by Cauble, Don
She liked the way I danced. That's the reason she went home with me, she liked the way I danced, she said, that first time we met in the spring of 1981, over twelve years ago, at one of Mala's emotional-energy workshops. I had not instantly liked her though, I can tell you that. I was a little put off by her. She seemed judgmental and very needy. Nor did I feel attracted to her physically. She was tall, large-boned, full breasted, kind of lanky. She had dark, straight hair and she didn't shave her legs. She smiled a beauty of a smile though. Her warm dark eyes, her full mouth, her whole face lit up when she smiled. Her smile came from one of the kindest hearts I've ever known.
I had just gone through a sudden, painful divorce.
I felt lost, bewildered. Our split-up had happened so fast. Like the snapping of a branch. Like one moment you're driving along in your car dreaming of how your wife looked last night, how she felt so sweet in your arms, so much in love with you and then, suddenly, another car weaves out of nowhere, crossing the line head-on into your path.
Only it's not a dream, this car.
So I was glad to dance with Aditi. Glad she went home with me.
We soon drifted apart, however. A sannyasin, a Bhagwan devotee, a wearer of orange, I would never be. I enjoyed reading Bhagwan's books and listening to his taped discourses. I did his kundalini meditation for months and went to a number of workshops facilitated by Mala and Aniruddha, sannyasins who had recently returned from his ashram in India. I felt his grand love and his magnetic pull. Yet I felt no push from within to become a follower. Maybe, as Angelina would say, I was just too independent.
When Bhagwan came to the United States and established his spiritual community at Antelope in eastern Oregon, Aditi moved to the Rajneesh Ranch. I drove out a few times to visit her, but I didn't feel comfortable in such an organized state of watchfulness. I felt watched all the time. And not as a mother duck might watch her ducklings out of concern. The Ranch energy felt intimidating and too paranoid.
Now and then, whenever Aditi came back to Portland, we'd see each other. Sometimes she worked at the Rajneesh Hotel on SW Eleventh. Aditi always wondered who would be the lucky woman to end up with me. Anyway, that's how she put it.
When the Ranch escalated into full-blown paranoia with armed guards protecting Bhagwan, and when Sheila, the Duchess Dowager of the whole shebang, tried to take control and drive out or poison her rivals, and when she even, so the story goes, tried to kill Bhagwan, and Bhagwan, with a few chosen ones, attempted to flee the country by private jet but was nabbed and jailed in North Carolina and charged with immigration fraud and, after agreeing to a plea bargain, was banished from the United States, and the Ranch closed, Aditi stayed on until everything that could be sold was sold, including the peacocks.
She went to Boston and took an apprenticeship as an electrician. Then she moved to a small town near San Francisco and did her electrical work and studied herbal medicine and developed a passion for good wine. She drifted into a relationship with a man she worked with, a married man, and the whole thing left her feeling frustrated and disappointed.
Aditi decided to play music again. She moved back to Oregon.
A year after coming back to Portland, Aditi found out she had cancer. With Merika and her husband, Odell, I went to see her in the hospital. A surgeon had removed one of her kidneys. They had gotten all the cancer. Or so they thought.
A year and a half later, she's undergoing radiation treatments, but not the really heavy-duty chemotherapy kind Treya Wilber underwent for her breast cancer in Ken Wilber's book Grace and Grit. Aditi had read Grace and Grit several times by the time I saw her at the Christmas party.
Aditi and I were squeezed together in a big comfy chair. It was still early in the evening but already she seemed exhausted. She had barely touched her glass of wine. She must have been in pain but she kept smiling.
"Viola, I want you to meet David. He's the man I've talked so much about."
Viola had a soft, breathless voice.
In a few minutes, she drifted away.
Aditi must have read my mind.
"She chose the name Viola for herself," she said. "Her spirit name."
I nodded. "How old is Viola?"
Aditi called her back.
"I'm thirty-four."
Viola was wearing a multi-colored, patch-quilt jacket Aditi had made for her as a Christmas gift and she had on tight black pants and slim black boots and a brimmed burgundy felt hat. A tall, slender woman with dark hair and a pretty face, I could easily have taken her for Aditi's sister. As I remember, I fell in love with her hat. And the way she kind of sloughed through the crowd and smiled warmly at everyone, as if she were a guest at her own party, rather than the host, anxious to take care of everyone.
My imagination fluttered.
I had no shame. My friend was dying and I was thinking of romance.
Across the room, Viola smiled at the two of us.
Viola's paintings hung on all the walls around us. Large, strange paintings of women in pain. Paintings of a woman who identified with the wolf, the bird, the shaman, the artist. The one that held my eye the most was a thick, heavy-painted, layered portrait of a child-woman emerging from pain, and all this shit flying in the air around her.
