As many stories go, and certainly most plans of the best laid man – uh, no that’s not exactly what I mean; indeed, it is true, I am best laid, but perhaps you get my drift. Anyway, way back on January 19th, I started this tale of many loves lost, so that true love could be found once again, and I am now ready in earnest to tell our story, the story of how Lady Lynn and I over time and space and through the tragedy of the December 26th Tsunami found each other again. It is quite a marvelous unveiling of two destinies inexorably intertwined.
First, though, some theoretical preliminary considerations: In the ‘70s I read Richard Bach’s bestselling books, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, soon after I was blessed with recovery from alcoholism/drug addiction in 1972. I was intrigued with his premise that we create the reality we deeply believe in. At the time, I was still desperately seeking the reality of manifesting my one and only true love forever and ever. As this Whooo, Whooo sequence of posts certainly and amply illustrates, the gods & goddesses know that up until that time a central theme of my life, endlessly it seemed, again and again, since grade school, had been to find and connect with the one and one only true love. Through a couple of marriages and many relationships, however, this seemed like a most futile quest, as ephemeral as any that Don Quixote and Sancho sought after.
There was another very influential story from another of my spiritual mentors, who I started reading in the mid-70s, John C. Lilly, who dropped bunches of pure Sandoz acid in sensory deprivation, isolation tanks and swam with the Dolphins. He wrote several books, including the most influential, The Dyadic Cyclone, with his partner Toni. In the introduction, he described the circumstances of their meeting, which I paraphrase from long ago memory thusly:
Lilly was invited to a party way back in the Hollywood Hills. He really didn’t want to go, but at the last minute decided that he would make an appearance, out of respect for the host and hostess, and then quickly return home. On the drive to the party just before he got to the neighborhood of the party, he had a flat tire, which delayed him getting to the party for a couple of hours, since his spare tire was also flat. Being so close, he decided to go on and make an appearance at the party. When he arrived the scene was in full swing with raucous music and activity. He entered a crowded room and was instantly drawn to the first person he saw, a petite woman, sitting by herself in a corner. He went straight away to her, knelt down in front of her, looked deeply in to her eyes, and asked,“Where have you been for the past five hundred years?”
“In training,” she replied.
It turns out that she had only just gotten to the party a few minutes before Lilly arrived. If his plan had prevailed without the flat tire, he would have come and gone before she came to the party, and they might still be searching for each other. They were inseparable for many years until she passed over, and together they wrote The Dyadic Cyclone, describing their adventures and learnings in relationship.
This reinforced and fueled my belief that somewhere out there I would find my soul mate, my true love, my Bersherta, the Yiddish concept for soul mate. When after a number of abortive relationships in the 70s during recovery in Manhattan, I encountered S. in October of 1979, which blossomed into the long relationship and marriage, I thought that she was the Alpha and Omega of this lifelong quest for me. In the mid-80s we read together Bach’s book, A Bridge Across Forever, which described his soul mate relationship with the actress Leslie Parrish. Their love story validated much of what our relationship had been. But our relationship, just as Richard’s and Leslie’s did, as described in this interview that I linked in the first post of this Whooo, Whooo series way back on January 19th, also came to pass. For the last of our ten years together, S. and I grew more and more distant and estranged, eventually crashing and burning on April 1, 2001, as surely as the World Trade Center Towers came tumbling down on September 11, 2001. For much of the past almost three years since I left New York, I wandered in many a lost land of thwarted dreams, believing that the best for me was done. Oh me of little faith, who had forgotten the quote from one of my friends in early recovery who said:
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