I was young; I was anxious; I was bound to an archaic concept of me.
She smoothed my mind and body with her sunny day thoughts and yoga softened hands.
I agreed to her assumptions and her understated demands.
That first summer we gloried in the eagerness of our interconnected bodies. Each morning we smothered each other in kisses that lingered after the passion had moved in the way it must. As our climaxes led us into stillness and soft murmurings we settled down with our pre-breakfast habit of figs and rooibois tea. We sipped the tea from hand-painted china cups. We chose the figs from the hand-blown glass bowl that always stood on the bedside table. We lay propped on a dozen bountiful cushions on our big round mahogany bed. We sighed in contentment as yearnings became satiated and bodies became still.
We marvelled as rays of fresh sunlight entered our bedroom window from over the bay. That light reflected from our crystals and dream catchers and from our eyes as we gazed lovingly into each others’ souls. We knew ourselves as privileged in our balconied and engardened beachside cottage.
And yet we took that privilege for granted, as our due, through our affirmative mind-states, and we congratulated each other unceasingly on the manifestations of abundance we continued to achieve from our lithe and positive young minds.
In the middle of those hot summer days, after she had gone to her job as a personal assistant in the city, as I sat alone at my desk in the blind-shaded front room, and tended to my freelance architectural design work, I often was visited by the long familiar pain and the longing in my heart for something I could not quite discern. I sometimes told her of these negative emotional events in the evenings as we ate our tempura and organic green salad, and we both agreed that with willpower and intent I could turn those feelings around to the light. She also seemed to have her black times when her moodiness and silences darkened the cottage and I tread softly so as not to disturb.
Together we denied the possibility that life could go in any other direction than how we planned. We spoke softly sometimes of the babies that would come to us at the right time. We did not take active steps to bring this about. We allowed our bodies to merge and we both deeply believed the souls who had already decided to come to us for caring in their preparation for a new lifetime of spiritual education on the material plane, would arrive at the moment of their own choosing. We felt snug with the investments that our families had set up for us on our marriage. We knew we would need to work in our professions for some time yet but that whatever happened some monthly income would accrue to us for the rest of our natural lives. We agreed it good to tithe a small sum regularly to the local charities as a mark of our humble duty and in recognition of compassion to the less fortunate.
We kicked sand along the beach as we walked in the cool evenings and sometimes we would laugh and proclaim “The world is our Oyster and a damn yummy one it be!” It was our little personal coupledom mantra, our mission statement for the life being created for us by our deeper intent as we moved resonantly into our love.
My anxiety and depression seemed to have faded from the constant presence it used to be. The regular brief visits of that darkness as I sat alone at my work desk just confirmed to me that I needed more people in my life. From the time I had met Aleena the year before, my emotional state had improved and there was no need to assume this was caused by anything than the finding of the love and companionship of my soul mate. Surely the remnants of lonely darkness would loosen away also as I began to socialise with the small circle of friends we were cultivating. We determined to attend a dinner party at least once every weekend and in between to have a few friends over for a nice cosy evening of games and white wine. I began applying for full time positions in architecture companies even though for the income there was really no need. People around me would perk up my slightly gloomy days, I believed. This perhaps was an ancient concept of me.
The Beginnings Of Intimacy:
Before the day Aleena had first invited me to her bed in her little apartment I had very little positive experience of sex and intimacy. Those arts had eluded me for the decade or so since I left school. A small number of young women had succumbed to my charms but a few weeks would go by and somehow they stopped returning my messages and my shyness prevented …
This Delivery was first published at 2 Rules of Writing, as An Archaic Concept of Me on February 10, 2022
Republished here as 2022 Delivery 2, February 2022 on March 25 2023.
This delivery contains also the first delivery. At the time I imagined including the previous delivery in every new delivery and extending the story, but I soon realised that process would become very unwieldy.
It is worth reading the start of the story again, now, as it sets up the dream that the young couple are entering into. It is perhaps good to reinforce the dream, and keep it in mind as we proceed, back in time before they met, and then later, into how their intimacy proceeded together.
I was young; I was anxious; I was bound to an archaic concept of me.
She smoothed my mind and body with her sunny day thoughts and yoga softened hands.
I agreed to her assumptions and her understated demands.
That first summer we gloried in the eagerness of our interconnected loins. Each morning we smothered each other in kisses that lingered after the passion had moved in the way it must. As our climaxes led us into stillness and soft murmurings we settled down with our pre-breakfast habit of Figs and Rooibos tea. We sipped the tea from hand-painted china cups. We chose the figs from the hand-blown glass bowl that always stood on the bedside table. We lay propped on a dozen bountiful cushions on our big round mahogany bed. We sighed in contentment as yearnings became satiated and bodies became still.
We marvelled as rays of fresh sunlight entered our bedroom window from over the bay. That light reflected from our crystals and dream catchers and from our eyes as we gazed lovingly into each others’ souls. We knew ourselves as privileged in our balconied and engardened beachside cottage.
And yet we took that privilege for granted, as our due, through our affirmative mind-states, and we congratulated each other unceasingly on the manifestations of abundance we continued to achieve from our lithe and positive young minds.
In the middle of those hot summer days, after she had gone to her job as a personal assistant in the city, as I sat alone at my desk in the blind-shaded front room, and tended to my freelance architectural design work, I often was visited by the long familiar pain and the longing in my heart for something I could not quite discern. I sometimes told her of these negative emotional events in the evenings as we ate our tempura and organic green salad, and we both agreed that with will power and intent I could turn those feelings around to the light. She also seemed to have her black times when her moodiness and silences darkened the cottage and I treaded softly so as not to disturb.
Together we denied the possibility that life could go in any other direction than how we planned. We spoke softly sometimes of the babies that would come to us at the right time. We did not take active steps to bring this about. We allowed our bodies to merge and we both deeply believed the souls who had already decided to come to us for caring in their preparation for a new lifetime of spiritual education on the material plane, would arrive at the moment of their own choosing. We felt snug with the investments that our families had set up for us on our marriage. We knew we would need to work in our professions for some time yet but that whatever happened some monthly income would accrue to us for the rest of our natural lives. We agreed it good to tithe a small sum regularly to the local charities as a mark of our humble duty and in recognition of compassion to the less fortunate.
We kicked sand along the beach as we walked in the cool evenings and sometimes we would laugh and proclaim “The world is our Oyster and a damn yummy one it be!” It was our little personal coupledom mantra, our mission statement for the life being created for us by our deeper intent as we moved resonantly into our love.
My anxiety and depression seemed to have faded from the constant presence it used to be. The regular brief visits of that darkness as I sat alone at my work desk just confirmed to me that I needed more people in my life. From the time I had met Aleena the year before my emotional state had improved and there was no need to assume this was caused by anything than the finding of the love and companionship of my soul mate. Surely the remnants of lonely darkness would loosen away also as I began to socialise with the small circle of friends we were cultivating. We determined to attend a dinner party at least once every weekend and in between to have a few friends over for a nice cosy evening of Games and White Wine. I began applying for full time positions in architecture companies even though for the income there was really no need. People around me would perk up my slightly gloomy days, I believed. This perhaps was an ancient concept of me.
The beginnings of Intimacy:
Before the day Aleena had first invited me to her bed in her little apartment I had very little positive experience of sex and intimacy. Those arts had eluded me for the decade or so since I left school. A small number of young women had succumbed to my charms but a few weeks would go by and somehow they stopped returning my messages and my shyness prevented me following things up. I always assumed there was something wrong with me as in my eyes they were perfect. I asked my male friends about this over a beer and inevitably they would advise me to man up and be more assertive about my needs and wants. I could not argue against that. I felt usually a murky presence in my mind that prevented me conveying much at all to my dates other than the pleasantries I knew were expected of me. The girls seemed confused too, claiming that yes they liked me, but then after a few times in the hay, just disappearing as if they had never existed.
Once I saw pretty Maria walking hand in hand across campus with one of the handsome and desired postgraduate high achievers and I made sure to change my pathway to avoid them seeing me alone. Just a couple of months before Maria had demanded I "keep going; keep going” for what seemed an eternity and I had summonsed up all my grit and determination to give her what she wanted, maintaining my thrusting in what I assumed was the constant firm rhythm she had explained she required, and after she let out a cry of passionate release that embarrassed me she went very quiet and lay inert in my arms before suddenly announcing her parents were expecting her for tea. I could not help but imagine if the burly muscled man walking with her was giving her something I could not achieve. And yet had I not lasted the distance? Women confused me.
I never told Aleena much about Maria or the other ones. She never asked and all I had said was I’d had some very disappointing short relationships before meeting her. She also did not offer details of her intimate life before me and really I just did not want to know. We silently agreed to imagine the past had never existed. In a sense that was so, because all I had imagined and experienced as intimacy turned itself inside out when I began laying with Aleena in the months before she became my wife.
When we married I had been out of university 3 years and had done my internship with the pre-eminent architecture firm to which my uncle had introduced me. It was a forgone conclusion that my uncle’s recommendation to his old school mates on the board would lead to my taking up the junior position on a fast track to a permanent job as an Architectural Design Engineer. Very little was demanded of me in the internship and I often spent my days drawing sketches of Eastern Pagodas or Rooftop Helicopter Pads that really had no hope of realisation in the briefs of the businesslike clientele who I met in the conference rooms at times. Somehow my drawings were incorporated into the First Consult Outcome Documentation that the clients paid immensely for, usually in an appendix with a heading like “Other possibilities”, or “Lateral Thinking Background”. By the Main Design Proposal my drawings had always disappeared, but I was always congratulated for the “Creative Input”. My uncle and I would have dinner monthly and always he would suggest that the managers were very happy with my progress. At that point he would usually remind me that if my father were still alive he would be very proud of me. I never knew how to reply to that as a knot in my stomach would appear from nowhere and I would cough into my ironed handkerchief and quickly pour myself a glass of Perrier from the magnum and as I recovered my composure I would ask politely if he would like some more water too.
I remember the days well, at the beginning of the second year in the company, and talk was that in the coming months the paperwork for the permanent position would need to be undertaken. I listened to my manager as he reminded me that the company had an obligation to its shareholders to advertise the position and interview only the top candidates. I was asked if I had read the position requirement statements thoroughly and could I think about how I would respond to questions like “What motivates me to deliver my best?” and “Please give an example of a project you delivered on that you are particularly proud of”. I always mumbled something as close to a yes as I could summons up and averted my eyes so the panic inside me could not be seen.
I cannot explain why these panic attacks came upon me so frequently at that time. I was really being given an easy ride into the company. The thought of needing to present myself well even to an audience who had previously decided that I would be given the role, overcame me with what I can only describe as apocalyptic terror. The facts just did not stand up. I could not explain myself even to myself and had not even endeavoured to discuss the attacks with any others aside from the counsellor I had found. I went to her only 5 times and was reluctant even with her to convey the extent of the panic. I described my condition as anxiety and she had stepped me through some thought patterns and breathing exercises and recommended I do some evenings of group therapy work that she led. I said I would think about that and had just not gone back. It had been 3 months since my last visit to her. The anxiety was the same and the attacks of panic arose as if from nowhere, periodically, giving me the feeling that I must be on the edge of normal sanity. I could not imagine committing myself to a professional routine and to keep up the front of composure that I seemed to have managed reasonably well thus far. I was considering just disappearing. Perhaps getting a plane ticket to Columbia and starting a new life.
