Even as I seemed freed from the subtle but very real oppression that in America is too often well-masked behind slogans like, “The Land of the Free” and so forth, I soon realized the grip of that particular perverse patriotism sometimes promoted in the United States of doublespeak and faux-democracy has an expansive reach, and seems want to draw back potential expatriates, perhaps for fear of being left all alone. My hiatus in Quebec was only to last three months before I once again entered a dystopia of strip-malls and fast food and suburban discontent in the midst of overabundance.
Now I must note, despite critical remarks, that I do love this land and its peoples. Though I feel contempt for a populace that is so easily swayed to follow a falsely-elected leader into an unprovoked war, and for an administration which displays such disregard for this land’s own laws and for simple justice, I meet U.S. citizens nearly every day and in every sort of locale that have the sense to be incensed at the absurdity of a president that can’t correctly form a sentence, livid at the loss of civil liberties supposed to be guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and furious at the felonious fucks that hold the White House (i.e., the Bush/Cheney administration and their ilk), and who thus hold the American people and much of the world hostage to their nigh fascist whimsy.
After a bit of wandering I found a darkened coffee house that offered Internet access and which maintained the gracious policy of allowing patrons to smoke indoors. As another example of America’s faltering liberty, the latter amenity has become a scarce freedom Stateside, as those who enjoy inhaling the sublime and to some sacramental smoke of the American tobacco plant are finding themselves increasingly driven to the street if they choose to imbibe.
The desperate nature of this trend is evinced by the fact that even Laramie, once rugged frontier town, has grown so gentrified (and contingently it seems, increasingly controlling) that it became the first city in the state to outlaw indoor public smoking, even in the bars! And this city even has a namesake brand of cigarettes featured on The Simpsons! and which was in fact a popular brand of smokes in the 40’s and 50’s. There is also, curiously, a bar and grill called Elmer Lovejoy’s—think “Reverend” on the same television series—which was named after a tinkerer who once had a shop on that corner of First Street, a school called Spring Creek Elementary, and a number of “Simpsons” related to Wyoming’s former Senator Alan Simpson, including a singer songwriter named Maggie. Never noticed Maggie raver-style suckin’ on a pacifier, though she certainly had a similarly intimate rapport with microphones. Not mere coincidences, at some level certainly.
Now, this sort of an ordinance may be fine in those emasculated and yuppified bedroom communities back east, else in densely populated urban centers where folks don’t have room to breathe in the first place. Here in the Cowboy state, however, and especially in bars like the Buckhorn—where every species of local ungulate is represented by at least a couple-of glass-eyed heads hung on the wall, and where bullet-holes embellish the mirror and ceiling—well, in such a place you oughta be able to light up your cowboy-killer whilst downing a whisky or nursing a PBR or perhaps a Fat Tire Amber Ale without harassment from the powers that be.
Back in the day, sheriff wouldn’t have lasted a day trying to enforce such a law in these parts. C’mon, at least give those who fumé a separately ventilated section with a pool table or two, a room where cocktail waitresses or waiters are not required to serve to protect those employees from the deadly ethereal spirits of second-hand smoke roaming the room in search of a victim.
As an aside, there is convincing data that the cause of so much cancer from tobacco products is not actually anything intrinsically present in the plant. It is not necessarily the additives, either—not to say that said practice of “big tobacco” is acceptable, nor that these various added chemicals do not add to the health risks. Rather, so many cancer-related mortalities are almost certainly from radioactive fertilizers used on conventionally grown tobacco, which expose a pack a day (conventionally grown) cigarette smoker to somewhere on the order of between 300 and 22,000 chest x-rays a year. According to one source, even C. Everett Coop—one of few of this nation’s Surgeon Generals to have gained significant notoriety, and in fact the fellow who put those little warning labels on packs of smokes—made a comment during a televised speech in 1990 wherein he stated that he believed ninety-percent of cancer from tobacco use was due to radioactive isotopes present in the tobacco. Regardless of the verity of this information, I’ve switched to organic.
French press in hand, I made my way to an open Internet station and proceeded to seek whatever contact information I might to find Leslie. I had already sent an email through the yoga studio where she was listed as an instructor, though had not yet received a reply. I learned the times of Leslie’s yoga classes from the studio’s website, then sat on the patio to watch the passing pedestrians in their fur-lined parkas and trench coats and to pen various musings in my journal.
Even insofar as it might have been a small step over the line, I decided to wait outside the yoga studio during one of Leslie’s scheduled classes, hoping she would not take offense at said presumption. The studio was on the second floor of an ancient building in Old Montreal, just above a small boutique and only a few blocks from La Maison du Patriot. I arrived a good while before the class let out and took a seat on the steps.
