Oy weigh iz mir

There once was a middle-aged fellow, call him Lamb Perdue, heavy and sad. Sad, that is, when he wasn't irritable and mean, mean to himself and to others. Divorced, lonely, and often feeling friendless and despondent, his depression kept him isolated, and as his hoarding grew and grew, and the trash piled in drifts like filthy snow, there seemed less and less possibility of lightening his load, or of gladdening his heart with visits from his dwindling friends, to say nothing of taking a lover! Who would want him, with so much flesh, and so much darkness?

He had stayed in therapy for years after his separation and divorce, only leaving his trainee when she was unable to accept his new forged covenant with cannabis, to pierce the darkness of his imprisonment. He made her cry, when he rejected her help, in favor of a forbidden medicine. The tactics and tricks he had learned with her, to identify his distorted thoughts, to challenge his hurtful beliefs, seemed like too much work for too little reward. He stayed depressed, and alone, and forgot his pain in the evenings an hour at a time, snug in the blissful embrace of cannabis.

Still, as the years of his life abandoned him, and his health declined, and his weight increased, and his joints got stiffer, and there was less and less room to dance or breathe in his little house, he still nurtured small flames of hope, deep in his imagination.

Three little flames Lamb kept burning in the hope of liberation from sadness: to outrun it with vigorous movement, to see through it with observant stillness, and to transcend it in the crucible of love. Movement, but not dancing, which challenged his awkwardness too much, but just a little exercise, to stir the blood, and maybe ease his bulky clumsiness. At the University, he pumped the machines with his arms and legs, and puffed and sweated and coughed, and sometimes felt better.

Closer to home, he found sangha with other seekers, and sat vipassana, and breathed, and coughed, and breathed some more, and coughed, and sent metta to the far corners of the universe, and sometimes felt better. But movement did not compel him, and stillness did not soothe him, and neither fed his deepest hungers, nor even showed him what they might be.

And all this time, season upon season, all the fragrant springs, all the smoky autumns, all these empty years, there were no playful dances of flirtation, no bright interludes of love, no urgent intimacies of bodies become one. Surely, he knew the rapture of infatuation, but only from afar, and he knew it had to be that way, for whenever he let slip his secret, his beloved would shy away, or scowl in anger, or pierce him with a shrug. Better to be almost alone, he said, alone but for dreams of my beloved, whoever she may be. I'll never stop longing. I must always long for someone, he said, and feed myself on dreams, or starve in silent agony.

And Lamb risked another experiment, to combine the stillness and the movement, and just by chance, he learned a hard lesson of love. Hatha yoga is millennia deep, and just as demanding, and his aching limbs could scarcely twist into the simplest asanas. He tried too hard for a couple of teachers, and then a teacher arrived who changed him, and his world. Her given name meant Bright Sanctuary in the old tongue. She was no child, but much younger than he, and very lovely, and kind and gentle, and above all, serious and skilled in the postures, the philosophy, and their teaching. 

Eros & Thanatos

Lamb's heart stopped when he first beheld her, and then beat so quickly. She had a generous, sensuous fullness from her father, a man of the south, and blue eyes and sharp cheeks from her northern mother, and her honeyed hair came from somewhere between. Her dazzling smile, like clouds parting for the sun, soothed and ingratiated all who found her, and only a few glimpsed the forlorn girl, the lost girl for whom the clouds always returned.

Her light, her shade, her kindness, her patience, her beauty, all enlivened with quick sparks of fury for obstacles, for foolishness and the tentative; all her qualities moved Lamb in ways that demanded much of him. Here, for perhaps the first time, he saw a woman he longed to give children, and for whose love he would joyfully pay any price, including his life. And while he knew this for a dream, it was a dream of great power, a power whose source he might find, and so he let his hopeless love grow.

And Lamb's love only grew, as she showed him his many fears, and the deep pain, resignation and neglect inscribed in his flesh. And harder, she showed him, with just her presence, his defects of character, of judgment, his frivolousness, and all manner of painful truths, all plain and simple in her glorious mirror. And as his image grew more flawed, so hers grew more sublime. And as his heart broke, as the true distance between them was revealed, so he clung all the harder to the beatific vision.

In the crucible of his aching heart, as his spirit guttered and threatened to extinguish, the yoga of bhakti, of devotion, of selfless love, was revealed to him, stronger than in his past infatuations, for his small self could no longer contain this great and powerful love. And then he began to see that it was not just Bright Sanctuary that he loved, that she indeed was becoming an outline without a face, a portal through which he saw, not just a pretty girl with a troubled spirit, but a goddess, a radiant incarnation of the divine feminine. 

And then Lamb knew he could not chase Bright Sanctuary and hope to encounter the goddess, for She did not so much reside in the girl, as hover, in subtle immanence, somewhere between his perception, and Her immortal realm. And worse, he could not hope to know Her, to find the source, for his only understanding of himself was as a weak and broken creature, a weary amalgam of flesh and spirit. This was not bhakti, for the goddess could not love him, or so he thought, to his despair. Nowhere in himself would he find Her counterpart; the idea did not even occur. He had no notion that the divine masculine could manifest through him, though that might have eased his pain. And when his teacher moved on, he lingered with other teachers for a bit, before falling away again into darkness, into years without bright sanctuary.