In the evenings after the company disgorged its middle level workers at 5.10pm I walked a lot, aimlessly pacing the streets around the office, eating some Chinese noodles in a cheap cafe, wandering though the department stores inspecting new shirts and raincoats that I knew I did not need, before taking a late train back to my suburb. I could not throw away the conviction that I was being watched in all this. The people at the intersections waiting for the lights to change would always avert their heads slightly as I glanced at them as if to indicate ‘No, we are not looking at you.’ I would pretend not to notice. I practiced the steady slow breathing the counsellor had taught me. The anxiety was ever present and no amount of correct breathing could alter that, however the embarrassing edges where panic made me suddenly articulate - quite audibly - a fear like “I don’t want that!” abated and I could present myself as what I considered fairly normal. Some of the people in the streets were onto me though, I knew that.
I began composing an email to Cliff, the personnel manager responsible for my relationship with the company. I drafted and re-drafted it over a period of a week. It took up the majority of my time in that week, but nobody noticed, as there was no call for creative input into new client consultations. At one point the email was 17 paragraphs long with sub-headings, an executive summary and a conclusion. On the Friday morning before the week when interviews would be scheduled I summonsed up my courage and sent the latest draft. It was quite short by now:
Dear Cliff,
I have considered my options and feel my future is not best served in the company. I will not be following through with my application for the permanent position. I understand that officially my internship is out of date already and I thus give notice of one week before I depart. Do let me know if the company requires me to remain longer than that.
Regards
Stuart.
2022 Delivery 3, March 2022
In previous deliveries we meet Stuart and Aleena, as they begin married life together. They lead a life of comfort, and prospective wealth, and they take that privilege for granted, as their due, through their affirmative mind-states. They congratulate each other on the manifestations of abundance arising from their lithe and positive young minds. They feel their duty to tithe small funds to the less privileged as they kick sand along the beach. They allow their bodies to merge, trusting that babies will eventually arrive into their care for a new lifetime of spiritual education on the material plane.
They each have some dark shadow, that is not talked about much. We head back in time a little to discover Stuart's poor experience with the other sex before meeting Aleena. We discover his unhappiness and lack of direction in the job in his family firm, that had been handed to him on a plate. We learn of his loneliness and panic attacks as he aimlessly paces the streets after work. We read his resignation letter.
Dear Cliff,
I have considered my options and feel my future is not best served in the company. I will not be following through with my application for the permanent position. I understand that officially my internship is out of date already and I thus give notice of one week before I depart. Do let me know if the company requires me to remain longer than that.
Regards
Stuart.
I did not bother sending a copy to my uncle, but was not surprised when less than an hour later my uncle’s secretary left me a curt message on my office phone, “Mr Harris wishes to buy you dinner at Florentine’s this evening. 8pm".
Soon I also received an email response from Cliff:
Dear Stuart
Thank you for your email. I will treat this as provisional and not file it with your employment matters until you have had a day or two to consider. I know your uncle and family would wish us not to be hasty in this.
Regards
Cliff
To the Future - Where We Know Ourselves
That evening I arrived promptly at 8 at the front door of the restaurant. The maître d' recognised me as always, with a courteous, “Young Harris, how delighted we are to see you again this evening, come with me. We have seated your uncle and yourself in the Apricot Lounge and we expect your uncle will arrive in due course.”
I followed him as he moved swiftly amongst the tables of groups of suited businessmen and women and the occasional couple out for a night on the town in polished boots and fashion label denim and acceptably seductive lace. Without asking, the head waiter brought me a glass of lemon lime and bitters, and I was left with my thoughts for half an hour before the maître d' suddenly arrived back with my uncle looming behind him.
As usual we discussed the state of the market, which I knew very little about but could come up with the appropriate questions for him to ride on, then a short mention of the damn weather we have been having, and a request for me to decide between the duck and the trout. I knew I had taken the trout the last time we were here, so I just said “The duck sounds absolutely perfect”.
When the waiter had come back and taken our order and departed again, my uncle was silent for a bit then tapped his index fingers in consort on the place mat in front of him, as was his habit when he expected full attention, and pointedly asked “Well, Stuart, Cliff has told me you are wishing to move on from the company. Is that so?”
“Uncle, I think I need to find my own way in my career and I am not sure what to do next, I just know that I am not being challenged to my full potential at Garlena, Smith and Harris.”
“Challenged to your full potential!” he repeated, and raised the corner of his mouth in the way I had seen so many times before and called his “I need to be seen to be smiling, smile” and then he turned his head away for a moment and asked without looking at me, “And what does that mean to you?”
“I don’t even know that, Uncle. I just know I need to find myself”
There was a longer silence at that point and I really thought my uncle may have forgotten I was there as he gazed out over the potted shrubbery at the diners in the area below. Finally he said “Your father would have wanted me to convince you that you must buckle down and do what you need to and let these youthful thoughts fade away. I also am just about inclined to give you the same advice. But I cannot insist. You are clearly of an age where you must be allowed to make your own decisions and reap the rewards or consequences of that. When I was your age your grandfather put me in charge of the Harris Engineering Division and I felt I was not ready and asked for another few years in middle management. Harris senior just said to me “Ralph, You begin on Monday morning 8am in the executive suite. Don’t be late.”
He paused and gave his authentic charm smile that I so loved, “I was there at 7:30am with bells on my toes”. I smiled and gave a small chuckle of appreciation.
“But times move on” he said “And these days youth have their own minds and perhaps us oldies need to learn to accept that.”
I was silent, as I knew he was working towards his pronouncement.
“I am not happy with your decision but I will not ask you to change it Stuart. I will tell Cliff to finalise your departure and payout your entitlements generously. I anticipate you will have some time of being without an employer so I will request Cliff to arrange for the odd piece of freelance design concept work to be sent your way until you stabilise yourself.”
I nodded my head in solemn agreement. I was thinking that I would rather not have anything to do with the company again, but who could argue with the totally reasonable pragmatic and caring approach my uncle was laying down for me even as I had rejected the family’s golden offer.
“Stuart, as you know, your father’s capital is bound in the family trust until you are 50 years old. The interest that is your apportioned share is also bound until you are 35, or until you marry, whichever comes first. The endowment your mother passes through to you is sufficient for only your basic needs, we know. I personally have no way of altering any of those arrangements, my hands are tied by the deed of trust. How, may I ask, are your adventures with the feminine gender going? Anyone you fancy as yet? We had imagined you would be well and truly hooked up by now.”
I knew what he was getting at. The family had been aghast when my father’s will had been read and it was clear that nothing substantial would reach me as sole inheritor for quite a while. There had always been a ribbing and an encouragement to me to get married to the first young lady who comes along, nobody will be perfect you know, just make sure her family is well connected.
“Uncle, nobody is in my sights right now. I’ve been going out now and again but nothing seems to come to anything.”
My uncle put on his ‘considering this’ look and replied, “I just want to remind you that Muriel Smith-Hanson is still sitting at home waiting for her beloved to arrive. I am sure if you called on the Smith-Hanson’s they would find every opportunity to leave the two of you alone to get to know each other more. I know she is not the prettiest thing around but she does have a good mind and I am told she can rustle up a passable suckling pig or cream berry pie. Perhaps you cannot be too fussy now?”
I indicated that perhaps I would visit the Smith-Hansons soon, but I was really remembering the time Muriel had tried to kiss me in the Botanical Garden picnic pavilion and I had pulled away with a feeling of disgust and, yes, terror. Muriel’s good mind did not take no for an answer from anyone and from that time she had always teased me with her little pinky rubbing her bottom lip each time I chanced upon her at the Sunday afternoon music recitals or at somebody’s wedding or birthday party. The thought of hitching up with Muriel sent shivers down my spine.
My uncle seemed to notice none of that and just expressed again what a good idea it would be for me to get to know Muriel some more.
I was half way through my duck by this point and my uncle was making good progress on his rare sirloin steak and greens. We ate in silence for a few minutes and my uncle poured us each a glass of Chardonnay. He raised his glass and toasted me “To the future - where we know ourselves” I liked my uncle sometimes when he said such things.
“Shall we have some pecan pie and lemon gelato for afters?" he said, and without waiting for my answer put his hand in the air knowing without looking around that the waiter would be at the table in 10 seconds flat. Indeed he was and indeed the pie and ice dessert was delicious.
I thanked my uncle as we left the restaurant and he took my hand and said “Stuart I care for you as if you are my own son, you know that. Take care till we meet again” He hailed a cab and was gone. I walked slowly off towards the train station, wondering whether I was doing the right thing in leaving the company, or not.
End Delivery 3
2022 Delivery 4, April 2022
Author's note:
In our first delivery we find Stuart with Aleena soon after their marriage, in their beachside house together, sharing breakfast after a night of lovemaking. We get the sense they are living a life of privilege and exploring affirmative mind-states.
Since then we jumped back in time to dig around in Stuart's history, and, in the previous delivery to this one we find Stuart having dinner with his uncle who encourages him to get to know his childhood friend Muriel and accept that she is marrying material. His uncle thinks in terms of financial benefits of the union. Stuart thinks in terms of his lack of attraction to her.
Now in this delivery we become more familiar with the way Stuart thinks and the way his mind drives him relentlessly in circles. His internal self analysis is on autopilot as he wanders the streets alone. And he is not inclined to meet up with Muriel.
In later deliveries we will find out how Aleena and Stuart met, and then we will follow their story subsequent to the exquisite opening of their marriage, into their discovery that all may not be as rosy as first seems.
The World is Big. Keep Going, Son
As the late night revellers milled around me, my familiar sense of deep loneliness returned. I looked at the young women, some walking with their man, and some wandering alone, and some hanging out with their friends. I needed a hand to hold, and yet I knew from past experience that once that hand was in my own I would feel the pain even more, not less, and I knew that were I to hold that hand I would inevitably let it go.
Was my father’s business partner’s daughter so unacceptable? We had known each other since kindergarten. We had played innocently in each other’s sandpits. At one time - perhaps I was only 7, or 8 - I had confided to my mother, “I think I will have to marry Muriel when I am big, because I don’t know any other little girls.” I recall my mother’s smile, it was one of the last smiles she gave me before,… before the car accident. My mother had smiled and whispered, “Son, the world is bigger than you can possibly imagine. Keep going.”
As we moved on from childhood, and led our lives, and moved into adolescence and eventually towards adulthood Muriel had become increasingly alien to me. Our social lives were interwoven, given the interconnections of our business families, so we often met, and often were alone together. But she seemed to move her mind in another orbit to my own. She insisted on moving conversations away from the freshness of new ideas and into well trodden automotions of who and what and where. She seemed never to have the time to listen to the end of my own sentences, breaking in suddenly with whatever had been triggered in her own mind. I tried to cater for her own mind stream direction, but that direction was always the same, and always limited, and always constrained and circular, and I wanted to explore deeper, into ever new territory. I conveyed this at times to her and inevitably she would smile and say something like, “Oh, you do take things so seriously. Lighten up”.
Our times together became tedious to me. My uncle had not been aware of how much time we had already spent together. And how much it had led nowhere. I think it was always me who prevented those alone times moving into anything resembling intimacy. She had certainly conveyed that she was available. And as my uncle had asserted, the value of her connections was indisputable. And yet, I just could not meet her, in the places where I needed to meet someone. At the same time, I felt myself as unreasonable, and again and again attempted to accept her as she presented to me. The conflict in me seemed to not be noticed by her. At least, she never mentioned it.
