An Uncommon Bond

by jeff brown

  From the outside, it looked like any mundane moment in a life. A simple meal, a series of stories, a moment’s pause from the midday heat. But it wasn’t. Because we weren’t alone. God was sitting with us at the table, communing with us, encompassing us in his resplendent glow. I could feel him close at heart, like a friend who never leaves, a devoted guide who ferries us from one incarnation to another, ushering us along love’s corridors. I was under no delusion that he appeared for us, and us alone. God is always at the table. It is the love that reveals him.

  Sarah noticed something, too. “Do you feel something near us?” she asked.

  “Yes, God is here,” I replied matter-of-factly.

  “Oh God, you are delusional,” she replied, just as matter-of-factly.

  “Yes, but...”

  She scrunched her nose with delight. “I have a new nickname for you. Your nickname is now OGDO.”

  “How do you spell that?” I asked.

  “O-G-D-O, and do you want to know what it stands for?”

  “Not sure that I do.”

  “Well, it stands for, are you ready… Oh Great Deluded One,” she said with a cackle, clearly pleased with her linguistic ingenuity.

  “You’re not going to write that on a wall are you?”

  She smiled softly, and reached for my hand.

  “Yes, but... you are right. God is here, OGDO. For reals.”

  My turn to deflect, “Shall we order him dessert?” I asked with a smile.

  “I’m sure he has already eaten.”

  “Angel food cake?”

  “Cute. No, I see him as more of a Crème Brulee type.”

  “Yes, that feels right. It has that heavenly quality.”

  That heavenly quality. When two hearts touch, the heavens open.

  We ordered a Crème Brulee for God and his two love-struck devotees. Before it arrived, Sarah leaned over and whispered in my ear, “IU, OGDO.”

  “IU, Sarah?”

  “Yes, I love you implies a gap. There isn’t one, OGDO. IU…”

  After dessert arrived, Sarah motioned for me to take the first bite. I did, and she leaned in to kiss my Brulee soaked lips, “Mmmmmm, actually I think OGDO means O’ Great Delicious One. That’s you. Creamy and perfect.” It was all I could do to contain my impulse to jump on top of her. Instead, we settled in for a long delicious kiss, the kind that even public kissers would find embarrassingly steamy.

  A Truly Happy Ending

  That evening, the soulevator finally arrived back at the ground floor. We were walking back to our motel, when I noticed Sarah drifting away. Ever-vigilant, I asked her what was wrong.

  “Nothing wrong, I’m just worried,” she replied, her lower lip quivering.

  “Worried, why, my dear?” I inquired gently.

  “This love. I hope that I can hold it safe.”

  I was too caught up in the love swirl to fully grok the meaning of this, but I knew enough to ask, “Why do you doubt it?”

  “I feel like I lose myself in you. Am I strong enough for that? not sure sometimes.”

  “But you don’t need to be strong alone. We find our strength together.”

  “Yes, but I just feel so young.”

  Her voice became softer, slightly trembling, “...and this love feels so old.”

  Then she broke away from me, cutting down an alley as though fleeing a crime scene. I followed her until she suddenly stopped and turned to face me, staring at me with frightened eyes. I asked her to tell me what she was feeling. She glared in silence. The silence catapulted me into a terror of my own: can we die this fast? She pulled a piece of chalk from her bag, and wrote this on the alley wall:

  How to hold love safe?

  She reached over to hug me and we cried together for a very long time. Sobbing, heaving, we released eons of emotional holdings. How could we hold this many tears? And whose tears were these anyway? Clearly, we had entered a new dimension, one that did not subscribe to traditional emotional parameters and relational expectations; one so energetically charged that it would demand everything of us. Like artistic expression, it was ecstatic, chaotic, and ever-morphing. There was no question. We were in for a challenging creative process. But there was nowhere else I would rather be.

