by jeff brown
After a few signings in Southern California, my driver picked me up before dawn for my final book signing in Petaluma, way up north. It was an eight-hour drive and he ranted most of the way. Interestingly, his rants were all about love—its impossibilities, its illusions, its disappointments. It never ceases to amaze me how much we all have to say about something so entirely mysterious, myself certainly included. And what do we know? I mean, really, what do we know about life’s greatest offering? We haven’t even begun to remove the wrapping paper, let alone look inside. The divine’s greatest gift lies in wait, cloaked in mystery and paradox, patiently waiting for humanity to open it fully and real-eyes its treasures.
After we missed yet another highway off-ramp, we arrived one hour late for the signing. I forgave him—love does have a way of confusing our exits. When I finally got inside, I was surprised to find there were over 200 people waiting to hear me speak, our largest crowd yet. The book was moving quickly to bestseller status, catching fire in the marketplace. The beloved was well-pleased.
Ready
I read from the book for about 30 minutes, then answered a series of forlorn questions from the broken-hearted. Goodness, had anyone been able to sustain their great love? I had been hoping for a simple ending to my tour, but it wasn’t happening in Petaluma. This crowd was alive and wanting answers!
When I finally sat down to sign books, I was overwhelmed by a scrum of purchasers, most of them buying two or more copies. I went into warrior signing mode, only looking up now and then, opening and autographing books as fast as they could put them on the table in front of me.
After an hour of rapid-fire signings, I suddenly noticed a subtle shift in the energy. Although people were still presenting book after book to the table, it felt like the world around me was slowing down. A feeling of warmth overcame me, a sudden softening around my heart. Then, as if in slow motion, a book was calmly placed in front of me on the table. I reached for it to sign, when I noticed words on the hand that laid it there. The hand hadn’t moved an inch. The words were unmistakable, written in bold green marker.
I am ready
I knew that hand anywhere. I knew. My hand began to shake, dropping the pen. My eyes moistened as I stared intently at those words. The hand of my beloved. As I opened the book of our love, a small tear fell on the page. No need to sign my name. This was the perfect signature.
I stared down at the book, feeling a sudden shyness. I needed a moment, I needed a lifetime. Can life change this quickly?
Yes. It can.
I looked up and deeply into her eyes. She met me there. Yet again, a bridge of remembrance formed between our souls. Not a moment had passed since our last meeting, not a bloody moment. Soon her tears fell too, landing with ferocity on the book of our love. My breath deepened, as she re-entered the chambers of my heart. The gateway opened wide, as every cell came alive. The great out-pouring, the great in-pouring. Our love was the perfect kindling for a heart-fire of ecstatic proportions. In the no-blink of an eye, our souls were set ablaze yet again.
The room went entirely quiet. People began to return to the table, as though they were witnessing a great rebirth. They could sense that this was no arbitrary encounter. The depth of presence was unmistakable. I looked at Sarah’s face, as though I too was witnessing something extraordinary. And so I was. My be-loved had returned. Oh the heart, the heart.
After forever, I walked around the table to hug her, but she backed away. “Not yet,” she whispered, just like the first time we met. “After the signings.” That voice! I forgot there were people still in line. Returning to the table, I completed the signings, while Sarah sat down on one of the nearby chairs.
After the last book had been signed, my chatty driver appeared, eager to take me to the airport. With my heart now wide open, I suddenly loved hearing him talk. Sweet chatterbox, how can I disdain you now? You have driven me to meet my beloved. I took him aside and told him I wouldn’t be needing his services any longer.
I wasn’t flying home tonight. I had already arrived.
24
Homecomings
Sarah and I left the bookstore, and began walking around town, in silence. There was so much to talk about, but not just yet. Our silence was abundantly expressive, rich in form and texture. We walked back in time and forward into eternity, keeping pace with the beat of our unified heart. Where before we bounced a little above the earth, something had shifted in our energetic field. Years removed from the roller coasters of young love, we now walked with our feet planted firmly on the ground. We hearticulated a little more sweetness with every step.
