An Uncommon Bond

by jeff brown

  Clearly the homeless Dude was right. We didn’t fight because we didn’t love one another. Quite the opposite, in fact. We fought because the purity of the connection was excavating love’s shadows. We were in the heart of essence, and every painful association with vulnerability rose into view. Here, in the heart of the everything, everything was being revealed.

  We spent the entire weekend alternating between lovemaking and jealousy triggers. And sometimes both at the same time. A wave of lust intermingled with anger as we made love with a ferocity I have never known. After each merging, I had to lie down for a few hours to recover. It was a beautiful release, but the underlying tensions were growing in intensity.

  A few days before Sarah was supposed to leave, she caught me off guard. I walked into the sunroom, where she was leaving food on the window ledge for her favorite black squirrel, one she called ‘Little Friend,’ when she asked to go.

  “I need to go home now, Lowen.”

  “But why?” I inquired. “We have two more days.”

  She just sat there, cold and detached.

  After a long period of silence, she turned my way, although she didn’t quite look into my eyes when she spoke. “I feel ferocious, like a wolf. Our love is turning me into a beast. I don’t know how else to protect myself. I have never been this jealous and triggered in a relationship. I don’t know where any of this stuff is coming from.”

  “Why do you have to protect yourself?” I asked.

  Silence again.

  She turned onto her side on the futon, curling up in fetal position. I could see a tear gathering at the edge of her eye, not quite ready to fall. She was resisting showing her vulnerability. And then, in a soft young voice I had not heard before, she spoke her truth of the moment: “I guess I never had this much to lose.”

  Amazing how we push away what we most want to hold close. Humans.

  Role Reversal

  We fell asleep until Sarah’s cries woke us up. She was sweating profusely and mumbling in tongues. I was afraid to wake her, but I was more afraid not to. I got down on the floor and called out her name. No response. I reached for her and she reached back, clinging to me with all her might. Her eyes opened. She began to sob deeply for some time before falling quiet in my arms.

  “What was the nightmare about, baby?” I asked.

  “A man... a man he came into my room...” she gasped, “And raped me.”

  “Where? At home in Colorado? Here?” I inquired.

  She sat up and looked at me, perplexed.

  “No, it wasn’t now.” She closed her eyes. “It was from another era altogether. But it felt so real, like I had been catapulted back in time. But he was... I mean... it was so strange. The oddest thing was that I didn’t experience it as though it was happening to me. I felt like I was living out someone else’s nightmare. I was in someone else’s body, and I was witnessing her at the same time.”

  She reached for me again, nuzzling her tear-streaked face into my chest.

  “Did you cry for help?” I asked.

  “Yes, I did, or she did, but no sound came out. Voiceless, powerless.”

  We already knew that this love was stirring the ghosts from the past. But which lifetime? And whose past? Can a love be so powerful that it brings up collective pain memories? Can great love uncover others’ ghosts as well? Or had I simply fallen in love with a tortured soul?

  That afternoon, we went out for lunch with my parents. Despite years of conflict, they had managed to find a way to stay together. My theory is that they had worn each other out so much, neither one had the energy to leave. Their theory is that life is shit no matter what you do, so there’s no sense leaving one path for another.

  Excited to finally meet my family, Sarah had arranged the occasion a few days earlier. Yet apart from a few pleasantries, she said nothing at all at the table. My father tried to engage her with stories about his childhood in Montreal, but she didn’t stir. Eventually, the meal turned into a dialogue between my parents about the bugs taking over the rosebush they had planted. On the drive home, more silence. That evening, she didn’t so much as look my way. My heart, it ached. I felt like I had been ripped away from the source-spring. Why was I exiled, again?

  It was as though our roles had been recast overnight. I was now the frustrated woman yearning for contact, and she the armored man. Now it was her turn to decide. Defend against this great love, or surrender to its depths? Goliath or Go-lie-with? Hercules or Heartcules? What choice would her soul make?

