I was thinking about Yoni’s message about giving love away when I called my dad for his birthday. At that point, we spoke only three times a year: on my birthday, on his birthday, and on Christmas Day.
Dad came to visit me in New York only once. Dana was so welcoming to him, setting up our guest bed so that it looked beautiful and making a color-coded list of museums and parks he might like to visit. But I could tell he was spooked by all the commotion. He hates being out of his element—he grumbled more than once about New York’s restrictive gun laws and how they made him feel unsafe—and there was a palpable relief in his body when I watched him walk away from our apartment to take the subway back to JFK.
It probably didn’t help the vibe of that visit that I had held my love away from him since Mom died. You could argue he held his love away from me, too—but Lama Yoni preaches only radical forgiveness, not score-keeping. And I still wanted to try to connect with my father.
My dad was born in the last week of the Aries sun sign—so he’s technically an Aries/Taurus cusp. That means he’s naturally predisposed to be aggressive, and to be a hardheaded leader. And he has been since I can remember. He’s the head of his department at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. He organizes fishing expeditions and takes up collections for his coworkers when they’re going through a rough time.
I was trying to remember these things when I heard his phone ringing. He only had a landline. He’s resistant to change in general. I’ve tried to help him move on from this resistance by surreptitiously passing along Yoni’s teachings. “A river that does not flow quickly becomes cloudy with silt,” I told Dad the last time we spoke on the phone. “Son, what the hell are you talking about?” was all he could say in response.
That day I made sure to call him around six A.M. his time. I knew he’d be awake but still at home. He lives in the same house he built for our family in 1984. I still urge him to move, to get away from Mom’s memories and start fresh, but he has zero interest. He answers every nudge with “I built this house,” as if that closes the discussion forever.
He picked up on the fourth ring with a cheerful “Yello?”
“Hey, Dad.” He sounded so happy; I was hopeful that this conversation would be a positive one.
“Ethan, good to hear from you.”
I thought about telling him my new name straightaway but decided against it. I wanted the conversation to flow naturally into my sharing these new developments with him. “I’m calling to wish you a happy birthday,” I said.
“Thank you. Just another year closer to the big corral in the sky.”
“Jeez, Dad. That’s bleak,” I said, though he always said things like that.
“Just God’s honest truth.”
“How are you?” I asked.
“Can’t complain. Spring season just about to start for black bear and turkey hunting, so we just got those licenses out the door. How’s things in the Big Apple?”
“They’re pretty good. I’ve been going to a lot of classes lately,” I said, testing the waters.
“Classes? Didn’t you spend all that scholarship money going to classes at that college?” I could tell from his voice that he was just ribbing me, and I tried not to let it deter me from my goal of connecting.
“They’re not academic classes. I guess I’d call them spiritual classes.”
“Like church?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“Well, that’s good. A man needs some of Christ’s guidance in his life from time to time.”
“It’s not really about Jesus, Dad,” I said. “It’s sort of an alternative religious group. But I think Jesus would approve of the messages. It’s sort of about life lessons. Loving your neighbors and being generous, that kind of thing.”
There was such a prolonged silence on the other end of the phone that I thought our connection had died. “Dad? You still there?”
“I’m still here,” he said. After another long pause he added, “I’m going to try to choose my words carefully here, because I want them to get through your thick skull. You don’t know what you’re messing with by going outside the church. This shit can be real dangerous, in ways you don’t even understand.” His voice got more and more emphatic as he spoke.
“What are you talking about? You barely went to church when I was a kid! How can you be so judgmental about something you don’t even know anything about?” I could hear teenage angst creeping into my voice. Looking back at this conversation, I wish I had been able to speak to my dad from a place of enlightenment, not from one of destruction. But at that point I was still so new to my practice that I often fell back into old, bad patterns.
“I know a lot about it. You just think I’m some backwoods hick, with your fancy college and your fancy wife. Well, I’ve been through some shit in my life and you ain’t got a goddamn clue about it.” I could tell he was really pissed. His voice was so gruff it sounded like he was spitting out each individual word.
“Okay,” I said, taking my yogic breaths and remembering that I needed to remain centered. “I don’t want to argue with you. I wanted this to be a nice phone call.”
“It is a nice phone call. I’m just speaking my mind. You can be naïve, Ethan. You’ve been like that since you were a kid. You’d befriend any old cur who crossed your path, even if they were dangerous. Like that Miller kid who lived down the street. I always knew there was something wrong with that boy, but you and your mother, you just ignored me.”
Dave Miller. Why did my dad always have to bring him up? We were best friends up through junior high. So what if he became an arsonist when we were in high school? He didn’t hurt anyone. He just set an abandoned building on fire one time. He’s not a bad person.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, trying to remove the edge from my voice. “I really didn’t mean for this phone call to be like this. I just wanted to wish you a great day, and to catch up.”
My dad sighed. I wonder if he felt as bad about our getting trapped in our old, worn-out groove as I did. “Well all right then. You have a good day, son.”
“Okay, Dad, you too. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, and hung up.
I got back into bed and stayed there for a while. I was so upset the only thing I could think of doing was a restorative practice. I put my legs up against the headboard and a pillow under my back and tried some deep, cleansing breaths.
