An Uncommon Bond

by jeff brown

  She reached for me, pulling me close. Her body felt delicate against my firm frame, as love shaped our forms into one, lost in our own private soul-o dance. We danced like we had danced together forever, tripping the love fantastic. I soon became the center that she orbited, turning her about like a whirling dervish. Every time she passed my left ear, she would whisper ‘I love you.’ I love you, spin, I love you, spin, I love you… I was dizzy with delight.

  After hours of celebration, the drummers ran out of steam. Good thing, I was parched. After getting some coconut water at the café, Sarah took my hand and led me into the nearby forest. As we walked, our experience of love blossomed outward. I had often wondered how a single human heart could hold great love—it is so tiny, and love so vast. The answer is simple: it doesn’t. It spills over. It becomes the everything.

  That night, we had a beautiful, quiet dinner at the café: organic salad, angel hair pasta, soul-gazing for dessert. As we often did when we shared food, we nestled together on the same side of the table. As we ate, I had visions of us as parents, raising two raucous children, living in a small mountain home, simple and happy. I also saw us working together one day, teaching a new paradigm of relationship consciousness to a starving world. These visions felt deeply resonant, like strands of knowing encoded in my DNA. We were exactly where we were supposed to be.

  After dinner, we went outside and sat at the edge of the lake, brightly lit by the full moon. I could feel my anxiety building as the pristine evening set the stage for intimacy.

  Returning to the cabin, we undressed. As we began to heartily explore one another, I became intensely excited. Her body ignited my longing like nothing before: the exquisite curve of her ample breasts, her soft luscious lips, her mystery canyon with all its tender blessings.

  At the same time, I was still sexually reluctant. I could touch her forever, but when it came to intercourse, I couldn’t bring my heart and genitals together. Every time I came close, I hastily retreated. Amour or armor? I kept choosing the latter. Merging with her felt like a huge step, an irreversible transition from me-consciousness to we-consciousness. It was crossing a huge threshold. There would really be no turning back.

  After a few moments of foreplay, I lost my sexual charge entirely. Damn warrior—he just couldn’t surrender. And then I went reactive. I got out of the bed and cross-examined her about a woman she had dated years before: “Are you sure you don’t prefer women to men? How do I know you won’t leave me for a woman? Would you prefer it if I had a pussy?” Typical man covering up his feelings of inadequacy by taking it out on the woman he loves. But she wasn’t biting. After answering the first wave of questions, she just looked at me, softly, and said, “You can’t hide from us forever, Lowen Cooper. It’s just a matter of time.” Damn woman!

  Frustrated and embarrassed, I grabbed a blanket and pillow from the closet and made myself uncomfortable on the cabin floor. Sarah fell fast asleep on the bed, while I lay awake until dawn, interfacing with my demons.

  A Root Awakening

  When I woke up, Sarah was gone but there was a carefully prepared fruit and yogurt breakfast waiting for me on the bed. And a little note, hand written on a small piece of white cedar:

  I want to hold your heart.

  Heart it over.

  My schmaltzy wordsmith.

  We spent the day apart. Sarah went to the meditation workshop, while I hung out in the forest, negotiating with my fear. We already knew that real closeness wasn’t my strong suit. Lost in the morass of primal triggers, it was all I could do to stay in the room. Yet I wanted to open, I really did. I wanted to taste this love whole. But how to unravel these imprints embedded in my psyche? Trapped between a cock and a heart place, I didn’t know how to bridge them.

  There are two forms of courage in this world. One demands that we jump into action with our armor on. The other demands that we strip ourselves bare naked and surrender. I was an expert at the wrong form. I had always assumed that courage on the battlefield was the greatest achievement. Until now.

  That night, we went to a concert in the main hall. A troupe of monks were sounding with beautiful Tibetan healing bowls. As I listened, I felt a strong vibration moving through me. I felt space opening up inside, as though the sonic waves were chiseling away at my emotional blocks. I also felt its opposite—the fearful, shrinking small-self expert at sabotage, clinging to what it knows.

