4

The Yoniverse of Meaning

Even before my plane landed in Toronto, I could feel the world closing in on me. It’s one thing to feel ecstatic on vacation in the mountains of Colorado, quite another to sustain it in the heart of an over-stimulated urban life. To drive the point home, the taxi I rode in from the airport had a fender bender with a garbage truck on the way into the city. Back to reality.

After two days at home, I was overcome with confusion. Immediately upon my return, I began an intense two week jury trial and found it incredibly difficult to keep my heart open in such an armored, hostile environment. If I was going to be an edgy warrior in the courtroom, I had to emotionally shut down some part of myself. If my opponent sensed even the slightest vulnerability in me, he pounced. In a way, it was like a war between worlds: the harsh world where most of humanity still lives, and the heartfelt world that awaits us. How to bridge the gap? Had I opened the heart-gate too early?

And, of course, it was more than the outer world alone. It was my inner world as well. My habitual range of emotion was much tighter at the seams than this startling love experience. Although I had laid the groundwork for deeper opening in my therapy, it was quite another thing to do it in real life. I understood the machinations of the marketplace, but love’s mysteries were beyond my comprehension. I knew virtually nothing about soul-sourced intimacy.

As I moved through my days, I found myself retreating deeper into my shell, even wondering aloud to Daniel if I had simply lost my mind in Colorado. He was sure that I had. It all felt strangely unreal, even otherworldly. Like landing on a planet devoid of gravity. Where the hell is the ground?

At the same time, one serendipitous act after another eroded my resistance. When I pulled out of my driveway in a hurry one morning, a VW minivan with a Colorado license plate just missed hitting me. What’s with this strange car-ma? And while sitting in my backyard, a red cardinal flew over and dropped a feather not six inches from my feet. Often I would think of Sarah and our favorite driving songs in Colorado would sing to me from the radio, sometimes two in succession.

I didn’t have the audacity to think that all these reminders were intended for me. But… were they? Is there a complex universal framework that invites those who are opening to love to open further? Is it possible that our connection was being orchestrated by a Universal Broadcasting System with benevolent intentions? If so, where was this orchestration leading us?

I avoided Sarah’s calls for a few days, until one afternoon she caught me at the office. Shit! I tried to keep it superficial, but she would have none of that.

“Where have you fled to, Lowen?” she asked directly.

I deflected, “Nowhere, just trying to get through my days.”

“I can’t feel you. Please speak from your heart...”

“Not sure where I left it, to be honest.”

Long pause.

“You left your heart with me. I’m carrying it for us,” she said softly.

Arrow to the heart. Shit.

She insisted on staying on the phone with me in silence until she could feel me. It worked—I slowly began to feel me, too. And then I could feel her. We were back on holy ground.

When I got home that day, I received a card from her with her words written in that familiar scrawl. Divine Timing...

When like the sudden wind
on the ocean,
the tides of life washed me ashore—
you collected my heart among the remnants,
then breathed deeply
into all my quiet dreams.

On the back, where one writes their return address, she had scrawled:

You are my home. I am homeless in your absence.

Say no more. Deep shit love. Try as I might, there was no turning back. Onward and upwards.

Mount Hurricane

We planned a five-day camping trip in the Adirondack Mountains in new York State a few weeks later. Sarah would fly to new York and rent a car. I would drive down from Toronto.

On the way to meeting her, I was overwhelmed with fear. Same bullshit again. So frightened, like being called to a vast canvas with tiny brushes. My breath shallowed and my shoulders rose as though in response to an imminent threat. Is love a threat? At the same time, a wave of optimism was shaking me loose from the inside out. I was about to see her again, my beloved, and the thought made me tremble deliriously. It was all there, terror and enchantment and delight.

I pulled up to the meeting spot, a parking area at the base of Mount Hurricane near Lake Placid. Just after I got out of the car, she arrived. When I saw her, I stopped live in my tracks, quickened within, frozen in timeless. Instead of getting out of her rental car, she just sat there in her seat, staring deeply into my eyes. Penetrating me to the core. Again, yet again, the minutiae fell away, as our souls bridged across dimensions. Forged in ecstasy, there was only this wholeness, this majesty, this infusion of love breath.

When she at last got out of the car, she raced toward me and jumped into my arms, joyous and alight. She climbed onto my shoulders, facing me with her legs wrapped around my shoulders. I could smell the sweet fragrance of her yoni (Sacred Sanskrit term for ‘vagina’), as it pushed up against me. I wanted to bury myself in it, to taste her from the inside out. Jumping down to the ground, she pulled me towards the forest, “Make love to me now, Lowen Cooper!”

