The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost

by Robin Rinaldi

  All of it transported me to a fertile ground that my soul recognized. A long-lost, familiar voice said this overgrown landscape was where I belonged. I had no good reason to trust such a voice, to throw out twenty years’ worth of hard work and love in order to fall away into a wilderness of hunger and occasional fury. And so I didn’t trust it. I struggled.

  * * *

  Three important things happened during the following two months. The first occurred the night I sneaked off to Alden’s after ducking into a work event for a half hour. I sped over the Golden Gate Bridge. He waited for me at his door as usual, ready to devour me without preamble. He led me into the living room and put Led Zeppelin on the turntable. I pushed him into a chair and began dancing for him. When it was over—him slumped in the chair, me collapsed in his lap, the turntable needle hiccupping on the album’s inner edge—we took long breaths to recover. He lifted his head and looked down at me.

  “Where did you come from?” he said.

  I knew what he meant. Once in bed I had asked, “Who are you? What do you want from me?” Now I opened my mouth to say something poignant.

  “Please don’t say Scranton,” he interrupted.

  I have no idea if that’s actually funny, but I started laughing, and then he started laughing, and we laughed so long and deep—rolling on the floor, stomachs cramped, tears and snot flying for what seemed like five or ten minutes straight—that afterward I felt reborn. It dwarfed all other memories of laughter.

  The second thing: Saturday morning at Alden’s house. Scott was out of town. We drank coffee from a French press at his dining room table while he shuffled a deck of tarot cards. Alden and I were cut from the same cloth, part old-school, part new-age. He’d learned how to read tarot and meditate but he didn’t attend drum circles or believe in The Secret. He read Dostoyevsky and ate red meat and listened to jazz.

  I shuffled and cut the deck, and he laid the cards out in a Celtic cross. It began with the High Priestess, symbol of the divine feminine, progressed through the King of Swords (intellect and judgment), the Magician laid upside down (manipulation, confusion), and the Ace of Wands (new beginnings, breakthrough). In the middle of the spread, Alden turned over the Two of Swords, a blindfolded woman in a white gown sitting on the shore of a lake holding up two crossed sabers. The image represented the process of making a decision based on intuition instead of external stimuli. The final spot in the spread, the conclusion card, was the Sun: radiance, joy, victory.

  I didn’t retain much of what Alden said as he laid the cards down. I was lost in the medieval renderings and muted colors of the deck. It was the first time I’d seen tarot cards up close. I took a picture of the ten-card spread and later spent hours looking up the detailed meaning and position of each card. Even so, I couldn’t explain its narrative. Rather, I felt the gist of it pulsing below the surface of my life: the feminine, the intellect, confusion, intuition, breakthrough, victory. At the office the following week, I opened a package addressed to me. Inside was an advance copy of a new novel along with a press packet. Tucked into its pages, the publisher had included a tarot card as a bookmark: the Sun.

  There are seventy-eight cards in the Rider-Waite tarot deck, and the Sun is certainly one of the more well-known. It was like getting an ace of spades in the mail as a bookmark days after winning your first poker game with the same ace. It might have been nothing more than coincidence, but when I saw it, I gasped.

  The third thing happened one night after Scott and I had some friends over to dinner. They were heading to Cafe du Nord, a club virtually across the street from our house, to see a local band. Scott was tired and told me to go along, seemingly at ease with the new distance I’d inserted between us. For the past several weeks he’d spent his time making wine and building a website for his buddy’s fiftieth birthday. About once a week he’d tell me to plan a vacation and I’d say okay, then put it off.

  At the club, I checked email on my phone. Alden had written a long love letter completely out of place in the electronic realm. It said, I suppose, all the usual things a man says to his married lover on nights he can’t see her, but no one had ever said them to me. My eyes settled on one sentence in particular.

  We are at the beginning of something profound.