  Sarah leaned toward me, insisting on connecting deeper. Go(o)d timing. We fell quiet and gazed into each other’s eyes for a long time, while the chant built to an ecstatic frenzy around us. Goodness Goddess, whose eyes are these, anyway? My mind tap turned off. I felt myself slowly submitting. My heart opened wider. Our love was a truth serum that had to be drunk.

  A few minutes later, she tussled my hair and whispered in my ear, “I’m going to the meditation Sanctuary. Come if you want, or I’ll meet you back at the room later.” I could see her hard nipples pressed up against her blouse. She kissed me with a fierce tenderness and left.

  Right after she was gone, I heard a quiet voice inside say:

  You’re either in, or you’re out. No more stories, no more sidestepping, escape hatches, veiled retreats. You’re either in, or you’re out.

  My inner warrior was actually challenging me to choose a path. Hercules or Heartcules? Goliath, or Go-lie-with? Who you gonna be, tough guy?

  A few minutes later, I made the long walk up the hill to the meditation temple in the dark. I didn’t want to be without her. The stars were bright tonight, lighting my way, the perfect flashlight to my beloved. As I set foot on the cedar deck, I stopped for a moment to listen to the water trickling into the deck pond. Such a peaceful invitation to soften.

  I left my shoes beside the door and entered. Inside, there were dozens of empty meditation back-jacks organized in rows. Sarah wasn’t here yet. I sat on a back-jack in the back row and closed my eyes to meditate. My breath deepened, as I searched for a mantra to center me. After a few minutes of jittery contemplation, I heard the door creak open. The room came alive. Sarah had entered. Rain began to pound on the temple roof.

  I tried to meditate, but it felt avoidant, preposterous, unnecessary. The proverbial leaves kept floating back into consciousness with her juicy body on them. Who needs mantra when God is already in the room? There was only one mantra I wanted and her name was Sarah. Detachment was one path home. Selective attachment was another.

  After some time, she coughed and my longing rose to the rafters of consciousness. Be still, my surging heart. I opened my eyes, and saw her sitting two rows ahead of me, back-jack reversed, staring deeply into me with her smiling eyes aflame. We looked into each other’s eyes for yet another eternity as shards of love-light merged into the perfect mirror in our shared heart. At each stage of in-to-mesee, new universes rose into view, as though birthed into being by our love alone. The next undress rehearsal. How many more until we were truly bare?

  I felt my soul yearning to merge with her, stretching at the seams. The yearning first took root in my heart—a heart-on of momentous dimensions—and then spilled over to my genitals. Soon enough, my desire flooded me and demanded expression. It wasn’t enough to heart-gaze with my beloved. I had to merge with this Goddass, or risk internal dam-nation. Block it, or express it. It was time to express it.

  Without any effort at containment, I hurtled over the back-jacks and pounced on top of her. In a soulbeat, we were undressed and writhing madly on the temple floor. The Buddha was aghast, as we attached, desired and clung our way to God. The rain intensified, and flashes of well-timed lightning lit up the temple—her temple, too. It was all a temple now.

  I surrendered to a sexuality that was different than anything before. Suddenly my genitals were a pipeline to divinity, my whole body a conduit to the cosmos. My usual lovemaking had no place here. Love was the turn-on, at last! There was so much love that I had to cry, moistening our sex with tears of gratitude. Oh the heart, the heart.

  As we mo
ved together, we became a divine invocation to the God-self, a prayerful homage to the love-soaked wellspring that sources the all. Had a team of monks stormed in on us, we would surely not have noticed them. Tonight, lovemaking was the loom that wove our spirits into one. With every rhythmic thrust, we smashed through the veneer between our hearts and the universal heart. We moved together until there was no felt distinction between our bodies. Her pleasure was my pleasure, my arms hers, her breasts mine. We became one unified body-being, crossing the gender bridge with every breath. I was touching she who was me who was God. This was our body.