I ran with her into the woods, down a small hill to a little thicket hidden from view. She leaned against a shaded tree and beckoned me close with her smiling eyes. As she undressed completely, I took my shirt off. We began to kiss ferociously, and I pushed up against her, lost in our shared resonance. But when she reached for my hardness, I pulled away, suddenly self-conscious—looking for a way out? She coaxed me back, kissing my chest, working her way down my stomach with her sweet kisses. And then I turned right off, losing my sexual charge. Still she kept kissing me, until I said the wrong thing.

“Suck my cock, baby...” I moaned.

Suddenly, the energy shifted and she stood back up and glared at me:

“Is that what I am to you, Lowen? Some cock-sucking baby? Is that your default position when love scares you—porn talk?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” I responded, embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. Not sure what to say. I don’t understand all of what I am feeling.”

Loving Sarah really was like learning a new language, one I couldn’t easily download into my archaic warrior system. I could persuasively articulate any concept, but to express my true feelings was an entirely different matter. When it became uncomfortable, I reflexively turned back to my caveman dictionary.

We dressed and walked back to the car in silence. After gathering our camping gear, we began to hike the trail. Not a single word was spoken for almost two hours, as we climbed Mount Hurricane in an uncomfortable silence.

When we reached the top, Sarah lay down on the ground and began to sob. Her body convulsed, like she was exorcising a long-embodied demon. I got down on the ground to hold her, but she put up her hand to boundary me. Backing off, I granted her the space she asked for.

After she calmed down, she quietly shared her piece, “I’m sorry, I have no compassion for that. I hate to be objectified, to be turned into a play thing. Especially by you.” A final tear fell onto her cheek.

“I am so sorry, I’m just scared. I don’t have a template for this. This love is beyond imagining.”

“Yes, it is. Let’s just be with that Lowen,” she softly replied.

We pitched the tent and then sat together silently on the cliff edge. The sun was going down, its light softening to meet the darkness. Although it was quiet, I heard everything—our mutual heartbeat, my love-quickened breath, a symphony of ecstatic rhythms gliding through the air. This is what God must sound like.

In her presence, everything that happened before in my life seemed up-framed, held in a whole new context. My painful childhood, my foolish mistakes, my chaotic relationships, my many detours, all seemed like perfect teachings. Even my prior commitment to non-commitment was validated. I really did have preparatory commitments to honor: clearing the emotional debris that interfered with my capacity to partner, building the internal girders required to sustain a genuine commitment. Before I could really take someone inside, I had to carve a space for her, a canyon for her river of love to run through. It was all ready-making for this moment.

It was getting cold on the mountain. We crawled into the tent and tried to sleep. Impossible. There was too much longing. Although we needed to slow the physicality down, we couldn’t contain the urge to meld. We got lost in a soothing cuddle-fest, holding one another breathily close, shaping against each other, trying to find the form that best reflected our love.

Cascading into oneness, our sexuality ignited. Sarah reached for my genitals, and I reached for hers. My heart opened wider, as I readied to penetrate her for the first time in this lifetime.

And then, suddenly, arose waves of terror, doom, a fear of death—if I crossed this line. Not physical death, but the death of the separate self. I wasn’t ready. Poised before the temple door, I shrunk back.

This time, she was compassionate, holding me close, looking deeply into my eyes. I felt so seen, like she was seeing straight through my armor to the essential being quivering beneath. After some time, she closed her eyes and smiled. Then she opened her eyes and looked right at me again. And then, she closed them yet again, smiling.

“What are you doing, Sarah?”

“It’s something I like to do with you, sweetness. I sync with your eyes then close my own to feel the radiance.”

Ahhhhh.

Lying in her arms, I felt into my warrior resistance. I could feel him breathing down my neck, determined to keep me separate. For the first time in this incarnation, he wanted me flaccid. Better limp than vulnerable. In every way, this love was a threat to everything that held me safe on this planet. It demanded surrender and bound-arylessness, when it had been vigilance and rigidity that had kept me alive. I had no template to stand in this heart-fire.

It is such an odd thing to embody armor and longing at the same time. On the outer plane, my musculature reflected my unyielding nature, but down below, a river of longing was pushing up against it, slowly softening its edges. Because this armor was fueled by so much more than conditioned masculinity—calcified from the hardened tears of a mad childhood—it was much more difficult to soften. I could feel myself shedding one thin layer of armor at a time, but would I get there in this lifetime? Could I truly bare myself before my beloved, or was half-hearted intimacy my best shot?

