire.  Alan and Betty, the couple I rent out the cabin to during the winter had left wood by the fireplace so it was dry.  I carefully arranged paper, kindling, pinecones and wood and in no time a fire was blazing and the cabin began to warm up.

It was so still except for the sound of the river, the crackling fire, and the gentle rain.  These ancient sounds are medicine for the soul.  My road weary body was comforted by the simple chores, the familiarity of my surroundings and the beauty.  Beauty is medicine.

In time the rain stopped and the dogs and I walked off our stiffness.  The clouds and mist cut mountain ridges in half and the sun came out occasionally creating vibrant colors.  Everything sparkled and glowed.  The rain brought out the smells of the forest.  I was the only one there.  I felt like the first woman on earth.

This was where Smoky went wild.  This was where I had been coming since I was two years old.  This was my home.  I knew every bend in the river, every tree, every secret path up the glacier rocks in a way only a child can know things.  They were all still there.  Nothing had changed in sixty years; there is the wisdom tree where I had brought countless dilemmas and sat under it until I had an answer, there was the place the fawn who lost its mother came out of the bushes and sat on my lap, there was the cliff over-looking the valley where I have done yoga at dawn for forty years, there was the clearing I had my first kiss.

            I came back to the cabin, made tea and sat by the fire.  I was so grateful for the peace I felt.  There is a picture on the wall of my mother in her seventies.  She has on a stripped t-shirt and a familiar smile.  Sitting there in the cabin I remembered a time I came here to visit her in the 90’s.  I was living in Boulder, CO at the time.

  My son, who was living in L. A., met me at the airport and together we drove to the cabin.  That night we all slept outside on cots by the river.  We always said we couldn’t close our eyes until we’d seen a shooting star.  The bats came out and flew over our heads.  We saw a satellite blinking through the black and starry sky.  I do not remember if we saw a shooting star. 

During our first breakfast I fought with my mother.  She was making snide remarks about Russell’s belief in magical healing, or healing oneself through proper thought and diet.  I blew up.  I said, “Mom, you say you love Russell and I but you have never made one bit of effort to understand what it is we love.  You won’t read anything about it and you criticize us for trying to be healthy.”  We fought and fought.  It was an ancient battle.  I had started one of the first health food restaurants in Boston in the late 60’s and Mom ate ice cream even though she was dying of emphysema.

                 Afterwards I realized in order to stay sane with my mother in the woods for eight days I was going to have to do a mantra.  I started repeating 3,000 times a day, “Divine Mother be with me.”  Two days later my mother came to me and said, “Please tell me what you are in to.  I really want to know.”

                 I was lying in the hammock.  She sat beside me on a little stool.  Her lovely face was open.  I told her about the spiritual paths I’d been on since I was twenty-two and the kinds of people I’d met along the way.  I talked to her about the struggles I faced in my own nature.  There was a yearning to know God but I only had the energy to reach that transcended place when my life was so horrible I needed a miracle.  Once I reached that transcended place everything my human side wanted would come to me.  If I needed money, money would come, if I needed a man, a new relationship would present itself.  Then all these things, men, money, jobs, home seduced me away from God.  Then I would have to wait for everything to fall apart again.  Trying to bare the emptiness of the false self I ruined my health with coffee, sugar and depression.  On and on I talked.  Even I didn’t understand it.

            As I told her the truth about the struggles I faced trying to find a world I could live in, a world she had never known nor wanted and didn’t understand, my heart opened to her. What a cruel joke to give a daughter like me to a mother like her.  My mother could make a box of chocolates last a year.  When she was full she stopped eating.  She was content with the slightest gesture of appreciation.  I needed a stage and a three-ring circus to entertain me.  It was like she was a bird and I a river.  She couldn’t find my mouth.  She didn’t know how to nourish me.  But that day, instead of trying to make me into something she could understand she tried to know me.  I was so grateful.  

                 The next day I continued saying my mantra, “Divine Mother be with me.”  I got up at dawn and climbed the mountain near our cabin.  I sat on a rock and took off my clothes.  Wanting the warmth of the sun I prayed with all my heart.  I could understand how people felt the sun was God.  The power, warmth and gifts the sun brings make it paramount to the human condition.  The gratitude I felt when the sun came up over Night Cap Ridge was a blessing few now know.  If you truly want to know Joy, allow yourself to be so cold, so hungry, so tired, that food, warmth and rest are ecstasy. 

