Alison advised me not to answer or argue again: I was in the right, and I should simply let it go. I agreed with Alison — at least, my mind did. But my heart found it hard to accept disappointing my friend.

In meditation, I thought about what I really wanted from friendships in the future. My guides and my gut agree that, in the past, I have been too accommodating, too willing to put the needs of others before myself. How could I fix this?

To inspire my meditation, I used my favorite deck, the Buddha Tarot by Robert Place. I drew these:

1. The Animal of Double Vajras (Garuda). The Garuda is a magical animal guide of healing, destroyer of evil monsters and corrupting powers. The Double Vajras correspond roughly to Water, but the Garuda is a creature of the air.
2. 10 of Jewels (Greed) The 10 of Jewels is about material satiety, and the greed that engenders.
3. 9 of Lotuses (Sacrifice) The Sacrifice is cutting away something that is valued.

In meditation, I felt drawn to the Forest of the Horned God. At the base of the World Tree, a spiral of wooden steps rose around the trunk, carrying me up above the treetops, so that I could see the white-capped Mountains of the Earth in the distance. They ended at a sort of tree house perched right above the tallest branches of the surrounding forest.

The house — which I understood to be the eyrie of the Garuda — was semicircular, jutting from the trunk rather like a shelf fungus. Structurally it was, in essence, a great half-circle of porch, with an elegantly architectured wooden house nested in the center of it. I didn’t see much of the house (though I got an impression of ash-wood and glass and brass, elegance and comfort, airiness). The porch, on which I stood blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, was of some kind of stone, decorated with precious metals and jewels in an astrological pattern, like a birth-chart carved into the floor.

The Garuda was man-shaped, tall, and dressed elegantly in red; his face was vaguely animal — a beaklike nose, deep eyes, and an expression of profound comfort in his own skin. He offered me tea (a nod to the watery associations of the Double Vajra, he said), and I gratefully accepted.

I asked him about relationships and boundary-setting. He said that as I get closer to my ideals of life and profession (10 Jewels), my relationships will change profoundly; and I’m going to have to give some of them up (9 Lotus).

“If people are used to you being accommodating, they will be upset when you change,” he said. “And you will continue to be uncertain about the right thing to do; because you’re in the midst of the change — you’re on shifting ground.”

“But,” he contined, “there is always a source of guidance: the Earth. Do you remember, when you first got the request from your friend, immediately you felt like it would be wrong to say yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to help her, but I had a strong feeling that I shouldn’t. I wasn’t sure where the intuition came from, and I didn’t want to be unfair to her, so I pushed it away.”

“You pushed it away because you wanted to subordinate your own needs to someone else,” he said. “To gain approval, to be liked. But that intuition is your rock, your connection with the Earth. Listen to it. It will lead you right.”

Just before the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, realized enlightenment, it is said the demon Mara attacked him with armies of monsters to frighten Siddhartha from his seat under the bodhi tree. But the about-to-be Buddha did not move. Then Mara claimed the seat of enlightenment for himself, saying his spiritual accomplishments were greater than Siddhartha’s. Mara’s monstrous soldiers cried out together, “I am his witness!” Mara challenged Siddhartha–who will speak for you?

Then Siddhartha reached out his right hand to touch the earth, and the earth itself roared, “I bear you witness!” Mara disappeared. And as the morning star rose in the sky, Siddhartha Gautama realized enlightenment and became a Buddha. — Barbara O’Brien

In the same way, if I keep one hand on the Earth, I will not go wrong, even if my universe of friends is upended. I do not need their approval, if the Earth is my foundation.

