by jeff brown
Perhaps, even, that’s why it came our way.
Cave of Remembered Dreams
That morning, I drove to Goshen Provincial Park. I found my way to the tiny cave we had discovered that magical afternoon on our walk through the forest. The place we had made crunched up love, merging with each other like horny little pretzels. I crawled inside it, and remembered the dream that was our love, the greatest gift this soul had ever received.
I closed my eyes and meditated on my intention to put our uncommon bond to words. My whole body relaxed and softened. Yes, this felt true to path.
When I was ready, I said aloud:
We will live on. In our breath, in our hearts, and in the words I write, I will love us forward.
The cave echoed back my benevolent intentions. Then I scrawled the words LOVE IT FORWARD on the cave wall with chalk and left.
I would return here many times in the writing process. To remember my pledge. To remember what is never truly lost. To commune with the beloved in the cave of remembered dreams.
21
Spiritual Graffiti
Before beginning to write, I created space for it. I committed to only the most essential social interactions and events, removing everything else from my schedule. I cut my legal mediation practice down to three successive days a week, leaving me Thursday to Sunday to write freely. Although the idea excited me, I really had no idea how, or what, I was going to write. I had been a capable academic writer in law school, but I had little experience with writing from the heart. It was like stepping into completely new territory, yet again.
Finally, after a week of preparation, I was ready to begin. Or so I imagined. I unplugged the phone and went to my writing desk in the sunroom, doughnut and coffee in hand. Five minutes later, I spilled the coffee all over the keyboard and had to spend three hours shopping for a new one. When I got home, it was time for lunch. Writers need energy! After a thick and creamy pasta dish, I lay down for a power nap, waking up close to five in the afternoon, almost four hours later. Time for dinner!
Someone wasn’t ready.
After another day of glutenous distractions, I finally made my way back to the computer on Saturday. It was a crisp autumn morning, reminiscent of the first day Sarah came to live with me. I opened a word document, and was immediately swept up in a sea of memories. Closing my eyes, remembering that beautifully hopeful moment when we brought her luggage into this room and ended up twirling in rapture on the carpeted floor. “Shagging on the shag,” we used to say. Every time I touched her, her eyes smiled like the first time I saw them, inviting me deeper into her valley of delight. I remembered how her eyes beamed on me the rest of the day, watching my every move like a tracker in the wild.
I opened my eyes and stared at the screen. It stared back at me. Neither blinked. I felt the temptation to leave, but willed myself to stay. After an hour and a half, I began to write words, but nothing that felt true. My mind kept returning to that lovely afternoon. The day we had begun our lives—together.
I returned the next day. Same thing happened. I sat there all morning, Lightnin cat by my side, writing little more than gibberish. She purred now and then, as though to inspire me, but it had little impact. I wrote a few words, and then my mind wandered back to joyous experiences Sarah and I had shared. I tried to write something wise and insightful, but there was no juice. It all felt purely conceptual. I was dry-docked.
Perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be a writer, after all.
Words from the Alley Wall
In the middle of the afternoon, I got up and went for a walk around the market. I saw Dude, but I avoided him, preferring to seek my own counsel this day. I went north on Augusta and crossed College Street, not consciously aware of where I was going, but getting the quixotic sense that I was headed somewhere in particular.
I turned left on Harbord Street and crossed Bathurst Street—my grandparents’ childhood stomping grounds—and took a right at the first alley. Oh, now I knew where I was headed. Of course, how could I forget? I walked another 150 yards and stopped to face the back of an old Theater. There, on its back wall, were the words Sarah had painted on our six-month anniversary, ten years ago. If you didn’t know what they were, you couldn’t possibly have made them out, but I remembered.
I leaned against the garage nearby, and stared at Sarah’s heart-speak. I wasn’t so much interested in her ironic words as I was in their faded, weather condition. As though to emphasize the passage of time, there was bright writing all over the wall, reflections of the newest generation of graffitists. Oh God, was it that long ago?
O, river of love,
streaming out from my soul...
How can I ever swim back to before?
And then the outpouring of tears. Yes, Lowen, she is gone. It was more than a decade ago. For all you know, she married a mountain man and has a gaggle of children. For all you know, she’s dead. Get Real!
My tears continued to fall. A bottomless well. Goodness, where do they hide?
Hours later, I walked back home in a somber stupor. What was I thinking? That I could write her back to life? That I could just write the happy moments? It doesn’t work that way. If I was going to write our love story, I had to tell the truth. I had to include the death of our union, too.
Once inside the house, I made myself a warm cup of chai and went right back to the computer. It was staring at me, just like before, awaiting my inspiration. Divine inspiration, anything, take me, I’m ready! Then I realized—something wasn’t right.
I got up from the desk and grabbed a marker from the windowsill. I turned to face the wall—the wall Sarah had written on time and time again. Staring at the blank canvas, remembering.