Whilst waiting on the stoop outside the studio and smoking a barely burnt Gaullouises I’d ground-scored, une jolie juene Femme employed at the boutique joined me for her break. She told me her name was Beth, and that she was from near Toronto. I told her of my quixotic intentions, and asked if she knew Leslie. Beth said they had met. I grew more anxious as I realized the moment of my expected encounter with this woman who was focus of long-held devotions, daydreams and romantic hopes was very near.
As the students began to emerge, foam-rubber mats rolled and tucked between torsos and either arm, I scanned each face for a glimmer of recognition. My heart was beating fast, palms sweaty in spite of the cold, and thoughts jumbled like some high school kid just before a first date. After nearly all the practitioners had passed through the double-doors, I stopped one woman to ask if the instructor was still upstairs.
“Oh, I am the instructor,” she informed me politely.
I told her I was an old acquaintance from Leslie’s home state, and asked her to pass on my email address if she happened to see her in the near future. A bit crestfallen, but able to breathe normally and think somewhat clearly again, I noticed Beth emerging from the building. She told me if I wanted to wait, she would take me to her place to smoke some grass. I was quite grateful for the offer, and of course accompanied her up the hill to le Plateau and her shared apartment just off Rue Saint-Laurent.
The three-bedroom flat was up a narrow flight of stairs, and like the yoga studio was directly above a clothing boutique. The neighborhood was about as hip as it gets, as the Plateau—and Saint-Laurent on the Plateau specifically—is the center of nightlife and café culture in Montreal.
As we entered her apartment we were greeted by Beth’s roommate Dan, another Toronto native, his friends Arthur, a dark-locked dready with dark complexion and a generous smile, and Jordan, Arthur’s housemate and Dan’s coworker at a nightclub across the street. I sat on a couch in the kitchen, which also served as the living room, and we smoked some herb topped with dark brown flakes of hashish and drank some rather extraordinary chai Dan prepared from raw ginger and fresh spices. I made the usual sort of introductory exchanges with these new acquaintances and explained the premise of my trip.
Beth had offered the use of their shower on our walk, and as I hadn’t bathed in a couple of days I had responded that I would very much appreciate said opportunity. Whilst we sat puffin’ and chatting, Beth mentioned the offer again, only I thought I heard her say something on the order of, “We should take that shower, when you’re ready.” Did she mean “We,” as in the manner royalty speaks of self in the plural? Was this some quirky Canadian use of personal pronouns?
A few minutes later, Beth stood behind me, leaned over me, and as I tipped my head back she said she was ready for a shower, and asked if I was ready—to shower with her?! I froze, and was struck dumb by this unusual entreaty twice offered, especially as ‘twas spoken in mixed company. After she disappeared into the bathroom alone, I pondered what it was I’d just heard. Did she really ask me to join her in the . . . Yes! What does this mean? Is such a thing customary amongst Canadians, perhaps a tradition adopted and modified from the Inuit custom I had read about, as this tribe’s men were said to offer the pleasure of their wives to travelers from afar?
Then it struck me: a friend I had known for a number of years named Dave, a California dready I knew in Laramie, once told me at the conclusion of a tale of his travels in Canada, “Jeffrey, if you’re ever in Canada and a beautiful woman asks you to take a shower with her, just do it!! Don’t ask me why, just do it!” he advised, ending his words with a hearty laugh.
Among other inconsistencies and indications of some sort of a potential alteration of time-space or mind I have noted since I have returned from said journey, the Dready-Dave I met on this side claims to have no memory of ever having offered said advice, nor any recollection as to why he might have spoken such a random-seeming imperative. Indeed, I am often left to wonder if the land I returned to is the same as the one I left, or if I might be in some other dimension or level of underworld/earth/heaven. Mayan mythology claims that something like twenty-three layers exist between lowest below and highest above. From what relatively little I’ve studied of the Vedic tradition’s voluminous texts and sanAtana dharma’s sundry teachings, the layers and loka (“locations,” “realm”), dimensions, heavens and hells are many and rather complexly related. Oh, for an accurate map to this life (and afterlife/afterlives?) and its subtleties, a spiritual GPS or inter-dimensional chart or some such!
After her shower—I did not join her, by the way, as I had obviously come to Canada with other romantic intentions—Beth asked Dan if he’d mind if I stay in the spare bedroom. He was more than amicable to the idea, and I ended up abiding with these kindest of hosts for over a month. I was told I could occupy the bedroom until another guest, Narev, returned from a tour in South America spinning trance-dance tunes at parties and clubs in Brazil. I thought the expected guest’s name a bit odd, and at first and before a bit of contemplation considered it might be merely some sort of DJ pseudonym. As I later concluded, there were indeed some odd coincidences to consider regarding the coming guest’s name, and the names of my two hosts, as well.