Although silent, I could swear I heard a little music in the winds. Was that a distant flute soulebrating our reunion? Had the cosmic conductor set the soulharmonic orchestra in motion? Were we being loved-up from afar?
As we walked, I noticed the changes to her appearance, as she no doubt noticed mine. A sprinkling of glittery gray hairs had replaced the blond, and her face was softer and more cherubic. Most notably, there was a prominent scar that stretched from her forehead and ended beside her left ear. And she walked with a slight limp in her right leg. It spoke loudly and clearly. Something terrible had happened. My heart longed to heal it, my lips to kiss it better.
We walked down a trail to a small river. Oh, how we loved rivers. As always, we became indistinguishable from the natural world. Soon there was no distinction between us and the sun that bounced off the river, the water that cascaded over the rocks, the trees that framed the banks. It was all Go(o)d. This time it really was.
Like in the beginning, I stared at our shared reflection in the mirror. Unlike in the beginning, I could now see where I ended and the other began. I saw the merging, but I also saw two formed individuals. Two distinct selves destined to touch again.
We put our feet in the water and laughed and laughed, struck with joyful amazement that we were together again, sharing a moment. It’s like we had never parted ways, except that there was more peace now. Time has a way of smoothing hearts out. No need to dive so deep for soul food when the fruits of our love labors are so perfectly within reach. We reached down and touched God(dess) to our lips, parched and thirsty after 14 years apart. The rivers of essence rose up to meet us as we drank to our souls’ content. We had so earned this divine thirst quenching. Heavens up.
Right Path, Wrong Time
After the soul-quenching, we wandered back to her car. We didn’t need to talk about it—I was going wherever she was going. Sarah drove us back to a small motel outside town where she had booked a room. She had driven all night from Sante Fe to get here, arriving one hour late, as I did. Yes, divine timing.
When we got inside, we lay down on the bed and held each other. Tears fell again, as years of loneliness washed away. We cried and cried, as though we were crying for our separation, for our reunion, and for all the other lovers who had lost their way. We soaked the pillow mightily, as we let it all flow through us.
We nestled together into a sound sleep. Early in the morning, I was awakened by a feeling of pressure on my chest. Sarah was up to her old tricks, writing graffiti on my skin with a felt marker. I let her finish, before standing and looking at her creation in the mirror:
Home is where the Ogdo is.
How many times I had woken up in the morning longing to see her graffiti words on my flesh. Finally, my mad artist was back at work.
“You lost your touch,” I said playfully. “I never used to notice until after you were done.”
“Noooo, I wanted you awake this time,” she smiled.
“Tell me everything...”
She did.
After we parted, Sarah spent over five years running away from her heart. She raced from town to town, job to job, entanglement to entanglement, until her flight from reality caught up with her in Minnesota.
“I ran like the wind, Ogdo, except the wind turned into a tornado—a tornado of my own creation. Then it all came crashing down to earth, just like it had to
,” she said with great relief on her scarred face.
One afternoon, right after losing yet another job, she lost control of her car and smashed into a large oak tree on the side of the road. She was catapulted through the front windshield, missing the tree by inches, luckily landing on a bed of tall, thick grass. Nine vertebrae were smashed, her right leg was broken in four places, and her face was mangled. Because it was dark, no one noticed the accident until the next morning. She was in a coma for eight days, requiring seven surgeries before she could leave the hospital 22 weeks later. In her words, it was the best thing that ever happened to her. The gift of crashing down. Some people need to create a nightmare far worse than the one they came from, before they will go back down the path and heal their early wounds.
At 31, she moved back home to live with her parents for two years. For the first time in her life, she began digging deep, doing the inner work that she had been running from, committing herself to a concentrated therapeutic process. She worked at it diligently, interfacing with her demons, healing her early memories, recognizing the ways her childhood had influenced her choices, behaviors and patterns.
