5

Growing Edge

Driving home, I felt like an escorted soul, cradled in the safe arms of Providence. With my third eye opened wide I saw the divine mother revealing her splendor everywhere. I looked to my left and saw a field of brilliantly pink, effulgent flowers, opening their sweetness to the world. Through the open car window, a soft heavenly fragrance greeted me. Up ahead, a sparklingly radiant sky. To the right, a flowing river of wonder. All of it here to show me, in vivid color, the intimate, sensual universe waiting on the other side of perfect love. I would never have noticed in my usual here now. Love’s immaculate perception.

When I arrived home, I took a long nap. I wanted to dream Sarah back into my arms. After I woke up, I unpacked my bag. There, between two smelly t-shirts, was a small pink envelope with OGDO on it. In it, she had written only this:

You are me inside I am you.

A few days later, I retreated again. Like a turtle, I needed to go inside and integrate this startling heart opening before I could step out still further. Each time we met, I experienced a radical dissolution of my usual framework of perception. As I shed one self-sense, another way of being stepped up to take its place. It was like I was dissolving and re-forming at the same time.

Who was this man, now?

And, now…?

At the end of the work week, I turned off my phone and drove to the forest for the weekend. I needed some alone time to reconnect with my center. While hiking in the woods, my cynicism took over again. I thought of the geographical distance, the religious differences, the age gap, our shared tendency towards solitude. Surely there was too much against us?

It was all I could do to resist my desire to take the first off-ramp. The monkey mind clicked into gear: Do I really need partnership? Who says we need a partner to be whole? Isn’t wholeness found within? On and on it chattered, comparing path choices. Truth be told, I was frightened beyond measure. The connection beckoned me toward a form-lessness beyond my reckoning. Yet the unknown had always led to disappointment. How to trust the mystery when it has never proven kind or generous? Why surrender to emptiness when it has always been consistently painful?

At the same time, I was tired of looking at my isolated reflection in the mirror, tired of being alone in pictures, tired of walking alone in the forest, tired of the isolated lair of the lone wolf warrior. How many lives had my warrior soul sat alone at the riverbank? How many centuries had I avoided the path of the heart? How many lifetimes had I put self-protection ahead of soul-connection? In my efforts to avoid humanity, I had surely averted my own humanness.

Now felt like time. I had journeyed intensively on my own. I had worked hard on myself for years. And I knew, whether my fear-body liked it or not, that there were aspects of myself, hidden treasures, that could only be brought forth through a depthful relationship with another. I think they call this “the growing edge.” But was this blade too sharp?

Just before coming home, I walked back to the rambling brook to meditate on the connection. Sitting beside the sacred place where I had first asked for this love, I wondered: Had love really hunted me down, or was I just a wishful thinker? Maybe I truly was the great deluded one?

Still not much of a meditator, I was distracted by a high-pitched chirping sound that wouldn’t let up. I looked up and only a few feet from me was a bright red male cardinal sitting on a cedar branch singing his body electric, eyeing my bag of trail mix with fervent desire. He kept chirping his mantra, as though communicating an imperative message. A birdsong with my name on it?

What’s with the fucking cardinals?

Meta-dating

Before returning to my apartment, I went to meet Daniel for Dim Sum in Chinatown. We have a long standing tradition of discussing life over dumplings and noodles. To get a sense of Daniel, imagine a stocky panda bear. Now add a pair of very thick glasses—thick like the bottom of a pop bottle. Now redden his hair, and brush some of it forward. Now add a kippah (a Jewish skullcap), and a small gold stud to his left ear and make him unstoppably cuddly. Oh, and magnetic blue eyes. That’s Daniel.

When I got there, his head was buried in yet another Eastern spirituality book.

“Good to see you Danny,” I said as I kissed his forehead and sat down in front of him. “How are you?”

Without looking up, he replied, “Neither good nor bad—just here.”

“Oh good, detaching from your wound-body again, are you?” I replied sarcastically.