                 I prayed all day hiking.  I hiked up on the Sonora Pass over St. Mary’s trail.  The first part of the hike is steep, but a half hour up and over the first ridge you enter a bowl that is several miles across and flat.  It is a moon-like landscape in a great bowl, the color of slate.  In this bowl was every color of wild flower.  In between the slate grey rock there were coral Indian paintbrush and chartreuse flowers that glowed.  There were little streams I drank from flowing over and down the rock.  “Divine Mother Be With Me.”  There were pine trees shaped by the wind and stunted by cold and a little black snake.   I walked through this wondrous land with my prayer like a pilgrim.

                 The next day, back at the cabin, I sat on a rock in the middle of the river saying my prayer.  I was annoyed.  I was bored from being at the cabin, bored with my prayer bored with my mothers constant talking.  She told stories I had heard hundreds of times.  She spoke in clichés.  In a temper I asked the stream, “Who is the Divine Mother anyway?”

In an instant I heard the answer.  The stream said, “I am the feminine face of God.” 

“What is your name?” I asked. 

She said her names were patience, forgiveness, love, and beauty.  I asked her to be with me while I was with my mother.  She said to ask in the moment she was needed.

                 That evening in the cabin after dinner during my mothers endless story I remembered Divine Mother and I prayed, “Please give me patience.  Give me Joy.  Give me all your qualities.” 

In a flash I was interested in what my mother was talking about.  That was a miracle in itself.  I began to hear parts of the story I hadn’t heard before.  My arrogance dropped away.  I asked questions about aspects of the story she hadn’t mentioned, and we laughed and laughed, imagining “what if’s”, or “who knows.”

                 In no time my mother was off to bed, very happy and I felt happy I had not turned into a horrible person, withholding my love because of my annoyance.

Remembering that happy moment with my mother and feeling her presence inside the cabin, I was at peace.  I put another log on the fire and began to meditate.  I slowly watched and counted my breaths as Ram Dass taught me thirty-eight years ago.  With the inhale you think “rising” and with the exhale you think “falling”.  I have counted to a thousand, “rising” and “falling”, most days of my life since then.  At some point the words disappear and I look at what is behind the breath.  It is a deep, still, indescribable place that nothing I know me to be can identify with.  I touch it then am thrown back.  My ego finds something to complain about or fear, and though I try not to listen, I can’t help myself.

I made a bed in the living room because the bedroom was too cold, and with a dog on each side of me we slept and snored our way through our first night.

Chapter 5.

 I am planning a trip to my cabin in the Sierra for ten days even though I hate being alone.  Every spiritual teacher I have ever read, listened to or met has in some way said that you can’t trust your choices as long as you can’t face your fears.   As long as that fear is there you can never trust that you are loving for the right reason.  If you use romance to keep away your fears, how can you know if you love that person or are just tricking yourself?           

            I have been to workshops to find and face this place in me that is afraid.  There is a Vipassana Meditation retreat in the foothills of California at North Fork.  There they hold ten- day retreats in absolute silence.  They provide two light meals a day for the one hundred fifty people who show up for each retreat.  It is free.  The only thing they insist on is that you show up for each sitting and complete the course. There is a monitor who counts heads to make sure everyone is there for each meditation period. 

            The first day, the meditation hall looks orderly and everyone is sitting with strong resolve.  By the second day you can sense agitation and restlessness.  By the third day the intensity of the place has risen.  People have built forts of blankets, extra pillows for knees or to sit higher on the meditation cushion.  Then people stop showing up and the monitor is off to find them.  People hide in their rooms, get sick, need to sleep, anything to avoid that place inside them.  People are trying to think of ways they can be called away on an emergency.  That place that has been avoided by talking, eating, comfort, jobs, and relationships is starting to arise to the surface of their consciousness.  The inner operation has begun.

            On the third day of my first retreat I met the grief of leaving my son when he was three.   I had done countless kinds of therapy to resolve this but it always came back.  I had come to accept it as a part of me that couldn’t be healed.  I, in some ways, felt like a shrine, a warning of what happens to a woman who leaves her child.  Each time I remembered putting my son on the plane with his father I fell apart.  “How could I let him go?  What kind of person could let their child go?”  I would picture his little tear stained face and scream inside. 

            For days I tried to fight off the memory with the meditation technique, but the feelings grabbed all my attention and the pain it caused in my body was unbearable.  I finally talked to the retreat leaders, a couple who volunteered to sit with us for these ten days.  They were available for instruction.  They listened to my story with great compassion then told me to feel the feelings without the story.

            I went back to my meditation torture chamber.  “What good is that going to do?” I asked myself.  I was pissed off they didn’t have a better suggestion.  Soon the feelings were alive in me again.  I thought, “Well, just try it for a second.” 

