An Uncommon Bond Read online

  “I’m leaving tomorrow. Will you come up?” I asked.

  “I need to do a few things. Can I come back in an hour?”

  “Of course, room 718.”

  I kissed her softly on the lips and got out of the car. She drove away right after I closed the car door, again triggering my fear that I would never see her again.

  When I got to the room, the phone was ringing. It was Daniel, calling to make sure I was still alive. After hearing my voice, he inquired into my well-being, “You alright? You sound strange… not like you?”

  His point was well taken. Who am I took on a whole different meaning in the heart of this love. Which me is real—the localized consciousness I have habitually called home, or the vaster terrain I was called to in her divine presence?

  Our conversation ended with his version of wisdom: “Stay strong. She’s just one chick, after all.” As much as I wanted to whack him, a small part of me appreciated the reminder from the brotherhood. I had a feeling I would need to lean into him in the coming months.

  Touching the G(od) Spot

  There was a knock on my door a few hours later. I opened the door and Sarah was standing there with a small bag in her hands.

  “I brought my pj’s, Lowen. Let’s have a sleepover.”

  She threw the bag on the bed, and reached over to hug me. I stepped back from her, momentarily afraid to connect. She looked at me, puzzled. I quickly moved back in for the hug.

  We soon found ourselves lying on the bed, facing one another with our eyes wide open. We lay there for hours, soul-gazing to our heart’s content. Goodness Goddess, where have you been all my life? Where have you not been all my life? Were you not always right here, awaiting our cosmic re-embrace?

  Late into the night, she asked me to touch her body. I felt suddenly shy, reluctant to see her. I stood up and turned off the light. She understood. This was the nature of the process: revealings, resistance, deeper revealings. I guess we still needed to keep something hidden.

  I walked to the bottom of the bed, and undressed her with a tenderness I had never experienced with a woman. I didn’t care at all about my own pleasure this night. I wanted only to worship this divinity. With great reverence, I began to touch her whole body. My usually selfish hands became tools of devotion, praying at the temple of her. The smell of her body comforted and ignited me—heaven scent. My fingertips became highly charged love-lights, hungrily searching for dark, hidden wonders to infuse with light. We fell asleep around sunrise, after many hours touching the G-od spot. I had no idea my hands could love another that deeply.

  When Sarah woke me the next morning at 10, I realized I had missed my flight home. And I didn’t care at all. I just felt ecstatic. A bridge of light was forming between our souls, as though a cadre of invisible angels were weaving it while we slept. Clearly, I had taken a different kind of flight home.

  After we dressed to go, we lay back down on the bed one more time. I felt a strong desire to make love to her, but it almost felt redundant. It was amazing to me how intimate we were together, even with our clothes on.

  She drove me to Denver airport to catch a later flight. On the way, a bright red family van pulled sharply in front of us, causing her to swerve to avoid hitting them. Their Ontario license plate read Heart Unity. We laughed. Where were we... Serendipity Central?

  When we arrived at the airport, Sarah handed me a large hawk feather she had picked up on our first walk together, “To fly our hearts home to each other.” I left the car pulsating with hope.

  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 toget
her 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.