After a pause, Sunglasses resumed: “Okay. Sarah and Mark, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to do something for us. Sarah, will you get up on top of Mark?”
WTF? I had come to this desert. I had sweated. I had slept in a tent on the extremely lumpy desert floor. I had observed the brass-knuckles coaching action for a couple days. And now he wanted me to lie on top of my husband in front of everyone?
Just as I was thinking this, Mark indicated with a shrug and nod that it was totally fine with him. As I picked myself up off the tarp and positioned myself above him, I continued silently reminding myself that I was here for Mark. Then I gently lowered myself onto him, not sure what was coming next. Suddenly, I was laughing inside. Was I “on top”—too dominant—in our relationship? Was this the metaphor?
We smiled silently at each other as I turned my head and rested it on his chest. Body to body, I could feel Mark's familiar heartbeat. It was high noon, and I was lying atop my husband on a tarp in the desert near the Mexican border while a group of people I barely knew stared down at us.
“How's that, Mark?” Sunglasses interrupted the silence. “Can you breathe now?”
Mark smiled and chuckled softly. “Yes, this actually feels good.”
At this point, I was just glad that I hadn't been identified as the immediate cause of Mark's suffocation. Then, more silence. As we continued to lie together—quietly breathing, connected—I thought: This is vulnerability. This is being willing to do whatever it takes, to be laid bare and allow our relationship of twenty-one years to be examined. This surrender to each other, to the group, to the Universe is simply a way of saying we are willing. Whatever happens after this doesn't really matter.
Then, to my relief, I was asked to roll off Mark. After input from the group, the session wrapped up with an assignment from Sunglasses, who told Mark to initiate pillow fights with me—metaphorically and literally—to elicit more fun between us. My job was simply to go along with the fun. Simple enough, right? It seemed Sunglasses had uncovered a pattern—Mark was too serious around me.
Afterward, Mark and I did have some awkward pillow fights, with lots of laughs. Though our desert stay was a strange and nonlogical experience, it most definitely brought us closer together. Mark continued to use his sleep apnea machine at night, but the air between us seemed easier to breathe—for both of us.
Maybe even more important, I learned that Mark truly and deeply longed to shift his own patterns, just as badly as I wanted to shift mine. And he was willing to go into the desert and endure guys in sunglasses with brass knuckles in order to do it. He wanted to awaken and blossom like a lotus, just as I did, and he was willing to be vulnerable in front of a crowd (even if not always at home). This surprised me and cracked me open. I was now aware of a part of him that he hadn't often revealed to me. And I loved him more.
Postdesert, I invited Mark to take a journey with me and asked if I could journey to request a healing for him. He'd been noticing a lack of joy in his heart and a feeling of being “less than.” He agreed.
We lay down next to each other on the bedroom floor with my phone playing the drumbeat. I briefly explained the simple procedure to go to the Lower World. Mark went in search of an animal totem for himself, and I went to request a healing for him. As I arrived in the Lower World, a single friendly dolphin showed up. I explained that Mark wasn't feeling “good enough” and didn't feel joy in his heart. I was brought to a whole pod of dolphins in shallower water, where we joined in a circle. The dolphins began to swim faster and faster, stirring up cloudy sediment from the deep—Mark's hurt and pain. Then they began to emit green smoke from their hearts, which drifted and turned the murky water crystal clear.
I thanked them and hugged each dolphin. Then they gave me a ride back to the beach, where Mother Bear met me. I fell into a hug, so happy that I had tears in my eyes. Mark and I both returned to the bedroom floor from our journeys and quietly wrote down a few notes. I could feel a sweetness and peace settling over both of us.
I thanked Mark for letting me journey for him and told him what a really beautiful thing it had been. Then I told him about the dolphins.
Mark smiled gently, almost shyly. “Mine was confusing,” he said. “I saw a lot of different images of different animals shapeshifting, but it was amazing and really peaceful.”
Our eyes were softer, our hearts bigger, our connection deeper as we shared our experiences. I felt so much more connected to Mark, and I knew this work was helping me. Helping us.
