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.
==

A business card - on it 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 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.

I decided I did not want to find about about “Malvern Brahma Soul-Dancer”. Probably just a crackpot. Aleena did not mention the card and in a few days I forgot all about it.

Time went by, as it does. 

I began to feel Aleena distant to me again. She seemed to want to be by herself a lot in the house. And some evenings she did not come back from work until 9 or 10pm. She said they were busy and she was obliged to help out with overtime. I took it at face value.  A couple of times she went away for a weekend, to visit her family.  I missed her company, but also I felt she seemed to need her space. I wanted to respect that, to put aside whatever feelings I had, to give her whatever she wanted. So I did not mention my lingering sense that something was going on.

Marriage is a big thing, a big change for any of us, and in between my own doubts, I assumed, like me, she was working out her new self-identity. And I was grateful to have found someone who remained, despite the distancing. So I silently agreed to the distancing.

I felt content to spend my days at home. My desire of seeking company was behind me.

Sometimes when she was at work I went for long walks alone on the beach. I felt the life-long sense of being alone in the universe, and yet, somehow tempered now with a presence accompanying me.

I thought of this presence as Aleena, perhaps even as my idealised Aleena. But at times I felt into the presence even more deeply, knowing it as Spirit. 

On these walks I felt more peaceful than I had ever felt before.

But I was often filled with conflicting feelings. Appreciation and suspicion. Peaceful inside and yet anxiety still surfacing. Trust and worry. 

Somehow the seemingly opposing feelings could co-exist in me. They rose and fell like waves on the ocean. I could though feel deep down, a slow strengthening of what I call my soul. And on the surface, even so, the old voice whispering, “This will not last. And there is nobody to blame but myself.”

One evening she came home, and sat down next to me. I had been working on a small architectural drawing project my uncle's firm had sent to me.

She seemed quite distracted. She was fidgeting with her hands and when I asked her about her day at work, she looked at me silently for a few moments and then came out with, "I might quit soon".

This surprised me. She had a cushy job. And I thought she was reasonably happy there. I asked her what was happening.

She replied:

"I'm just not content with the people there. I mean they are not inspiring. Their lives are repetitive. Dead. They don't seem to understand spiritual things. They talk about movies and sport and when I venture more deep they clam up. I want to work with people who understand that we create the universe each time we breathe in and breathe out."

I had to smile inside for a moment, as I caught on that it was not only me who did not quite meet her spiritual standards.

I saw that she was quite effected by what she was disclosing. Aleena did not often cry, but I saw that tears were coming to her eyes. I could see she was holding them back. She reached into the shoulder bag she had carried home from work, to get a tissue.

As she was opening the bag a card fell out onto my desk. The mystic’s card. I recognised it immediately without even reading the text. The raindrops behind the words. The memory of it being in our letterbox returned. I pretended I had just seen it for the first time. I said as calmly as I could, “What’s that Lina?”

She patted her eyes with the tissue, then put one of her hands over the card, and shuffled her hands around like she was trying to make the card disappear. I looked at her face and indeed the darkness in her eyes had returned. She saw my concern. She uttered, “It’s nothing, it's ... it's somebody I’ve been consulting”. 

I picked the card up, from under her hands, and she did not resist.

I read it, contriving to appear as if I were reading it for the first time. Even as I read, a voice in the back of my mind was acknowledging to myself that after all the intimacy Aleena and I had entered into I was still pretending with her. Not only was she hiding something, I was also. I was not only hiding the fact that I had seen the card before, but more than that, I was hiding the fact of my fear of what it meant. I wanted to appear unaffected. And I could not put aside the inner voice declaring that the distancing I experienced was no different than the distancing I had set up all around me for as long back as I could recall. 

But the self-reflective voice in me faded away, in almost an instant, and I placed the card back on my desk.

"Whatever is a Mystician?”, I asked, “and what does he consult about?”

“A Mystician is a practicing mystic, honey.” 

I must have frowned, because she stroked my brow with her finger tips in the way she knows I love.

“Most mystics like to just do their own thing and don’t really care to help other people understand or progress. A mystic with a practice is out there engaging with the problems and thought patterns of normal people, you see. An engaging mystic will help you find the way into your own inner interiority where bliss is, and show you how to remain there whatever happens in the outside world”.

“Hmm”, I said, “and he charges a fee for that?"

“Yes. Morris says people value his work more when they have paid for it." 

“Morris?” I asked, turning up my eyebrows. 

“Oh, … yes his real name is Morris, he just calls himself Malvern Brahma Soul-Dancer professionally.”

“I see”, I said. “He helped you with your thing about limitations? And bliss? And you paid him for that?”

“Yes", she replied, “and I got good value for my money.”

She threw her head back as if to call an end to the questioning and turned away into the kitchen. I could hear her in there operating the coffee machine. 

I went to the sunroom and sat on the sofa. Soon she joined me with 2 cups of espresso. 

I sipped the strong black brew. “How many times did you see him, Elly?”

“7 times”, she replied. "He is leading me through a process of inner knowing and acceptance and transitioning into a deeper level of consciousness. It takes awhile. He made me promise before we started that I would persist with the journey until at least I could look him in the eyes and say authentically, ‘I see you, and you are the same as me'. I did try that a few times but each time I started to giggle and got embarrassed and he said ‘Almost but not quite.’"

I considered all this. It sounded a bit cuckoo and I almost opened my mouth to say so. But the voice of tolerance inside me whispered in my mind: “Who am I to judge what people need to do or learn in order to be happy.” And then, “She is my wife, my mission is to allow her to find herself”.

“How much does he charge?” I asked.

She hesitated, then she came out with it, “He charges $720 a session, Stu”. I spluttered in my coffee, almost burning my lips. “Seven hundred and twenty dollars?”

“Yes, and worth every cent”.

“What does he give you for that? Nobody charges that much for these self-development things!”

“It is not self-development honey, Morris says the self needs no development. All he needs to do is tune me into my own frequency so I can connect with my own higher source. And the tuning, he says, is a finely skilled work that took him many many years of diligent study and self-experimentation to come by.”

I stared out the window over the bay.

“And you did not have sex with him?” I asked bluntly as I turned my gaze to her eyes again.

Even as I asked I felt I was out of line. The subject of sex had suddenly appeared in my own mind. I remembered what she had told me about the massage teacher, and how he invited her into his life, and into his bed. And she went there. It was a long time ago, and even before she met me, but, ... people do not change. Not really.

I perhaps saw a shadow cross over her face but I could not be sure. 

She replied “Of course not, you silly goose. Not every man wants only one thing.” 

She began to stroke my earlobes and then she placed my hands against her inner thighs and began to unbutton her blouse. “Come and get your sweetness offering honey, you are the only one it is for”. 

I put aside my doubt, given an offer I could not refuse, and began to enter a familiar world of passion and delight. We had abandoned ourselves together in that world so many times before. It never seemed to matter what was going on between us, or not happening between us, the sacred energies took us, even without us trying.

As we came to our bed we always paused for a moment to recognise the divinity in each other, before we lay down naked.

And inevitably our bodies fused, and our minds emptied.

And then as usual, we slept.