Shorty before I had departed from Laramie, my paternal grandfather passed away. His name, as well as the names of my father and older brother, is Vern. Backwards, Vern is pronounced something like “Narev.” Whilst staying at the apartment in Montreal, my paternal grandmother, Betty Lou, purportedly followed her husband’s departure from Ada, Oklahoma to somewhere beyond this life. Beth’s middle name is Louise, and her middle and last name correspond to the names of the streets between which sits the house where I grew up (said paralleling streets, by the way, were named to honor the first official Anglo explorers to officially cross the Western U.S., to offer a clue without betraying confidences). I later discovered that Leslie had suffered from an emotional breakup with a man named Dan, the first name of my other host. Two others amongst her most recent paramours Leslie later happened to name, Stephen and Frank, were the first and middle name of my best friend during and for a while after high school.
Certainly there is something of substance to names, and perhaps if you taught your children that the name of a rose is “the shit-stinking-raunchy-puke-smelling flower,” roses might not smell so sweet to their noses. Since this time, and to a somewhat lesser degree preceding, such synchronicities and odd coincidences of names, memes, mythemes and memories have become my daily fare (as you shall read if you choose to continue), and sometimes to the point that it all feels rather like a case of 24-hour déjà vu—which sounds much cooler than it is, let me assure you.
There is no question in my mind of the verity of “synchronicity,” as some (after Jung) have named these instances of vision or other sensations that seem beyond the supposed range of allowed perception and probability, given one’s current and supposed time and space perspective, else as has become customary to call those coincidences too succinct to be considered “merely-.” I have seen and heard too many things inexplicable by laws of statistics or other figurations of probability to deny the certain existence of some subtle mode of interconnectivity or other. I would not claim, however, to have an immediate knowledge of how all of these phenomena ought to be interpreted, though I have my theories and much corroborating evidence.
Despite whatever perils made apparent, I have maintained a want to seek and comprehend, an unquenched desire to understand these mysterious and esoteric lineages of action and effect, thought and affect, as uncanny and odd occurrences have so oft manifest in my experiences and so many seeming magical happenings continue to unfold before my eyes—all three. Indeed, impossible coincidences and virtual miracles appear too often and overt for me to deny, even if I had a wish to do so. And with a view of so much that doesn’t coincide with conventional paradigms, I have a similarly unstoppable impetus to find where I might best fit myself in light of these ulterior realities revealed. Inasmuch as I might be rebel or revolutionary, I do trust in a truly good order behind, beyond, or transcendent to the official.
Similar to my certainty of synchronicity, serendipity, and subtle connectivity, I also have no doubt of the existence of many sorts of mythical creatures. I’ve seen bioluminescent faeries swooping through the swamp as I walked a darkened trail beneath the branches of old growth cedars and other great and aged trees, ferns and devil’s clubs’ thick on either side of the pathway fading from view with the sun’s deeper journey below the horizon. In this particular magical section of the trail upon the onset of dark night, said little blue lights would sometimes suddenly appear and dart through the nigh pitch black marsh, to my amazement and inability to explain, save by the interpretation my friend and coworker Jonah offered—pixies.
During this same period of time spent clearing trails in the wilderness of the Sauk River drainage in Washington, we twice encountered a Sasquatch. I’ve seen a woman shape-shift at close range. I could have run over a skinwalker that scurried across the road one time on the Navajo (Diné) reservation in Arizona, as mentioned a few pages previous.
I KNOW by much (and much self-scrutinized) experience that there is much more to the workings of the world than meets the average eye. To sift through all the possible interpretations of what these things, and especially other hidden things less playfully made manifest might mean or portend, is a task might drive one mad if such glimpses past various veils become de rigueur. Nonetheless, I somewhere and sometime decided to notice and even seek out these subtle clues and cues related to the existence of those things less materially evidenced (or less observed or admitted as materially evidenced), for better or worse.
To become aware of such subtle happenings and mystical secrets generally seems to come with a contingent responsibility, by the way, an obligation to sometimes take action to assure sattva (“righteousness,” or “order” for lack of a better translation) and dharma (teaching, justice, etc.) are maintained in the midst of subtle minds crossed and manifestations sometimes gone awry, and on occasion a duty to deal with demons needing to be dispatched. To see wrong or suffering is of course cause enough to confront or act as one is able and ought, at whatever level of existence, yet in certain contexts surely the more so once the veils begin to fall before your eyes. With great understanding comes great responsibility.
In spite of sometimes being subjected to taunts from passing vehicles such as “Lazy hippie!” “Get a job!” (often as not, when I’ve been employed, though also often as not as a playful taunt rather than a curse), etc., as it has turned out I’m not just taking “fun trips” into the forest or living care-free whilst wandering America’s roads and wilderness in the company of other pot smoking, psychedelically-enhanced hippies—though I must admit I have had plenty of fun in-between occasional battles with demons and vyings with unruly demigods, intense and taxing yogic endeavors, and sometimes rather epic trials and tribulations.