CHAPTER 22
Emergency Sabbatical
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Mark is walking through an apocalyptic landscape; I follow about ten paces behind him. He suddenly encounters a raging river. As he nears the river's edge, I begin to cringe and start to shout: “No!” The edge of the river is unstable. The ground beneath his feet crumbles and he plunges into the rapids and disappears. Without thinking, I dive in after him. Only then, when it's too late, do I see my folly. I shouldn't have impulsively leaped in after him.
I wake up. It was just a dream.
Days later, Mark came home from work and declared: “I think I need an emergency sabbatical.” He wanted to go on a forty-two-day intensive vision quest in Montana that was being run by a friend, but he wasn't sure it was possible.
“How good are you willing to let it get?” I asked, posing the life-coachy question that I used to help me when faced with similar options.
Mark was worried. “I don't know what they'll say at work.”
The proposed adventure was only six weeks away, which meant that there wasn't much time to shuffle his patients around so that other doctors could care for them while he was away. Mark looked frustrated and torn. “It can't hurt to ask,” I offered.
A few days later, Mark got a thumbs up from work. Before he left for Montana, we went on a weekend get-away we had previously planned—a romantic trip to the north shore of Lake Superior. When we arrived at the resort, we decided that kayaking on the lake would be fun. We hired a guide, sharing him with a well-coiffed and warm forty-something Chicago couple who were also staying at the resort.
We headed down to the rocky beach with lightweight kayaks and their skirts on a sunny, late-July day. We threw on life jackets, got a quick lesson from the energetic guide on how to paddle, and launched. We had all kayaked before and, although the lake's surface wasn't entirely flat, the waves were small and soft. As we moved out onto the lake, there was something about the scale of this body of water that I found mildly terrifying. It was more ocean than lake. I was finding it hard to keep up.
We went north first to see the mouth of a river with its picturesque low cliffs, then made our way south, aiming for the sea caves. The shoreline changed from low sand beaches to three-story-high walls of red stone that dropped precipitously into the water. There was nowhere to go ashore anymore. Then the wind picked up a bit and there was some mild chop, but the day remained sunny. We began to see small caves and stone cliffs arching over the water that we could paddle beneath. It was stunning but also eerie.
Finally, we arrived near an opening in the rocky cliff, all bobbing in our kayaks. Our guide wanted to show us something. He demonstrated how to maneuver the slim kayak into the narrow little cave and get a look inside, then how to back out by pushing with the paddle.
I went first, paddling slowly into the little inlet of the cave. Inside, it was dark and filled with jagged rocks. It felt a little claustrophobic and smelled damp and funky. I backed out and paddled out of the way for Mark, who went in next. He paddled in okay, but when he tried to back out, his kayak seemed to get stuck on the rocky bottom. The next thing I knew, he had capsized and was trying to wrangle his six-foot-four self out of the kayak. Suddenly, this fun, playful exploration became deadly serious.
Instantly, I remembered my recent dream and my impulsive desire to save Mark, to leap into the wate
r after him. Shamans teach that night dreams can be incredibly important and, at times, can serve to alert us so we can avoid an undesireable outcome in “ordinary” reality.
I felt all of us panic. The water was viciously cold—cold enough to render you unconscious in fifteen to thirty minutes. And with the hundred-foot soaring walls of stone, there was no way to swim to land. The kayaks were skimpy—there was no way to take on a passenger—and Mark's was swamped with water. Our guide quickly became all business. “Mark, center yourself,” he quietly commanded. “You're going to need to get back in the kayak.”
I caught a glimpse of Mark's face as he attempted to orient himself. He looked as if he had seen a horrible ghost, as if he'd aged fifteen years in ten seconds. Did he hit his head on the rocks as well? I tried to stay calm, so I wouldn't add to his anxiety. Thank God the guide was steady.
Mark quickly scrambled to stabilize the kayak while the guide helped from his own. Mark finally slipped back into the kayak, but it was still half-submerged and unable to float. Mark was soaked, freezing, and pale as the moon. What the hell had we been thinking coming out here? Mark could die. How far were we from a place where we could go ashore? A mile? Three?