He put the book off to the side and looked me square in the face. “It’s better than activating it, my friend. Much much better.”

The showdown had begun.

I replied sharply, “It’s always active, my friend. Transcending it doesn’t make it go away. Doesn’t heal it either. Just comes back later and bites you in the ass.”

When I first met Daniel in law school, he was a passionate love seeker. If he wasn’t in a relationship with someone he called “the one,” he was sure he had just spotted her. And then he met Hannah—a woman that he loved so deeply he would have given his life for her. Two orthodox Jews madly in love, we were sure they would get married and raise a beautiful family. But then she left him on his 26th birthday to “explore other possibilities.” Three weeks later, she died in a scuba diving accident in Belize. Perhaps to manage the pain, perhaps to find an answer, he became a spiritual seeker, focusing on various Eastern perspectives. Lately, his focus was on detaching from emotional pain. He was desperate to find the moment, while sidestepping his unresolved wounds.

“Non-duality requires a more expanded consciousness, Lowen. Less ego more…”

I cut him off, “No, not less ego, Daniel. Less unhealthy ego. Listen, you can’t call it a unified field of awareness if you remove everything uncomfortable from the moment: the ego, your body, your unresolved pain, your personal identifications. That’s not expanded consciousness, buddy. That’s dissociation.”

“Quite a soliloquy, but let’s look at the facts. You spent the last few days tormented by your latest love relationship, right? I spent the last month unperturbed by anything.”

“Like a robot.”

Clearly agitated, he shot back, “You are pissing me off.”

“Wound-body awakens. That was quick!” I replied.

He went quiet and took his glasses off to clean them—a habit that signaled he was feeling uncomfortable. This dialogue was hitting a nerve.

“Just let her go. It’s too intense. What’s the point? You’re just gonna crash and burn,” he said with great certainty.

We sat and slurped our noodles in silence for some time. Although he was annoying me, I also felt grateful for his impeccably timed message. In a way, he was the perfect reflection at the right time, representing the part of me that wanted to detach from Sarah; that wanted to find nirvana without risking loss; that wanted to find my answers in concepts rather than feelings. He was the wounded part of me that was still chirping in my inner ear, trying to convince me to give up on love as path. He was the isolationist part that wanted to make God a fleshless head trip. It was good to see myself from the outside.

I thought of Sarah in those last moments just before we parted in the mountains. The way the sun danced on her face, the way her smiling eyes sparkled, the softness of her hand in mine. Only once in an eternity does God launch this kind of heart rocket. How could I turn away?

I suddenly felt compassion for my friend, struggling as he was to find his faith in love after such a tremendous loss.

“Right now you can’t relate but you will again, Danny,” I said softly.

He replied, much less confident in his position, “I get there meditating.”

“Yah, me too,” I replied. “Meta-dating, there’s just something about the effect of two destined hearts merging that deepens the meditation experience.”

He quickly responded, “It’s destined to fail,” with a shaky voice, failing miserably at sounding firm.

I wanted to challenge him again, but I looked up and noticed a tear in his eye. There was suddenly nothing to debate. He was doing his best to manage his pain. I was doing my best to believe in love. To each their journey.

When I got home, there were flowers waiting at my door from Sarah. In the heart of the most radiant sunflowers I have ever seen, was another card. This one said it all:

Love of my life, I remember us.
We fell once then climbed a mighty summit.
Clinging together, our hearts sharing a
new pulse, our seams woven and knitted
closely, we tumbled together down a grassy
hill, staining our hearts with
one another’s love pledges.

I remember you. I loved you a thousand
times before—your sweet fire still burns
inside my breast. I’ll love you a thousand
times more. Eternity prompts me
to join your love with mine.

Like a hot arrow to the heart, I was immediately felled. Rendered completely vulnerable, open and raw. If I had any remaining doubts, they were instantly erased. No sense resisting reality. She is my calling.