Why was her kiss, in the pavilion, at 17, so unappealing to me anyhow? She certainly had intended the kiss to move onto more intimate contact. Her hand moving with slow certainty down my chest, and over my belly, and beginning to pull playfully at the belt of my jeans made that clear. As her hand moved insistently a primal response had certainly arisen in me, only to be pushed down immediately by something confused and wary in my own mind.
It was not only the risk that at any moment someone would walk into the pavilion, it was the conflict in me between letting go, and protecting my inner state of mind from being felt by another.
I knew that conflict then, in the pavilion with Muriel, and each of the few subsequent encounters with other women since then had started out the same. Movement below, stultification above. I always needed time to integrate, and I could not move on until I felt the surrender in me and the surrender in the other. And that did not seem to happen in unison.
Muriel was inclined to take command, to move her own energy into places where the invitation had not yet been made for entering. Perhaps it was only that, that dominant intent, that had made me cringe. Or was it really, actually, only the banality of her conversation?
I walked on, wanting to stop thinking about Muriel.
I considered a night club. But instead I spontaneously jumped onto the late night tram that was weaving its way through the high-rise apartments towards the harbour district. Some of the revellers pushed their way past me to claim the best seats.
I sat alone and tried to look like I was going home contented. The tram wobbled towards its destination. By the time I could see the ocean most of the revellers had disgorged. A young couple were kissing in the booth in front of me. I wanted to ask them to stop, but instead I took a cough lozenge from my pocket and pushed my indignance down.
At the end of the tram line the harbour road stretches along the ancient wharves. Towards midnight the lights are always low. The sea breaks incorrigibly against the pillars of the jetty. Seagulls still hunt relentlessly for discarded tourist snacks. Lonely men, and sometimes lonely women, are common here. On the docks they can imagine being carried away across the ocean to a brand new situation.
I came to the end of the jetty. I had come here often before. I allowed some tears to flow in the privacy of the night. I asked a God I no longer believed in, "Am I throwing away a comfortable future of career, of marriage, of security that you are gifting me?"
As always no answer.
But as I dried my tears I remembered the words of my mother, "The world is big. Keep going son."
I picked myself up. The trams had stopped running so I walked through the night the 2 hours to my apartment. I slept well. My mother woke me in my mind just after dawn and whispered, "Get up Stu, your life is just beginning”.
In the days that followed the meeting with my uncle, I swung back and forth from giving Muriel a call to arrange a date. I could never quite convince myself it would be good. I was lonely though, without even a workplace to distract me from my own inner gloom. I visited a house where young ladies provide themselves for a price, by the hour. Afterwards I felt the gloom even more. I considered seeking help from a psychologist. Again I swung back and forth. I just lacked the clarity to know what would lead me to a better place. Or perhaps I knew and was unwilling to take the necessary steps.
One time I was walking down High St, when I suddenly got it in me to break into a run. I had nowhere to run to but I knew I just had to run. Somehow the running was helping me leave a dark cloud behind. A dark cloud that had hovered over me for what seemed an eternity.
Families were strolling and shoppers were looking at the window displays. As I ran past, they turned and gave me a look like "What is wrong with him!". I was asking the same question of myself as I ran on, my legs seeming to have their own momentum. I came to the city square and finally could stop, heaving breathlessly as I had not really exercised for some time. I recall leaning down to catch my breath and the next thing I knew I was coming back from a dark place, and was lying on my back with a group of concerned matrons peering down at me.
"Are you OK, young fellow", they asked. I nodded but could not manage any words. One muttered to the other, "Too much to drink I suppose", and they walked on. I pulled myself up and managed to sit on the ledge surrounding a fountain, trying to look as normal as I could. It was hard though to look normal for in my mind I could hear voices like ravens calling out, "Run!, run for your life”.
Sometimes in the evenings I would go alone to a bar. I would get myself a drink and sit in a corner, waiting for someone to say hello. Nobody ever said hello. I would read the evening paper from cover to cover. Then I would summon up some courage to walk across the room and sort of hover around a group of young women and say something banal like, "Do you know who is playing later tonight?" They would look at me and giggle and not reply so I would slither away as if I had suddenly seen the band programme for the night, on the wall.
Other times I would stay in my rented room for days at a time. I would draw pictures of new settlements on the moon. Or ancient families eating bison in a cave. Or a young woman about to be married, and smiling at her man. I would sometimes weep as I felt that life was passing me by.
After the Mindfulness session I sat on a bench in the foyer drinking some jasmine tea that had been offered to me silently as I left the meditation hall. A few other participants were sitting around on various chairs and small tables. A man was intently perusing the leaflet stand as if searching for the lost chord or the holy grail. A few people just walked straight through the foyer and down the steps out of the building into the night. I wondered what value this evening had had for me. I did feel a lovely sense of calm but somehow the feeling that my life was pretty purposeless wrapped its arms around me as well. I tried not to frown, rather to smile slightly as I looked at the miniature waterfall next to the bench, in what I hoped was an appearance of rapt attention. I did not immediately notice that someone had very quietly sat on the other end of the bench perhaps only a metre away from me. A quiet cough drew my attention to her. She was looking at me, and when I turned my head towards her she commented, “You like water, I see”.
...
2022 Delivery 5, May 2022
Author’s note, May 8 & 9 2022.
I wrote the initialisation scene of this story, way back in 2017. My Evernote tells me the scene was first drafted 3 December 2017 at 17:52. The initialisation scene - edited a few times since 2017 - is found in Delivery 1 of the story. [Link to Delivery 1]
In that scene we find the couple - who I tentatively named Aleena and Stuart - relishing in the privileged life they are living in a house looking over the ocean. But the scene itself arose in my own mind to illustrate a particular way of thinking.
The way of thinking that was arising in my own mind as I wrote the scene was a ghost from my own past visiting me. We call it Manifestation Thinking. The ghost seemed to be visiting me, declaring, "Look at me again now, from a distance, as if outside me, and bring my essence into a showing."
And then, perhaps it was that ghost who fed my mind with the opening sentence from which the initialising scene, and then the entire story, unfolded:
"I was young; I was anxious; I was bound to an archaic concept of me."
Aleena and Stuart were born out of that sentence.
Aleena and Stuart believe that their thoughts determine reality, and positive thoughts - affirmations - are determining the reality of the privilege arising for them. At the same time, as the story proceeds, we find hints that Stuart is subjugating his own perspective-direction under the influence of Aleena’s stronger will.
This Manifestative way of thinking, the Law of Attraction, The Secret, was in the long-time-ago past my own way of thinking. Or more precisely, it was a practice I entered into, under the guidance of others. And, yes I did quite a bit of subjugating in past relationships.
"What is manifestation exactly? Essentially, manifestation is bringing something tangible into your life through attraction and belief.”
- Kimberly Zapata, in How to Manifest Anything You Want or Desire
The 1980’s was the decade I was most immersed in Manifestation Thinking. So in fact when I wrote the scene it was set in the 1980’s. Is it me reaching for the figs on the bedside table? Yes, and no.
Is Aleena one of the women I shared my soul with in my past life, around the 80's? Or a combination of them? Yes, and no.
The scene is a word painting arising out of my lived experience around that time. But it is a long time ago, and my ‘practice’ - if I could at all consider myself as having one - is - how to put it? I take Manifestation Thinking with a pinch of salt.
This may explain - in part - why the title “An Archaic Concept of Me” was chosen. There are other parts, other insinuations embedded in the title, but let's not go there yet, for it may pre-empt the ending of the story.
Now I am undecided whether or not the story is best set in the 1980’s as intended, or should be time-warped into the more recent past.
I was confronted with this choice when, in the writing of this particular delivery, from a rough sketch from years ago, I had Stuart reaching for his phone, and making a voice call to a number he reads on a shop window. But no, in the 80’s, we did not carry phones with us. So I removed the phone sentence, thus bypassing the decision of time-setting.
As to location of the story, we gather it is in a city somewhere, as there are luxury restaurants and trams etc. I suppose the city I lived in where my own Manifestation Thinking Process was most consciously undertaken was Adelaide, South Australia. 1984. I was 30 years old. I was young, I was anxious ...
The story is told in the first person perspective. Events arise as if inseparable from the mind of Stuart. The cogitations he goes through are as much a part of the story as who, what, where, and when. Perhaps even more so.
So the reader now begins to be more or less informed that some aspects of the story are derived from my own journey of transformation. Yes, I experienced despair and loneliness. But the piece is in essence fiction and the journey I have taken is like a thin line passing through a sphere of imagined situations that make the story travel. Or like a rope that a blind man grasps as he navigates a strange land.
It is all illustrating an Archaic Concept of Me. The title is a claim of a discarded self-understanding. Of the character, or of the author? Or.. both, and ... is the core self-understanding that the protagonist demonstrates, still, after all, part of me?
It also sits in my mind each time I come back into progressing these deliveries... is it time to change the title?
The ending of this story is already written years ago, early in 2018. As are various segments along the way. Currently,as we proceed through these deliveries, through 2022, I am filling in some missing scenes.
If the story is set in the 80’s the ending is also set in the 80’s, or perhaps early 90’s. We do not follow Stuart’s cogitative life past that.
If the story needs to appeal more to people who were not yet born in the 80’s perhaps it is prudent to reset it around 2012? It truly could be. Either way, perhaps relevance into personal self-understandings can be found here by many. Or at least some.
These deliveries onto 2 Rules of Writing began in January 2022. As we moved through the deliveries so far, we jumped back in time earlier than the initial scene, reaching a bit into Stuart's adolescence, into his engagement with, and perception of women, and the beginnings of his working life. Then we find him lost and alone, and at the conclusion of the previous delivery [link to delivery 4] we find him reaching for a purpose for his life.
In this delivery we find Stuart beginning to move on from despair, into seeking avenues of hope.
And, his discovery of the Mindfulness Community.
And what transpires from that.
Aleena and Stuart are in their mid or late twenties as we enter this delivery.
Always, the reader decides what to make of what the mind-artist throws on the cogitative word-stream canvas. Including this 'Author's note' which purports to stand outside the actual story.
,
Delivery 4 reminder:
As the late night revellers milled around me, my familiar sense of deep loneliness returned. I looked at the young women, some walking with their man, and some wandering alone, and some hanging out with their friends. I needed a hand to hold, and yet I knew from past experience that once that hand was in my own I would feel the pain even more, not less, and I knew that were I to hold that hand I would inevitably let it go.
....
Sometimes in the evenings I would go alone to a bar. I would get myself a drink and sit in a corner, waiting for someone to say hello. Nobody ever said hello. I would read the evening paper from cover to cover. Then I would summon up some courage to walk across the room and sort of hover around a group of young women and say something banal like, "Do you know who is playing later tonight?" They would look at me and giggle and not reply so I would slither away as if I had suddenly seen the band programme for the night, on the wall.
Other times I would stay in my rented room for days at a time. I would draw pictures of new settlements on the moon. Or ancient families eating bison in a cave. Or a young woman about to be married, and smiling at her man. I would sometimes weep as I felt that life was passing me by.