Once you know, you become to whatever degree contingently responsible to respond to what secrets you’re made privy, and likewise to act according to whatever visions you receive that meet more than the uninitiated eye, at least in relation to your given understanding. Thus the cautionary admonitions advising any who would study cabala or tantra (i.e., real tantra yoga, and not merely the enhanced Hindu style Joy of Sex version) or any particular mode of esoteric teachings to carefully follow a proscribed path, and thus the supposition such is to be undertaken under the supervision of a teacher or guru—though I must admit, I have approached these things as rather a dilettante and without a particular guru, and indeed at times to my personal peril.
Yes, I do recognize that certain of these beliefs certainly might allow me to figure or fit neatly into any number of psychiatrically designated categories. I know otherwise, however, from many carefully scrutinized experiences and a not insignificant mass of convincing evidences. Though science according to the “Western” model has its value, open-minded observation (a supposed cornerstone of the scientific method) has the significant potential to convince a careful witness that much cast aside by academically informed judgments as “superstition” maintains more abiding truth than many a so-called scientific maxim.
And on the lighter side of examining this supposed dichotomy between science and supernatural sight, too much belief in the reality offered by secular science and you shall likely miss the little people spying your campsite in the Cherokee National Forest, overlook the trolls peeking out from under the bridges you cross in the Schwartzwald, and ignore the wind calling your name on the seashore or in the mountains or whilst simply sitting on your back porch watching a storm blow in. You might thus miss much of life’s beauty and magic, but at least they won’t call you “crazy.” I’m personally beyond caring what “they” think, however, and hope you too will choose the beautiful magic of life’s possibilities rather than to hide behind the supposedly well known, the purportedly well analyzed and documented, those dead letter propositions prescribed by scientific dogma and official, institutionally approved and peer reviewed “truth.”
Certainly meeting Beth, and the shelter and kindness she and Dan offered, and the various odd synchronicities and serendipities I experienced in their home and further on this quixotic misadventure exemplify the providential kindness and undeniable magic that comes to the good hearted and open minded traveler. For over a month I was sheltered and fed by these hosts, serendipitous kindnesses received with much gratitude despite my lack of means for any expression of material gratuity.
I seem nearly always granted at least base needs by providence, the care of friendly goddesses and gods or angels or ganas or everyday folks or whatever not-quite-random agents of compassion whose motives derive from a layer beyond where science has yet invented a means to describe or delineate. And of course from a merely material perspective, the generosity of my new Canadian friends was a welcomed boon. In addition to a general gratitude for shelter from Montreal’s cold winter weather, I was especially grateful for this hospitality as I soon developed a toothache that might have become a serious medical condition, had I not a warm place to sleep, bathe and practice good hygiene.
I sent another email to Leslie’s place of employment, requesting that they pass on the telephone number at my temporary abode. After somewhere around one week at Beth and Dan’s, she called. Her voice indeed sounded like the melodious voice I recalled from years before, yet with a note of ill-ease I had not remembered from inadvertently or otherwise overhearing her conversations at the coffeehouse, else from our terse if courteous exchanges those years before. The woman I had become enamored with at Coal Creek Coffee a decade previous was playful and vibrant. Her laughter in particular had resonated with my soul or stirred some memory within me, if one not quite understood at the time except at an instinctual level. Her tone on the phone seemed different, hinted at some distress or at least betrayed a tinge of sorrow.
I was actually talking to Leslie! Beatific belly dancer, Divine yogini and sometimes-wrathful goddess purging me of attachments and imperfections in at least my envisioned constructions of the dilettante tantra-yoga I had practiced for the past several years. Leslie, certain object of devotion, focus of a practice of bhakti-yoga I maintained with her always at least peripherally in mind, my chivalric ideal as beloved and tantric ideal as a vision of Sakti. This is who she had been to me, and through my eyes and imaginings and interpretation of signs I yet believe her to be at least a close emanation or expression of these things (and if she ain’t, may these praises raise her to a more elevated state).
I was more than a bit giddy for the fact that I had finally made contact with this woman who had been for so long unapproachable and admired, yet a bit hesitant at noting her tone. Also, nervous and concerned and a combination of many other perhaps unnamable emotions as we made tentative plans to meet at Café Dépôt, a block away on the corner of St-Laurent and Prince-Arthur Ouest.
She was on the other end of a telephone line, in the same city as I once again, and was quite prepared to meet me for coffee or tea. Three days, and we would meet, and I would perhaps have some answers as to what substance might explain my intractable devotion, and as importantly would be granted an audience with one of the (if not the) most amazing and beautiful of women I’ve ever encountered—if only a woman and not goddess or Goddess, that is.