  When we awoke in the morning, the heaviness was gone. Sarah was lying beside me, staring at me in that way she did when she had been looking at me for hours. I jumped on in, gazing into her eyes, traveling back and forth on our bridge across forever. She moved a little closer and began to stroke my face with her hand. Oh, how I loved those long, nimble fingers. Then she reached down and stroked my chest, lighting my heart aflame. The fire spread to my loins, where an erection of eager proportions rose into view. This erection wasn’t like my usual hard-ons, inspired by external stimuli. This one was ignited from the inside out. A heart-on.

  I lay back on the bed and she gave me a long and beautiful heart-job, touching me with the perfect balance of tenderness and tension, repeatedly bringing me close to the peak, before backing me off for another ascent. My face remained buried under her still arm throughout, happily smelling her sweaty perfection. Then, when the moment was just right, my throbbing essence erupted into rapture. I had never experienced such a sacred, triumphant release. The heart-genital highway was finally open for travel! A truly happy ending.

  Before parting, we took our final shower together. Sarah got out early to call her family, while I let the water run over my head, drowning my imminent sorrow. How to return to the armored world after another taste of eternity?

  As we made the long drive back to my car, it felt like a funeral procession, morbid and haunting. How do you part from your own heart without dying?

  We pulled into the lot and sat in silence. I clutched on to her hand for a very long time. We got out of the car to hug goodbye. Hugging wasn’t enough. We walked down the hill to the same thicket where we first began our trip together. This time it was different. So much had transpired in these past days together. We were now being nourished from the same root.

  She leaned up against a wide oak tree while we kissed ferociously. Kissing wasn’t enough. I needed to imbibe her fully, so her honeyed life force could sustain me during our time apart. I lowered her pants and began to worship her with my tongue. This wasn’t oral sex as I had known it. Sparks of aliveness ignited inside me as my heart opened wider with every taste. She was the perfect elicksir for my love-starved soul.

  In the heart of the worship, I had a profound realization. As my lips merged with hers, I felt the presence of the Godself rising up to meet me. Outside the portal of connection, I couldn’t quite see it. But here, in the moistical membrane of co-creation, he was heartfully revealed. God wasn’t up there, on a pogo stick to the stars. God was right here, in the heart of the yoniverse. Here was the proof that God exists. Here was the treasure I had sought. The yoniverse of meaning was before me.

  5

  Growing Edge

  Driving home, I felt like an escorted soul, cradled in the safe arms of Providence. With my third eye opened wide I saw the divine mother revealing her splendor everywhere. I looked to my left and saw a field of brilliantly pink, effulgent flowers, opening their sweetness to the world. Through the open car window, a soft heavenly fragrance greeted me. Up ahead, a sparklingly radiant sky. To the right, a flowing river of wonder. All of it here to show me, in vivid color, the intimate, sensual universe waiting on the other side of perfect love. I would never have noticed in my usual here now. Love’s immaculate perception.

  When I arrived home, I took a long nap. I wanted to dream Sarah back into my arms. After I woke up, I unpacked my bag. There, between two smelly t-shirts, was a small pink envelope with OGDO on it. In it, she had written only this:

  You are me inside I am you.

  A few days later, I retreated again. Like a turtle, I needed to go inside and integrate this startling heart opening before I could step out still further. Each time we met, I experienced a radical dissolution of my usua
l framework of perception. As I shed one self-sense, another way of being stepped up to take its place. It was like I was dissolving and re-forming at the same time.

  Who was this man, now?

  And, now…?

  At the end of the work week, I turned off my phone and drove to the forest for the weekend. I needed some alone time to reconnect with my center. While hiking in the woods, my cynicism took over again. I thought of the geographical distance, the religious differences, the age gap, our shared tendency towards solitude. Surely there was too much against us?

  It was all I could do to resist my desire to take the first off-ramp. The monkey mind clicked into gear: Do I really need partnership? Who says we need a partner to be whole? Isn’t wholeness found within? On and on it chattered, comparing path choices. Truth be told, I was frightened beyond measure. The connection beckoned me toward a form-lessness beyond my reckoning. Yet the unknown had always led to disappointment. How to trust the mystery when it has never proven kind or generous? Why surrender to emptiness when it has always been consistently painful?