---
Delivery 5:
I felt safe in my rented room, even though life was passing me by. But always some inner imperative insisted I move out into the world. There were people out there, and in my locked away aloneness there was only me. I believed I was not enough without those other people. So I continued to seek out activities where people gather for a purpose. A bar implicitly has a purpose, but I began to feel less and less hope each time I found a new bar. Perhaps I would find engagement in a place of more explicit purpose. I believed if I could find purpose I would also find engagement.
One fortuitous day on my solitary ramblings through the city, I saw a poster on a shop window: “Bee Mindful Community”, it was headed. I scanned through the rest of the text:
“Are you unable to find the contentment that is your due? Are you seeking for answers outside yourself? Is it perhaps time to sink down deeply into your own radiant being?
We are a community of people just like you. We meet every Wednesday evening for two hours of Mindfulness Practice.
It is not only a solitary activity. We look inside ourselves in silence and then we join together into sharing our own insights about ourselves. We might dance a little. In this way we harness the energy of each other to break through the energetic barriers that prevent our own self-discovery.
You are welcome to join us. No commitment. If it is for you, you will stay with us.”
And then there was a phone number.
A few days later I rang, and the next Wednesday evening I found myself in the Mindfulness Session.
Photo by Ivan Samkov, on Pexels
As we sat scattered around the room, eyes closed and breathing slowly and deeply, we were given instructions like:
"What is the feeling in your lower back right now, as you sit on your cushion? Stay with that feeling. Breathe in, breath out and notice. Nothing more to do than notice. We will come back in 20 minutes to check in with each other.”
Eventually we were invited to open our eyes. Eventually. I was sure the facilitator has passed away, abandoning us in eternity.
“Take some time to connect with yourself. Remain silent for a few more minutes while staying inside yourself. Be present in that.”
I peered around at the other people carefully. I wanted to appear as if I was connecting with myself, while really I wanted to connect with someone else. A few of the women caught my eye. None seemed to be aware of me at all. The facilitator must have noticed I was checking the people out. He was smiling at me. I tried to look contemplative. He kept on smiling and then began to turn up the music. It seemed like some Himalayan monks chanting, and they did not seem happy. He invited us to chant together. I had no idea what the words were but some people seemed to know. I tried my best to follow along, at least keeping my lips moving. After a few minutes the chanting stopped and the facilitator asked if anyone had something to share about what they had become aware of in themselves during the session.
Five or six people spoke. One guy seemed to want to tell his entire life story starting with the trauma of his childhood, and letting out a few tears. An older lady beamed and declared she had realised her connection to source. I had no idea what that meant. A couple of people shared they found it difficult to still their mind. I nodded my head in agreement. The facilitator offered:
“Just do not be concerned with stopping the mind or altering it in anyway, our task here is to watch it. Be mindful of whatever is occurring. Sit in the depth of your feeling. Be attentive. That’s all”.
He seemed to be looking directly at me, so I nodded my head again.
“That’s all? Feel it deeply? I just want those feelings to go away.”
I felt like a phony. I managed a small laugh inside myself as I caught the thought, “Just watch that phoniness, sit in the depth of that phoniness, Stuey”.
I did not share my experience into the room, and felt reasonably comfortable with that, because quite a few others did not share, also.
Eventually the facilitator started the music again, this time with a more upbeat song, and he invited us to stand up and dance. I felt embarrassed. I shuffled around and hoped the track would not be too long. At the end of the track the facilitator called out:
“Amazing energy, all of us. See you all next week."
Meeting Aleena:
After the mindfulness session I sat on a bench in the foyer drinking some jasmine tea that had been offered to me silently as I left the meditation hall. A few other participants were sitting around on various chairs and small tables. A man was intently perusing the leaflet stand as if searching for the lost chord or the holy grail. A few people just walked straight through the foyer and down the steps out of the building into the night. I wondered what value this evening had had for me. Now that it was over, I did feel a lovely sense of calm but somehow the feeling that my life was pretty purposeless wrapped its arms around me as well.
I tried not to frown, rather to smile slightly as I looked at the miniature water feature next to the bench, in what I hoped was an appearance of rapt attention. I did not immediately notice that someone had very quietly sat on the other end of the bench perhaps a metre away from me. A quiet cough drew my attention to her. She was looking at me and when I turned my head towards her she commented, “You like water, I see”.
Photo by Eva Elijas, on Pexels
I knew this was an offering to chat but in the moment my mind went blank and all I could think was, “No, I was just pretending to be engaged with something so I would not look like a loser”. I am sure my mouth opened once or twice as my mind fought with itself to not convey such a ridiculous thing. Eventually I replied, “Yes, it is so tranquil don’t you think?”
“Water is a symbol of ease in movement and change,” she offered. I wondered if she was an expert in this. She went on, “when we see water it is a good opportunity to reflect on where we are heading and how we would rather move”. She smiled slightly and just looked into my eyes. I am sure I blushed. I hate it when I blush. I managed to ask, “Do you study such things?”
“I dabble in many aspects of the great mystery”, she whispered.
“And I come to these kind of evenings as much as I can. I think a life spent just adapting to the demands of society is a waste. I like to find out how other people have managed to transcend the mundane. I imagine you do too, or you would not be here.”
She peered at me as if waiting for me to confirm that I was indeed seeking some higher truths. I just nodded my head and said “Life can be a challenge at times”. She smiled at that and said “Challenges are opportunities in disguise, you know, and we can create the energy field that we want to abide in”. Again I nodded, but I was feeling quite a bit out of my depth.
She stood up, as if to go. I was disappointed. I imagined she might have settled in for more of a get to know each other. I mumbled something about enjoying her viewpoint and could we meet again? She seemed not to hear all of that and just replied “Oh yes, I like to keep my perspective fresh at all times”. With a huge smile she turned towards the stairs, then over her shoulder just said “I hope you are here next week too, I will be”, and down the stairs she went, lightly like a kitten playing at being a balloon.
I wanted to call after her “What’s your name?” but I could not disturb the reverent silence that had fallen over the foyer now that we had stopped talking. The man at the leaflet stand had been watching us, I saw now, and when he noticed me looking at him he nodded his head to the staircase and said “Lovely girl”. I turned my attention back and she was nowhere to be seen. I stood up to go and at the bottom of the steps saw her riding her bicycle off down the High Street hill.
I ambled up the hill a block to where my car was parked. I climbed in behind the wheel and just stared through the windscreen for ten minutes, deep in thought about girls who like water and imagining how she might look in a bikini. Finally I pulled myself out of that, started the engine and drove carefully to my house.
That night I slept peacefully for the first time in many months. But, in the early hours of the morning I had a long dream about travelling to a snowy mountain top where people looked after each other in houses made of glass and I was treated like a long lost relative for a season until the snow began to thaw and silently one by one my new family just disappeared. I was left alone on the mountain top and there was no obvious way for me to climb down. I looked up at the sky and an eagle hovered overhead. It slowly began to descend towards me. In my dream I felt unprotected on the rocky top of the mountain and I did not know if the eagle wanted to rescue me or to eat me.
Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger, on Pexels
I began to awake and for a moment or two believed deeply that I had made a huge mistake going to the mindfulness evening because clearly the beautiful girl was a witch in disguise. Why else would this warning be coming to me in my dreamstate?
My rational mind slowly came back into existence to do its job and announced to me that it was time to get up and all this silly nonsense about eagles, girls and witches was to be forgotten.
As I went about my daily activities I managed to let go of the eagle and the witches but the girl kept playing in my mind enticing me to imagine her coming out with me to the movies and the night of passion we would abandon ourselves to almost before leaving the cinema.
Again, I wished I knew her name. I began to count down the days and hours until the next Mindfulness Evening.
Coming up next: Stuart discovers a new trajectory for his life, and we witness his first night with Aleena.
2022 Delivery 6, June 2022
Here we are, about to read the sixth delivery of ‘An Archaic Concept of Me’.
In the initiating delivery we found Aleena and Stuart enjoying a new morning of privilege, waking for breakfast in bed, with water views, figs and all.
Here is an image that might trigger our memory of that first delivery:
As we proceeded into Delivery 2 we backtracked into understanding the story of how the pair came to be in bed together eating figs. We hear the story via the voice of Stuart. We discover he quit his well-paying job because of anxiety and panic attacks, and we perhaps empathise with him as he feels a lack of success in relationship with women.
In Delivery 3 we find out the basis for his life of privilege, being born into a moneyed corporate family. We meet his wealthy uncle, a kind but distant figure. We begin to understand that Stuart is perpetually conflicted in his own decision making.
In Delivery 4 we are privy to more details about a past relationship that left Stuart dissatisfied, and which he was not inclined to continue. We perhaps feel into the pain of his ongoing isolation.
In Delivery 5, as a prelude, we are offered the voice of the author as he reflects on his own story of writing about Stuart and Aleena. He wonders how much of Stuart is in fact reflected out of his own life-journey. As we return to the voice of Stuart we find him taking on some control of his own experience, beginning to attend mindfulness evenings.
And yes, we perhaps sense where the deliveries are heading, for at the first mindfulness evening he meets a young woman who he really wants to get to know.
And now, as promised at the conclusion of Delivery 5, we head towards their first night together. Hang on In There, there may be some explicit adult content coming up.
Delivery 6. Which we may subtitle: “Wait. Feel The shoulder Energy.”
On the third evening of Mindfulness I summonsed up the courage to suggest we see a movie together. I had researched, and found a sensitive love story, hoping that would encourage us into a certain space together.
I had learned her name was Aleena. I liked the sound of it. It conveyed a certain soft rhythm like a stream melting its way down a hill. I wanted to follow that stream. I wanted to lay down in that stream and feel it passing over me. I wanted to drink from that stream. I wondered if other men fall in love so quickly and so totally. And why this total immersion had not ever happened to me before.
We were sitting on the bench next to the water feature, where we had first met. She had been telling me about the way the world bends to accommodate us when we affirm our intentions clearly in the light-filled energy field of our higher mind. I had nodded as if I could find light in my mind. She had turned to me and asked, “Does that make sense to you, Stuart?”
“Somewhat”, I replied.
She grinned. “I can see you have your doubts.”
“It is just that I don’t quite know how to do it yet. I trust our teacher just before when he said ’No need to try, the light will enter you, you do not need to pull it in.’ I trust that, and I trust you, but no matter how hard I don’t try, there is always a sense of trying inside me. Not light. Just trying.”
She looked in my eyes and did not say anything. I had not met anyone before who could just look in my eyes without commentary. I found myself able to look back, although blinking quite a bit. She held my gaze for perhaps 15 seconds like that. Eventually she whispered, “I like you”.
I almost burst out with what I had been rehearsing during the mindfulness session:
"The Regent is showing a preview of 'All the Love’, on Sunday evening. Would you care to come with me?”
She nodded her head. She smiled. “Yes, Stuart, I would care to come. I do like you.”
We arranged that we would meet in the cinema foyer at 7:45pm. As we agreed on that, she stood, touched me briefly on the shoulder without speaking, and then, like the first evening, she was skipping down the stairs like a kitten. She turned her head briefly at the exit and smiled again.
I waited on the bench. Not wanting to appear as if I was following her. The session facilitator came by and said, “We need to lock up now, see you again next week?”
I replied, “Yes. This mindfulness thing is all very good for me”. He seemed about to want to deliver some further wisdom, but caught himself, and said “Great, see you then.”
Over the next few days I stayed in my rented room, often pacing up and down, nervously. But finally Sunday evening arrived.