  At some point, I felt a need to speak the love poem that was us, but my mouth was busily lost in hers. The writer within made his way down to my root chakra and I began to write my love inside her, dipping my pen-is in her liquid well of wonder, inking heartspeak all over her inner walls… Beloved, Grateful, IU. I felt my hips take to the task, a true poetry in motion, spelling out this love with perfect penmanship. She received my poem with a heaving hunger, her love walls tightening their grasp, then loosening at just the right moments, as though our love sonnet had been pre-choreographed by the divine. This was the highest form of expression—God’s cosmic heart graffiti. I wrote one love poem after another inside her, until I had nothing left to say. After a wondrous orgasm, we fell deep asleep on the temple floor.

  We got up with the sunrise, stirred to awaken by the sacred chiming of monk’s bells outside. We looked at each other aghast and scrambled to put our clothes back on. Just as we opened the temple door, a group of resident monks entered the Sanctuary for their morning prayers. Divine Timing. Sarah and I smiled at them, and they smiled at us, as we walked past. I could have sworn the head monk gave me a knowing nod. Everyone prays in their own sweet way.

  We found our way back to the cabin. Before falling back to sleep, we wove yet another tapestry of love. With hearts weaving and hips heaving, the soulfire ignited the heartfire ignited the rootfire time and time again. It was like we were co-creating a new form of meditation, one where our impassioned lovemaking was a portal to everything divine: V-passiona meditation.

  Afterwards we lay startled, awe-struck. We could only say “perfect,” because it truly was. Holding Sarah’s hand was like holding God in the palm of my hand. It was wordless, but it said everything perfectly. Even if we wanted to move, where would we go? We were already everywhere. It was as true a thing as I could ever imagine.

  One person will come to divinity while sitting alone in a temple. Another will find it in the arms of his beloved, lying side by side, hand in hand, in a little cabin in the woods. Grateful and Gracious—in the arms of God.

  IU

  I left the room before Sarah woke up, wandering the grounds with my heart on my sleeve, her spirit held close. I felt like a remarkably different person from the one who had walked alone the day before. The conditioned male warrior who had ruled my consciousness was nowhere to be found, melted into oneness by love’s transformative medicine. The change was manifest throughout my body. There was a liquidity to my movements, a beautifully bearable lightness of being. Oh my, armor weighs so much more than magic.

  What a journey this had been already. Within seconds of our first sighting, I had entered a startlingly new landscape, a karmic boot camp of such fervor and ferocity that I could not help but be transformed. By the time we spent our first full day together, I had already changed forms countless times over, shaped and re-shaped in love’s cosmic kiln. And now, in the heart of our first complete lovemaking, I was catapulted to yet another dimension, one where unseen universes rose into view, revealing their sacred fruits. It was as if we had entered a great temple together, with our intimacy as the master key. Now I knew how to answer when asked what my favorite sexual position is: LOVE is my favorite sexual position.

  Most startling was the quietude of my mind. Love had put my big brain to sleep and revealed its true purpose as servant to the great master: the love-oxygenated heart. What a realization. The way to calm the monkey mind is to open the human heart. I had spent so much time looking for peace outside of my own heart, but it wasn’t out there. It was within the heart itself, with love as the magic code-breaker. How very simple it actually is—open the gateway to the heart and peace enters.

  As I wandered, I marveled at how genderless I felt, almost as though I had entered a gender-inclusive or trans-gender dimension. Together, our energies had bridged us into something higher, more whole, holier. Although it was sexual union that took us there, the chemistry wasn’t gender sourced, nor was the state we entered gender identified. What got us there was the merging of our twin souls along the heart-genital highway. They wanted only one thing: to merge with their other half.

  It struck me that those who condemn another’s sexual orientation merely reveal the absence of depthfulness in their own sexual lives. Because when you have had the highest form of sexual experience—one that is soul-sourced and heart-driven—you immediately recognize that gender is entirely irrelevant. The soul doesn’t care about body parts. It simply loves who it loves.

  Through the eyes of essence, I saw gender for what it is: a way station on the karmic quest for wholeness. Perhaps this is what it means to be trans-gender, in the ultimate sense? You identify with gender until you are ready to transcend it. When you enter great love’s door, you enter an entirely different dimension. The ultimate form is polyphrenic, an inclusive embracing of all archetypes and energies. The perfectly blended juice of divinity. Drink from love and see as God sees.