Oddments

• A tremendous manifesto from Ali — one of the best things she’s written all year. “Ritual is not for our sake alone… our religious communities are not only human.”
• Would you kill an elephant? The complex tangle of justice woven between an internet tycoon and an angry young bull.
• Subscribe to my flickr photostream, and get updates whenever I create a new landscape like the one below.
• This deck… O my friends, this deck I must have. Steampunk Tarot.
• Get Into the Grove: new druid blog from OBOD bard, Moncha.
• Quotes:
  • Books are good company… for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book. – EB White
  • Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower… soaking in around your green beans. – Marcelene Cox
  • Sun-bleached bones are most wonderful against the blue, that blue that will always be there after all man’s destruction is finished. O’Keefe
  • The night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does. – Borges
  • We all have our blind spots. To what extent do we *choose* those blind spots — subconsciously — in order to have the life we want?
  • The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture, where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, and the more it nourishes. – Huxley

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I was recently divorced, and had just met an extraordinary woman; but she lived five hundred miles away.  Ali was in Pittsburgh, and I lived in Massachusetts, near my children, my ex-wife, and her fiancé.  At first I resigned myself to a long-distance relationship, and had little hope that it could become serious and long-term.  But then I found that, completely by coincidence, my ex-wife’s fiancé’s parents lived in Pittsburgh as well; and this confluence, plus Pittsburgh’s lower cost of living, better employment prospects, beautiful mountains and rivers, and moderate climate decided all of us that we should simply move everybody wholesale.  So I went ahead and moved to Pittsburgh.

But then, when my ex-wife was partway through planning her own move, suddenly things were up in the air again:  her fiancé had a serious job prospect open up in Chicago, an opportunity worth a lot more money.  Everything went on hold while he went to interview after interview, and agonized over the choice for weeks.  Depending on his decision, my children might end up a day’s drive away from me.

By this time my relationship with Ali had become very serious indeed.  If my children moved to Chicago, there was no question that I would need to be near them.  But, unless Alison came to Chicago as well, I’d be a broken man.

Fortunately I didn’t have to choose:  the job in Chicago didn’t work out, and now all of us are living happily in Pittsburgh.  But for me it was a tense time, in which I thought a lot about the different kinds of bonds between people.

The bond between a parent and young child is extremely strong — stronger than any other bond in the world, I think; and yet we call it “love”, the same word we use for the relationship between, well, “lovers”.  In one way, it is not the same kind of thing at all.  In another way, they’re very similar.

Let me try to explain…

The Inner Landscape

A central part of my spiritual religious practice is meditation, particularly visualization.  I use a technique common to many religious traditions, in which I relax and concentrate on visualizing natural scenes, cultivating a sort of ‘inner landscape’.  In this landscape I work with images and symbols, much as one works with dreams or subconscious symbols in psychoanalysis.  The practice is extremely valuable for me, giving me essential information about my own psychological makeup and inner life, as well as hints of divine intention.

For example, at one point while I was still married, my ex-wife was involved in a potentially fatal car accident, and for months afterwards I suffered from nearly uncontrollable attacks of fear and panic.  Visualizations of the flights of eagles, meeting with guides and gods, and climbing out of an abyss helped me regain my composure and dig out the roots of the problem.  Later, while I was going through the breakup and separation that led to my divorce, visualizations of crawling up mountains and negotiations with agents of change helped me adopt a healthy emotional attitude, to feel supported and guided through the process.  Even later, visualizations involving Death and fire in water helped me find my emotional footing while I was negotiating a new relationship, a new city, and a new job.

I should make it clear that these visualization meditations are not the same as daydreaming or writing.  It’s a creative process, but one in which the subconscious is engaged as directly as possible.  Generally you start with some idea of a setting — a garden, a beach, a forest — and once it is firmly established in your imagination, you allow things to happen, or guides to appear, or follow impulses to wander or explore.  The images, guides, and impulses are messages from your subconscious, or even deeper influences.

After exploring my inner landscape for a few years — its forests, pools, beaches, and mountains — I began to recognize patterns in its geography.  For example, it had four edges, roughly speaking:  an abyss, a desert, mountains, and the sea; and these four corresponded to the four classical elements:  air, fire, earth, and water.  Near the center, in a place where I usually began my meditations, there was a pair of small hills, each with a temple on top of it; and between them was an amphitheater, a broad open valley and garden.  For me, this area was a sort of axis mundi, a world axis, in which the entire world was reflected and centered.