I cringed as the bedroom scene filled the giant screen in front of us. Barry with his full moustache and rotund biceps slowly easing Mellisa's singlet top over her head as she sighs in anticipation.
I imagined Aleena sitting beside me thinking, “Now we all know why this guy invited me to come to this movie on this night.”
How embarrassing. But then I felt her hand reaching for mine, and staying. Her hand was warm, and very steady. I thought, “This girl is a goer. She knows what she wants.”
And it came to pass.
The first night with Aleena:
We went for a drink after the movie, and as we sat at the bar she again reached her hand into mine. I felt the steadiness of her contact. I felt somehow validated. I felt welcomed. I wondered if she could feel steadiness in my hand as well. I could feel my own heart beating a little faster than usual. I sipped my wine and made conversation. She followed my conversational lead as if she was born to hear and understand me. Sometimes she offered a few pieces of her own life, but she seemed not to want to go into that too much, and continually turned the conversation back to me. I felt all this as something I had been yearning for all my life.
Late in the evening we came back to my room. We sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed. We were silent. I assumed she was waiting for me to move. I put my arm around her waist and she did not pull away. I slowly moved my hands up her body to her shoulders. I began to move my hands, ever so slightly, down towards her breasts.
“Wait” she said. I took my hands off her body. Evidently I had made my move too soon.
She silently took my hands in hers and returned them to her shoulders.
“No, stay there, just don’t move forward with your hands or even in your mind. Feel my shoulder energy. Only move after you are sure you can engage and resonate with that energy.”
I tried to feel that energy. I had no idea how to engage with energy. I could feel my hands uncomfortably resting on her shoulders and I could feel the slight warmth of her skin but I could not really say I could feel shoulder energy. I opened my eyes.
“I don’t know what that means”, I said. She just laughed and said “I know. I can feel you not feeling it.”
"It feels like you want me to be very slow", I offered.
The development of sexual abandon:
She did not reply, instead she rolled back onto the bed, pulling me with her. "No, I want you to be very connected." She began to unbutton my shirt, and then unbuckled my belt.
Somehow a few seconds later we found ourselves naked on the bed, with our clothes on the floor.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. She smiled. “I would not be here if I did not want it. I want you to take me. I want it now and I want it connected.”
I thought again, “Well, this girl knows what she wants.”
So I began stroking her arms tenderly, slowly, and - I imagined - mindfully, connectively.
She laughed. “Not like that”. She took my hand and placed it on her breast, holding it closely against her nipple. “Like that”.
I felt her nipple firming and I began to be aroused as I had not experienced for a very long time. She looked into my eyes.
“I assure you that you can move your energy across the entirety of my body including the bits men love so much and you can do that in about 15 minutes and you will enter me still connecting up the energies and I will cum delightfully and you will cum massively and then we will rest and 15 minutes later we will begin again. I assure you of that, … if you really connect your source energy up with mine at every physical touching point we can dance through it all in 15 minutes. And do it again and again, before we fall asleep.
The way you are going though will take us 15 days.”
She laughed again and stroked my chest assuringly. I wanted to ask her if she had experienced that 15 minutes thing and with who, but I backed off, deciding I just did not need to know. Instead I just said “I want to learn how to do that with you”.
“There is no learning, there is only doing” she whispered.
And with that cliché, even I laughed, and I relaxed, and I pulled her towards me, and felt our energies merge, a few moments before our bodies followed into wild abandon.
The remaining 2022 Deliveries will be published soon. And the 2023 Deliveries are also forming.
2022 Delivery 7, July 2022
A Moment of Authory* Self-Reflection
Some months back, I’m half way through writing the book before I notice almost all of it is internal narrative of the main character.
I had been considering going back to edit it towards more external action, and less dominated by early-adult thought-angst of not fitting in.
But then I realised (and claimed for myself),
“No this is the book I write. This stream of consciousness arises from my world as I knew it. I lived in a very introspective world. Perhaps a self-indulgent world, perhaps a world that was ready for transformation via mindfulness. Either way, this writing perhaps conveys the pain, and the value, of mind that is full of itself, and mind learning to know itself, as experience happens around it. As I write into the fiction of Stuart finding Aleena, I focus on Stuart's own mind. This is the way that seems inevitable for me to write it. Others can do the other ways."
I mentioned this on Facebook a few days ago, about tending to write from internal narrative, and someone replied simply: "How very Virginia Wolf of you."
* Yes, Authory is now a word.
,
Where we began, way back in January 2022
I was young; I was anxious; I was bound to an archaic concept of me.
She smoothed my mind and body with her sunny day thoughts and yoga softened hands.
I agreed to her assumptions and her understated demands.
Where we were at, at the end of Delivery 6, mid June:
The way you are going though will take us 15 days.
She laughed again and stroked my chest assuringly. I wanted to ask her if she had experienced that 15 minutes thing and with who, but I backed off, deciding I just did not need to know. Instead I just said “I want to learn how to do that with you”.
“There is no learning, there is only doing” she whispered.
And with that cliché, even I laughed, and I relaxed, and I pulled her towards me, and felt our energies merge, a few moments before our bodies followed into wild abandon.
Where we go now, into Delivery 7:
We never really perfected the 15 minute thing. And I began to feel that Aleena sometimes just mouthed some of her affirmative proclamations for effect. But her effect on me was exhilarating. In the days after our first love-making session we discovered each other’s hot spots, searched each other’s souls, and jumped in and out of each other’s beds like micro-dosed rabbits. The 15 minute timer dissipated. Neither Aleena or I felt the passing of time at all. We lay and romped in the proverbial garden of Eden and we were alone, and complete, and newly born.
The days turned into weeks and then months. We never talked about the future. We somehow silently agreed that we did not want to risk the moment with promises we would not keep, or even intentions that would not come to pass.
Aleena seemed to have a job to go to, but many days she just forgot to go. I asked her about her work, but she just returned, “It is so boring, being a worker in the machine, I’d rather snuggle up with you. Don’t talk about boring things.”
“But won’t your boss call you in for a talk?”
“She has tried that many times, and I just forget to go to her office.”
“And they keep you on?”
“Ha! They would have Estreda to answer to if they lift their H.R. hands!”
“Estreda?”
“My Great Auntie.”
I wanted to find out more. It felt weird that I knew her body and mind from top to bottom but did not quite know what she did for work. But when I persisted she would roll over on her belly, put her hands back over her ears and call out, “I am deaf blind and dumb, Take me!”
So, inevitably I took her. All the time knowing it was she who was taking me.
Photo by Any Lane from Pexels
In between Taking Each Other in Bed, we took each other to our favourite places in the city.
Aleena liked to take me to Fringe Theatre events. Like the one where the audience was on the stage and the actors were out in the stalls. They roamed around, in a range of costumes from disparate eras, calling to us:
“Desist from the tired old ways, and come and join us down here.”
But when we laughingly began to climb off the stage another mob of them would be there, ordering us back:
“Go back to where you belong Serfs!”
And in the Dress Circle we could just make out naked feet and arms appearing above the balustrade, as if an orgy were happening that the audience was not being invited to view, and voices calling out:
“Do it to me, do it to me one more time.”
In the interval we were given copies of Mao’s Red Book, a CD of Early Medieval Chanting, [a subscription to FanBurners], and a Balloon with our Name on it.
We agreed it was not wise to try to make rational sense of all this. We held hands and whispered love messages to each other [as if to form protective solidarity against the confusions of life] .
I took her to the bar where I used to go when I was lonely. I wanted her to understand what she had saved me from.
I knew little about what girls drink in bars. I assumed they liked sweet pink things with bubbles and little sticks or umbrellas coming out. But no. When I asked her what she would like to drink, she whispered, “Double Dark Rum, Neat”. Of course I smiled and said “Dark Rum for 2, it will be.”
And when we sat in the little alcove where I had reviewed the evening papers so many times, alone, I began to explain how much she meant to me. She would hang her head as if she was listening intently, and when I had finished my sentences she would look up, and say, something like:
“I hear you Stu, we are both fortunate, but never forget we do not own each other and never can. People like us are born free, and we come from a long line of interstellar voyagers, and this planet is not our home.”
I never knew how to respond to such. Maybe it was true. I did not want to argue against her ways of understanding, nor did I want to affirm. So I would say something like:
“I love adventuring with you.” The non-committal me, matching the non-committal she.
It did not matter, what she said, what I said, at the end of the evening we would whisper to each other, something like, “Whose turn to be Master, this night?”
On the nights she was master, I submitted and abandoned my power to her. On the nights I was master she did what I commanded, and yet… I felt and knew where the power was held, and it was not in me.
Mindfulness fades into the background
We only returned to the mindfulness evening once. As we walked into the room, hand in hand, the facilitator welcomed us with a smile, then a wry look, like “Aha! I knew it.”
We took our places, deliberately on opposite sides of the room.
Part way through the introductory closed-eyes mindfulness meditation I opened my eyes, as I was curious about the other people in the room. Aleena was sitting like a guru, perfectly composed, eyes closed, seemingly in a trance. I moved my eyes around the room, curious about the others. A young woman caught my eyes at the moment she turned her head towards me. She smiled briefly, before closing her eyes again. I recalled the earlier sessions when, as a single man I had checked out the women, and none seemed to even notice my existence. Now it seemed this woman was checking me out. I grasped the irony of it, that now I was in energy connection with a woman I was felt as desirable by other women. Or this is how I constructed it all in my own mind.
I felt complete in the moment, and could allow myself to return to inner contemplation.
After the session Aleena and I left the building quite quickly. It seemed neither of us wanted to connect with the other people.
At times in her room or mine we sat silently, each in our own space, but we did not discuss mindfulness again.
In all this we began to know each other deeply. And the connection between us became tighter and tighter.
And yet, was it so simple and clear? I sometimes looked in her eyes and she turned her gaze away and I thought, "what did I just see, that she did not want me to see, and why was it so dark"?
Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
The Darkness Sometimes Crept Between Us
In the third month of us being together an incident brought up much concern in me.
We were in the park walking, holding hands. A tall well-dressed middle-aged man came from behind and passed us in a fast stride. When he was about 5 metres ahead of us, suddenly Aleena let go of my hand and ran towards him, grabbing his waist and calling out, “Hector where have you been?”
I saw him turn his head towards her and I clearly heard him say, “I don’t know you Ma’am, you seem to mistake me for someone else". But just as clearly I saw him reach into his trouser pocket and hand something small, like perhaps a business card, to Aleena. She put the item into the pocket of her own jeans. She whispered something to him, that I could not make out. He shook his head as if to say, “no”. He gently pushed her arm away, and walked on at a fast pace. Aleena stared after him, and then slowly came back to me.
I said, “Who was that?”
She replied, “I was mistaken, I thought he was an old friend.”
“What did he give you?”
“Nothing. He gave me nothing. What are you so worried about? He was just a guy, and nothing to do with me, and now he has gone.”
But as she was speaking, she was still looking down the path, towards where he was disappearing around a bend.
I took her head in my hand and gently turned her eyes towards me. She looked at me for a few seconds. Inside myself I cringed.
The darkness I had seen a little of previously, on occasion, was now indelibly scratched into my soul. She turned away and let out a soft groan.
“Forget it, forget it, I am not really like that. It has gone.”