The guide reached into his kayak and pulled out a packable down jacket that he handed over to Mark and told him to put on. Then he pulled out a pump and began furiously working it from his lap so that small geysers shot out of Mark's kayak. The rest of us watched silently. Then the guide made an irreverent reference to masturbation, and we all started laughing. Oh my God, it was a relief to laugh. I was so scared.
Mark's color started to come back and, with his kayak emptied, he was afloat once again. We pointed our kayaks back out into open water and began to paddle carefully and solemnly back along the shore beneath the red rock cliffs. I thought of my friend's brother, an experienced kayaker, who had gone out one beautiful afternoon for a paddle on this north shore just a few years before and never returned. This lake was as remorseless as it was mesmerizing. We finally hit the stony shore and hauled our kayaks out one by one. I had never been so happy to be off the water.
Riding back in the van, I felt a weird desire to hug and kiss our guide. If he hadn't been so prepared, Mark might not have survived. This seemed to have been another kind of initiation—for both Mark and me. I was also reminded of how precious Mark was to me, and was made newly aware of his absolute vulnerability.
The time finally arrived for Mark to head for his emergency sabbatical on a mountainside in Montana. Like me, he was searching—wanting to realize his full potential and return to wholeness. I was excited for him.
Mark left fully stocked with headlamps and long woolen underwear. At the last minute, he even contemplated rolling up the fluffy, Greek lambs-wool rug from under our living room furniture to put in the back of his truck in case he needed it for warmth. Mark, like me, seemed to be struggling to let it all go.
Mark's vision quest included kundalini yoga, the yoga of awareness that focuses on awakening a potential primal energy lying coiled like a serpent at the base of the spine. It involved meditation, special breathing techniques, poses, and hours and hours spent in complete darkness and isolation in a yurt he'd make from twigs and black plastic.
While he was away, we weren't in contact much because his cell phone didn't work unless he climbed up pretty high on the mountain. At one point, however, about three weeks into the trip, he called. I could tell from his voice that things were not going well. When I asked how he was doing, he answered that he missed us and sometimes wished he were home.
Mark sounded really down—as if he was actually contemplating coming home early. Instead of feeling supportive, however, I felt annoyed. I was completely overwhelmed with trying to deal with all the start-of-school anxieties, the new-student orientations and parent-teacher meetings. In a way, I would have absolutely loved it if he cut his vision quest short. But that was my selfish self. I ordered it to quiet down and I offered encouragement: “It won't be long and you'll be back home driving kids to soccer and hauling the garbage can to the curb. So take advantage of the time.” I was in a dark metaphorical yurt of my own, and I wasn't feeling up to soothing souls.
Just before Mark left, I had asked him what he thought of getting a second dog. The last time he'd gone out of town for an extended period, I'd brought home the world's most irrepressible dog. I recall driving over the hill on the way to the shelter with the kids and wondering if I were doing the right thing. Then, at that very moment, a huge eagle soared over the hood of our car and the kids, knowing how attuned I was to the messages of animals, shouted and pointed it out. It felt like a sign—one that seemed to be confirmed when we arrived at the shelter and spotted a lithe and glossy black-brown dog with white socks and chest and a big smile. She reminded me of a hyperattentive border collie crossed with an overexcitable Irish setter.
“Spirit,” as the shelter had named her in another burst of synchronicty, was a feisty, fun dog. As I began walking her off the leash in the woods, I found myself continually calling: “Come, Spirit, come!” to get her to return to me. One day, I just laughed out loud at the irony of it all. I think my helping spirits were having a pretty good time with me.
With Buttercup no longer around, however, Spirit had become anxious. I wondered if she would be calmer if she had another dog companion. When I asked Mark what he thought, he seemed resigned and told me to do what I thought best. He didn't say no, I told myself, and chose to interpret this as “Go ahead.” So the kids and I piled into the car and drove to the animal shelter. I reminded them that we were only bringing home a new dog if it was the right dog for us.