  At the same time, I was tired of looking at my isolated reflection in the mirror, tired of being alone in pictures, tired of walking alone in the forest, tired of the isolated lair of the lone wolf warrior. How many lives had my warrior soul sat alone at the riverbank? How many centuries had I avoided the path of the heart? How many lifetimes had I put self-protection ahead of soul-connection? In my efforts to avoid humanity, I had surely averted my own humanness.

  Now felt like time. I had journeyed intensively on my own. I had worked hard on myself for years. And I knew, whether my fear-body liked it or not, that there were aspects of myself, hidden treasures, that could only be brought forth through a depthful relationship with another. I think they call this “the growing edge.” But was this blade too sharp?

  Just before coming home, I walked back to the rambling brook to meditate on the connection. Sitting beside the sacred place where I had first asked for this love, I wondered: Had love really hunted me down, or was I just a wishful thinker? Maybe I truly was the great deluded one?

  Still not much of a meditator, I was distracted by a high-pitched chirping sound that wouldn’t let up. I looked up and only a few feet from me was a bright red male cardinal sitting on a cedar branch singing his body electric, eyeing my bag of trail mix with fervent desire. He kept chirping his mantra, as though communicating an imperative message. A birdsong with my name on it?

  What’s with the fucking cardinals?

  Meta-dating

  Before returning to my apartment, I went to meet Daniel for Dim Sum in Chinatown. We have a long standing tradition of discussing life over dumplings and noodles. To get a sense of Daniel, imagine a stocky panda bear. Now add a pair of very thick glasses—thick like the bottom of a pop bottle. Now redden his hair, and brush some of it forward. Now add a kippah (a Jewish skullcap), and a small gold stud to his left ear and make him unstoppably cuddly. Oh, and magnetic blue eyes. That’s Daniel.

  When I got there, his head was buried in yet another Eastern spirituality book.

  “Good to see you Danny,” I said as I kissed his forehead and sat down in front of him. “How are you?”

  Without looking up, he replied, “Neither good nor bad—just here.”

  “Oh good, detaching from your wound-body again, are you?” I replied sarcastically.

  He put the book off to the side and looked me square in the face. “It’s better than activating it, my friend. Much much better.”

  The showdown had begun.

  I replied sharply, “It’s always active, my friend. Transcending it doesn’t make it go away. Doesn’t heal it either. Just comes back later and bites you in the ass.”

  When I first met Daniel in law school, he was a passionate love seeker. If he wasn’t in a relationship with someone he called “the one,” he was sure he had just spotted her. And then he met Hannah—a woman that he loved so deeply he would have given his life for her. Two orthodox Jews madly in love, we were sure they would get married and raise a beautiful family. But then she left him on his 26th birthday to “explore other possibilities.” Three weeks later, she died in a scuba diving accident in Belize. Perhaps to manage the pain, perhaps to find an answer, he became a spiritual seeker, focusing on various Eastern perspectives. Lately, his focus was on detaching from emotional pain. He was desperate to find the moment, while sidestepping his unresolved wounds.

  “Non-duality requires a more expanded consciousness, Lowen. Less ego more…”

  I cut him off, “No, not less ego, Daniel. Less unhealthy ego. Listen, you can’t call it a unified field of awareness if you remove everything uncomfortable from the moment: the ego, your body, your unresolved pain, your personal identifications. That’s not expanded consciousness, buddy. That’s dissociation.”

  “Quite a soliloquy, but let’s look at the facts. You spent the last few days tormented by your latest love relationship, right? I spent the last month unperturbed by anything.”

  “Like a robot.”

  Clearly agitated, he shot back, “You are pissing me off.”

  “Wound-body awakens. That was quick!” I replied.

  He went quiet and took his glasses off to clean them—a habit that signaled he was feeling uncomfortable. This dialogue was hitting a nerve.