  Maybe it was my age, or the life-changing decision I faced, but I often found myself thinking forward to the grave. So much of life was repetition that immediately faded into background. So few words and experiences would matter at the end. Against this tide of mundanity, of half starts and crossed purposes, I’d been grasping for an anchor for so long.

  I went into the bathroom of Cafe du Nord and sat in the small stall, the bass thumping, muted, through the walls. I read the letter over, held the phone to my chest, and closed my eyes, resting in one small moment of eternity. They didn’t come often; this might even be my last.

  With my hands crossed over my chest this way, I touched the other small pillar of timelessness within my grasp, my wedding ring, worrying it back and forth around my finger. I didn’t yet know whether I could bring myself to leave Scott for Alden, but I was sure of one thing. I needed this letter inscribed onto parchment and sealed with wax. I needed to be buried or burned with it.

  31

  The Master of Polarity

  A LARGE DENIM SHIRT hung on Deida’s tall, thin frame as he paced the stage of a conference room in a Miami beachfront hotel. He looked about fifty, balding with a trim beard and mustache, like any regular guy. He wore loose jeans and practical walking shoes.

  “This isn’t therapy,” he said. “Therapy is about creating safety, making boundaries, healing wounds. There’s nothing wrong with that, but this is more like yoga. Or art. You can be broken and still practice beautiful yoga. You can be broken and still make great art. This is about opening your body to let more love and light shine through.”

  As he spoke, his hands moved gracefully—rolling an imaginary ball in front of his chest, extending outward like wings—and he roamed the stage on bent knees like a dancer. Every so often he’d stop, face us head on with feet planted and arms relaxed at his sides, and slowly scan the crowd. During these pauses I could see him breathing evenly and feel his mind working.

  “Therapy and boundary-making are the work of the second stage,” he said. “That’s when you learn to take care of yourself, balance your own internal masculine and feminine. The third stage is about letting go of that balance, surrendering your boundaries, dancing with your partner in a way that opens you more than you could open yourself.”

  I was just now learning to create a kind of cooperation between my own masculine and feminine energies, my need for structure and goal-oriented achievement versus sensuality and emotion. I looked around the room and wondered if I was spiritually behind the others. Had they already matriculated to the third stage? Couples and singles of varying ages, they were all white and well dressed, ranging from what looked like vibrant middle-aged entrepreneurs who golfed a lot to young West Coast and European progressives. Next to me sat Val, Susan’s former sister-in-law, whom I’d contacted after noticing her profile on the Deida Connection. I’d last seen her fifteen years ago when we were both living in the Sacramento suburbs, me with Scott and she with Susan’s brother, a hardworking, pragmatic guy who reminded me of Scott. Now she lived alone in Los Angeles doing special effects for film and television. A mane of long, straight blond hair framed her blue eyes and tiny diamond nose ring.

  I didn’t have much truck with Deida’s three developmental stages. I’d lived through the therapy culture of the nineties and saw how experts tried to encapsulate the fluidity of emotional states into blueprints that were only temporarily helpful at best. Psycho-spiritual dogma changed every few years. I was there for a more practical reason: to see for myself what kind of alchemy resulted when men fully inhabited their masculine energy and women their feminine. Deida was one of the few people on the planet who made polarity his full-time job. Here I am, David. Show me how this works. />
  * * *

  In the first set of exercises, the women formed a circle facing the walls of the room and the men formed an outer circle facing the women. The workshop comprised an equal number of males and females. Couples who had come together stood facing their partners, though they would soon migrate to others. Deida instructed us to simply say hello, and then give each other feedback on our voices and body language before moving to the next partner.

  To a man, every partner who exchanged hellos with me asked me to smile more. They noted how intense my gaze could be. One man said, “When you smile, you’re the most beautiful woman in the room.” The command to “Smile!” shouted from construction workers and homeless men alike usually annoyed me, but the exercise made me wonder if an unsmiling woman actually scared a man.

