Bring the Wind and Bring the Thunder




Six years after we fell in love and four years after we stopped talking, his memory came rushing back to me on a Labor Day morning in September.

I woke up at six a.m., looked out the window at the silver maple trees with pale green leaves ripening in rust colors, and took a deep breath of cool fall air, also inhaling a memory of his love for me – or was it my love for him? The emotion was surprising. For a long time, signs of him had stopped tugging at my heart – Roger Waters singles, Danish cities, Viking lore and legends no longer followed me around. I had surrendered: he faded into the past somewhat and I lived in the present and occasionally feared never finding great love again, even though I dated every so often. Yet, for the last several days his memory haunted me: Mats was the protagonist’s name in several foreign movies I rented from the library downtown, and "Gimme Shelter," his favorite song by the Rolling Stones, had played at a couple stores in town where I shopped.

From past experiences, lessons learned during my heartbreak were preceded by signs of him. Jolts and bolts of eye-opening epiphanies rained down until I accepted their message: Love yourself even though he found someone else to love; think yourself worthy even though he did not recognize your worth; know you are beautiful even though he never said it; realize he loved you even though you did not love yourself enough to believe it. It could be a conversation I overhead of Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring, a constant topic of our conversations ('did he or did he not love that girl with the pearl earring or did she love him,' as implied in the book by Tracy Chevalier) or finding the sterling silver necklace of Thor’s hammer he gave me for protection, which I found lying around several years after losing it, that triggered a tsunami of realizations.

This time, his memory didn’t spur anger or an urge to send him to hell telepathically, or to give him the psychic finger. It didn’t matter if he had been a soulmate, twin flame, karmic relationship, anam cara, king, better half, kin, companion, husband, lover, friend. All labels I once studied with intention of applying to our connection now staunched its mystery, as if trying to stop a mountain waterfall with a raised finger. The mysterious and the glorious had to be trusted, experienced, and left alone – yet another lesson. 

That morning his memory promised another epiphany, so I breathed it in, slowly and joyfully, a sensation I perceived as I walked to the YMCA up the street where I intended to work out; it floated above the uneven brick pavement that rose and fell from cracks caused by the roots of Canadian maple bulging under the sidewalk; and it traveled in the air with the scent of last night’s pot smoked from the neighbor’s house and a cake baked in the following house. This time love felt different, not like a cavalry of cherubs shooting their arrows at my heart and groin, causing an invisible gash like the first time.

The YMCA was closed for the holiday, so I returned to my apartment, grabbed my khaki jacket because the morning was cool 65 degrees, and went for a walk in the town center. It was 7:00 am and streets were deserted, except for a tourist waiting for a cab at the entrance of the luxurious Weston Eastlander.  Portland, Maine, was quiet most of the time but especially in the early mornings and evening hours, and quieter still on Sundays and holiday Mondays, as if its residents had an unspoken agreement to rise and go to bed at a mutually convenient time for all to start and end the day as to not make any unnecessary noise.

I recognized the Maine silence now, but at first it was heavy, dark, threatening, and accusatory; it recollected mummies and werewolves from the chatter heard on street corners by those who knew it only on face value, or as interpreted in the books of one of its most famous Mainer and celebrity, Stephen King. Really, silence had been my road to facing personal demons.

My first three years, I tossed and turned every night on a $70 foam mattress. My 200 square foot attic apartment in a converted 1800s house was bare -- no curtains, rugs, furniture to block open space. I was married to the seasons. Spring rains, summer's blue skies, fall leaves, winter snow tapped on my window like old friends. I acted intuitively -- and insanely -- when I abruptly left the South, my friends and job, for a place I’d never even visited, only movie romances set in Maine and its lighthouses seem to inspire me to leave everything behind. My kids were off to college. I was 45. I had always wanted to run away from home. 

Suddenly, I needed space -- not the maple, teak, expensive and oversized furniture I got in the divorce many years ago after a sixteen-year marriage, the same furniture I donated to the thrift store before leaving for the Northeast. I gave up my luxury Acura now rundown, stilettos, and $400 designer dresses – also acquired during my marriage - and I donated my collection of over 300 books to the library. My soul started breathing. Then, my past gurgled up like acid reflux, like the woman’s blood curdling scream I heard one night and the explosion from what sounded like a Revolutionary War cannon another night. Maine was strange and scary, I thought, and covered my head with the pillow.

Without knowing it, Mats had started me on a journey to truth. “I think your father didn’t treat you well,” He said in conversation when we were still together. “Did I say that?” I asked, horrified by his astute perception. 

I’d never talked about my father, but Mats sensed I hid the truth about him; they looked alike – gray eyes, short stature, frenetic pace, and love of travel and women - similarities I didn’t dare admit to myself. It was more important to honor a parent, I thought, than to be honest about your feelings for them, even though my relationship with both my mother and father had shriveled me within an inch of my humanity. Anyway, that was the past: I had bravely survived and successfully buried memories of my long-ago childhood. But in the darkness, silence, and solitude of Maine its pain was glaring.