“The universe is very wise. No matter how things look, it always has our best interests at heart,” she stated. “It made sure the injury was so bad that I couldn’t take care of myself. I had to go home to heal—and not just be home like in the old days, when I could run away at the first sign of trouble, but go home and just lie there. This time I was a sitting duck, unable to move, totally dependent. Wow. I was sure I would just die—really. I felt my defenses would kill me in my sleep, but they didn’t. Then, after more screaming outbursts than I can count, I realized it was all perfect. I mean, it really was. Because if I could stay there without running, I could stay anywhere without running. What better place to work through my issues than the house that birthed them. Not from afar, with vague, selective memories, but right on the battlefield itself where I couldn’t forget anything. And my compassion for my parents deepened as well, as I really got to know all they had overcome in their own childhoods.”
I was captivated by her clarity as she spoke.
With respect to us, she owned her part, acknowledging in subtle detail all the ways that she had acted out. Clearly she had thoroughly processed this, piece by piece. Whenever I tried to own my part in it, she stopped me cold with the same words, “There was nothing you could do. I wasn’t ready yet.”
Right path, wrong time. For her, it was that simple. If aging teaches us one thing, it’s that we cannot force another’s path on them. They have to learn how to walk it on their own terms.
“I wanted to contact you when I was healing, Lowen. I picked up the phone hundreds of times, but I stopped myself each time.”
“Why... why did you stop yourself?”
“Because my reasons for calling were selfish. I was calling for me.”
“What would be wrong with that?”
“It would be the same as it was before. Me taking from you and giving back so little. I didn’t want to take without giving anymore.”
“But...”
“Just because I was forced to slow down doesn’t mean I was ready. Even though you were also young in your own way, you modeled something to me that I hadn’t become yet. You modeled absolute devotion. I knew you would die to protect me, but I knew I wouldn’t do the same for you. I couldn’t inhabit my love for you yet—I wasn’t ready. I realized that when I was lying in the hospital bed after the accident. I imagined your spirit entering my body, taking my pain, enduring it all so I wouldn’t suffer. Even in those darker days, you were the light all along. I knew you would have gladly taken my place, but I knew that I wouldn’t take yours in the same situation. I was still too selfish. I made myself a promise that I would never return unless I would take your place on your deathbed.”
We sat in silence for some time before I decided to take a break and get us some breakfast. On the way out the door, I turned to ask her the obvious:
“And would you, Sarah?”
She looked at me with tremendous presence and replied, “Yes, Lowen. Yes I would.”
I had never seen her so resolute.
Mystery Stew
After we ate some delicious banana pancakes and took a long nap, she continued to share her story. Following her time at home, she went back into the world, moving to Santa Fe to complete one of the dreams she had begun and then abandoned in her non-committal lifestyle—a degree in naturopathy.
While in school, she met a wonderful man who helped to nurture and support her as she came of age, a man she genuinely loved and valued. They were together for four years, building a joint naturopathic practice in the mountains of new Mexico. It was a meaningful and grounding time in her life.
After a few years, the beloved kept waking her up at night, demanding her attention. At first, he arose in the form of gentle dream-scapes, as she had with me. Then, when she pushed them away, he arose in the form of harsh nightmares in which she was perpetually torn away from the other half of her soul. The beloved calling to the beloved across space and time. Dial in, dial out, there really is no such thing as long distance when two hearts beat in the same direction. The only choice is to answer, or the call comes through in more obtrusive ways. We had each lived with a fire in our heart, one that burned so bright that our spirits could not ignore it.
After a process remarkably similar to mine, she let him go. She spent some time on her own, then flew to Toronto to see me, somehow knowing I would still be in the same apartment. She had come right up to the house—twice—and knocked on my door. The first time, she had heard me coming and fled down the side alley. This must have been the time I could have sworn I heard a knock at the door and imagined it was her. The second time, she sat on the chair on the rear porch for hours, waiting for me to come. But I never came.
