Summer's Path

by Scott Blum

  Martika followed Robert’s instructions and inhaled a deep breath and slowly let it out. She was familiar with this technique of meditation, and had used it herself many times before.

  “Now, move your awareness into that light until you are fully engulfed by its luminosity. Then let the light grow until it fills your entire body. Let it seep out and fill your aura that surrounds your physical body. Once you’ve done that, allow it to expand to include the space that is being inhabited by Don.”

  Martika surrendered to the white light and felt as if she was floating inside of it.

  “Good. Now hold a single, simple thought in your mind, and let the answer come to you. Since you are now meditating together, you should be able to trade thoughts.”

  “How will I know it’s not my own thought?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  “Just trust the communication,” Robert replied confidently. “In the same way you know that I am talking to you right now, you will know when Don talks. It’s best to start out with visuals and smells if you can, since dogs have a harder time with words.”

  Martika remembered the gift she brought and conjured the smell of frothy unpasteurized milk. Her mouth began to water as she held the image in her mind, and right before she could imagine tasting it, a single thought appeared that there was no mistaking. Martika’s heart sank.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Robert.

  “He said he didn’t want any of the milk I brought,” she replied, unable to hide her disappointment.

  Robert laughed.

  “That’s not funny!” exclaimed Martika. “Why are you laughing?”

  Robert continued to laugh a deep belly laugh until he regained his composure. “Dogs are lactose intolerant,” he snickered. “Of course he doesn’t want any milk!”

  “Oh.” Martika felt embarrassed.

  “Why don’t you try something else? Ask him if he knows your son.”

  She knew that was the real reason she was here, but she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that yet. She took a deep breath and filled her mind with the image of the day when she left her baby. Concentrating on his face for several minutes, she began to drift off. And as soon as she was at the point of losing consciousness, her nose filled with an unmistakable scent that she hadn’t smelled in years.…

  Hoping it would calm her baby, Martika created a unique blend of three essential oils. After mixing lavender, chamomile, and sage, she dabbed a few drops on Donald’s upper lip before putting him to sleep. Ever since he was born, he constantly needed to be held, and would scream incessantly every time she put him down. But although the oils appeared to calm him for a few minutes at a time, he would quickly lose interest and return to screaming.

  Martika had forgotten about that smell, and she had the unmistakable feeling that the puppy had given it to her as a gift. He seemed to know things that nobody else could know, which was simultaneously disturbing and comforting. She couldn’t wrap her head around it, but she had a strong feeling that this small black puppy held a mysterious connection to her baby.

  A sneeze startled Martika out of her dream state, and when she opened her eyes, she discovered that she was cradling the whimpering dog as if he was her own baby. She had subconsciously picked him up and had been gently caressing the side of his muzzle with the back of her hand. She felt self-conscious when she noticed Robert was looking at her.

  “I don’t think he minds.” Robert smiled.

  “I can’t believe I left him,” sniffled Martika as tears streamed down her face. “I’m a horrible person.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Being separated from your baby was a gift from the universe.”

  “But it was my fault—I’m the one who left him.”

  “Yes, that was your role to play.”

  “And how is abandoning my firstborn child a gift?”

  “The universe uses difficult situations to teach us our most significant life lessons that would be impossible to learn any other way. In your case, you need to resolve your issues with abandonment that you incurred from before.”

  “When I took my own life?”

  “Yes. That has been your karma for many lifetimes, and every time the universe gives you a gift, you run away from it as quickly as it arrives.”

  “But it’s painful. Why would I want to dwell on the past?”

  “It’s not a matter of dwelling; it’s a matter of integrating. Once you allow that experience to become a part of your daily life, you will be able to draw from the wisdom that comes with it.”

  “I still don’t understand why it’s a gift.”

  “The wisdom is the gift—and the difficult experience is the carrier of that gift. But you haven’t been able to accept the gift, since you’ve been burying that memory for so many years. Now that you’re starting to integrate it into your consciousness, you can begin to draw from it and live your life with more grace.”

  Martika could sense her vision blurring as her eyelids began to swell. She put the sleeping puppy down on a blanket that was covered in matted black hair. “I think the allergy medicine is starting to wear off,” she said after a sneeze startled the puppy awake.

  “Perhaps the milk will eventually help with your allergies so you can babysit Don on occasion.”

  “I would like that,” Martika said wistfully. “That would be nice.”

  After Martika left, Robert and Don remained silent for several minutes. Robert lit some sage and began smudging the ground where Martika had been, and systematically blessed the entire perimeter of the tipi while fanning the smoke outside.

  “Can you believe what just happened?” Don finally broke the silence. “Wasn’t that incredible?”

  “Yes, thanks to you. By returning her burden, she is finally able to begin healing.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her it was really me?”

  “I think she was starting to figure it out.”

  “But why couldn’t you reassure her that what she was feeling was real? So she knew that it was true?”