Suddenly, I reached up and wrote the words she had written on the alley wall:
O, river of love,
streaming out from my soul...
How can I ever swim back to before?
And, like a call-and-response, I answered:
My river of love,
We can’t swim back to before.
Broken waves we are to the very end,
yet the seas can’t hold all we’ve perfected.
I stepped back and stared at what I just wrote. Wow. As I gazed at the words, I felt something building inside me, a voice of my own demanding expression. I reached over to the wall and began to write some more. At first the words came through me tentatively, uncertain of their worth. Then quite suddenly a wellspring of realizations began to flow. The first sentences came out raw and chaotic, but gradually the words became more seamless, almost like they were pre-written in the manuscript of my being. Soon my first full paragraph was born:
It seems counter-intuitive to romantics and those
who feel ready to partner when someone walks
away from a beautiful love connection. But
some people can only handle a half-love because
whole love shines a light on their dark places. Real
intimacy requires real presence, and if someone
isn’t ready to be truly here on an individual level,
they will find it very difficult to manage all the
triggers that come up when real love comes.
Only a small few can hold the gate open
when profound love enters.
A blessed and courageous few.
Then another wave of expression came through me, and I wrote it on the wall. And then I began scribbling on the blank wall like a madman, barely fast enough to keep up with the flow of expression. One paragraph after another moved through me without cessation. A floodgate had been opened.
After a while, my hand began to ache. I stepped back and stared at the wall in awe, wondering where this fluidity of expression had come from. Is this what I had been crafting all these years in the quiet recesses of my being? Before I could answer, I was seized again, surrendering to another wave of words in pre-encoded form. The writer had been released from his cage.
And, apparently, h
e was a Graffitist too.
The Wholly Holy
Soon, writing became an all-encompassing spiritual practice, one I could not live without. I woke up every morning like a man on a mission. The passion to write was so alive that I couldn’t just limit it to my home. Even during my work day, words poured out of me, demanding immediate expression. I wrote them on scrap paper, left them on my home answering machine, and emailed them to myself so I didn’t forget. Even when I came home after an intense trial, I was propelled back to the wall to write deep into the night. As my colorful dream had predicted, the walls of the sunroom were soon covered in love-writings, as I let the creative process turn my idea of feng shui upside-down. I was becoming Sarah, or so it seemed.
Interestingly, there was only one thing that turned the expressive channel off: fantastical visions of Sarah and I together. Whenever I imagined us still united, the words would dry right up. I simply couldn’t write from the fantasy of Sarah’s presence. I could only write from the reality of her absence. Clearly, my writing voice was present—and presence—centered, directly linked to my own truth, to my own inquiry, to my profound interest in understanding love and the true-to-life road we had traveled. But not to keeping the dream alive.
Where before I had imagined I would write a love story, what was actually coming through me was a blend of story and insights into relationship as a spiritual path.
One night I sat on the porch thinking about ways to measure love. Although I had been with Sarah for the blink of an eye, I was remarkably transformed. I recalled speaking to the crone about this at Rock-wood—wondering if I was crazy for feeling so different after such a brief spell of love. And she said with clarity: you don’t measure love by how long it lasts.
How do you measure love, then?
My being responded, and I went to the kitchen wall and wrote:
You don’t measure love in time.
You measure love in transformation.
Sometimes the longest connections
yield very little growth,
while the briefest of encounters change everything.
The heart doesn’t wear a watch—it’s timeless.
It doesn’t care how long you know someone.
It doesn’t care if you had a 40 year anniversary,
if there is no juice in the connection.
What the heart cares about is resonance.
Resonance that opens it,
Resonance that enlivens it,
Resonance that calls it home.
And when it finds it, the transformation begins...
That night, I was startled awake. But this time it wasn’t a nightmare. It was more like a vision, visceral and palpable—as if it were truly happening to me. This one had an ethereal quality to it. I was floating through a timeless space with another genderless form. The space was constantly changing color, as we passed through one portal after another, holding each other close, intertwined with the divine. We were beyond the identifications, the battles, the confusions, the learnings of human form. And we were deeply, completely in love. Not just with each other, but with the space between. With the portals of possibility that awaited us. Love relationship may have been our first step in, but we were now well beyond it—inhaling God, exhaling love everywhere we looked. It was like a vision of possibility for humankind. The wholly holy.
I woke up overwhelmed with optimism for our humanity.
The Great Bazaar
Sometimes, I went to sit with Dude, to discuss my insights. We had graduated from the relationship of teacher-student, as I grew to carry my end of the dialogue well. It was rare to find a man who wanted to talk about something other than automobiles and competitive sports, so I was grateful for our rich conversations. Yet in our conversations, I noticed how he would seldom share details about his personal love history. His great wisdom must have been lodged in life experiences, but he didn’t share them. One day I prodded him a bit.