I learned that Viola had just finished two years of intense psychotherapy. She had come out of a painful, dreadful darkness that went back into childhood horrors, into sexually abusive events so shameful to her that she had split herself into multiple personalities.
I knew little about multiple personality disorder.
I knew about splitting-off in my own self. Indeed, I knew about that. But I didn't know the depths that one might take this splitting, to distance oneself from the pain, from the humiliation, from the powerlessness. And then to have the courage, the guts, the grit, to find one's way out of this darkness into the light; to come out of this wounded place screaming; to come out of this living death alive.
At the Christmas party, with Aditi's family and Viola and other close friends in the same room—especially Odell and Merika, close friends of mine, too—and Roberto, a handsome, dark-haired man who wrote music and wonderful poetry, and his lovely wife, Kathy, who played violin in the Oregon Symphony—I suddenly realized the truth that Aditi would be leaving us soon.
We sat together, the two of us, holding each other. We had come together at the beginning in the place called Heart. Our lives did not mesh, we had different journeys to take, our paths ran parallel and not together, yet in her final days our journeys had come together once again. We could hold each other in this sacred moment, in this place of coming together, without needs, without nervousness, without fear. Quietly, we rested in this place.
§
from Going into the darkness / Tales of past times
(an unpublished novel)
Wild strawberries
for Sarah (age 28)
Remember how fresh, how sweet, they tasted
in your mouth,
that summer night you came home
with me?
"The berries, they're so juicy," you said.
"So sweet."
You held one in your mouth,
your red-stained mouth,
and you kissed me.
I tasted the wildness in your life,
your reckless youth,
your sadness, your skinny nakedness,
thin as my own.
How could you be so thin,
slender as a flame,
your legs dark spotted with bruises
from falling down
and bumping into corners,
yet so wild, red-stained and delicious?
You smiled at my seriousness,
your dark, blue shaded eyes
catching the curve
of my heart
like a blue Bellflower catching the flight
of a hummingbird.
In another life
We could have been storybook lovers,
husband a
nd wife,
traveling with little money in another country,
Italy, the town of Brindisi,
on the coast,
drinking red wine from a barrel
in a small tavern,
waiting for a boat to Greece.
On the side of the road,
near Sparta,
wild roses ripped at your dress
as you leaned too close
to capture their fragrance,
do you remember?
But that was a long time ago,
this other life.
More than twenty years.
You would have been only eight years old.
I could have been your father,
had I known your mother.
Only I've never had a daughter,
never had a son.
I don't understand time, nor age,
nor this emptiness that I feel
inside my chest.
Time evaporates like kitchen clouds
steaming out of a kettle,
swallows us like fog
on a river bridge,
and disappears like wild strawberries
in your red-stained mouth.
"My heart belongs to another," you said,
"but I will stay with you tonight, if you wish."
I lay without sleeping in the dark,
thinking of you
and of the sacred emptiness of all things,
all night,
tears claiming my heart
as your arm reached out and curled
like the tip of a wave
around me,
an old man in love
with a woman he does not know.
Endless the beginning
1996-2005
§
Endless all that I am,
and endless this journey to you.
Before the beginning
He had no idea where he was or how he got here. He had no memory of any events, no memory of any journey. Perhaps a shipwreck? He knew ships. He had seen one pass by in the watery distance—too far away for him to signal. The big silver birds that flew across the sky, sometimes at night, with lights flashing—could he have fallen from the belly of one of those giant birds? His clothes offered no clues. He had on a long-sleeve flannel shirt, a blue coat with big pockets and a hood, blue denim jeans, athletic shoes. Already the day had warmed and he removed the jacket and his shirt. Inside his coat, in a pocket, he found a worn leather wallet. In the wallet, he found a driver's license, a credit card from a bank, several new twenty-dollar bills, an old, torn library card, a ticket stub to a movie. He felt something else deep inside the coat pocket. He stared curiously at the object—a black and white photograph of a young woman. The woman was smiling warmly into the camera. She had nice teeth and a lovely, relaxed smile, a sensual mouth, and a slight mischievous look in her eyes. The woman had pinned her dark hair behind her head and the wind whipped a few wispy strands of loose hair about her face. In the hazy background, he saw a low, tree-covered mountain, and just beyond the mountain, he could make out a body of water, probably an ocean, like the one now surrounding him. The woman had on a sleeveless blouse and she wore a beaded necklace. The pattern on her blouse seemed to match the design on the large glass beads around her slender neck. The woman, he could tell, possessed a kind heart. Affection and freedom—he saw these in her smile and in her eyes. Hope, time, identity; these all belonged to her. A thin bra strap showed on her right arm, slightly below her shoulder. His eyes lingered on the picture. He had no memory of this beautiful woman.