She took my hand and pulled me forward into her arms. “See? Feel me, I am of the light, and we are joined in the higher realms. Let’s go home. Who is the master tonight?”
I felt I could not press her anymore. I felt concerned, or even quite afraid. We walked home in silence, and in the bed also, we made love without speaking, and fell asleep immediately afterwards.
The weeks went by again, and we never mentioned the incident. I began to think she was right, she was of the light, and I had seen in her eyes merely a reflection of my own long journey of darkness.
But, the undertone of concern it raised in me, sat inside me, from then on. I loved her so much though, that I felt I could live with that concern, and even with the darkness, whether it was in her, or in me.
We move into speaking of the future.
Something changed in her though after that strange incident in the park. She began to speak dreamily, of a future together, where we would have children and a little house by the sea. I encouraged the possibility, but whenever I would attempt to make it more tangible, with a suggestion of a marriage in the spring, or a joke about getting old together, she would back off and say something like, “Not now, Stu, we need to wait until we are sure.”
I did not feel she was leading me on, just that she could not quite commit. I found in myself the patience to wait on her timing. I myself, was ready.
We were still very happy together. The concerns seemed like minor ripples in a stream of timeless delight. We did not need to worry about money, I still had the handsome payout from my employment, and she seemed to get paid whether or not she turned up to work. We sometimes ate at expensive restaurants, and whenever we did, I would invariably think of my Uncle, 6 months previously, raising his glass of Chardonnay and toasting me, “To the future - where we know ourselves”.
So much had changed in me in those 6 months. I almost could believe I was on the verge of knowing myself.
Photo by João Jesus from Pexels
Where we go next time (mid August):
The mutual proposal:
We walked along the wharf hand in hand. On Tuesday afternoon it was quiet. The few tourists took photos with their smart phones and cameras. We did not say much. The million dollar yachts tied up at the little jetties seemed to reinforce the notion that abundance and good living would be with us wherever we went. They did not need to belong to us, they just complimented our own ownership of things that make our life interesting. We stopped to look in a souvenir shop. Aleena wanted to buy me a Drover’s hat with corks hanging off the rim but I said “No, please don’t. I would just look like a silly duffer in that” She scrumpled up her eyes in that irresistible way and laughed “You ARE just a silly duffer, Stu Baby love.” But she put the hat back on the shelf and we moved on to look at the stuffed koalas.
We spied a home-made gelati kiosk...
2022 Delivery 8, August 2022
Where we left it in Delivery 7:
We move into speaking of the future.
Something changed in her though after that strange incident in the park. She began to speak dreamily, of a future together, where we would have children and a little house by the sea. I encouraged the possibility, but whenever I would attempt to make it more tangible, with a suggestion of a marriage in the spring, or a joke about getting old together, she would back off and say something like, “Not now, Stu, we need to wait until we are sure.”
I did not feel she was leading me on, just that she could not quite commit. I found in myself the patience to wait on her timing. I myself, was ready.
We were still very happy together. The concerns seemed like minor ripples in a stream of timeless delight. We did not need to worry about money, I still had the handsome payout from my employment, and she seemed to get paid whether or not she turned up to work. We sometimes ate at expensive restaurants, and whenever we did, I would invariably think of my Uncle, 6 months previously, raising his glass of Chardonnay and toasting me, “To the future - where we know ourselves”.
So much had changed in me in those 6 months. I almost could believe I was on the verge of knowing myself.
The mutual proposal:
We walked along the wharf hand in hand. On Tuesday afternoon it was quiet. The few tourists took photos with their smart phones and cameras. We did not say much. The million dollar yachts tied up at the little jetties seemed to reinforce the notion that abundance and good living would be with us wherever we went. They did not need to belong to us, they just complimented our own ownership of things that make our life interesting.
We stopped to look in a souvenir shop. Aleena wanted to buy me a Drover’s hat with corks hanging off the rim but I said “No, please don’t. I would just look like a silly duffer in that”. She scrumpled up her eyes in that irresistible way and laughed “You ARE just a silly duffer, Stu Baby love.” But she put the hat back on the shelf and we moved on to look at the stuffed koalas.
We spied a home-made gelati kiosk with a few tables on a little terrace shaded from the sun by a canvas canopy. I bought two double flavoured waffle cones and we sat down to enjoy them. As we licked the melting ice I decided now was the time. I opened my mouth and said “Aleena, I have something to ask you”. She stopped licking her gelati with her tongue still poised in mid air. She turned to face me and seductively slid her tongue through the air. She reached for my hand and looked in my eyes and just said “Yes, Stuart, I will marry you.”
I blinked. I had been ready to take the huge risk of hearing her usual non-committal kindness. But here was her total agreement.
I said “Lina, how do you know that is what I want to ask?” She said “Oh Stu, you silly duffer boy, women like me just know theses thingses. I was waiting all day knowing today is the day. When you bought me a gelati and we sat down here I just knew that the moment in the day was fast approaching. How do I know? I don’t know how I know.” She stroked my hand. “Now tell me I am wrong and you wanted to ask me what time it is.”
And here she is sort of implying it had been me all the time, tardy with my own commitment. But no time to analyse myself right now, this is the moment I had been waiting for, for many many months.
I said “Oh, however could I live without you. Of course I want to ask you to marry me but now the whole scenario of me asking formally has been ruined by your all knowing perfect little brain”.
I smiled and she gave me her melted look.
“Let’s pretend I did not know you were going to ask that and I said Yes. What do you want to ask me, Stuart Harris?’”
Occasionally she used my formal name, and evidently this dignified decorum was called for right now.
We both laughed and she tickled me under the arms and I threw back my head and said quite loudly, “Oy, lady, get your hands off me!” The other people on the terrace turned in a moment of alarm but when they saw two young lovers having such a beautiful time they grinned and returned quickly to their own ice creams.
I said “Aleena Beamont, I request your hand in marriage. I know I am unworthy of your magnificence but I am sure over time I can learn to meet your standards of spiritual purity. Please do say yes or I will go back to the tourist shop, buy myself the yobbo hat with the hanging corks and leave the city to wander amongst bullocks and 'roos and disappear from your life forever.”
She laughed. “Well done, that’s the best marriage proposal I ever had. Let me check my prior commitments and I will get back to you” … I raised my hand as if to strike her in fury but turned the gesture into a soft stroking of her hair.
“Yes beloved man, yes”, she said, “Of course yes, I will marry you, you are mine and I am yours”.
A small tear came to my eyes. She reached across to wipe it with her finger tip. “I love you forever” she said.
We sat for awhile in silence looking deeply into each other’s transparent souls.
We set a date for our wedding. We were wanting it to be soon, and we decided 3 months away was not too soon and not too far away.
Would it be a traditional wedding?
I asked her, and she looked confused.
"You mean me in white and a flowing... what's it called, a cape?”
“I think you mean a Train, honey. A Train is what flows out behind you.”
“I don’t want that. How about I wear a sarong.”
“A Sarong? My Uncle would Not Be Pleased.”
“Your uncle will be at the wedding? I assumed it would just be you and me and the registry clerk.”
“I have family obligations.”
“Since I have known you, you have hardly even mentioned your family. Except the time you woke up in the darkness of the night calling out, ‘I can’t do that!’. And I woke, and murmured, ‘just a dream, what is it about?’ And you sleepily replied, 'My family, they wanted me to live in a box.' And promptly you fell asleep again.”
“Oh did I really say that?”
We were silent for a time, then I realised I had better tell her about the Family Trust and the inheritance that would come to me on our wedding day. She did not blink when I mentioned the amount. Again we fell silent.
“I will always love you for who you are Dear Man. You know that. I also have money to come to me, I am not a security seeker.”
I balked. Had I really insinuated that was a worry for me?
“Honey, I know that. We will get by, money or not.”
She looked at me and again I saw a darkness in her eyes. I still had little notion of what was behind that darkness. Something to do with money? There was a place inside her that she keeps hidden from me. Sometimes she seemed totally transparent and then…a dark cloud over her inner reality, hiding that from me.
Perhaps we all are entitled to a private place. I reached out my hand and said gently, ‘we trust each other, that is enough’.
I could see some discomfort in her, as it was in me. We seemed to be saying things that were very different than what was deeper in our minds. But, I needed to let that rest.
We agreed my Uncle and his companion were to be invited, even before we began to consider the rest of the guest list.
I rang my uncle to tell him.
He answered the phone and said, “Stuart, good to hear from you.”
I replied, “I have something to tell you Uncle.”
He laughed softly, and said, “When is the wedding?”
"Was it that obvious?” I thought.
"September, Uncle.”
“Big or little? We can arrange an appropriate venue.”“Little, Uncle, please. We want you and Imelda there, and just a few others.”
He was silent. I could almost hear his fingers tapping on his table. Finally he said, "I will tell the Trustees to prepare the bequeathment papers.”
He paused.
“But look, I actually think we need more than a few at such a significant occasion. I will arrange for the Gala room at the Crest. I will of course pay all costs. September 15 will work for us.”
I did not feel to argue with his vision management of our wedding so I thanked him and put down the phone. Did money come into everything? Was it me? Only doing things for money? I sat for a few minutes. “No, I am doing this because at last someone loves me for who I am.”
Later Aleena asked me my uncle's name, as up to now I had called him Uncle. "What should I call him when I meet him?"
I was a bit confused because I always just called him Uncle. "Uncle Harris, I suppose".
"I mean his Christian name."
"Oh, his name is Stephen. But he hates it. Please don't call him Stephen. Not even Uncle Steve. No, especially not Uncle Steve"
"OK I will ask him what he wants me to call him."
I considered this. "No, that would not be polite. We are expected to just know these things."
She frowned. She threw her hands up in the air. "Your family is Hopeless. H. O. P less." I laughed at her expression. My "hopless" family. I could not disagree.
"Perhaps Uncle Harris might be best. Yes, let's see how that goes.”
Aleena’s increasing absorption in manifestation thinking.:
In the months between expressing our commitment to each other, and actually tying the knot, we had many many conversations about the nature of our relationship and how we wanted to live our lives together.
Sometimes we spoke of how we met, at the mindfulness workshops. Usually though when we recalled those evenings we did not call it Mindfulness, but rather, “The Manifestation Process”.
In one such conversation I expressed some fear that perhaps we could not really ever know that we would be together forever.
She had come into the room and noticed me staring out the window vacuously.
"Tell me your thoughts, dear one.”
"I am wondering about certainty.”
She looked at me with that fully attentive look, that always made me feel I was the luckiest man in the world.
"I mean, how do we actually KNOW that we will be forever together?”
She continued listening attentively, not interjecting. So I shared what was trickling up in me.
"I suppose one of us will die before the other. I hope it is not you, for I could not live on without you, and I hope it is not me, because I could not be so selfish as to leave you alone.”
I turned to her, and expressed more clearly my concern.
“I want to live without this constant nagging feeling that just around the corner everything we have together will fall apart. I want to live without this underlying current of anxiety that seems to have been in me forever. I want our life to be just like the manifestation master began to teach us so many months ago. Mindfulness is nice but it never really clears away the doubts. They just come back when I open my eyes."
She took my hand, and whispered. “I Love you Stu. We will make it happen”.
Tears came to me, and I did not try to hide them from her. She continued to hold my hand as I wept. She waited until the sobbing lessened, then again she quietly spoke.
“I will always love you. Change your thoughts to this new reality”
She took me into the bedroom, still holding my hand.