The Place of Love and the Other

Near one of those temples is a forest which I think of as the Forest of the Branching Paths, a mostly oak and beech forest with paths that cross and branch endlessly.  There are many people wandering in this forest; some are friendly, some are not.  Because of the shadows of the forest, and the tendency of people to wear heavy cloaks and hoods, it is often hard to see who you are talking with, or get a clear idea of their expressions or intent.

I often come to this forest when I want to gain some insight into people in my life.  For many of us, life is a lot like this forest; and I think in some ways the forest represents our physical or social experiences on earth.  In fact, some areas of the forest seem to be especially associated with certain people I know well.

Outside the forest, on the slopes of the hill not far from one of the temples, is an area associated with Alison.  The hillside is green and lush and grassy, and there is a stone Celtic cross standing in the turf.  It’s a place you could lie down in and spend the whole day watching the sun and clouds go by.  Once or twice I have come here in meditation to get a clearer sense of what is going on in our relationship.  I feel almost as if this is a place where Alison’s inner landscape touches my own; as if it is an area where our minds and hearts meet, in some sense.

Other times, when I reach out to Alison in meditation, I find she is right there with me, wherever I happen to be in the landscape — as if she and I are not separate people at all, but somehow shadows of each other, or overlapping individuals.

Things are very different, however, when I meditate on my children, or my parents.  When I go into meditation and think of them, my thoughts are drawn to the hills themselves, the twists and turns of the landscape, the patterns of vegetation and temperature.  In some way I feel as if my children and parents determine the very foundational geography of my inner landscape.  They never appear as symbols in meditation, but they are pervasive, integrated into everything.

Blood and Water, Air and Breath, Stone and Bone

I honestly don’t know why there’s such a difference in the way Alison and my children appear in meditation.  It might be because my children are blood relations; or it might be because I’ve known my children longer.  And I don’t know whether this difference would hold true of everyone, or is just a quirk of my own personal ‘landscape’.

But there is a clue here, I think, to why it is we use the same word, ‘love’, for these relationships that are so profoundly different.  Because whether, in the case of Alison, I am semi-physically linked like a shadow, or, in the case of my children, my paths are constrained by the shape and character of the landscape, these relationships help to define my very sense of self.  My four children are a fact about who I am, just as my partnership with Alison is.  I may change my coat, my haircut, my house, or my job, and that does not change who I think I am.  But a loss of these relationships would break me.

In other words, these relationships are an essential part of the scaffolding upon which I am building my life.  If I lost my children, I know that whole continents in my inner landscape would change (just as, when my marriage ended, a mountain collapsed).  If I lost Alison, the grassy hillside would become bare, and more profoundly, I could not reach out in meditation and find her there beside me and within me, closer than skin.  This, I think, is love, in blood or in water:  living in a landscape that is not yours alone.

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Cave of the Bear

And the next time I meditated, a saw the bear in its real form. It was there among the rocks, on the other side of the stream, a brown bear, on all fours and looking in the water, dragging its paw in the stream, fishing. Then there was a flash of silver and a splash, and the bear had a fish in its mouth. It lay down like a dog, holding the fish on the ground between its paws, and began to eat. After a moment, as I continued to watch, the bear looked up at me. I was a little afraid, but not too much. Although the bear was clearly strong and powerful, there was something in its gaze that welcomed me as a respected equal.

I crossed the stream and the bear approached.

I got the feeling it wanted me to follow, and it led me away from the cave entrance and toward a single huge tree, tall and broad and old, its branches high and spreading. I looked up the trunk, and not far up there I saw a large beehive perched among the leaves. I climbed the tree, gathered some honey in glass jars that I happened to have with me (bees almost never sting me), and brought them down for the bear. This gift was accepted with grace.