            I let go of the story, the words to criticize myself, even the words of the facts of what happened.  It was as if the story was keeping the feelings about two feet away from me.  When I dropped any words to describe it the impact of the emotions were like a kick to my chest.  My chest, neck and head began to burn with an intense fire.  I burned for a long time.  At last the burning ended.  The sadness I had carried in me for over thirty years, this self-hatred and grief had just burned itself out.  It wasn’t me at all.  It was something I believed.

            For a few days I felt as if I were freezer burned.  If I experienced the slightest breeze or if the air conditioner came on my skin felt as though it had been physically burned.  Then, that too disappeared, never to return.

            With the story gone from my body, new insight came.  Though I was not a conventional mother I had stayed alive for my son.  I had gotten sober and have remained so for 27 years.  When I was five years sober he came to live with me.  Though my son is still very angry about me leaving him, he calls on me for help from time to time and I can be there.  I am there for my grandson Tiger.  I also saw the family pattern of my grandmother dying when my mother was four and leaving my mother motherless.  My mother had put me in a foster home for a while.  It was a family pattern, leaving children.

            I am fascinated about the connection of our minds and bodies.  In my thirty-two years of being a massage therapist my constant question was what kind of thoughts created that kind of problems in the body.  It eventually led me to be able to read bodies.  Reading bodies I can tell in an instant what is unconscious in a person.  For instance if the left foot is sticking out at an angle there is an unresolved issue with the mother, the right, the father.  Rounded shoulders and upper back pain is always related to affairs of the heart; abandonment issues, a broken heart, etc.  Lower back is financial, always a lack of some needed support.  Large stomachs are related to mother issues.  Scoliosis, or a twisted trunk is usually about the upper part of the body, the mind and heart, not being able to communicate to the lower nature; sex, a need to belong, power, etc.           

            While I was wrestling with the demons of fear about Wyn not responding to my gesture of reconciliation, my right arm began to ache and became unusable.  I could not lift it from my side.  It was as if my arm was showing me my dilemma.

            “You are so helpless you need someone, (Wyn,) to do everything.  You are not even capable of lifting the slightest object,” said my arm.           

            As the realization hit me that I had married Wyn to save me financially, to protect me from my intense pain body, from all my fears of abandonment and of being alone, – as this awareness exploded in my consciousness the ache in my arm became unbearable.

            I was in Santa Barbara for my grandson, Tiger’s, first violin recital.  I drove there from Ojai with my left hand.  My son, Hesu Whitten, a chiropractor in Santa Barbara, was also at the recital.  He adjusted me.  Every bone in my body was out of alignment.  His expert hands put into place my neck, the entire vertebral column, hips, shoulders and arms, with the accompanying sounds of release and movement of bones, muscles and tendons.  Had I not been aware of the issue that had caused every part of my body to be out of place, his adjustments would not have worked.           

            I awoke the next morning and the pain was gone.  It was gone, not because the adjustment had fixed it, it was gone because the issue was gone.  Once the awareness comes there is no need for the illness.  It is the belief in some conflict that keeps the pain in place.

            I recently did body work on a woman who was going to school to become a therapist.  She was looking for a place to do her internship.  She had been on many interviews and not been hired.  I saw how her shoulders were rounded protecting her heart.  Her back was so tight and twisted from tight muscles she flinched every time I tried to put the slightest pressure into my strokes.  Her neck was unmovable.

            “Where do your people come from?” I asked her.

            “From Russia.  We are Russian Jews.”

            “Ah, that makes sense.  You are carrying the pogroms, the persecution in your body.  Your family probably didn’t know how to talk about it.”

            “No,” she said.  “No one ever talked about anything.  They didn’t smile, they weren’t happy.  They were critical about everything.”

            “They internalized what happened to them,” I said.  “You have done the same thing.  You are carrying their story in your body.  You did not become a therapist to help others you became a therapist in the hope you would receive the love you have never had.”

            She gasped and began to cry.           

            “Do you have a spiritual path to help you?” I asked.

            “I guess you could say I am a Zen Buddhist.”

            “Good.  Are you familiar with the story of the Bodhisattva?”

            “Yes.  They are people who have awakened to the Truth of Life, but have come back to help others.  In fact they have vowed to come back until all human beings are saved.”

            “You have decided to become a therapist.  You have gone through years of training.  If you choose to stay with the Russian Jew story you will perpetuate it and it will kill you.  You body is in so much pain it will create an illness that will take you out.  If you choose the Bodhisattva story you will not only heal yourself but all those who come to you for help.”

            In that moment her shoulders released.  It was a beginning.

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.