I shared this news with my hosts, even jumping up and down a bit, yet maintained some semblance of reserve or restraint or reticence upon sensing Leslie’s tone, my jubilance at this momentous occasion held in check by a recognition of this very important other’s seeming sorrow. I experienced the next few days with a continued inner turmoil: excited at the prospect of a face-to-face with Leslie, yet a reluctance to maintain too much glee in the face of whatever burdens seemed to weigh upon her. And as I mentioned, off and on during this period I was suffering a rather excruciating infection from a problemed wisdom tooth, to add to the physiological-cum-psychic disharmony and the tumult comes with the prospect of true love.
I was also generally sensing an odd tension in the air I was breathing there and thereafter, a noticeable difference in the makeup of the reality I was experiencing in comparison to the reality I’d become accustomed to in a decade of wandering. A “disturbance in the force,” to use the now cliché expression.
With this woman never quite not an imagined participant, I had worked up a vast wellspring of energy, tejas (fire, spiritual energy) stored through much practice, acts of devotion and battles with the world’s ills, journeys of discovery and encounters with thousands of beautiful revelations and people and raised by tapasia (purifying fires) and contemplations, in and through the acts of austerities and celebrations, sitting trance and wild dance. And now all this seemed at the verge of some sort of release or resolution or transcendent fruition, yet with certain restraints brought into play, perhaps an unconscious recognition that I must not allow all my hopes to reside in these moments. Rta kal. Right timing.
Devi is present, yet perhaps not yet ready to reveal Herself fully. She has made Herself known at moments in my past. She is in my future as at least a true and properly manifest emanation someday to be my consort, lover, friend and companion (whether or not in this life lived), as tantra yoga doth no doubt prescribe practitioners become Siva or Shakti, or better, discover that they already are. Whether She is or ever fully has been the amazing woman I have known as Leslie, or shall be present thus in my future, I cannot say. Regardless, such devotions have at the very least proven helpful to me personally, as I have learned to be more authentic, to understand and explore ways of knowing, loving, and bettering self and this world, mostly due to such devotions to Devi, often envisioned as Leslie. Regardless of only short hours spent together in overt practice, Leslie has in this sense at least been a longstanding yoga partner to me, and I still believe for the better.
The day and time of our appointed meeting arrived, and I made my way on a snowy day down the street to grab a cappuccino and take a seat, not so patiently awaiting her arrival from the smoking section of Café Dépôt. I watched the door and more than a few beautiful women with similar dark hair and like brown eyes made their way to the counter to order whatever caffeinated libations, en Français. I wrote in my notebook and sipped from my cup, and nervously waited till well after the appointed hour. Disheartened, I returned to my hosts’ apartment, entered the front door and was right away informed Leslie had called, hoping to reschedule.
When several days later we met, we shared moments I’ll not forget. However real or dream, as life can seem and might be either or both, and whether the apparition I held in my arms was truly her or some semblance, doppel or emanation, I felt a wall between myself and Beloved crumbling, if not fully removed.
I entered the smoky café, a less gentile coffee house further up San Laurent filled mostly with older men playing chess. I sat and soon she appeared at the door, fur-lined hood framing her face, a vision of certain beauty and apparent sorrow that made my breath pause and heart skip or dance. We sat together and shared a conversation I had long anticipated.
She shared with me of her sorrows, a broken relationship and other contingent circumstances I shall not disclose. She told me it was good to see someone from home—Wyoming, I guess she meant—even if someone she said she did not specifically remember. I gently took her hands in mine and she cried on my shoulder, and in my perceptions at least these were tears of sublime property that moistened my overcoat. I felt I was receiving some sacred sacrament of a goddess’s lament, and a chance to warm the hands and perhaps heart of one who had been so much inspiration to my practice and sacred devotions.
I do not here inscribe our exchanges in quotation, as it seems inappropriate to disclose not only words she would have me not repeat, but also the others that are sacred to me by my own mythology and as memories I’ve want to hold and not commit to print. When she finished her tea and I emptied my cup of coffee, we walked out the door and made our way down the cold Montreal street. She asked me to put my arm around hers as I accompanied her to the subway stop. She asked me to meet her again, to be her friend. I watched her walk down the stairs, her fur-lined hood pulled over lovely auburn hair. I gazed mesmerized, in an amorous and even entranced state as she descended the steps to catch her train, still somewhat in disbelief at what had just transpired.
I had held her hands, embraced this figure I had long imagined the Beloved. I had been allowed into a woman’s life I’d long wondered of, admired from afar, and wished to be closer to for many moons and reveries. Yet circumstances and mixed emotions presented yet more complexities, for in my visions of our sometime meeting we were both at peak of life and health, and I’d imagined naught but blessings and an aura of celebration surrounding and in our someday manifest encounter. Perhaps some semblance of the fullness I imagined would arrive is yet to come, or else not to be fulfilled by or in this form I’d grown and have grown the more to so adore. Regardless, both because and in spite of our later times together, I maintain respect, a certain love and something not unlike reverence for Leslie, if ever or not we meet again . . .