Then I realized the sun was starting to go down. I followed the bear back to the entrance of the cave, and turned and face back down the hill, where I could see the rippling rocky stream below, and the mixed forest of oaks and beeches and pines, and several other rocky hills nearby. The sun had already fallen behind the hills, and the sky had become ruddy and gold and purple. For a moment I stood and watched the sunset, feeling the cool breeze of evening, and smelling the gentle scents of the forest below. The birdsong had quieted, and all I could hear was the wind. The first stars were appearing now.

I felt a tremendous sense of peace and security. This is one of the gifts of the Bear: self-sufficiency, protection, peace. There is no threat that can harm the bear in its domain; it does not want or fear. But there are other gifts, too.

I turned back to the entrance to the cave, and the bear led me in. Inside it was very dark, but there was a dim red light coming from a small fire burning in the center of the stony floor. The firelight flickered on the walls. I did not see the bear; but I could feel its presence everywhere around. It had not gone away:  it was there, in the walls, in the floor; its life burned in the fire. It is as if I had entered the very soul of the bear. I felt its strength and protective energy all around, holding me, surrounding me, welcoming me. By entering this place, I had come to where the bear was most vulnerable, to share its warmth, its protection, its abundance, its heart.

I sat down by the fire, facing the cave entrance. The fire burned low and dim; and I could see, or sense, the stars outside, crowding the sky like scattered diamonds. The wind was blowing, and I felt the warmth of the small fire before me. Here is where the Bear comes to be reborn: like the sun, it retreats into its cave in the winter, and her cubs are born there, like the young sun of spring. Then I looked up at the walls of the cave, and realized that there were faint red lines of fire there, as if reflecting or echoing the flames; and the lines were tracing the stars and swirls and symbols painted on my pipestone bear.

Bear and Temple

I returned to the Bear’s realm several times over the next week, exploring it, finding its limits. There were clear boundaries: in one direction, a thick impassable forest of pines; in another, a place where the river ran up into another bear’s territory, and so on. The Bear’s realm didn’t seem to be connected to my inner landscape anywhere.

However, I did find quite a surprise when I went around the mountain to the side opposite the bear’s cave. Here the mountain’s lower slopes were covered with oak trees, and the earth was thick and rich and shadowed. I scrambled down the slope and encountered another stream, crossed it, and climbed up the bank on the other side. I saw a tumble of great stones embedded in the hillside, forming another cave. I poked my head in, wondering if there was another bear here, but it was obviously empty.

At this point I felt compelled to climb up this new hill, so I went on up. The earth was soft and loamy, and smelled of fallen leaves. It was just a short climb to where the land leveled out again, and I saw an opening in the trees ahead. And there, where the dark shadows ended, and an open sunny meadow opened up, with bees humming among the flowers — there was Apollo’s second temple, exactly as I had first seen it in meditation years ago.

It was still abandoned and dirty, leaves of past autumns layered on the floor, spiders everywhere, and a sense of mustiness, lichen, and aging stone. The pool was muddied and cloudy. But now I knew what to do.

I went back down the hill, across the river, and up the other side, back to the bear’s cave. I called to the bear, and she — now I knew it was a she — followed me — down the hill again, over the river, and up to the empty cave in the hill. She was delighted with it, and immediately began cleaning it, clearing it of dust and brush. I continued up to the second temple, and started my own cleaning job.

Every once in a while I returned to that place. I would actually go to the temple and imagine myself cleaning it, scrubbing away at years of grime and stain; and I would hear the bear working in her new cave. Now the temple sparkles, and the cave is cleaned and ready. There is even a hearth fire burning within it.

There is a lot more to be discovered here. I don’t yet know why there is a second temple, but in a way I know it’s a connection between the bear’s world and my usual haunt. I don’t know what will happen now that the connection has been made. Maybe nothing; maybe everything…

How many other guides do I have that I just don’t know about?

(Thanks to Ali for the beautiful photographs of my bear fetish.)

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