  “Just let her go. It’s too intense. What’s the point? You’re just gonna crash and burn,” he said with great certainty.

  We sat and slurped our noodles in silence for some time. Although he was annoying me, I also felt grateful for his impeccably timed message. In a way, he was the perfect reflection at the right time, representing the part of me that wanted to detach from Sarah; that wanted to find nirvana without risking loss; that wanted to find my answers in concepts rather than feelings. He was the wounded part of me that was still chirping in my inner ear, trying to convince me to give up on love as path. He was the isolationist part that wanted to make God a fleshless head trip. It was good to see myself from the outside.

  I thought of Sarah in those last moments just before we parted in the mountains. The way the sun danced on her face, the way her smiling eyes sparkled, the softness of her hand in mine. Only once in an eternity does God launch this kind of heart rocket. How could I turn away?

  I suddenly felt compassion for my friend, struggling as he was to find his faith in love after such a tremendous loss.

  “Right now you can’t relate but you will again, Danny,” I said softly.

  He replied, much less confident in his position, “I get there meditating.”

  “Yah, me too,” I replied. “Meta-dating, there’s just something about the effect of two destined hearts merging that deepens the meditation experience.”

  He quickly responded, “It’s destined to fail,” with a shaky voice, failing miserably at sounding firm.

  I wanted to challenge him again, but I looked up and noticed a tear in his eye. There was suddenly nothing to debate. He was doing his best to manage his pain. I was doing my best to believe in love. To each their journey.

  When I got home, there were flowers waiting at my door from Sarah. In the heart of the most radiant sunflowers I have ever seen, was another card. This one said it all:

  Love of my life, I remember us.

  We fell once then climbed a mighty summit.

  Clinging together, our hearts sharing a

  new pulse, our seams woven and knitted

  closely, we tumbled together down a grassy

  hill, staining our hearts with

  one another’s love pledges.

  I remember you. I loved you a thousand

  times before—your sweet fire still burns

  inside my breast. I’ll love you a thousand

  times more. Eternity prompts me

  to join your love with mine.

  Like a hot arrow to the heart, I was immediately felled. Rendered completely vulnerable, open and raw. If I had any remaining doubts, they were instantly erased. No se
nse resisting reality. She is my calling.

  6

  V-Passiona Meditation

  Sarah wanted us to go on another trip together. From a practical perspective, it was entirely inconvenient. She had the perfect working life: three weeks on, and one week off. But I didn’t. I had a locked-in litigation practice, with endless details and obligations. And I was already behind on my work.

  Nonetheless, I had no choice but to go. I rearranged a series of appointments, passed a drunk driving trial to an associate, and somehow made it happen. For this moment at least, my soul was calling the shots.

  Two weeks later, we met at the Ascension Institute, a holistic retreat center in new York’s Adirondack Mountains for a 3-day Vipas-sana meditation workshop.

  Or so we thought.

  No-Entry Trauma

  Sarah was late. Instead of waiting for her, I went for a long walk around the grounds, finally landing at the beach where a small gathering of drummers and dancers were jamming in the sun. They had just ended an African music workshop and were joyfully charged. So much fluidity and freedom in their energy, in their movements, in their eyes. Much to my surprise, my body began to move effortlessly. At first I danced alone under a large maple tree, and then found myself drawn into the circle as their infectious warmth pulled me closer. I had always felt uncomfortable dancing in public, but today I danced without self-consciousness.

  And then I felt her. I didn’t see her, but I felt her. My spirit soared with excitement. I kept dancing, as the drummers intensified their beat. Soon the beach was filled with dancing fools everywhere. I moved into the center of the crowd, lost in a swirl of hips and toes. And then, I felt her right behind me. I turned, and there she was—her vibrant green eyes looking right through me, her sun-freckled face crunched into a warm, playful smile. We stared at each other for some time, as the world around us fell away. With our eyes in perma-lock, we merged with the divine, yet again. Soul-gazing, the real contact lens.