SamadhiMuse

                             Lise’s Birthday
   I’m puzzled at how I can pour myself so fully into another and come away
   so empty.  The moments begin with such magic and end with me feeling so
   drained. I long for the immersions.  To break through, if just for
   hours, into the space of another.  But this landscape I’ve found is so
   riddled with contradictions. openness, strength…the sure knowledge
   that what we are is not at risk if we risk.  Against this the jaded lack
   of investment and the retention of deep control. A dance of incredible
   contrasts between true feelings and true callousness.  It strikes me
   that God, once again, has sent me a mirror of myself to gaze into. I’m
   not sure how it all fits together.  I’ve opened together with another
   before and felt joy and growing.  Have my motives changed or is it she?
   Even as I write I form my answer.  I think its she.  Its worked with too
   many others; that opening and giving has given me more than I gave. With
   her my compassion empties into her as if she were a bar across the poles
   of my battery.  And I wonder if I understand who I’m dealing with. Her
   life seems to draw so much misfortune to itself.  All driving pressures
   to beat her down…and she, like steel beneath the woman, bears it with
   grim tenacity. Darkness in her eyes and her skin and her karma.  Her
   history a battlefield of confrontations in a lustier vein than mine.
   Nothing subtle, just brutality. I feel like some half grown do gooder
   gaping at a soul being hammered…unsure of what I see or why its
   so…guidance and growth raining like stones from above. I’ve always
   sensed the power of her soul and seen the violence of her karma.  Now I
   begin to sense what kind of soul could draw such lightening into it’s
   life. Her husband, Phil, so into spiritualism these ten years, playing
   games far beyond fair or reasonable; knowledge not come to fruition,
   cloaking evil terror. But this is what she tells me.  How should I know?
   Something drew them together, wedded their lived and gave them each to
   the other. Games with the minds of his children, threats of suicide,
   violence and physical domination, psychic draining and forcing.  All
   these weapons whirling in wicked arrays. And she survives.  She knows
   instinctively about spiritualism.  Does she give back his physical and
   intellectual domination in other ways? Has she enslaved his soul through
   love? She told me she’s felt evil come to her twice.  Skin crawling
   permeation of her mind and perceptions and of everything around her.
   Breath shortening and a deep animal fear clawing. Objects diffused with
   evil like a cloud…the room filled, the feeling unbearably tangible.
   What do I sense in her from what I’ve seen and heard? I’m still not
   sure.  I remember Tarot cards told me to stay away from Tarot cards, but
   why that connects, I’m not sure.  I don’t think I’m in any danger of
   being overcome. But what is my purpose here if not to share openness?
   What ever I do seems so ineffectual against the stories running through
   her life. Perhaps, I’ve met a spiritually advanced soul who’s not making
   it this time around and whose spiritual depth so far exceeds my own that
   I’m like a child watching an adult and offering irrelevant advice.
                                          gallagher
                                          16 Jun 1984

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —