One day she swooped into the room, dressed in leopard-skin pants and a plunging bodysuit, flanked as usual by her entourage in their flowing Punjabi garb, and took her place on the dais built just for her. She scanned the room and her eyes landed on Randy Sanders.
“You!” she shouted, pointing a long red nail at him. Randy Sanders sat straighter on his cushion and tried to stare her down. “Don’t bust my balls!” she said. “I’m not your goddam guru. Get out!”
And he did. He stood up and walked away. And we all followed: his goofy wife, his pious son, his rebellious daughter, and little lost me.
I drifted back across the country to California with Randy Sanders and his family. I had just turned fifteen—my first birthday away from my family—and I wasn’t sure what to do next. In Napa we visited friends of the Family Sanders who, like my parents and their friends, had embraced a half-assed back-to-the-land lifestyle, which amounted to a dash of voluntary poverty, a splash of psychedelic substances, and waterbeds nestled in the redwood forest. Upon one of these waterbeds Randy Sanders continued my initiation.
It was late afternoon. The wife and son and daughter were grocery shopping in town. The couple whose property this was were making loud love in their yurt. Randy Sanders lay down beside me where I had been reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He gazed deeply into my eyes.
“It’s time for the next step of our journey together.”
I began to tremble. The electricity was almost too intense to contain.
“Now kiss me. Take your time. Tune into our connection on all three planes.”
Awkward, awestruck, I kissed him.
“Use your tongue.”
I inexplicably flashed on my father. I accidentally pictured Ramón. I thought of middle-aged men in Coney Island hiking their swimming trunks over swollen bellies as they rose from their beach blankets to take a dip. I did not want to taste Randy Sanders’s saliva. But I understood that my resistance was my doorway to transformation. I stuck my tongue into Randy Sanders’s mouth. He moaned.
After a while of trying to figure out what to do with my mouth and how to coordinate my breathing, I felt Randy Sanders pull back from our embrace. “Now lie still.”
He lifted my t-shirt and began to rub my belly. His hand ambled up to my breasts and his fingers lingered on my nipples, which had turned into pebbles. I gasped, squirmed. My eyes filled with tears.
“No,” I whimpered. My body was on the verge of shattering into a million pieces.
“It’s okay,” Randy Sanders said. “It’s just shakti, the energy of the universe. Let it take you.” And he kissed me again, this time more slowly, and I surrendered.
Our final merging was yet to come. Randy Sanders promised that I would know when I was ready to fully receive him and be transfigured.
We spent the rest of the summer camping in the Pacific Northwest, and freeloading off various people the Family Sanders had met at Lama. I was beginning to despise myself. I kept falling apart. Messy emotional breakdowns. I could not articulate what was going on, and so Randy Sanders and his family put me in the center of a circle and held up their hands. They poured light from their fingertips, and I tried to let it wash over me as Randy Sanders instructed. His wife expressed her sympathy that I was having “such a hard time,” and I wanted to slap her.
This technique of focusing on me and my problems did nothing to alleviate my frustration. It was not about anything they thought it was about. It was not some brokenness inside myself that tormented me. Not a matter of narcissistic obsession or thwarted desire. It was them. The Family Sanders were driving me crazy.
We were somewhere near the Oregon Coast, I think. There was a wide river, shallow and torpid, surrounded by towering Douglas fir trees. Randy Sanders splashed into the center of the river, and I followed him. We climbed onto a large flat rock. He took my hands.
“It is time for you to receive your spiritual name.”
I did not want a spiritual name. Everyone I knew back at Lama had one, and I was embarrassed for them. Karima, Shanti, Wadud, Ganesh. As if having names in ancient languages would magically transform us into liberated souls. As if calling ourselves by the name of a goddess or a prophet made us automatically holy. Now, not only was I stuck with the Family Sanders, but I would also be saddled with an impossible-to-pronounce moniker. It would confirm my family’s judgments about how I take myself too seriously.
He closed his eyes. I closed my eyes. “Your name is Mirabai.”
My eyes flew open. Mirabai. That wasn’t bad. I had carried the ecstatic poet saint inside me ever since playing her on stage at Lama after Phillip died. I had fallen in love with Krishna, and I still sang to him every morning when I woke and every night before I went to sleep: Sri Krishna, Govinda. I didn’t even have to take on this name as a spiritual practice. Secretly I could consider it to be my nickname, springing from my role in a school musical.
Randy Sanders smiled. “I spoke to Ram Dass, and he sanctioned your naming. He sends you his blessings.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Now memorize this moment. This rock, this river, my presence. This is your sacred touchstone. Whenever you need to remember who you are, close your eyes and come here. This place resides at the center of your heart.”
Randy Sanders sent me home.
“You are too emotional,” he explained. “It’s starting to be a burden on our family.”
Shamed, I boarded a Continental Trailways bus from San Jose to Albuquerque. Back home with my family, I was unmoored. I pined for Randy Sanders, utterly bewildered by his rejection. He had opened a treasure trove of vital urgency, and then blithely snapped it shut.