  I floated back to the cabin to find Sarah. Opening the door, I saw her lying there, eyes wide open. Her hair was lovemaking messy, her juicy left breast deliciously exposed. I entered and lay down beside her, hungry to merge. But as I reached my hand over to hold hers, she pulled it back sharply and turned her head away.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “Did something happen?”

  Silence.

  “Sarah…”

  She softly replied, “Scared, Lowen.”

  “What of?”

  Turning to face me, she said, “Too many doors feel open. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel like myself. How can we live this open in this world?”

  “With our hands together.” I reached to hold her hand again. It was freezing cold.

  “I don’t trust you,” she said, turning away again.

  “Why?” I patiently replied.

  “Because you have been with so many women.”

  “You have been with more men.”

  “It’s different.”

  “How so?”

  “I loved all those men. You didn’t love all those women.”

  Now I was pissed off. As if!

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel safer. You loved over 30 men by the time you were 26!” I shot back.

  She leapt out from under the blanket and stormed out of the room rapid-fire, but not before expressing a clearly articulated “Fuck-you!”

  Woah, that was fast, bipolar, startling. After such intimate merging, how could this happen? Holy shit! Must be the way a duck feels when it is shot from the sky. I lay there, sweating in the noonday heat, burning with confusion. My heart felt pierced, overcome with blindness after a morning of deep seeing. Is this the nature of great spiritual openings? They are followed by harsh closings? You soar together on the wings of a love, only to plummet to earth in shards moments later? Is that the deal—ecstatic sky, or thorny earth? Where’s the dependable middle ground?

  I remembered Sarah’s own words, “The brighter the love, the darker the shadow.” Is this why great love never lasts? It brings our unhealed wounds so blisteringly to the surface that we can no longer see one another clearly? I had managed to keep my abandonment wound in check for months, but now hers had erupted to the surface to awaken mine. Perhaps a love that stirs—but doesn’t shake—is all we humans can sustain at this stage of our evolution? How to swim this deep without getting caught in our own nets?

 
I left the cabin to look for her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. Since searching for her was only exacerbating my abandonment triggers, I went down to the beach to do some yoga.

  While I stretched and opened, I felt the wound arise with ferocity. As always, a combination of terror and nausea overcame me, but this was even more intense. I felt a burn unlike any other I had known, the fear of being abandoned by the beloved herself. The ultimate exile. I lay down in child’s pose in search of comfort.

  As the sun was going down, I walked back to the cabin to look for her. Empty. After a few minutes trying to get comfortable, I heard the key turn. I felt afraid: Please no more fighting. Please no war. Sarah entered, eyes softened by tears, yet none the worse for wear. I opened my mouth to speak, but she touched her finger to my lips, “Ssssshh, my love. Not now. It’s okay.” Clearly, she had worked something through. She reached over and ran her hands through my hair, melting me into submission.

  She stopped to undress, slowly, while gazing into my eyes. Fully naked, she climbed atop me, straddling my chin with her hips. The river was already flowing, drip-dropping its delicious love juice onto my waiting lips. I again became the river mouth, hungrily receiving her offering in the harbors of my heart. There really is no taste like the taste of the beloved.

  Then she reached for my penis and I retracted. Our conflict was still with me—I couldn’t surrender to her touch that fast. Some of us can’t give when we feel emotionally unsafe. Others can’t receive. I couldn’t receive. She looked me in the eyes, but I couldn’t hold the heart gate open.

  I closed my eyes and went back to my default warrior position, imagining her an object to fuck. I began to talk dirty in an effort to get excited, but she refused to join me. She moved to the other side of the bed, leaving me alone with my heartless hard-on. When I eventually reached for her, she made a hissing cat sound. Message easy to decipher: stay over there!

  What a dichotomy this love was. Love so powerful that it could reveal another universe. Love so fragile that it could turn to stone in a heartbeat.