Back at Beth and Dan’s, I was still in something of a daze. I shared an account of our meeting, and it felt that the responses of my kind hosts revealed they somehow had greater knowledge of this affair than was spoken, at whatever level. Beth made a somewhat catty remark, whether at this point or later, which I took as an obvious indication she had more than a fleeting familiarity with Leslie, repeating a phrase she sometimes uttered.
“Oh m’god!” Beth said with a mild sarcasm on one occasion as I was standing in the hall talking about Leslie to Dan, and indeed with a tone that certainly seemed to indicate she knew her better than as only casual acquaintances. Beth’s utterance was not so spiteful as might be imagined from the above, mind you, but rather seemed to indicate she thought I was perhaps making too much ado about the whole affair—though I might be reading wrongly.
Another very odd thing Beth said that revealed she was more intricately involved in this absurd lila (Sanskrit for “divine play”) I have been recounting was a rather off-the-wall question she posed to me one evening,
“So pardon me for asking,” she asked in a casual tone, “but, do you like chicks with dicks?” I answered “No,” not meaning to imply I have some prejudice against trans-gendered folk, but to answer that insofar as my sexual preferences, women who are fully women are my choice for partners. I pondered the question, sensing such an off-the-wall query was clearly indicative of some intrigue or other afoot.
Perhaps she was just wondering why I didn’t hop into the shower with her when she invited when we first met. Or perhaps this was an indication of some strange conspiracy of mind I had long suspected, and has been revealed (if at times revealed askew) through events and channeled information granted most succinctly over the past few years, and in bits and pieces for years before. Regarding Beth’s rather odd query, by a suggestion some years previous someone planted a passing notion within my earshot that a woman who rather reminded me of Leslie in Laramie had genitalia mismatching what would normally be found upon an assumed woman.
Subtle coincidental curiosities and bizarre innuendos such as this have vexed this experiencer for quite some years. Indeed, I have often wondered if many others experience as I do, or if I am unusual in the degree to which I perceive the intentionally emplotted interconnectedness of thought and channeled information and emotions and things observed outside myself, other’s words and actions too often and too succinctly fitting my immediate thoughts and certain mythemes or archetypal cycles, else not infrequently receiving channeled thoughts that too precisely meet observations of things presented to my eyes and ears to be meaningless flukes or luck of the draw.
The interconnectedness of so many thought forms and circumstances and individuals is still difficult for me to piece together concisely and neatly, and perhaps this lifetime will not reveal all the relevant subtleties of meaning and motive, or even of everyone’s identities beyond facades or veiled presentations. I have even contemplated the possibility that the woman I met with in Montreal, and with whom I even shared a small studio for one month’s span, might indeed not have been the same as the Leslie I only scarcely knew before, the graceful dancer and beautiful barista too beautiful and circumstantially too difficult for me to comfortably approach ten years previous. And yet at moments I did see the certain presence of that same someone shining through in the woman I befriended in Montreal who bore the same visage, if perhaps a bit altered by time and circumstance, and who claimed the same first name I remembered from before.
After some experiences to come, succeeding our later parting, I came to realize some things can make one’s true self retreat inside or elsewhere hide whilst the vessel or overt form seems a shadow of the truer, and might even present the opposite of the real spirit within when certain factors assail or infiltrate. People change, as might be said, and can be likewise altered by experience or exposure to this reality’s sorrows and ills, forced to show a façade that is a defensive shell, else even display in action a foreign spirit’s undue influence.
We met again several times over the coming weeks, and I was granted glimpses of the spirit of the woman I had remembered and admired, laughing and insightful and graceful and even powerful. Still, some seeming fierce oppression maintained some hold of her, if somewhat decreasingly.
Leslie sometimes let it out with a scream, unapologetically uttered into the chill Montreal winter’s gray and white days and nights. Once or more she rather giddily if agitatedly informed me that she was going to scream whilst walking with me down the dreamily wintery sidewalks on Le Plateau. Some wild energy would rise in her, fierce and frightening and beautiful and something I imagined as more than a little like Kali or some like wilder expression of Shakti. Through her dance and yoga and other healing arts, too, Leslie the yogini would transform these troublesome energies only partly understood by me, and perhaps better felt as mighty swells of emotion as I was made privy to her mood and momentum.
After our parting, I too became assailed by an increase of seemingly similar psychic assaults, spiritual attacks that have at moments nearly driven me to insanity. Though it seems these struggles in mind were not introduced on this journey, it also seems by braving this quest to French Canada to find and be a friend to Leslie my path had expanded, as perhaps has the scope of those ills of this world and humanity I am obliged to battle and energies I am responsible to try to transform. Regardless, these oppositions to my natural momentum, mode, mood and mind would soon challenge me to the core.