  Instant feedback was the method of choice. Men went up to the front of the room and stood facing us. Deida asked how many of us could feel the man’s presence. Did he have integrity? Could he penetrate with love? Then Deida would whisper into the man’s ear and his posture would subtly but visibly shift to something less timid, or less cocky, more quietly forceful.

  Women volunteered to do the same. A pretty, meek-looking woman in a floor-length skirt stood before us with Deida behind her. He told her to take her hands from behind her back and lay the palms outward. “Let your hands be open to receive love,” he said. Then he had her lift her arms to the side and arch her chest slightly while looking directly at us. “Open the front of your body, your breasts, your throat, your belly,” he instructed. It sounded simple but looked difficult to do.

  Deida took questions. A tall woman sitting in the front row raised her hand. She had on a flowing white sheath that showed off her ample breasts and small waistline. Her wheat-blond hair wound into a casual French twist, her skin was flawless and her lips swelled with injected collagen. Though she spoke for several minutes, alluding to an older husband at home, a nonexistent sex life, she was unable to finish a sentence, to the extent that Val and I looked at each other worriedly as she tried. Later, after standing in a circle watching the women dance, the men had to choose two women: the one whose dancing most inspired them, and the one whom they most wanted to sleep with. They chose the woman in the long skirt for inspiration, and the inarticulate blonde with the French twist for sex. As Deida invited her into the center of the circle and the room applauded, Val walked up behind me.

  “Dude,” she whispered, shaking her head in disapproval. I looked at her and sighed. Neither of us clapped.

  That was the rub, the double-edged sword of woman as energy: not that boobs and blond hair were a turn-on—of course they were—but that intelligence counted for nothing. To see the majority of men lust after the sole woman who couldn’t form a single thought astounded me. “The song is called ‘Something in the Way She Moves,’” Deida joked, “not ‘Something in the Way She Talks.’” All these so-called third-stage men wanted the same thing any frat boy did: the easiest chick possible, so that they didn’t have to do any work.

  But how could I blame them, when I wanted the same thing? My ideal man didn’t take a lot of work, either. He was handsome, brilliant, wealthy, stable, but also passionate, artistic, spiritual. He could contain my emotions with steadfast calm but fuck me to smithereens when necessary. He treated me as an equal but also—every so often, only when I felt like it—as a princess in need of protection and special handling. I could throw up defenses and he could tear them down. The woman in me wanted, quite literally, everything. I’d been subconsciously asking myself a question for months now: What was the difference between this ceaseless font of “feminine longing” and mere narcissism?

  As for surrender, I wanted it only in the bedroom. Outside of it, I had no intention of letting anyone direct my life, tell me how to speak or think, what city to live in, what to do with my time, when to smile. The perfect man served my desires—cue Mama Gena and the whole modern goddess movement; cue the popular wisdom “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” In short, I wanted to totally dominate while playing at surrender.

  * * *

  We formed two circles again, the women on the inside. “Men, you’re about to experience the thing you most fear,” Deida said from the center of the circle. “I want you to stand up straight, breathe through your nose, keep your eyes focused on hers, and don’t move. You’re about to see that you don’t need to hide from her rage. And ladies, you’re about to see what it feels like when a man consciously contains even your biggest, wildest emotions.”

  Some of the men laughed nervously. I looked over at Val a few feet away and we exchanged gleeful smiles. We were about to get permission to do something we’d never again be allowed outside this room. My heart pounded with anticipation.

  The man across from me, in his thirties with a thick build and short-cropped hair, wore a polo shirt and had the wholesome look of a high school football coach.

  “Women, I want you to breathe slowly and start to get in touch with any anger you can feel in your body. The anger might be from something that happened today or twenty years ago. Let it come up from your belly. When I say go, you are going to use sounds and express it with your body: Scream, moan, stamp your feet, pull your hair. The only rules are that you don’t strike anyone, you don’t use any words, and you stop when I say stop. Okay? Everyone ready? Go.”