Later as we lay together nestling our satiated bodies she began to whisper in my ear. Almost poetically. Or perhaps very poetically. Like her words were being delivered to her from another realm. Like she was in a trance.
"We just have to recognise our total immersion in infinity.”
She paused. I listened to the pause. She began again.
“From that state of pure wonder and acceptance abundance arises.”
Again the words paused, as if transmission had ceased, and I felt the body warmth between us. She continued.
"We need to mindfully get in touch with our underlying intent for every part of our lives, and tune it. Then we acknowledge the sure thing that will come about as we relax and let the universe work out the how to do’s.
It is so easy. So very easy.”
Maybe she could feel the skepticism in me, because her voice changed as if coming out of trance. And I felt a coldness passing from her body to mine.
She raised her head from the pillow and looked directly into my eyes. The darkness peering into my soul again.
She insistently asked, “Don’t you find that the world moves closer and closer to how you want it to be? I do.”
I did not know how to answer. My future wife had laid down the ground rules for our collaborative venture. Affirmative intent. My own doubts seem insignificant and needlessly negative against her bristling confidence and trust. And my own wavering mind seemed impotent against her demand that light and positivity be always our guide.
I wondered if perhaps I could let go some more of who I had been in the past and expand my mind to meet hers more fully. I said “You have so much trust. I admire you for that. I wish I could say the same about me. But I want it. I really do. I want that manifestation ability you talk about so often.”
She nodded her head, “Yes, you do. You want it and I want it for you too.”
As she slept in my arms I looked at the sweet beauty of her face. It seemed to me a perfect angel was laying with me. Her words about letting go of all fear swirled around in my head. I determined to give her what she saw possible in me, and make myself into the man she apparently imagined I was.
Coming up next in Delivery 9:
Heads bowed as silence filled the room. “Lordess, we know we are imperfect reflections of our holy eternal higher-beings, so we rely on you to bring forth our most loving intents and actions. Stuart and Aleena are now one in your eyes, guide them to greater and greater magnificence as they seek and follow your ordained purpose for this unified life they are entering together. Help them to see others as holy beings such as themselves and to show those less fortunate the compassion that you showed so long ago when you too were just a human lost on this planet. Godess, bless these pilgrims and may the light shine forth from their hearts forever more. I ask this in the name of the Parent energy, of the Child energy, and of the Holy Magnificence present in us all. Amen."
2022 Delivery 9, September 2022
We began in delivery 1 with a Vignette. A Vignette of lingering kisses, stillness and soft murmurings, bountiful cushions on a big round mahogany bed, privilege taken for granted, and of lithe young minds congratulating each other on their own manifestations of abundance.
A vignette delivered to us by a much older version of a young man named Stuart.
The older Stuart recounts the first summer in a beach front cottage with Aleena. As that first delivery proceeds, and into delivery 2 to 8 of that older man’s memories, we follow the formative Stuart even further back in time. We discover his conflicted mind. We discover his meeting with Aleena. We discover the entry into intimate relationship. Clearly a first for Stuart, and - it is perhaps not clear - also a first for Aleena.
But, this is Stuart's story, told by himself, as he frames the long ago experience, not Aleena’s construction of all that.
As we entered into that journey through his memories, perhaps we gained some sense of what the older Stuart is calling his own Archaic Concept of Self.
We get a sense perhaps that by the time the older Stuart is recounting his entry into intimate relationship, he now holds a very different feeling of who he is. A very distinct experience of himself, than the ideas and feelings of self he had back then. Otherwise why would he be calling it an Archaic Concept of Me?
Here in delivery 9 we continue following the journey towards that first summer in the beach house. And by the end of this delivery, we have caught up with all of that backstory, and are, in the warping of time, in the beach house.
We are almost ready to find out in the next deliveries - from the old man’s mind - what transpires after that first summer of manifested love.
Where we left it in Delivery 8:
I wondered if perhaps I could let go some more of who I had been in the past and expand my mind to meet hers more fully. I said “You have so much trust. I admire you for that. I wish I could say the same about me. But I want it. I really do. I want that manifestation ability you talk about so often.”
She nodded her head, “Yes, you do. You want it and I want it for you too.”
As she slept in my arms I looked at the sweet beauty of her face. It seemed to me a perfect angel was laying with me. Her words about letting go of all fear swirled around in my head. I determined to give her what she saw possible in me, and make myself into the man she apparently imagined I was.
Where we go now, in Delivery 9
The Pivot
Around that time I had a dream one night, as Aleena lay next to me.
In the dream I was with another woman naked in bed together. I sometimes had those dreams back then, and occasionally still. Usually they cease before the copulative action. But this one went right through to the climax, and, perhaps surprisingly because it was a dream, afterwards, in the dream, I had a conversation with the woman.
In the dream, as we lay in the afterglow of first union, I asked her how that was for her.
She whispered,
"You cannot remain joined with me unless you dive deeply into your own soul. Many have tried to meet me there, in those depths, and they have all disappeared. I am wondering if you are the one who will succeed.”
In the dream I determined to try. I began to limber up for the deep dive. I was on a platform like an oil drilling rig, over a wild ocean. But the dream ended there. Before I could dive.
I lay awake for awhile feeling the anxiety that often returned in the night, back then, as I fantasised about possible futures. In the waking state as the dream faded, I felt fear that my relationship with Aleena would not be forever. And perhaps the dream was telling me that.
Reflecting from the me in the dream, to the me now wide awake, I once again summonsed up from inside myself, the determination to try, to really really try, to be the best version of myself, and thus keep my prize.
===
The Journey Continues
Over the next months the conversations kept returning to the notion that intent creates reality. I wanted to believe it. Even more than that, I wanted to retain her love.
We were sitting in the city square just watching the people go by. Aleena had shopped for a couple of hours without buying anything except a pair of bamboo socks for me, and a little golden elephant for herself.
I had walked around the streets aimlessly. I enjoy to do that. Just turning corners randomly. Heading nowhere in particular except for the intention for us to meet up at 4.
We were both weary from all that, so we just sat on a bench in the late afternoon sun. I had been telling Aleena for a few days that I had a lingering fear that our love would not survive. As we sat silently taking in the activity around the square, suddenly she turned to me and proclaimed,
“Fear is not real; ignore its power but don’t deny it reflects your own intent.”
I recoiled. I felt attacked. Was she accusing me of intending our love to break down? And why would I want that?
Masking my reaction, with a smile, as sincerely as I could, I offered, “I am not sure I understand.”
“Catch and tune your intent.”
Just like that. She almost flung her words at me. As if someone was dictating to her, somebody with authority over her life and mine. Or like a director of a stage show rehearsing a new actor. Putting that actor through their lines.
“Honey”, I whispered. But she seemed almost to be in a trance.
“The world loves to give us what we intend. So that is why we must always remain in our purity.”
I touched her shoulder so as to re-assure her I was still there. She did not acknowledge the touch. She did not turn her head to mine.
She sat there, though in silence, and I did not intervene, and soon the sky began to turn dark.
We walked together, still in silence, to the tram stop. As always when we arrived home to my apartment we made love, and afterwards as I was falling asleep I heard her crying next to me, like a child.
Like a child who has just found their kitten lifeless in the hessian bag they had tied up with string and dunked in the garden pond.
After an hour I woke and found her sitting in the kitchen eating soup she had heated from a can. She smiled at me, and said, “Are you hungry, honey”. As if all that had been between us in the previous few hours had never occurred. I said, “Yes", and began to cut up some vegetables for a stir fry.
For weeks after that, it was one day united, next day facing each other as enlightened teacher and weak-minded student.
But always our love-making returned us to softness with each other.
And soon we found ourselves in the chapel with the hundred people that uncle had arranged to witness our union.
"You are now fully together in holy matrimony, equals in the eyes of God and wondrously joined for all eternity”, the minister intoned. She smiled.
“No more do we recognise even death as standing between the love of a man and a woman predestined by God to become one”.
“Please kiss each other in recognition of your equivalence in this holy merging”.
We turned our heads towards each other and kissed each other solidly on the lips. Her arms reached up and clasped my head to her. I held her around the waist and she began to wriggle her hips as if dancing to a distant tango tune. The congregation began to laugh softly, and the minister joined in the fun, proclaiming in a loud voice,
“The wedding ceremony is not yet over, please encourage the couple to wait a few hours before joining together in bodily union as prescribed by the Good Lord for their mutual enjoyment and spiritual solace later this evening. … Later, I said, Later!”
The guests now realised they had permission to laugh solidly and the chapel began to fill with sounds of laughter and clapping and even one or two wolf whistles.
The minister looked at her shoes demurely for a few moments and then softly clapped her hands. “Let us pray for the loving intimacy of this couple and the good works they will do with other souls who come into their life together.”
Heads bowed as silence filled the room.
“Lordess, we know we are imperfect reflections of our holy eternal higher-beings, so we rely on you to bring forth our most loving intents and actions. Stuart and Aleena are now one in your eyes, guide them to greater and greater magnificence as they seek and follow your ordained purpose for this united life they are entering together. Help them to see others as holy beings such as themselves and to show those less fortunate the compassion that you showed so long ago when you too were just a human lost on this planet. Godess bless these pilgrims and may the light shine forth from their hearts forever more. I ask this in the name of the Parent energy, of the Child energy, and of the Holy Magnificence present in us all. Amen."
We hired a car and drove deeply into the mountains for a honeymoon. We stayed for 7 days at an old and quaint wooden cottage next to a rippling stream. It was early spring, so there was no snow left on the ground, but we could see white patches still on the peaks not much higher up.
The ceremony seemed to have broken a spell. We began again to feel consistently aligned. I felt the possibility of abundance continuing, as she had encouraged me to assume. She stopped trying to convince me that my intent needed tuning. And I noticed that she was no longer entering her Guru trance.
And the darkness I sometimes had seen in her eyes seemed to have been resolved. We began to take things together much more lightly.
The days of the honeymoon felt to be timeless, but soon our week was up and we drove back to my apartment in the suburbs.
3 days after we returned from the Highlands Uncle called me. He spoke mysteriously, but with an unusual tinkle in his voice. I had a slight memory of his visits on Christmas morning when I was a little child, bringing presents for me, and me running into his arms.
“Stuart, meet me tomorrow morning at 11, on the corner of Beach Road and Dylan Drive, in Brighton. Bring your lovely wife. I have a surprise for you both."
When I told Aleena she frowned. “Oh not on your Nellie, not lunch at the Seaview with your uncle. Once a year is more than enough. You go. Tell him I have my period. Tell him I have left you. Tell him I don’t like him.”
I smiled. I knew she would come around in a few minutes and indeed she did.
“OK, but we have to leave at 2 for an important appointment with, um, my hairdresser, OK?”
I took her in my arms and smoothed her hair. “He won’t believe you, your hair is already perfect, but, yes.”
We arrived at precisely 11am. Uncle pulled up in his Jaguar at exactly the same time. "Hop in", he called, through the open window. I opened the back door for Aleena, and she smiled. Not so much because of my gentlemanly attention but for my recognition that she preferred to not sit in the front with my uncle.
I sat next to my uncle as he drove silently and fastidiously through the narrow streets leading down to the bay. He pulled up outside a Victorian beach cottage on a prime site facing the water. A For Sale sign adorned the front white picket fence. And across the sign, a large sticker, “Sold”.