  The next morning she woke up at dawn sprinkled with wonder. My heart filled with optimism. Whatever she needed to work through had cleared. The house was again alive with whimsy, filled with energy, as she danced around the living room to kirtan and hip-hop, playfully sexy in one of my baby blue button-down shirts. Something about that hot little ass popping out from below my suit shirt got my sexual juices flowing, something fierce. She made me a delicious breakfast—steel cut oatmeal and a blueberry papaya fruit salad—while I snapped pictures of her with my cell phone. What a beauty!

  We had planned a picnic on Toronto Island, but I prayed for rain so I could stay inside and ravenously devour her before her night flight. As we walked into the bedroom to get dressed, the storm began. God is good! Into the bed we went. Time to get wet.

  I spent hours savoring every part of Sarah’s body. It was all I could do to avoid her yoni, but I didn’t want to discriminate. I wanted to know every room in the temple equally. I moved my hands and lips over every contour and curve, absorbed and tasted every texture, learning her like a beautiful new foreign language. Past, present and future all merged into a single tense as I discovered a grammar my heart could finally understand. At one point, I spent half an hour just kissing her armpit. Not just any armpit, but God’s ticklish hiding place. And then the small pink birthmark on the back of her neck. When you love someone fully, you are always kissing the divine.

  As I worshiped, I had visions of us flood through me: canoeing together down a marshy river, sitting side by side in an old-time prairie schoolhouse, lying beside each other on a desolate beach. I didn’t know where these visions were coming from, but it seemed impossible to imagine a lifetime without this woman in it. And one persistent future vision: Sarah with a baby born of this love, fast asleep in her arms.

  Later in the day, my tongue led the way down her body, lingering at her nipples, sliding over her soft belly, circling her belly button, and finally plunging into her moist and ready love-cave, taking this tour of the yoniverse to a whole new level. As the rain splashed against the bedroom window, I too got wet, soaked to the bone by sweet yoni rain. What an immature man calls a hot pussy, an awakening man calls God in liquid drag. The more I ingested, the more I awakened to source. God is a dish best served juicy.

  When we finally stopped, we realized Sarah had almost missed her flight. We packed and dressed hastily, while I inwardly prayed for a traffic jam. With the salty smell of sex all over us, we raced to the airport, arriving just in time. She kissed me quickly and darted out of the car.

  When I returned home, I found this little bit of farewell prose chalked on the bathroom wall by my complicated beloved:

  We break

  we break and mend

  we flow

  against the surf

  we fold

  we bend and twist

  we splay

  we break again-

  and again, we mend.

  Just as long as we mend, I can bear most anything.

  8

  Fly Away Home

  I got undressed and sat down in the tub, letting the water fall on my head as I contemplated the week that had passed.

  Who was this man, now?

  Not anyone I had known before.

  This love was working me hard, kneading me, transforming my consciousness with a kind of merciless persistence. There is no question—love is a sculptor that molds you from the inside out. With your heart as its clay, it reaches deep inside you a
nd reshapes your inner world. One form, then another, then another, until the earthen form you once identified as “self” has grown resplendent wings of light. Even my body felt different every day—softer, more pliable, more truly naked, more seen. Our undress rehearsals were revealing more and more.

  The Museum-mobile

  I spent the next few days overcome by a deep desire to marry Sarah. On one level, I recognized that it made no sense. We had only known one another for a few months, and we were becoming increasingly combative. Yet, on a level beneath that, it made all the sense in the world. Though we had only known each other for a few months, we had known each other forever. After too many lifetimes apart, I wanted to carve our union in stone. This was no love affair. This was a life affair—one lifetime after another, after another.

  Validating my certainty were a myriad of soulendipitous moments. A brown female cardinal seemed to have become permanently affixed to my backyard apple tree, as if waiting for her mate. Feathers landed at my feet on city streets. A neighborhood child kept chalking the word “L O V E” on the sidewalk in front of my house. Nowhere else, only my house. And not just any child, but a young girl that looked remarkably similar to Sarah as a youngster. The universe was busy with us.