Something no doubt foreign, unless an inundation of direct opposites—inversions of my own thoughts and intentions—had somewhere acquired access to my mind and were likewise increasingly manipulated my exterior reality. I recognize in retrospect that some semblance of these infiltrations of my thoughts had begun a year or two preceding this journey, if not yet recognized as a foreign power. Such harassment and malicious psychic influences increased exponentially during the continuation and aftermath of this quest, however, regardless of the point of inception. Though I had experienced battles in “mind” and other realms previously to these past few years, something or someone had found further means to adversely affect even my internal thoughts, and to an extent greater than I had ever faced before. And it seems not unlikely that the psychic assaults I later faced were not unlike, and perhaps not unrelated to whatever energies Leslie was dealing with when we met, despite their less overt onset at an earlier and as yet unascertained moment.
I ought to note that a dream that I believe was planted in my mind by some other—dreamt perhaps eight years or more before this fateful journey—had presaged a good bit of what I’ve experienced over the past few years and especially after I departed from Montreal. Though thankfully much of this dream has failed to come true with precision, enough has manifest to convince me there was of certainty some degree of valid prescience (or perhaps programming?) presented therein. If I recall correctly, said dream came to me just after I had spent the night with a young woman I encountered at a party in Laramie. Can’t say one way or the other whether or not she had anything in particular to do with said encyclopedic dream, save by proxy. However unlikely and insane as it might seem to the “rationally” minded, I believe dream and mind in general have a good deal more to do with reality manifest than do mere physical factors and officially sanctioned scientific notions of cause and effect.
Similarly, I have been for a long time convinced that much of what the discipline of psychology deems “mental illness” has causes that ought be traced to so called “supernatural” sources rather than to mere neurological or electrochemical factors. Many of the most spiritually insightful people I have known have spent time in psychiatric wards, and certainly many, if not most or all ailments of mind and body are indeed as easily shown to be the result of issues of “spirit” (for lack of a better English term) and not merely result of material, psychological or physiological conditions generally.
Supposedly aberrant experiences (hearing voices, having visions, observing shifts in time-space, telepathy, etc.) had first hand, carefully critiqued and skeptically surveyed, analyzed as an educated man at least relatively well versed in modern psychology and quite adept and well trained at introspective self-criticism convinces me mind and body and spirit are not aptly contemplated separately, and that at least as often as not mental illness is actually malady of the realm of “spiritual” nature—though still not disconnected to body, nor conflicting with true scientific knowledge either, mind you.
Though I do not completely reject the findings of scientific inquiry into the intricacies of human behavior, I think something important was lost when any sort of science of spirit (again, for lack of a better English term) was cast out along with what was dubbed “superstition.” My experiences have too clearly evidenced that much more is operative in the human mind’s workings and in the interactions of mind and matter than officially sanctioned scientific notions of cause and effect allow. Channeled information (for lack of a better term) has too often proven valid, visions have come too clearly true, and ‘voices’ heard within or without coincide with materially manifest verifications on too many occasions for me to neatly cast them as symptoms of schizophrenia. I also know myself (and Self) too well to accept many uncharacteristic thoughts I have experienced in recent times as merely self- (or Self-) generated.
Perhaps some of you might relate, recognizing there may be more verity than officially or commonly allowed to various personal experiences you have kept secreted, for fear others might deem you delusional. I am not advising that you obey the digital readout on the microwave should it suggests you should kill the President or a movie-star, mind you. Just that it is alright to believe you saw a faerie next to the lake that time when you were a child, or to admit that ghosts talk to you, or that you remember details from a past lifetime, or that God or Goddess or other celestial beings visit you sometimes.
All this said, I do not know of any one system I trust to offer a fully correct and easily accessible interpretive framework to fully decipher or facilitate a complete comprehension of the immeasurable and ethereal subtleties that create the operative rules of mind and spirit, and the interaction of these with the material world. The traditions and teachings of India have come closest to providing such a framework, though these as well as the Western scientific paradigm seem wanting in regard to certain solidly evidenced experiences I have known and scrutinized with a figurative microscope and an academically well trained skepticism (though I must admit I am not at all well versed in the Vedas). The interpretive frame I have found most useful and true is more an admixture of various religious and scientific traditions, as many paradigmatic perspectives do certainly contain clues, though not one overarching schema I have encountered has yet to prove itself to unerringly encompass or accurately explain all I have known and experienced, though I have just scratched the surface of the perennial treasures of Vedic wisdom.