I should have known my dad would be dismissive of anything non-Christian. When I was ten he threw D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths into our fireplace after he had a fight with my mom about it. It had been my favorite book; I read about Athena popping out of her dad’s skull and Zeus turning Io into a cow with complete reverence. I loved looking at the golden-hued illustrations and learning about my zodiac sign—Libra, the scales of balance. My mother would sit with me as I reread the myths, quizzing me on the difference between Demeter and Diana.
I couldn’t quite remember what the fight was specifically about; I could only see the look of rage on my dad’s face and the look of resignation on my mom’s. The anger was pretty hypocritical on his part, since he didn’t even go to church on Christmas Eve, and though he’d been raised pretty religious, he never seemed especially spiritual to me.
When Dana and I were planning our wedding, we didn’t think we would have a pastor marry us. Dana’s half-Jewish, and I didn’t feel strongly about it. But when my dad found out, he was apoplectic. “You and Dana need to be married the right way under the eyes of God,” he told me. This exchange took place in person at my family home in Livingston. That was the last time I was back in Montana, for Christmas a few years ago.
I scoffed at him. This was way before I learned about radical empathy from Yoni. “What are you talking about?”
“Son, you know I don’t ask you for much,” my dad said, putting his meaty paw on my shoulder. “But this is important to me. Your mom and I weren’t married the right way. I want you and Dana to have the best start i
n life, and I think that comes from a pastor’s guidance.”
My dad so rarely opened up even this much that I softened. “Okay. I’ll talk to Dana.”
“Good,” my dad grunted, and then he scooted out of the room, as if staying in the same airspace with his emotions would cause him great physical pain.
Dana, who wasn’t even a religious Jew—I always had to tell her when it was Passover—balked at this request. “It would really piss my mom off,” she said, not wanting to goad her mother into yet another shouting match over our wedding. Her mother had already given her a hard time about the guest list, the location, and her dress. “You’re wearing that?” she’d said when Dana sent her a link to the knee-length gown she had bought for the ceremony. I watched Dana fight back tears over the phone as she explained that yes, that was what she was wearing.
Still, Dana and I had a huge fight about the officiant and eventually she agreed to have both a rabbi and a minister officiate. Despite the drama and stress leading up to it, the wedding was wonderful, and my dad was pleased.
I held the image of Montana’s mountain backdrop in my head for a while. By the time I came out of my savasana, two hours had passed. I felt better. I had accepted that my dad’s deeply held religious fervor is something I’m not meant to fully understand. And in turn, my spirituality isn’t something he’s meant to understand, either.
Dana
The sheriff told me that the last person outside Zuni to see Ethan was his dad. Apparently Ethan went to Montana by himself for a visit three months before he and Amaya left the retreat and met their deaths in that cave. I asked the sheriff if Ray was helpful to him. “Since this is an ongoing investigation, I can’t divulge much from my conversation with Mr. Powell,” the sheriff said. Whatever openness had been in his face when I shared the book with him had closed off the second I ventured into unauthorized territory.
I was slightly heartened by the fact that Ethan hadn’t cut ties with his dad. They’d always had a complicated relationship, but family was important to the Ethan I knew. That was a big reason I married him. I thought creating a new family with someone supportive and kind would help heal the wounds left by my mother and father—my mother’s unending criticism of me, and my father’s tacit approval of that criticism. My dad has never once stood up for me or Beth, which is almost worse than my mother’s constant disapproval.
But despite my many efforts over the years to get to know Ray, he gently rebuffed my attempts to get closer to him. I’d always get on the phone when Ethan called, and his responses to my probing questions were kind but brief. When I’d lament our lack of relationship, Ethan would say, “Don’t take it personally. It just takes my dad a long time to open up.” Ethan told me that it took ten years for Ray to talk to his best friend about Rosemary’s death. “Ten years!” Ethan exclaimed, shaking his head. “It takes me ten seconds to tell people about my mom.” That Ethan was still in touch with Ray told me that “Kai” hadn’t done a total one-eighty. Maybe just a ninety.
I made two copies of Ethan’s book at the sheriff’s office, one for him and one for me. We agreed that I should put the original back where I found it. It sounded like Sheriff Lewis always felt John Brooks was “hinky,” even before the deaths. “Folks around here have always felt a little strange about Mr. Brooks and what’s going on over there,” he explained. “He bought up damn near about half the county several years back.”
“For the Zuni Retreat?” I asked.
“Yep. Folks around here are mostly Christian, so they were concerned that Mr. Brooks was going to get up in their faces with, well, whatever it is that he believes.” The sheriff sighed, exasperated. “But then they realized that the people at the retreat mostly kept to themselves. They respect that. Most folks move out here to get a lot of space.”
“That makes sense,” I said, looking out the window at the empty street. Not a single car had passed the sheriff’s office the whole time I was there. “What do they think about the deaths?”
The sheriff shrugged. “They mostly think the deaths don’t concern them. They don’t trust Mr. Brooks overmuch, but the retreat has pumped so much tourist money into the economy and has created a lot of cooking and cleaning jobs. So most folks around here are more worried about losing a paycheck than they are about some silly people dying in a cave.”