  “If I would’ve told her that her son was now in the body of a dog, it would have triggered her intellect, and she probably wouldn’t have been able to continue with the healing flow. Her brain would have questioned the entire experience, and she might have lost all faith in what she was feeling.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Remember, Don, this isn’t just about you. She has some big issues to heal, and we’ve done as much as we can. The rest is up to her—just be patient. She’s going to need to take some time to integrate all the soul lessons she’s just learned, which are much bigger and more involved than they might have appeared. We’re all subject to ancestral entanglements from our previous soul family, but in her case she’s been trying to learn the same lessons for so long that many of the entanglements she needs to deal with have come from her own past lives.

  “Historically, one of her tools of avoidance has been to give herself completely to her children once she’s been confronted with what she has done to them. This allows her to begin to live their lives so she can once again avoid living her own. That’s why your situation is so perfect. Today she was forced to confront abandoning you, but because of your current form, she was unable to begin living your life.

  “Over the next few months she’ll have the opportunity to integrate all of this information while unraveling her entanglements. What she did to you is her biggest burden of this lifetime. And by you being near her without being in human form, it allows her to confront that burden without using it as an excuse to lose herself in it.

  “Hopefully soon she’ll be able to take responsibility for what she has done to each of us, while being honest about what she has done to herself. I’ve been waiting for this day much longer than you have, and I pray that this time she’ll finally be able to release us from all of her karmic responsibilities.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Why did he come here?” Suzanne asked aloud as she walked across the parking lot toward the
bright yellow caution tape. The warm air was remarkably calm in Hellgate Canyon, yet scattered on the ground were broken shards of glass and red reflector plastic that hinted at the tragedy that took place before.

  When she reached the wall that had been unsuccessful in preventing her husband’s car from plunging down the ravine, she noticed a collection of medium-sized river rocks that had become dislodged from the wall’s mortar when Don’s car had apparently rammed through it. She couldn’t believe such a flimsy barrier was expected to ensure safety on such an obviously dangerous road, and she could feel her anger return once again. “So pointless,” she fumed while shaking her head. “How could this have happened?”

  At the base of the ravine, she saw a bright emerald pool cradled by sheer granite cliffs. The beauty of the steep canyon was undeniable, somehow enhanced by the thousands of razor-sharp stones flowing toward the water in an enormous granite waterfall that was easily twenty stories high.

  Suzanne had been wondering if she should give Don a memorial service, but she wasn’t sure who should be invited. She didn’t think that anyone would show up except for his slimy lawyer friend— and she didn’t want to be alone with him, no matter what the occasion. But the real reason she didn’t want a memorial was because she didn’t think that Don deserved it. She was still angry at him for leaving her so suddenly. If he was really in that much pain, she would have understood—but they were a team; he had no right to make that decision on his own.

  Without thinking, she straddled the wall and quickly found a path that meandered along the precarious rock face. After just a few steps, she slipped on a rock and lost her footing, falling backward and sliding down the steep embankment in a blinding cloud of dust. Fortunately, she was able to grab on to a thin oak branch, which prevented her from tumbling to the bottom. Suzanne’s heart raced as she gripped the branch with both hands and held on tightly while catching her breath.

  After several minutes of struggling, she pulled herself up with the surprisingly sturdy oak branch and resolved to find a pathway down to the water. When her eyes were able to adjust to the glare of the bright sunlight, she saw a narrow footpath worn into the straw-colored grasses that had grown in between the cracks of the large boulders.

  Walking just a few minutes, she came to a dead end at the edge of the steep cliff. She retraced her steps and followed a second fork along the back side of the canyon. The path circuitously wandered along the rock face before once again ending at the edge of another steep cliff.

  Lying down on her stomach, Suzanne inched slowly along the ledge that cantilevered out from the mountain’s face—high above the glimmering green pool below. When she reached the edge of the rock, she shakily tried to maintain her balance without the benefit of anything to hold on to. After successfully standing upright, she briefly looked down to the water and nearly passed out from the vertigo. Closing her eyes tightly, she instinctively outstretched her arms in a T shape in order to stay balanced.

  In that moment an overwhelming urge came over her to jump off the cliff and join Don in the water below. She wanted to know what her husband had felt was more compelling than being alive with his wife. The emerald pool was Don’s mistress, and Suzanne became obsessed with confronting her charms.

  With her eyes still closed, Suzanne stood on the precarious boulder for several minutes as she tried to decide what to do next. Beads of sweat gathered on the bridge of her nose, and her throat started to constrict. The temperature gauge in her car had said it was ninety-seven degrees outside when she arrived, but she hadn’t realized how warm it really was until she was standing on the cliff without the benefit of shade.

  She began to feel light-headed, and her vision pulsed to darkness every few seconds as the heat seeped into her every pore. A gentle breeze caressed her cheek, and subconsciously a smile crept onto her lips as she remembered something from her childhood: “Listen to the words that the wind carries,” her grandfather would say. “They are the only words that can be trusted.”