Knowledges of mind and spirit and materially manifest reality I have acquired from study and experience, meditation and contemplation and intuition have likewise only granted me a modicum of certainty as I seek to comprehend “others.” Even as I believe I have an open third-eye, I cannot always see clearly into the depths of who is who or what is true of many I meet in the marketplace or on the street, nor even assuredly ascertain the deeper truth of some I assume I know quite well. Mysteries and uncertainties seem to linger, both near and far.
On one certain occasion I felt assured Leslie was fully present, present as the Goddess had first captured my attention and devotion years previous, and without the distractions it seemed assailed her, moving and acting with such unearthly motions and gestures—or perhaps with the most earthly of motions, motions conveying all the beauty and seductive grace of the natural world, and the confidence of Durga Ma. At least on this one occasion I was certain I was not encountering a doppel, a dream or a mere shell of the divine young woman I had adored from afar before my pilgrimages of Self-discover.
Leslie invited me to work out with her at a health club where she taught Yoga and Pilates. Her schedule was filled with teaching these disciplines and belly dance, working at two restaurants, and performing her gracefully sublime dance at various venues. Mostly I would walk with her to and from her appointed destinations, perhaps sharing lunch or dinner on the way. On this evening, she allowed me to share with her in practice.
I met her at the corner of Rue Rachel and St-Laurent. We rode the elevator to the second floor. We performed sun salutations. Pranam. Reach above, bow, thrust feet back, downward dog. Flowing motions, breath observed, bodies in movement, beings becoming.
I couldn’t help but notice some similarity in performing asanas with Leslie and having performed the same series of movements those early mornings at the Yoga Center in Laramie with Chloe. I suppose this would make sense, as both were to some degree trained by the same woman, Chloe’s mother Julia. Still, certain other similarities seemed underlying.
There was a punching bag by the windows in the studio, a red and white leather cylinder dangling from chains amidst the otherwise mostly empty room. Leslie seemed to take some relief swinging at this representative of whatever or whomever her angst and sorrow might have derived. I couldn’t help but find some humor in the contrast between her only moderately powerful blows and the vision I had sometimes held of her as Kali, whose fiery rage loosed levels thousands with but one swing.
Leslie turned on some Indian or Middle Eastern music, and attempted to lead me in a dance. This is the moment I felt she was again or again fully the powerful woman or Goddess I had encountered in Laramie, forever etched in my memories: rhythmic tantric motions, sublime gyrations and flowing limbs hypnotizing, face and whole form radiating an aura of otherworldly substances, the air rarefied by her very presence—only this time her hands touching mine. I was not merely audience or voyeur, but also participant with her, much more intimately involved with this beautiful being and her divine bodily movements than when I had years before been mystified by her entrancing dance. Again I felt as if a novice, a fool, naïve and unworthy, a degree of insecurity I had not experienced for quite some time.
She took hold of my hand and moved her upper body to the right upon a wave rolling from one hand’s fingertips through arm and shoulders and arm to the opposite hand’s reach. Her instructions were authoritative, matching the certainty of her movements, and something of her glorious aura returned else was again unveiled to my eyes as she adjusted my body’s movements to her lead.
I have never been completely comfortable dancing with a partner (with the exception of a couple of times dancing salsa and meringue when I accompanied some friends in Chicago to a Latin club, my limbs loosened by a few cerveza or margaritas), and the awkwardness of my movement to hers made this endeavor short-lived, though I think she may not have actually intended this particular dance as partners to succeed.
This hesitance of partnered motion seemed not unlike the more general reservations I had placed upon my own prana (energy, vital breath) by the circumstances. We were both wary and weary. Not fully manifest right now. Not the proper moment to perform tandava or whatever sacred dance, not appropriate timing or perhaps placement for tantra asanas or fruition of devotional mantra to manifest, and of course little if any certainty we are properly matched partners, here, now, or elsewhere, to dance this particular dance divine.
Regardless of the seeming imperfections in this attempt at synchronous motion, I felt blessed to have seen Leslie’s radiant life-energy return, face-to-face and at close proximity to view in her something of the self-assurance and graceful strength that had first attracted my attention—or perhaps more accurately, mesmerized me—as I sat sipping coffee or tea and still laboring to perfect my Master’s thesis, a world in the past at Coal Creek coffeehouse in Laramie.
I am writing these words at the very coffeehouse, in fact, and perhaps yet another world away. After spiraling around the map, my movements might well have conveyed me further or at least elsewhere than whence I began this particular adventure, above or below or a dimension away from that past moment’s seeming same location. After all, how can one be certain even one’s hometown is the same place one knew before departing on a given journey? or even rest assured that as you get up each morning you are on the same plane or occupying the same dimension as when you went to bed the night before? that the woman (or man) you made passionate love to the night before is the same being you awaken to after the sun’s rise? I suppose it is faith, or unthinking acceptance of the fiction that things remain existentially the same, when in fact they may not at all.
Continued in next post...
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