I set up a tent at the top edge of my family’s property on the other side of the irrigation ditch and tried to meditate, but the high desert sun beating on the nylon kept driving me out. I began to write poetry again and draw pictures of Krishna in my sketchbook. My heart stretched out toward the beautiful blue-skinned deity. “Come, my Beloved,” I chanted.
But, just as the legendary Lord Krishna inflamed the hearts of the gopis with love-longing and then slipped away, the God of Love eluded me.
The school year was about to start, and I was facing either attending Taos High or dropping out at fifteen when the phone rang.
“Mirabai, it’s for you!”
Mom did not seem to be having much trouble calling me by my new name. “You feel like a Mirabai,” she said. “Why should the name I gave you at birth have any more validity than the one you assumed?”
“I didn’t assume it,” I explained for the eleventh time. “It was given to me. It’s my spiritual name.”
“I see,” she said. But she didn’t. No one did.
It was Randy Sanders calling. Inviting me back.
The Family Sanders had decided to settle in Berkeley and wondered if I would like to come live with them and go to school there. Berkeley was famous for education. With a mind like mine, Randy Sanders concluded, the Taos school system would be a travesty.
A flight of swallows exploded in my chest, and I left for California.
It was not easy leaving Amy and Roy. Sometimes they felt more like my children than my little brother and sister. I had groomed them in the mornings and gotten them ready for school. Cooked them grilled cheese sandwiches and rocked them after nightmares. Read to them and encouraged them to read.
Ramón was just as weird to them as he was to me, even if his weirdness took different forms. With me it was a laser-focused critique of my psyche, framed by eloquent flashes of sarcasm. For Roy it took the form of almost militaristic discipline, sometimes accompanied by blows when Roy talked back. Amy found her way by pretty much ignoring Ramón altogether. He didn’t seem to know what to do with her quiet disdain, so he just ignored her back.
But there were other times Ramón was like a giant stuffed animal come to life to cuddle and soothe us. Under the warm light of his love, all was well and always would be. Until he began to drink again and ret
urned to his senses, remembering what little shits we actually were.
Mom was lost in love. Or lust. Or something we could not connect to. We missed her, but we had been missing her since Matty died and Roy was born and we cut the ropes that tied us to our life in New York and gone hurtling into space.
Randy Sanders kissed me and kissed me whenever the family was out. He massaged my breasts, guided my hand into his pants, whispered instructions for raising my kundalini.
“Are you ready?” he asked one day.
I nodded and reached for him.
“Not yet,” he said. “Our time is coming. First you need to go home to Taos and make an appointment with Dr. what’s-his-name for birth control.”
“Michael.”
Dr. Michael was our local hippie physician who presided over the free clinic in Ranchos.
“Okay,” I said. But it wasn’t okay. This plan felt like an almost unbearable ordeal. I dreaded going home to my family who, as Randy Sanders often pointed out, didn’t get me at all and never would. The prospect of admitting to our doctor that I was about to become sexually active felt like confessing a mortal sin to a priest. But it was the next and highest step on my journey to awakening, and there was no turning back now.
“One more thing.” Randy Sanders stroked my hair. “You cannot tell anyone that this is for me. Tell them you have decided to share your virginity with Jason.” Jason was Randy Sanders’s wife’s brother’s son, and he was a fine-boned biracial kid with bulging biceps. They had come over for dinner recently, and Jason and I had spent hours talking on the porch. He was a drummer, and we shared a love of music. Randy Sanders had forbidden me from continuing this mundane connection at the time, but now Jason came in handy.
“The world will not understand our love,” Randy Sanders explained.
He picked me up at the bus station. The rest of the family was spending the weekend with his wife’s parents, so we had the house to ourselves. Nevertheless, Randy Sanders had prepared a special nest for us in the garage. He led me through piles of gardening tools and abandoned croquet sets to a mattress surrounded by a wall of cardboard boxes, over which he had draped bolts of material from his wife’s sewing collection.
He had arranged a circle of candles around the bed, which he now lit with his Zippo. From these small flames, he ignited a stick of jasmine incense, which he waved over the bed. His lips were moving in silent prayer.
“Now remove your clothing, beloved one,” he said.
I stood before him, naked, shivering so hard I thought I would knock my own teeth out.
He stood before me and circled my body first with one of the candles and then the incense.
“Om Namah Shivaya,” he chanted. “Jai Jai Ma!”
After I gave Randy Sanders my virginity, I gave him Phillip’s thunderbird ring. I had kept it inside the sandalwood box, keeping my promise to gift it to the first person I ever made love with.
But when I handed him the ring, along with a poetic prayer I wrote letting Phillip go, Randy Sanders handed it back to me as if I were trying to poison him.
“It’s not appropriate to give me your dead boyfriend’s things,” he said. “Our love is not of this world. Don’t you get it?”
No, not really. I didn’t get it. There were so many rules, and they were not written down anywhere. I only learned them by stumbling over them, inevitably breaking something—something sacred and crucial and apparently irreplaceable.
I had to see Joya one more time. We heard that she was coming to the Oakland Hills to give a retreat at an old Boy Scout camp, so I signed up for a scholarship and got it.