  Vague thoughts of Scott refusing to impregnate me and of my dad’s old cruelties flitted through my head, but within seconds I simply bent my knees, crouched over, opened my mouth wide, and let out an ear-splitting roar that trailed from my perineum to my throat. I curled my fingers into claws and wailed as if someone were stabbing me with a cleaver until Deida said “Stop,” at which point I stood dizzy and gasping, tears filling my eyes.

  Deida told the men to take one step toward us with outstretched arms. My partner did so, looking at me with soft, fearless eyes, which made my tears come faster. Then we repeated the process: ten more seconds of rage followed by the men taking one step closer until they were standing inches from us, their arms almost encircling but not touching us.

  I had never felt so alive and present in front of a man. Tears trailed down my face but I wasn’t sad. A clean, grounded current zigzagged through me, linking my most embedded self to my skin, like a swimmer who had surfaced. My partner’s face flushed and his breathing quickened.

  Deida said, “You’ll notice the level of sensual possibility that exists in the moments right after rage. This could easily transition into a very powerful sexual encounter between a couple, even though we won’t be doing that now.”

  Everyone laughed. Other than a scratchy throat, I was restored. I couldn’t imagine how happy and healthy I—and every woman I knew—would feel if we could do this on any kind of regular basis.

  By the time the rage exercise ended it was going on 11:00 p.m. Val and I changed into our bathing suits and walked out the hotel’s back door, past the pool to the beach. It was a clear early-October night, about seventy-five degrees, and the sea was lukewarm. The full moon cast so much light that we could see our feet on the ocean floor. We waded up to our waists, then gently lay back, spread our arms, and floated for about a half hour, silent. The small waves were as calm as a lake’s. Every so often, I lightly paddled my arms, swinging myself back around to face the moon. Through my peripheral vision I could see Val’s white-blond hair splayed on the surface of the water.

  * * *

  Deida devoted many of the workshop’s final hours to questions and working with individuals. From the center of the room, I raised my hand. He pointed to me. I told him my dilemma: Should I stay with my husband, whom I loved but who had less interest than I did in developing polarity, or should I leave him for a man with whom I had much more natural polarity?

  “Does your husband love you?”

  I said yes.

  “Is he a good man?”

  I said yes, definitely.

  “Well, your husband’s not here, so I can’t speak to his par
t in all this. But I can give you feedback because you’re here. I wonder if you invite his presence. To me, you seem depressed. Look at how you’re sitting.” I had my shoes off and my legs crossed Indian-style on the chair with palms resting on my thighs. I’d intentionally turned the palms up and open as he’d told the woman in the long skirt to do.

  “I think if your husband is a good man and you love each other, you should stay with him. Work on opening. You can always open no matter what the other partner is doing. Focus on the ways he is trustworthy. Work on inviting more of his penetration with your body. You’ve been together a long time and you have to give him a chance.”

  Openness. Not verbal demands, not sex, not even flirtation or seduction. Despite the pole lessons, the womanly arts courses, had I been open in my marriage? And would changing my gaze and smile and the position of my palms do the trick now? It felt too subtle for Scott to even notice at this point, a homeopathic remedy applied after chemo had failed—not to mention after I’d delivered the additional blow of infidelity.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, and Deida moved on to the next question. I wasn’t done, however. When he brought his male assistant up onstage and asked who wanted to work with him, I shot my hand up again. Deida called on me and I went and stood next to them.

  The assistant sat facing me in a hard-backed chair, feet planted on the ground, hands resting on knees, staring at me—or rather, through me. He was demonstrating the energy of a man burdened by work and by his own thoughts.

  Deida stood between us. “How are you going to lure James out of his head and into his body?” he asked. All eyes were on me. I stepped closer to him, took some slow breaths, and looked into his eyes, trying to slowly call forth my inner seductress. I smiled but his harsh stare didn’t soften.

  “Use your voice and your body,” Deida said. “Try to draw his energy down toward his legs.” I knelt down and touched James’s shins and he scooted forward in the seat and beamed down at me. “Fuck me, baby,” I said softly.