After a visit to many of the places we had frequented together, she had rented a car and driven to Goshen Park to find the cave. After hours lost, she finally found it, our cave of remembered dreams. Once inside, she grabbed a piece of chalk from her bag and wrote me a love letter on the wall. Then she turned around and saw the words I had written. She panicked and smudged over her writing. As she was exiting the cave, she turned back and drew a big heart around my words, as a way of seconding the motion—loving it forward. Ahhh, I remembered seeing that chalk heart around my words. It was her.
She raced back to Toronto, overwhelmed with emotion. After a sleepless night in a downtown hotel, she decided to go home. She knew that it wasn’t time yet. There was still more prep work to be done.
And then, two years later, she knew it was time. The catalyst was the sudden death of her mother. Jessie died peacefully in her sleep one night, of a heart attack, with norman by her side. The intensity of the heartbreak cracked through Sarah’s final layer of armor, leaving her no choice but to live with her heart wide open. The fragility of life hit her hard, and she saw there was no time to waste.
And then she searched for me on the internet. When she found out about my book tour, she organized her work vacation around my final book signing. Still living in Sante Fe, she had driven most of the night to get here. It was a smooth ride. Finally, no obstacles in our way.
After she shared her story, I hugged her long and deep, and then went for a walk alone in the magical night air. I needed to integrate all of this. There was an entrancing quality to the night, one of those California evenings that is soaked in warmth and wonder.
While walking, I noticed how calm and safe I felt in the deep within. Where the heart rate of the connection was once restless, it was now restful. Where before I would have doubted her pledge of readiness, I now trusted it. It wasn’t a question of wishful thinking. It wasn’t a question of thinking, at all. It was simply clear. I could genuinely and viscerally feel the transformation in her energy, in the tenor of her words, in the vulnerability in her eyes. She was now both solid and open at the same time. She had come through a long gestation period,
and re-emerged in a healthier form. And so had I.
Earlier I had written, “You can look for a relationship but you can’t look for love—love finds you when it’s ready.” now I realize there is an addendum to that. Sometimes love finds you when it’s ready... and when you’re ready too. How that happens is anybody’s guess. Love is the great mystery stew, its secrets well kept, its ingredients known to Providence alone. While both people are being prepared, marinated, skewered, cooked to readiness in the fires of life, the cosmic alchemist is turning the pot, reverently preparing the base for the lovers to meld into it. Only God knows when the stew is ready to be served. Divine timing, divine dining.
Clearly our stew was ready. A beautiful convergence of readiness. Both the universe and our inner worlds were aligned and in agreement.
Our time was now.
Cuddlelingus
When I got back to the room, Sarah was in the shower. Soon I was too. Naked together for the first time in 14 years, we entered a state of reciprocal devotion. A far cry from the sexed-up showers we used to take, we moved cautiously, slowly and tenderly re-learning each other’s bodies. We kissed one another’s scars and seeming imperfections, with bhakti presence. I gently ran my tongue over the scar tissue that stretched across her face. Then, I turned her around, moving her wet hair, and found her perfect little pink birthmark on the back of her neck. I kissed that too. It was one of the most intimate experiences we have ever shared together. Although both of our bodies showed signs of aging—a little more weight, some hidden plump places, the touch of lines in our skin—there was no judgment nor retreat. There was only gratitude. Gratitude for the blessed opportunity to commune together yet again. Gratitude for the opportunity to wash the past away and begin anew. Such grace.
It was then I realized: If we age honestly, we become love. As the body weakens, love surges through us, longing to be released, longing to be lived. With no time left to not love, we seek authentic embrace everywhere. Our deft avoidance maneuvers convert into directness. Our armored hearts melt into pools of eternal longing. This is why we should look forward to aging. Finally, after all the masks and disguises fall away, we are left with love alone. God waits for us on the bridge between our hearts.