I was thinking about Ray when I approached the turnoff to the retreat. He’d had such a hard life—first Rosemary dies, then Ethan. Knowing what I know about Ray, I’m sure he thought Ethan’s new lifestyle was bonkers. He is a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, not a quinoa one. He must have suspected something off about the retreat, something “hinky,” the way Sheriff Lewis did. Ray could certainly understand the desire for an unbothered life—the man lives in a cabin in Montana—but he’s got a pretty unflinching moral core. I imagined he’d be disgusted by the inaction of the locals after Ethan’s and Amaya’s deaths.
I made it back with just enough time to slip the original volume back into the library before dinner with Sylvia and her pals. To my surprise, Mae said, “Everybody, put down your birdseed and lift up your glasses.” We held our mugs full of rejuvenation tea aloft as Mae spoke. “This is to Dana. You have made great spiritual progress this week. We’ve all noticed how far you’ve come. Here’s to your continued progress, and to your youth!”
All the other ladies shouted, “Hear, hear!” as we clinked our misshapen ceramic mugs. Though I smiled, I wondered how they could gauge such a thing as spiritual progress. How could they know what was going on inside me? Maybe in my brain there was an endless cartoon loop of a blank-eyed cow munching grass in a field instead of something deep or “spiritual.”
That night, while Sylvia was out at a mystical femininity workshop, I powered through another chunk of Ethan’s book. I still couldn’t quite grasp, intellectually, how he had been taken in by Yoni’s nonsense. Ethan was an extremely bright guy. I always thought he was smarter than I was, he just didn’t have the drive to succeed. But the descriptions of how he fell for both Amaya and Yoni were somehow more upsetting than reading a description of an average affair. It wasn’t just that Amaya was meeting physical or emotional needs that Ethan had. I knew Ethan had those needs, I just thought I was meeting them. It was that Amaya and Yoni together were meeting Ethan’s metaphysical needs. I didn’t even know those existed for him.
We’d never talked about God. It seems like a wild omission, considering Ethan and I had been together for so long. But a higher power just wasn’t part of my lexicon in any way. If you had asked me, I guess I would have said that the world works in random and chaotic ways, ungoverned by anything but science. When it came up, which was infrequently, I defined myself as agnostic, because I couldn’t absolutely, positively rule out the existence of something greater than all of us. But saying I was agnostic rather than atheist was just a way of refusing to think about it at all.
I had assumed Ethan felt like I did. It was one of the many ways I had mistaken his silence on an issue for an embrace of my own stance. Reading his book, I finally understood that.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I sat up with a start when my alarm went off at five A.M. I looked over at Sylvia’s bed. She was fast asleep. I left a little note for her, thanking her for taking me under her wing. I really was grateful. I never would have found Ethan’s book without her guidance. But more than that, despite learning all that painful shit about the end of my marriage, I felt more at peace than I had in years. I didn’t know if it was just getting out of New York, or if it was Lo’s weirdly freeing workshop, but I couldn’t deny that the old hippies had experienced something substantial during their repeated trips to the retreat—because I’d had a taste of it myself.
The sun was just coming up as I walked up the path toward the main building to check out. I was looking at the horizon instead of in front of me, and I ran smack into a woman in my path. She fell back onto her hands, and when I bent down to help her up, I noticed a dark blue medal
lion with an asterisk on it hanging off her neck. I stared at it for a moment before I looked at her face and realized it was Lo. “I’m so sorry! I wasn’t looking where I was going,” I said. “Are you okay?”
Lo dusted some dirt off her long, crinkly skirt. “I’m quite all right, dear. I’m glad to see you before you take off.” She gestured to my suitcase.
“Oh, really?” I had really enjoyed her class, but it surprised me that she cared enough to want to say good-bye to a first-time visitor.
“Yes. I couldn’t believe the progress you made. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been doing this for forty years.” She made deep, direct eye contact as she said this.
Even though the line about progress sounded as bullshitty as when Mae said it, I couldn’t deny feeling flattered. Just like when I was in grade school, I loved hearing a teacher’s praise. “Thank you,” I said, blushing. “You were a great leader.”
She waved away my compliment. “I have never, ever done this for a first-time student. But you have something special,” she said, grabbing my hands. “I think you’re ready for the next-level retreat.”
“Really?” I said, basking in her praise in spite of myself. The “next-level retreat” sounded a little intense to me, but I was still flattered to be asked.
“Yes. Your energy is a color I’ve only seen a few times in my life. You need to learn how to harness it properly, and I want to be the one to help guide you,” Lo said. She bowed to me. “Namaste.”
I thought about what Lo had said while I waited for the receptionist to check me out. There was no way I could come back here. I couldn’t afford to take more time off work. I was sure I’d already be in the doghouse when I returned. But I did, technically, have more vacation days that I could use.
Then I stopped myself short. I couldn’t believe I’d bought into the retreat enough that I was thinking of work logistics. Lo had had me in a class for a couple of hours. How did she know anything about me, or what I was capable of? And my “energy”? Are you fucking kidding me?
Soulmates Page 10