I awoke at dawn to a now familiar scratching sound. Sarah must be writing. Stumbling out of the tent, I wandered over to the cliff edge. Down a few dozen feet she stood, naked, writing on the cliff wall. It was like looking at the maker and his finest creation at the same time. The maker has the sweetest lower back curve. She looked up at me, smiling eyes in all their glory. I climbed down to join her. I turned to the cliff wall. The stone was covered in writing—she was on fire this morning.

I reached for the chalk. She put her hand up to stop me, “Write naked, or get your own chalk, city boy.” Hippies! I shyly undressed, and she handed me a piece of chalk. Like two excited children, we turned to the wall and wrote together to our soul’s content.

When we were done, we sat down and welcomed the day. I longed to touch her, but there was no need—I was already touching her. Reaching deep into her. And she into me. We sat in silence, enchanted by our shared divinity.

Sarah got up and climbed a tree at the cliff edge. Crawling out on the thickest branch, a naked purring lioness, she hung herself upside-down. A new yoga asana: Upside-down tree pose? It was a perfect reflection of my current experience. Everything I had identified as reality was being turned upside-down. Or was it now right-side up?

OGDO

Raindrops started to fall. We packed up the tent, and began the hike back down the mountain. As we hiked the trails, prior incarnations rose into view, reminding us of the magic and the madness that is our story. Hand in hand, heart in heart, we were called back in time, excavating our shared karmic lineage from the cells of our being—the enlivened beginnings, the seamless mergings, the harsh fall-aways. There was no question—this was not our first lifetime together. Our souls had danced together before.

As we moved through the days, we continued to deepen our recognition of one another. We were together for the first time in this lifetime, and yet we both somehow knew that this moment would come all along. We shared a quiet sense of each other that transcended language. In looking at one another, we gazed at our own reflection. Whatever the manifest differences, they were transient, temporal, surface. At the place of essence, no difference.

It is such a profound relief when great love comes your way after years, lifetimes, without it. In Sarah’s presence, prior connections were revealed for what they were—necessary rungs on the ladder of wholeness, leading to the true destination. Every prior involvement could now be seen in its futility, in its sobering limitations. At some level, in all the various stages of my development, I was always weaving a nest for this love. All those times I had projected love onto strangers, chased them down on the street to say “hello,” left notes on their bikes, were revealed for what they were—a search for what I had lost so very long ago. It was always a quest for Sarah. And now, as my heart opened, her spirit re-entered, returning us to our rightful inheritance. The One-nest. Our eternal stomping ground.

At the same time, an air of danger enshrouded us. I didn’t know if it was mine, ours, or humanity’s, but it was palpable. I felt it very strongly one morning while we were washing each other in the shower. It was only a quick flash, but there was an instant when I thought I saw the path ahead of us. I saw a merging so remarkable that it opened a portal to an entirely different level of consciousness. And I saw a darkness looming within and beyond it, as though foreshad-owing its impossibility. Was this love-dance all pre-encoded, both the meeting and the farewell, the hello and the goodbye? Or was my childhood trauma again projecting its worst imaginings?

That afternoon, our light shone through. We were sitting at the back of a quaint French restaurant, waiting to order dessert after a wonderful Pain Perdu lunch. Sarah was sharing stories from her adventurous early life in the Flatirons. I was listening closely, but even more, enjoying her endearing idiosyncrasies: the freckles that sprinkled her nose like a constellation of stars, the sparkle in her eyes when she spoke about her chess champion grandfather, the excited tenor in her voice when she shared her great love for poetry.

From the outside, it looked like any mundane moment in a life. A simple meal, a series of stories, a moment’s pause from the midday heat. But it wasn’t. Because we weren’t alone. God was sitting with us at the table, communing with us, encompassing us in his resplendent glow. I could feel him close at heart, like a friend who never leaves, a devoted guide who ferries us from one incarnation to another, ushering us along love’s corridors. I was under no delusion that he appeared for us, and us alone. God is always at the table. It is the love that reveals him.

Sarah noticed something, too. “Do you feel something near us?” she asked.

“Yes, God is here,” I replied matter-of-factly.

“Oh God, you are delusional,” she replied, just as matter-of-factly.

“Yes, but...”

She scrunched her nose with delight. “I have a new nickname for you. Your nickname is now OGDO.”

“How do you spell that?” I asked.

“O-G-D-O, and do you want to know what it stands for?”

“Not sure that I do.”

“Well, it stands for, are you ready… Oh Great Deluded One,” she said with a cackle, clearly pleased with her linguistic ingenuity.

“You’re not going to write that on a wall are you?”

She smiled softly, and reached for my hand.

“Yes, but... you are right. God is here, OGDO. For reals.”

My turn to deflect, “Shall we order him dessert?” I asked with a smile.

“I’m sure he has already eaten.”

“Angel food cake?”