  I flew to Colorado two weekends later to be with her. We considered going camping in the Flatirons but decided to make it real by bringing me into the house she shared with her parents. She had been folded into my daily life—now it was time for me to join hers.

  Even before I landed in Denver, I could feel her near. When I entered the baggage area, Sarah raced to me with tears in her eyes. She was wearing the same skirt she had worn for one of our first meetings—but now I knew what treasures lay below it. I lifted her high in the sky, as she playfully spread her arms like wings in flight, smiling eyes abright. What an eyesoar! After she landed, we stared into each other’s eyes until there was only one suitcase left on the baggage carousel—mine. As we left the airport, all I could think about was the treasure hunt I wanted to go on when we got back to her house.

  For the first time in my life, I felt absolutely sure why I was here. I was here to love and marry this woman. And when the time was right, our love would spill over into the creation of new life. Little souls would be born. It just had to be.

  We drove to her mountain home in her dirty, fascinating car. Her car was a kind of museum of her life, replete with artifacts from her childhood, keepsakes from her nature digs and walks, along with a wardrobe of clothes for quick changes. I called it the museum-mobile. A tiny childhood doll hung from the rear-view mirror, with the letters LF written on it. “LF?” I asked.

  “Lightnin’ Foot—Dad’s nickname for me. Because I would vanish so quickly.” The car smelled like cedar, no doubt from the strips of cedar bark strewn all over the front dash with poems written on them. She was a true eco-poet, driving a filthy VW Beetle into eternity.

  From the moment we arrived at her family home, I knew that I was actualizing a soul-scripture written before I was born. Absolutely everything was familiar. The old gray country house, those two retrievers, that long winding, snake-like drive up the dirt road—they were all part of the karmic blueprint. As if I needed any more evidence that love is an encoded path, I had seen this coming from a lifetime away.

  As we stepped foot on the big ole porch, out stepped Jessie—Sarah’s mother—a tall, heavy-set woman with a wonderfully kind smile. Her face told me two things in an instant—that she had known tremendous suffering, and that she had chosen to keep smiling anyway. She was like a warm billowing cloud of kindness. She hugged me like she had known me forever, kissing my cheeks and thanking me profusely for coming all the way from Canada. Then she sat me down on an oak rocking chair on the porch and told me to not move until she returned. A few moments later, she came out the front door with a plate of cinnamon bread big enough to feed a small troop of boy scouts. A mama after my own heart. I tuned out the rest of the world and ate to my belly’s content.

  After being licked profusely by both dogs, Smoky and Bear, an old black pickup rolled up the driveway, sputtering to a stop right before the porch. Out came a bald, edgy man, wearing worn-out overalls, with a bright white goatee and combat scars all over his neck and arms. One of his hands was missing two fingers. This guy had been to hell and back. I instantly knew who he was: Sarah’s father norman, a decorated WWII combat veteran. He was about twenty years older than Jessie, a seventy-five-year-old man with the vitality of a youngster.

  As soon as his feet touched the ground, he jumped up on the porch heading my way. I chuckled to myself as I imagined him coming through the incarnation portal with his guns blazing. Not sure the gate-keepers would have had the courage to take them from him on the pass through. When he reached me, he picked me up from my chair like a twig and gave me the biggest bear hug I ever did see. It was both welcoming and terrifying at the same time.

  “The man who conquered Lightnin’ Foot... that ain’t no easy feat. Glad to finally meet you, Lowen,” he said with pointed intensity and a big smile on his face.

  “Good to meet you too, sir,” I politely replied.

  “Don’t sir me, kid. Just call me norman. We’re family now. Ma, when’s supper? I worked up a serious appetite fixin’ Pete Shepherd’s barn door.”

  I’m always more comfortable with people who call it supper.

  Sarah called out from inside the house, “It’s now, Dad. Outside, or in?”

  “IN!” he shouted back, grabbing my arm and pulling me inside the house.