He studied his driver's license, looking for some clue to the past. He had no idea how many years had passed since the picture on the license was taken, but the picture showed a man obviously younger than himself. He suddenly felt an emptiness inside his belly. He recognized that feeling. He was hungry. An apple. He wanted an apple. But he didn't know the meaning of that word apple. He said the word over in his mind several times. Then he saw an image. He saw a roundish, dull golden fruit with a splash of red coloring its skin. Ah, so that's an apple, he thought. And the color red. He liked the word red. But what did the word mean? He felt a current of energy tingle through his body. He bit into the red and dull golden skin of the fruit. Juice ran down his lips. The apple tasted sweet and crisp, as if it had suddenly ripened on the tree. He ate the apple and looked out upon the water around him. He took off his shoes, his socks, and walked barefoot on the sand. The sand seemed to welcome his feet. He had no idea where he was going or how long he walked. A thin, cold stream fed into the sea from a single tributary on the land. He took off his clothes and placed them carefully on the ground. He walked into the sea. Overhead, sea birds watched him curiously. He swam in the water and then washed the salt from his body in the thin, cold stream. He dried himself with his T-shirt. He walked inland, away from the sea.
He sat on a high bluff, out of the wind. He watched the sun go down and thought that he had never seen such a spectacular transformation as the sun vanished over the water and the moon appeared and the stars dotted the night sky. A large, golden moon. Another word that comforted his tongue. He said the word 'moon' several times. How did he know moon? What did this word mean? He sat spellbound, as if he had never seen the night sky before. Perhaps he hadn't. Perhaps the flying ships in the night had all been a dream. How could he fall from such a height and not perish on the rocks or break apart? There had to be another explanation. He dismissed the idea of a shipwreck. His wallet would have been soaked; the picture of the woman would have been damaged. The moon reminded him of the woman. Both were as wondrous and as unknown as anything he knew. Considering his predicament, and how little he knew, he pondered the irony, for he felt absolutely safe. He wondered how that could be. How could he feel safe, alone, not knowing who he was or where he had come from, and certainly not seeing any place to go from here? He cupped the moon in his hands. The woman contained earth, warmth, life; the moon felt cool and indifferent to his presence. He could not warm the moonlight with his hands. He turned his eyes to the stars. The stars both amused and awed him. They twinkled in the sky, like little kids who couldn't sit still and were just waiting to run outside to play. Their great number astounded him. They reached from one end of his out-stretched arm to the other arm and beyond. He couldn't contain all the stars, there were too many. He touched a star very carefully, then another. They looked so far away, and yet all he had to do was reach out with his mind to hold one in his hand. They were beautiful, but he had no desire to be a star. He wanted to be one with the woman; with earth, fire, time. If he could touch the stars, why couldn't he remember this woman? Why couldn't he put himself in her eyes, and touch her spirit with his, and come home to her? Surely, she waited for him, carrying his memory locked in her heart, just as he carried the black and white photograph of her in his pocket. Perhaps this is all a dream he thought: the sea, the land and the flying ships in the night, the stars he could easily touch. Perhaps, he thought, I will awaken and find myself at home in bed, warm and safe with this woman, and she'll be half-smiling in her sleep with her arms wrapped around my chest and her hair slightly tangled across her face. Or perhaps I've gone mad. This idea made him smile. Suddenly, he remembered a poem. It was a poem about a man counting the stars and writing them down on a piece of paper, and everyone thought the man was crazy, or else a genius, for he wanted to protect the stars from the rain, and the man only half-smiled out of one side of his mouth when they questioned him. Of all the poems he had read in his lifetime, strange, he thought, that he should remember this one. But none of this made sense to him. Why should he remember one thing and not another? He touched the stars once again, to make sure they were real. Then he wrapped himself as best he could in his blue coat and, thinking of the woman, he fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed he was coming home.
§
from Going into the darkness / Tales of past times
(an unpublished novel)
I remember
I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design
but as someone following the flight of a bird.
—Sir Laurens van der Post
For Jane
Listen to the air around you,
my love.
If you hear shimmering beats
know that I am near,
know that I am calling to you,
"Let's go, let's go!"
Sssh, sssh, my lovely bird,
the night is a long flight.
Here, rest your head on
my breast,
the way lovers do.
Here, close your eyes.
Do you now see the lights
of home?
Do you remember?
Oh… yes… yes!
I remember. I remember.
Outside my thoughts
for Blazek, Kryss, & Willie
Time to get ready "not to be here,"
as a famous poet once wrote in a poem
he wrote one morning in winter,
when ice lay on the ground
and the temperature froze his words
in the north country air above my head.
Time to get ready, he said in his poem;
and I thought: Is that not
the meaning of time, from