“C’mon Dude,” I urged, “Tell me something about your personal love story.”
Silence.
I persisted, “Come on, Dude, you can’t hide from me... fess up.”
“Not now, now I am more interested in getting that taco you promised me.”
“Okay, Dude, taco it is. If I get you two, will you share a little of your own story?”
“Better you get me just the one.”
Then, as the perfect deflection, he got up from the curb, reached into his crumpled suit jacket, and pulled out a small hardcover book of Rumi poetry. Entirely weather-worn, with dozens of ripped pages, it looked like it was hundreds of years old—a book from the hands of Rumi himself. How long had he carried this book? He opened it, and began to read aloud, speaking the poems with such panache and familiarity that you had to wonder if he had actually written them in another life.
Soon the whole sidewalk was filled with passersby who stopped dead in their tracks to hear Rumi brought back to life. Was this Toronto’s Kensington Market, or Turkey’s Great Bazaar? It was such a startling, spontaneous event, one you would seldom ever see in a modern city, one that called the spirit back in time. He read for almost an hour. At the end, a throng of dozens clapped and demanded an encore. He pulled the book back out of his jacket, and read something that spoke directly to my heart:
Without You in me how could I bear one moment
This grief of living without You?
And these tears—aren’t they You rising in me
To flood me ruthlessly toward Your hidden arms?
Thereafter, half the crowd left, while the rest of us got into a lively discussion about the nature of love. Some argued that great love is destined before we are born, others contended that it was all left to chance. A couple at the front held each other and cried, admitting to the crowd that they had just broken up over lunch and didn’t even know why. Two women from the crowd came over and comforted them, placing their hands on their backs. Even a Kensington beat cop stopped and chimed in, sharing his belief that love is a hopeless catastrophe. I looked over at Dude, and saw a tear falling from his eye. He looked like he was missing someone—Shams perhaps?
Beaming with warmth, I went back home and wall-wrote with Lightnin by my side, delighted to know I wasn’t the only one trying to make sense of love’s perplexities. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to figure it out without each other, are we? I picked up my marker, and wrote my own version of Rumi:
Great love is the great cosmic kiln
where souls are set ablaze
until they finally surrender to God.
Remain open in the heart of that inferno,
and your separateness
will melt into wonder.
To Each Their Path
I awoke the next morning with a new inquiry burning inside: Is love partnership for everyone? Is it essential to a life well lived, or is that just a cultural myth? Was the love I experienced with Sarah something that was designed for everyone? Or did each have their own path to God? Is there even an ultimate path, or is life just a patchwork of arbitrary happenings?
On a spiritual level, I was truly at peace with my journey, my choices, my high standards: Live Beloved, or die! Maybe I was single, but it was different now. When you have loved as God loves, you no longer yearn for companionship in the same way. You no longer feel isolated when you walk alone. Because you have been penetrated by divinity. Because you have been transformed beyond yourself. Because you walk in shared shoes. Because you always feel the beloved close at heart.
Yet sometimes, I did feel tinges of doubt and fear creep back in. After all, there was still the practical world to consider. I was middle-aged and still single... was this my destiny? To grow old alone? To cuddle up to my eco-pillow? To drive myself to the hospital when I got sick? Had I forgotten my basic needs in my quest for everything beloved? What about companionship, dear man? What about a hand to hold on a cold winter’s night?
Holding my inquiries close at heart, I went walking. I soon saw Dude lean
ing against a head shop taking the sun. I opted to run into him—been a long time since I had been fed a Dudism.
“So Dude, I got a question for you... Is partnership for everyone? I mean, it’s clearly not in this chaotic world we live in, but in a healthier world, would most of us be in conscious relationship? Is it necessary as part of a complete life?”
His answer was unusually brief: “To each their path.”
Then he crossed the street and walked in the other direction. Clearly I had touched a nerve again. Love is such a difficult subject for so many of us.
I picked up some churros and sat on the curb and ate them. Dude was right: to each their path. For some of us, a relationship isn’t particularly relevant to our journey in this incarnation. That’s not to say we can live without relationship altogether, but only to say that intimate love relationship isn’t everyone’s portal to God. Love connection is only one way home.
I went home and scrawled the following on my writing wall. The wall was already filling up, becoming a kaleidoscope of soulspeak.
I have heard so many theories on the question of
whether we are complete on our own, or only complete
if we are with another. Because of all the pressure
to be partnered, so many people walk around feeling
badly if they are on their own, and many others
stay where they don’t belong for fear that they
will be seen as a failure outside of relationship. All
of this misses the point. What is most important is
that each of us lives a life that is true to path,
whatever that means to us. For some, their sacred
purpose is inextricably linked to love relationship.
It is there that they excavate and humanifest
their deepest meaning. Yet others are called in