I turned to my uncle. He was pretending to look at the bay. I made a sound. “Umm…”. He looked at me and almost sang, "Yes it is yours. My wedding present for you and your lovely bride."
Aleena almost screamed. “I knew it! I’ve been manifesting this moment for a long time!”
My uncle frowned, but long years in business consultancy had enabled him to quickly recover decorum. He swung his head towards Aleena in the back seat, and said “Congratulations then, your manifestation seems to have worked.”
He handed me a key. I reached over and put my arm around him for the first time since I was just a little boy. He recoiled a little, he was not welcoming of touch between adults, but he allowed my embrace for a few seconds then said, “Well, let’s go and look inside.”
As we walked up the garden path I whispered to my wife, “Care to cancel your hairdressing appointment, my love?” She grinned. “Hmm, yes maybe."
A month later, after arranging furnishings, and decorations, and sacred objects of Manifestation, we woke up on our first morning in the cottage.
We had slept most of the night with her in my arms. It seemed that my uncle had hit the right note. Aleena’s energy was wide open to me. And mine to hers.
We had prepared breakfast in bed, the night before. We sat looking at the bay from our big new bed.
She murmured: “You and I are co-creators of a beautiful reality.”
I replied dutifully,
“I see myself as I can be when I let go of my final limitations.”
I grinned as she took the little coffee spoon from the saucer and tapped me on the temple with it, as she pronounced a benediction.
“Arise Sir Stu, and look your goddess in her eyes.”
I thought, she had just needed to receive the gift of a home, in order to relax her own mind from the constant conviction that she had to control her own thoughts in order for life to be good. Her mind had done its job. Or so she conceived it. But, I felt no need to correct her, I felt her love, and I felt our blessing state together.
And I felt at last a conviction that I had it in me to come into the life I deserved.
Spring turned to summer. She smoothed my mind and body with her sunny day thoughts and yoga softened hands. We still spoke of abundance. It became much more relaxed. Not so much as something we were heading towards in the future, but something with us right now.
That first summer we gloried in the eagerness of our interconnected loins. Each morning we smothered each other in kisses that lingered after the passion had moved in the way it must. As our climaxes led us into stillness and soft murmurings we settled down with our pre-breakfast habit of Figs and Rooibois tea. We sipped the tea from hand-painted china cups. We chose the figs from the hand-blown glass bowl that always stood on the bedside table. We lay propped on a dozen bountiful cushions on our big round mahogany bed. We sighed in contentment as yearnings became satiated and bodies became still.
We marvelled as rays of fresh sunlight entered our bedroom window from over the bay. That light reflected from our crystals and dream catchers and from our eyes as we gazed lovingly into each others’ souls. We knew ourselves as privileged in our balconied and engardened beachside cottage.
And yet we took that privilege for granted, as our due, through our affirmative mind-states, and we congratulated each other unceasingly on the manifestations of abundance we continued to achieve from our lithe and positive young minds.
==
Our married life had begun. Summer turned into Autumn. I continued with my freelance work at home, Aleena commuted to her office most days, the leaves fell down around our little front garden, and slowly winter returned.
Ending of delivery 9 here.
==
Where we go in Delivery 10
A business card - on it was written a name “Malvern Brahma Soul-Dancer”, and the information “Consultant Mystician. Private Studio or House Calls” and a phone number. The text golden on a black background with the very faint impression of rain drops filtering down through the words. On the back of the card, a handwritten note: “Aleena, Call me, you won’t regret it”.
I put the card back down into the letter box. I came back inside. I sat at my desk unable to work. Around 6pm I heard Aleena come in the front gate, and the letter box open and close. I composed myself, and began typing randomly on my keyboard.
2022 Delivery 10, October 2022
Where we left it at end of Delivery 9:
Our married life had begun. Summer turned into Autumn. I continued with my freelance work at home, Aleena commuted to her office most days, the leaves fell down around our little front garden, and slowly winter returned.
Souls need a very very gentle touch
Now that we were living together in the same house rather than spending time in each other’s apartments, Aleena seemed a little more willing to open up about her life before she met me.
She had always evaded my questions about her past relationships with men.
On an unusually early winter sunny afternoon we were sitting on our balcony with chardonnay and figs. We had been silent for a time, appreciating the break from clouds. We were taking in the vista of ocean in front of us, with day-trippers walking along the sand. Some were taking their shoes off to wade in the shallows.
One man had laid a mat on the sand and was practicing some yoga positions.
Aleena turned to me and said, “I did yoga for a few years before I came to the mindfulness evenings, where I met you”.
I had not known that about her before, so, being curious I asked, “Oh, how did you come to yoga?”
Her face turned a little dark. Not as dark as I had seen her a few times before we were married, but she did turn her head away as if she knew she was heading into revealing something that she was not quite sure she wanted me to know.
I felt her hesitation in telling me more about yoga and I did not press her.
But she seemed to come to a decision and went on,
“My massage teacher recommended I do yoga.”
“Your massage teacher?”
“Yes, I learned massage about 5 years before I met you. I was quite young. I was 20. I wanted to break out of the world that my mum and dad lived in. Very respectful, as you know. And very… boring. Also they had the view that women should not work, but rather wait on a man to marry her and in the meantime do some charity work.
So I thought, well, let’s learn massage. I did not tell them of course. I will still living at home, I just told them I was involved in the church.
Also I'd never had a real job. No need. My family was able to support me comfortably. More than comfortably. As you know.
But I wanted to be alone with my own potential. And I saw that the women around me could never relax. Always protective, never really free.
So I began to think I would get a job in a beauty salon and massage ladies. My friend told me about a Korean man, a doctor, who taught massage classes, and I took 10 lessons from him.
After the final lesson he sent me a letter. Do you want to read it?"
"Yes of course."
She went to the spare room where she had put some removal boxes, still unopened.
She returned with the letter.
===
Dr H. Mar
31 Redhill Grove
Newstead
13 September 1983
Dear Aleena,
When you left you wanted me to tell you how your massage skills were developing and I did not say much, but now I want to be honest and convey what I saw and felt.
You have the techniques now. But there is still something missing. Your hands do not so much relax the muscles, as order those muscles to behave.
We need to bring the softness you know in your heart out into your hands. This is something that cannot be taught. I recommend some sort of practice that leads your mind into a timeless zone. There are various practices like that, Meditation, Tai Chi, Yoga.
Any of those will encourage the Chi to move through your own body - like a gentle - but irresistible - mountain stream - and soften your hands. It is the timelessness that does it. And the consequent presence it builds up in you.
As our Taoist colleagues might say, "You have too much Yang in your hands, and nothing wrong with Yang, but now we need to enhance your Yin.”
And when your hands are soft, and yet, your strength is also there in your hands, your client will say “However did you do that? My body feels so wonderful”.
When they ask me how I did it, I often say:
"I did not only massage your body, I massaged your soul.”
And, Aleena, souls need a very very gentle touch. Otherwise your strength will be refused.
I hope you understand, and take my advice kindly.
Hajun
===
As I finished reading the letter I asked, “So you took his advice and started doing yoga?”
“Yes. I…”
She did not finish whatever it was she was about to say. Suddenly she grabbed the letter out of my hand and took it back to the spare room. I thought it strange. She returned with a sheepish look on her face and started to talk about something else. I got the impression she had shown me the letter spontaneously and now regretted it. Or she was just not quite sure. Something she wanted to tell me but was worried about revealing.
So I agreed on her direction and we spoke again about the people we could see on the beach.
Then she returned to the letter.
“I replied to the letter, and told him I would begin yoga. He rang me a few weeks later and asked me to come to his house. I thought he wanted to discuss yoga again. But…”
She looked at the ocean and then at me.
“Turns out he had other things on his mind."
Of course I knew without asking, what the other things were.
“It was nothing.”
“We were together only one night and then he just, disappeared out of my life.”
I felt a pang in my heart, and wanted to deflect it for both of us, so I asked,
"And yoga?”
“Yes, I went to a community hall and did it every week for 2 years. I liked it. I learned to relax my hands I think. But then I got sick of it. And I never did go and get a job in a beauty salon.”
I was quiet again, but the pang was throbbing now so I returned to the subject I had not wanted to enter immediately.
“Only one night?”
“Yes.
He did not even contact me again. I rang him and he never answered. I was too scared to go back to his house. So, I decided to move on.”
She looked away. “No. In high school there was Pete.”
The pang grew.
Again we sat silently for a few minutes. Then she spoke.
"He was older. Already 18. In first year uni. Had a car even. Yes, we did it in the car. A few times. Maybe more than a few. Over 3 months. In the end I told him it was not working for me.
He just did not try. Never tried to please me. Just him and his joking around and his urges. Never even tried to find out what was going on in my mind.
We were walking on the jetty where we had first spoken our intention to marry. We held hands. We had not mentioned her previous intimacy history again. I had reached inside myself and found I could see it as not such a big thing, as I had felt it when she first disclosed. She seemed not to want to talk about it again. In the keeping it quiet, we held it, and it became part of the bond between us.
We sat on a bench and she said,
"I feel very good with you now. Our lives are heading in the right direction. But I want us to be even more free. I want us to transcend the limitations that we still hold onto."
I cringed a bit. What limitations was she thinking about?
She continued.
“I’ve been reading about bliss and I think we deserve more of it. We must be limiting our own immersion. A Tantric Sage I read about can emanate bliss to the people around him. Just by sitting there. I think we can learn to give that to each other.”
I sighed inside. Here we go again. I thought we had all this spiritual stuff settled.
“Where did you read all this honey?”
“Truth and Transcendence Magazine. Somebody left it by mistake in the lunch room at work. “
I looked at the ground between my feet. “And so, how do you propose we immerse ourselves in bliss?”
She must have caught my faint sarcastic undertone, for she just replied, “Forget it, it's not so important.”
We continued our walk, and spoke about other things. She kept herself a little bit distant. I could feel it. Or perhaps it was me.
We never needed to be concerned about money. The investment fund my uncle had signed over to me gave me ample income each month and Aleena had her own investments left to her by her family. As well her job in an office and my own freelance work, allowed us to not need the money of the other. We just put in a pot a housekeeping amount from each of us each week. I actually did not even know how much Aleena had in her bank accounts. It seemed to be none of my business.
We continued to feel very privileged. And even I felt a sense that my mind had improved its state, and consequently the universe was supporting us. Mostly Aleena seemed to accept that I had improved out of my anxiety state that she found in me from the beginning. But, occasionally she seemed to be expecting more immersion in some sort of spiritual journeying with me.
I could not quite fully trust that she was as committed to our relationship as I was. I was afraid I did not quite meet her expectations. Sometimes at night next to her I had bad dreams, often involving being abandoned in a desert, or searching for family in a huge house, or walking through the city and somehow wandering into streets where gangs hung around waiting for weak people like me
Where we go in Delivery 11:
A business card - on it was written a name “Malvern Brahma Soul-Dancer”, and the information “Consultant Mystician. Private Studio or House Calls” and a phone number. The text golden on a black background with the very faint impression of rain drops filtering down through the words. On the back of the card, a handwritten note: “Aleena, Call me, you won’t regret it”.
I put the card back down into the letter box. I came back inside. I sat at my desk unable to work. Around 6pm I heard Aleena come in the front gate, and the letter box open and close. I composed myself, and began typing randomly on my keyboard.