  Suzanne hadn’t listened to the wind since she was a little girl, but remembered that it always seemed to tell her what she needed to hear. She hoped that she could remember how to do it and tried to clear her brain of all the distracting thoughts that kept it occupied. Once her mind was quiet, she began to listen to what the wind had to say.

  At first she couldn’t hear anything, but after a few minutes, she was able to discern the distinct sounds that the winds were carrying. She heard the sound of a bird above her, and the leaves rustling in the trees. The trickling sounds from the river below were carried up the canyon walls, and she was eventually enveloped by the calming echoes of water. After several minutes, she was finally able to stop hearing the wind, and began to listen. Slowly, words emerged that were as familiar as they were unknown:

  Harbinger, home within

  Surrender to the mystery

  One of three, we all become

  Rain, tree, crow.

  She’d never heard that poem before and wasn’t sure what it meant, but for some reason it comforted her. It provided a sense of calm and appeared to contain a profound wisdom that couldn’t be explained. Whispering the poem several times in hushed tones, she felt herself rise above the rock face as if she was gently being lifted by the warm breeze. She couldn’t feel her feet anymore—nor, for that matter, her ankles or calves. It was as if she had begun to levitate and was gently floating above the canyon.

  Instinctively, she held her breath for several seconds, and when she opened her eyes, she saw the sun dancing with the clouds in the sky above. A single sunbeam appeared to fall from the clouds, and as she followed its luminosity to the river below, she thought she saw the unmistakable outline of Don’s car underneath the water. The police had said they were going to remove it, but perhaps they hadn’t been able to yet.

  Suzanne didn’t want to look down to her feet, but she knew she had to. As soon as she saw that they were still firmly planted on the ground, she couldn’t keep herself from being disappointed. The floating feeling began to dissipate, and the words of the poem drifted away as the breeze suddenly stopped.

  “I can make it to the water if I jump out far enough,” she said aloud, trying to convince herself. She then carefully bent down and picked up a small pebble that had lodged itself within a crack in the boulder she was standing on. With as much force as she could muster, she threw the stone as far as she could. It flew effortlessly a few hundred feet before gracefully descending toward the emerald pool. Her heart sank when it failed to reach the water and instead plummeted into the rocks at least fifty yards from the riverbank.

  Suzanne closed her eyes tightly and tried to summon the floating feeling that she had felt before, but she wasn’t able to. Her feet felt more firmly planted on the ground than they had in years. It was as if the weight had returned to her legs after they’d been hollow for as long as she could remember. It was a reassuring feeling; however, it wasn’t what she wanted now—she wanted to float through the sky and into the water.

  She tried to recall the enigmatic poem that the wind had carried, but she had already forgotten the words. Something about a bird, she thought, or maybe a flower? The wind remained still, and she began to lose hope when she finally acknowledged the obvious: “I don’t think I can make it to the water from here,” she whispered softly as tears began streaming down her cheek. “Maybe I can get in somewhere upstream.”

  Without warning, the wind gusted with such intense force that Suzanne was nearly knocked off balance. And deep within the loud rumbling sounds of the gust, she heard the wind’s unmistakable voice once again:

  He can’t be followed.

  The wind continued to gust for several seconds, and then it fell completely still, leaving a deafening silence in its wake.

  “Why can’t I come?” Suzanne screamed at the top of her lungs, and the canyon echoed her plea. “Why can’t I be with him anymore?” she cried in desperate resignation, and began to shake uncontrollably as tears fell from
her eyes to her lips. As the last shred of hope escaped into the void of the very canyon that took her husband, Suzanne suddenly felt more alone than she ever had before. Don was her entire world, and he was gone. Her husband had left her, and he was never coming back.

  Then the heavy feeling in her legs started to rise and fill the rest of her body. It seeped into her belly and throughout her torso—then into her arms, her neck, and finally her head. She felt unusually solid and stable in her footing, and her loneliness began to evolve into a profound sense of independence. Without kneeling down, she calmly turned around and assuredly scaled the boulder back to the footpath. She knew Hellgate Canyon was no longer her place to be, and she suddenly felt as if it was time to leave.

  Suzanne deliberately walked back to her car without turning around. “I would have followed him anywhere,” she whispered solemnly as she wiped the remaining tears from her cheek, “but I guess I can’t do that anymore.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  After fully exploring the town, Robert and Don began to frequent the Co-op, which appeared to be the meeting place for all the locals. Every morning Robert would carry the puppy from the tipi to the natural-food store when it opened at 7 A.M. He would sit in meditation opposite the glass doors of the exit and tune in to the energy of everyone who was leaving with their groceries. As they entered the store, their energy was very chaotic, but when exiting, the patrons were much more at ease and often had a singular focus.

  Most of the time their thoughts were quite mundane, like: I have to get back to work, or I’m so tired today. But more often than he would have expected, someone would have a thought that Robert would find intriguing, such as: You can’t get clean in dirty water. Robert began to write these thoughts down on used cardboard panels that the Co-op was recycling, and then he would share these profundities with everyone who exited the store.