  Before we ate, Sarah took me on a quick tour. We began with the upstairs, which could only be reached by walking through the kitchen. On the way up the stairs, I paused to look at a series of old family photos. Like me, Sarah was an only child. She was adopted by Jessie and norman when she was six days old, because they were unable to have children. Most of the pictures were of her growing up, and almost always, there was an animal with her. Dogs, cats, horses and—in one unforgettable picture—a small brown bear.

  “A bear?”

  “Dad liked to bear-wrestle.”

  “I bet he did,” I replied with a chuckle.

  At the top of the stairs, we stepped right into Sarah’s bedroom. Above the bed was the same Albert Bierstadt picture that I had on my bedroom wall, along with a series of beautiful photos Sarah had taken on her nature walks. Beside the bed, there was only a small armoire and a rocker near the window. It was like a simple Amish room.

  “Is this where we’re sleeping?” I asked.

  “This is where I’m sleeping. You’re sleeping in the living room. Ma and Pa are old-fashioned,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. I could tell she had great respect for her parents’ values, even if she didn’t share them.

  I sat down to one of the finest home-cooked meals I have ever eaten: pork chili, elk burgers, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and something dangerously fantastic called buttermilk pie for dessert. I probably gained fifteen pounds, and it was entirely worth it.

  While eating, I listened to effusive stories about Sarah’s childhood from both parents—her brilliant academic achievements, her tendency to sneakily return the fish to the lake on family boating trips, the pig she saved from a neighbor’s barn fire when she was only six years old. Every story they told, they gushed with pride. She was clearly the apple of their eyes. At the same time, something else hung in the air. I couldn’t quite identify it, but there was a Pandora’s box in this family, one their intense positivity couldn’t quite disguise. This little house had seen plenty of pain. I could almost hear its silent screams.

  After dinner I went for a walk with norman down the mountain road. He seemed determined to let me in on a few of the family’s secrets. After minimal small talk, he cut to the chase. “I called her Lightnin’ Foot because she was feisty and fast as a little one. At any sign of trouble, she would sprint away, faster than lightnin’. You met her feisty side yet, Lowen?”

  “Yes, a little,” I laughed, nervously.
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br />   “Well, you gonna meet more of it. She love you a lot. That means it’s gonna be a war.”

  Oh God, not this advice again.

  “The key is staying on the battlefield till she knows she can trust you, however long that takes,” he said with warrior conviction.

  I felt like I should salute. “Does it have to be a battleground, sir?”

  “Stop with the sir, boy, and yes, it do. Real love is ferocious.”

  “It can’t be kind and gentle?”

  “Sure it can, but only some of the time. We Hardings are spitfires. We don’t go down without a fight.”

  How fascinating was this as a matter of karma. I had fallen in love with the daughter of a warrior. Try as I might to shed my own, a warrior consciousness was never too far from my path.

  The Tree Fort

  That night, Sarah and I went for a drive in the country. On the way back, she pulled over the museum-mobile and kissed me. She smiled softly and said, “IU, Ogdo, IU,” with her heart shining through her face. Then she opened the car door and got out, calling to me, “Come on, I have something to show you.”

  I got out of the car and followed her as she entered the pathless forest. God forbid she should use a trailhead!

  After a few minutes, she stopped in front of a tall limber pine tree that was partially pushed up against a cliff edge. It had a stout trunk that must have been twelve to fifteen feet in circumference. Taking my hand, she brought me around to the back of the tree. I could make out a tiny opening at the base of the trunk, just large enough for a small person to fit into.

  “This is where I would live when they were fighting,” she said softly.

  “Live? You would live in here?” I asked, flabbergasted.

  “Yep, I would bring my blankets, pillow and food, and hide here until it was safe. Sometimes I would stay out here near a week.”

  I felt heartbroken imagining her out here, cold and alone, as a little one.

  “How bad was the fighting?”

  “Bad enough that they didn’t always notice I was missing. And bad enough that the police had a special jail cell with Dad’s name on it. Dad has a soft heart, but he has PTSD from his time in the war. Nobody understood that back then. They would let him out in the day to weld, and then Ma would have to drive him back to his cell at night.”