When we arrived, we were introduced to Maximus, a highly anxious long-haired chihuahua who warmed up to us once we met in a private room. Maximus was highly sensitive. We were told he might not take kindly to males. I ignored this and pushed through. He was soft and snuggly. We brought him home.
Maximus slept under the covers in the crook behind my knee and liked to sit on top of my desk, watching me adoringly as I worked. The kids loved him, too, but George got a little scared when the dog bared its teeth as he gently approached. This all happened, of course, the week before I was to travel to West Virginia to teach medical students at Patch Adams's Gesundheit Institute.
Our fearless Mary Poppins-like sitter, Meghan, arrived to run the ship while I was gone and Mark was still off the grid in a yurt in Montana. She was eminently capable and continued smiling even when I explained that, the week before, I had added another dog to the family. If she was disappointed in my judgment, she didn't show it—which is why she was my favorite sitter. I left town feeling relaxed.
One night, there was a knock on my door in West Virginia. “Sarah, one of your kids is on the phone.” I rushed to take the call, worried that something awful had happened. There was no cell service there, so a call on the house phone wasn't likely to be good news. It was Katherine; she sounded panicked. “Mom, it's Maximus; he's gone crazy! He only really likes you.” It seemed that Maximus had staked himself out on a corner of our front stoop this wintry night and refused to budge. All approaches were met with ferocious growling, and Meghan had already been bitten once, albeit without major damage.
Meghan got on the line and voiced her concern that the dog would freeze if left outside overnight. I sat on the stairs in the Gesundheit hallway flooded with shame at having brought home this anxious, needy dog then leaving the next week. The kids were upset and even scared of Maximus, not sure that they wanted him back in the house. Suddenly, I remembered my friend Marta, a fierce dog advocate. I arranged for her to handle the situation. But I couldn't seem to stop beating myself up. It really devastated me to think that our love hadn't been enough to bring Maximus peace, and I worried that he'd never find a permanent home. To make matters worse, Meghan told me that, when they couldn't get through to me right away, they'd also tried Mark's cell phone in Montana, so he already knew about the dog debacle and was on his way home. Grab a fork; I was a
bout to be served humble pie.
Mark got back just in time to pick me up at the airport after my return flight from West Virgina. I was so excited to see him again, sure that all that yoga, fresh air, and down time would have him feeling fantastic. When he got out of the car to grab my luggage, however, I barely recognized him. He had a full beard and had lost thirty, maybe even forty, pounds. He had always been slim, but now he looked gaunt and hollow—not adorable Gandhi skinny but deathly skinny, as if he were being consumed by an alien parasite. We hugged and kissed briefly. He smelled musty and decaying, as if he not only looked half-dead but actually was half-dead.
I was scared and infuriated. How could Mark come back in this state? What the hell were they doing out there? Starving themselves to death? This was supposed to be his break, his chance to restore, to become more vital and healthy. Instead, he'd returned weakened and sickly. What was the point?
We drove solemnly down the freeway toward home. Even Mark's car smelled a little like death. I tried to conceal my aversion. We talked about practical, safe things like the kids and his drive back from Montana. He seemed down, almost depressed. I wasn't even sure how to begin to talk with him about it. I wasn't sure what he could handle right now. He didn't seem to have any awareness of how unwell he appeared, and he was so subdued that I felt as if I needed go easy.
We stopped for dinner at a Chinese restaurant off the freeway and I finally asked him if he had found what he was looking for out there in Montana. I searched his face for answers. He paused and then said, with a bit of hesitation: “Yeah I did have a moment where it seemed as if something did happen when I was sitting in the darkness.” I didn't push for details. Mark had always been a deeply private person, and I wanted to respect that.
Over the next weeks, I baked a lot of oatmeal cookies and cooked lots of family dinners. To my relief, Mark ate and returned to his normal physical condition pretty quickly. A new calmness and peacefulness seemed to arise in him. His smile returned. So did his sense of humor. He confessed that he'd secretly snuck maple syrup in to put on his bland quinoa porridge ration from the lean-to kitchen when he was half-starving from self-imposed dietary restrictions. A few months later, I could see that he was happier now than he had been before—more content.
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