Randy Sanders was not pleased, but he shrugged his shoulders. “You will have to discover for yourself that painted cakes do not bring satisfaction,” he said, quoting from Be Here Now. “There are false teachers and there are true teachers,” he went on. “The former will betray you, and the latter will set you free.”
“But I didn’t get to say goodbye to her. I just want to say goodbye.”
It turned out, as Randy Sanders had predicted, to be a colossal mistake.
On the first day we gathered in a meadow and waited. It was a hot autumn afternoon, and there was no shade. Finally, the guru sashayed onto the scene wearing a purple bikini. Her Mediterranean complexion glistened with baby oil. She settled onto her pile of cushions and closed her eyes, appearing to slip effortlessly into a deep trance. We sat in silence. The air pulsated with power.
When Joya opened her eyes, she called for me. “Where’s the fifteen-year-old brat?”
I looked around, schizophrenically praying it wasn’t me she was summoning, and craving her attention with all my heart. She was staring at me through the crowd. I rose and went to her.
“Come, baby,” she said. “Sit in my lap.”
“Ma, Ma,” the assembly murmured.
Joya wrapped her arms around me and rocked me. I began to cry. She nuzzled my face with her face and hummed “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.”
“Where’s your mommy, Honey?”
I ignored the question, inhaled the fragrance of her neck, a blend of Nag Champa and coconut.
One of Joya’s attendants leaned over to explain that I was here on my own.
“What? Does your mother know where you are?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I whispered.
“Speak up!”
“She doesn’t care.”
“That’s what you think,” Joya said. “A mother always cares. That’s all mothers do is care.” And she swept her gaze over the crowd of worshippers.
“Are you a virgin, kid?” she suddenly asked.
I flushed, squirmed, kept quiet.
Joya pushed me out of her arms and held my face between her hands. “You don’t understand the question? Cherry! Has anyone popped your cherry?”
This was way too complicated to address with a simple yes or no. I could not consider what I had done with Randy Sanders a question of virginity. It was a cosmic rendezvous that altered the gravitational field of the earth itself.
“Get over here.” Joya snapped her fingers at her handsome son—a guy in his early twenties who drove a motorcycle. “Take her over to the picnic tables and talk some sense into her.” He rose and reached out his hand to me. I shook my head hard.
“So you don’t like them young?” Joya said. “Okay. You!” And she beckoned a balding man with a thin gray beard, who came over and lifted me to my feet.
I didn’t feel like I could refuse the Divine Mother a second time, so I went with him, reinforcing the notion that I preferred older men. I chafed against the irony of my predicament and trailed behind him to an oak grove, where we sat across from each other and stared into each other’s eyes for as long as I could stand it.
That night we all chanted in the main hall.
“Call out to God,” Joya coaxed from her place at the head of the room, flanked by musical devotees playing harmonium, tablas, and small brass cymbals. The Brooklyn housewife had morphed into the goddess and sublime poetry flowed spontaneously from her lips. “However you most deeply connect to the Divine, my children, visualize that, manifest that, merge with that!”
With every fiber of my being I called Krishna’s name.
And he came to me. In spite of Randy Sanders, even in spite of Joya, independent of every spiritual book I had read and every spiritual teacher at whose feet I had prostrated myself, my Beloved came flooding into the shattered container of my heart and filled me with even greater longing. I sang to him, I wept, and I sang some more.
Eight years later I married Randy Sanders. Eight years after that, I left him. The sky, just as he had predicted, fell. And the whole world opened to receive me.
9
DANIELA
I did not give birth to my children. But I poured every particle of my maternal juices into loving them.
It all started when I was sixteen and, convinced that the planet was hurtling toward environmental devastation, I vowed that I would never brin
g children into this world.
I had followed the Family Sanders to the Mendocino Coast, where they had been offered a job caretaking a farm near Albion. We were raising chickens and goats, building berms around the vegetable gardens to block the coastal gales, experimenting with windmills to pump water and solar panels to heat it. Randy Sanders’s vision was to create a community over which he would preside with spiritual rigor and common sense.
I dropped out of school and then stumbled into a juicy alternative program designed for teenagers living on their own. I passed the California High School Proficiency Examination and enrolled in classes at the local community college. Like my father before me, I jotted enthusiastic notes to myself in the margins of my favorite new books: Small Is Beautiful, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Desert Solitaire, Of Wolves and Men. I studied classical choral music and South Indian dance, creative writing and astronomy, and a new multidisciplinary course called “Futuristics,” which combined sociology, philosophy, economics, and environmental sciences. This was the seventies, and the hot-button issue was overpopulation. It seemed self-evident that if everyone were to carry on reproducing with abandon, humanity would implode and become extinct within a hundred years.
I, for one, was not about to contribute to the crisis. If I ever had the overwhelming urge to bear a child (which seemed unlikely), I would adopt one. And not some blond-haired, blue-eyed infant, but an older child, preferably black, possibly with a serious physical or mental handicap, maybe even terminally ill. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t feel the same way.
Tapping into the same determination with which I eventually gritted my teeth and married Randy Sanders at age twenty-three, I found myself at twenty-eight the mother of an eleven-year-old girl named Daniela.
Caravan of No Despair Page 7