“Cute. No, I see him as more of a Crème Brulee type.”

“Yes, that feels right. It has that heavenly quality.”

That heavenly quality. When two hearts touch, the heavens open.

We ordered a Crème Brulee for God and his two love-struck devotees. Before it arrived, Sarah leaned over and whispered in my ear, “IU, OGDO.”

“IU, Sarah?”

“Yes, I love you implies a gap. There isn’t one, OGDO. IU…”

After dessert arrived, Sarah motioned for me to take the first bite. I did, and she leaned in to kiss my Brulee soaked lips, “Mmmmmm, actually I think OGDO means O’ Great Delicious One. That’s you. Creamy and perfect.” It was all I could do to contain my impulse to jump on top of her. Instead, we settled in for a long delicious kiss, the kind that even public kissers would find embarrassingly steamy.

A Truly Happy Ending

That evening, the soulevator finally arrived back at the ground floor. We were walking back to our motel, when I noticed Sarah drifting away. Ever-vigilant, I asked her what was wrong.

“Nothing wrong, I’m just worried,” she replied, her lower lip quivering.

“Worried, why, my dear?” I inquired gently.

“This love. I hope that I can hold it safe.”

I was too caught up in the love swirl to fully grok the meaning of this, but I knew enough to ask, “Why do you doubt it?”

“I feel like I lose myself in you. Am I strong enough for that? not sure sometimes.”

“But you don’t need to be strong alone. We find our strength together.”

“Yes, but I just feel so young.”

Her voice became softer, slightly trembling, “...and this love feels so old.”

Then she broke away from me, cutting down an alley as though fleeing a crime scene. I followed her until she suddenly stopped and turned to face me, staring at me with frightened eyes. I asked her to tell me what she was feeling. She glared in silence. The silence catapulted me into a terror of my own: can we die this fast? She pulled a piece of chalk from her bag, and wrote this on the alley wall:

How to hold love safe?

She reached over to hug me and we cried together for a very long time. Sobbing, heaving, we released eons of emotional holdings. How could we hold this many tears? And whose tears were these anyway? Clearly, we had entered a new dimension, one that did not subscribe to traditional emotional parameters and relational expectations; one so energetically charged that it would demand everything of us. Like artistic expression, it was ecstatic, chaotic, and ever-morphing. There was no question. We were in for a challenging creative process. But there was nowhere else I would rather be.

When we awoke in the morning, the heaviness was gone. Sarah was lying beside me, staring at me in that way she did when she had been looking at me for hours. I jumped on in, gazing into her eyes, traveling back and forth on our bridge across forever. She moved a little closer and began to stroke my face with her hand. Oh, how I loved those long, nimble fingers. Then she reached down and stroked my chest, lighting my heart aflame. The fire spread to my loins, where an erection of eager proportions rose into view. This erection wasn’t like my usual hard-ons, inspired by external stimuli. This one was ignited from the inside out. A heart-on.

I lay back on the bed and she gave me a long and beautiful heart-job, touching me with the perfect balance of tenderness and tension, repeatedly bringing me close to the peak, before backing me off for another ascent. My face remained buried under her still arm throughout, happily smelling her sweaty perfection. Then, when the moment was just right, my throbbing essence erupted into rapture. I had never experienced such a sacred, triumphant release. The heart-genital highway was finally open for travel! A truly happy ending.

Before parting, we took our final shower together. Sarah got out early to call her family, while I let the water run over my head, drowning my imminent sorrow. How to return to the armored world after another taste of eternity?

As we made the long drive back to my car, it felt like a funeral procession, morbid and haunting. How do you part from your own heart without dying?

We pulled into the lot and sat in silence. I clutched on to her hand for a very long time. We got out of the car to hug goodbye. Hugging wasn’t enough. We walked down the hill to the same thicket where we first began our trip together. This time it was different. So much had transpired in these past days together. We were now being nourished from the same root.

She leaned up against a wide oak tree while we kissed ferociously. Kissing wasn’t enough. I needed to imbibe her fully, so her honeyed life force could sustain me during our time apart. I lowered her pants and began to worship her with my tongue. This wasn’t oral sex as I had known it. Sparks of aliveness ignited inside me as my heart opened wider with every taste. She was the perfect elicksir for my love-starved soul.

In the heart of the worship, I had a profound realization. As my lips merged with hers, I felt the presence of the Godself rising up to meet me. Outside the portal of connection, I couldn’t quite see it. But here, in the moistical membrane of co-creation, he was heartfully revealed. God wasn’t up there, on a pogo stick to the stars. God was right here, in the heart of the yoniverse. Here was the proof that God exists. Here was the treasure I had sought. The yoniverse of meaning was before me.