“Motherfucker,” I screamed out one morning to my long-deceased father. “Why? All your cursing, spitting in my face, and violence didn’t let up until you died when I was 17. I was just a child." Then there was my cruel mother inciting him to more violence by pitting him against me or my sister and me. I would forgive and let go later, but now I had to understand and accept that my innocence was stolen at a young age. That all my sensual, emotional, psychological and natural impulses were made a perversion. That my curious nature was stilted and afraid.  That I didn't surrender to anyone or anything, not even great love, for fear of the slightest hint of violence or rejection.  That I was made “shelterless” by my sheltering parents, and that I had never come to terms or accepted the wrongs done to me -- even after being married, divorced and raising two kids on my own. 

The anger tightened around my chest. I had Reiki in town, hiked in and around the city, learned how to breath slowly and mindfully, and meditated twice a day. Like in Sarah Groves's song, “Like a Lake, “ I braced for the storm:

Bring the wind and bring the thunder

Bring the rain till I am tried

When it's over bring me stillness

Let my face reflect the sky

And all the grace and all the wonder

Of a peace that I can't fake

Wide open like a lake. 
Sarah Groves, Like a Lake (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjAhho6U3r0)

Everything started to come up -- anger, sadness, betrayal, heartbreak pommeled me.  I was exhausted from raising two kids as a single mother, working three jobs, finding love, losing love, and releasing childhood trauma I had calcified into my psyche.  

My immune system failed. I suffered bouts of overwhelming fatigue from severe allergies. I developed a recurrent ear infection that occasionally sent me to the emergency room, several blocks from my place, which I walked at 2 or 3 in the morning with throbbing pain -- and I hadn't even had a flu in over fifteen years. Sometimes, I didn't leave my bed for days (thankfully, I worked as an online American History instructor). Even so, signs of Mats were always present to cushion the blows: his favorite book, The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, popped up in bookstore windows; his Mona Lisa, liked he called me, was on posters everywhere... – all because like he said, “we arrived on the same meteorite at the beginning of time.” Everything was going to be a okay, I thought. I once heard a great line in an Italian film: "the one who loves you is always there. Even before you. Even before meeting you." Maybe, that was also true.

I started to feel better:  I took French language classes at the adult education center and joined a reading group. I was stronger and a bit lighter and was moving away from the darkness for fear it was too familiar and must now avoid staying in its depth for too long, like the drunks and drug addicts here who went from hit or bar to a crumbled body slump on the streets, further confirming the allure of being lost forever.   

Later, I learned that the Portland was also known as the phoenix, because two great fires, one in the 1800s and another in the 1900s, had claimed the small city, which rose again each time as better version of itself, like I was now trying to do.  Resurgam, the Latin for “I will rise again” was written on the Portland flag. 

That first winter, six years ago, though, I was innocent to what was to come and simply thought the silence annoying when I sat on park bench at Deering Oaks Park, one night tired from carrying bags of groceries with items reflecting my most recent past -- too many meats, rice, beans, and cooking oil for a single person. 

Silence was not what I signed up for. I expected new friends, block parties, and all the merrymaking experienced by the tourists who came during the summer from around New England and Europe to whale watch, hike, drink beer, boat, fish, and sunbathe. I didn't know that the real spirit of Maine was dark, deep, and mysterious and could only be experienced as a soulful redemption brought on by silence and wild, natural beauty. The place was hell with large pockets of heaven, which the seagulls who soared even in the most violent of weather, constantly reminded me to reach in their expansive and life-affirming flights, which I could see outside my bedroom window. Maine had the feel of the old woman in the woods, the fairy tale about the lost traveler, who finds a cabin in the woods and in it an elderly woman who rocks him back to health all night until morning when he rises to become the sun. 

Yet, my immediate present felt funereal like the deserted park of oaks bald from winter, branches on evergreens weighed down with thick flakes of wet snow, lake frozen with sheets of scratched ice, and hazy pastels reflected off light posts. Why did I move here alone? Why hasn’t he called? Why didn't he marry me like he said he would? Why didn’t he love me?

Now, I continued strolling with my long, lost feeling of love on Congress Street with its brick sidewalks (the city was a small fortress of brick, flat, dented, uneven, and rising as buildings inlaid with art deco touches, also constructed in light, deep, fading, or painted shades of red brick).   A few homeless men sat on city benches or walked around as if lost.

When I turned on Temple street, with the movie theatre where I enjoyed extra servings of hot butter on my popcorn on days I caught a film, I finally breathed into life an epiphany: the pure, sublime, sacred, mysterious, innocent feeling that overtook me the moment I fell in love with Mats had never been made nauseous, inferior, or grotesque in my human interpretation of it or in my effort to contain, understand, possess or dismiss it– even when the sex was bad, even when he disappeared, even when we stopped talking, even if he did not love me as much as I loved him, even when I was heartbroken. Divine love had traveled to me from eternity and stayed on.

Maybe, the man I once loved was the source of such experiences – the stone from which the wild feminine pulled from it her Excalibur. Maybe all the women he had loved and lost (and there were quite a few) -- like his fiery Danish Spanish, as he called her, who I imagined with red medusa like locks and deep blue eyes radiating a superheroine’s passion, a woman he claimed took him to the cosmos in marathons of uninhibited sex -- had given him a taste of the divine, and in turn he confirmed the divine in them. 

My relationship with him had also been about the other women in his life – the ones I thought were the competition. The one’s I thought I had to outperform, compare myself with, beat out. Cry over, be envious of.  Through the frustration of my limitless and long-winded grief and heartbreak of six years, which I was ashamed to admit to, I found the courage to go deeper into myself and to my piercing pain as a headlamp to see more and clear the debris - before Mats, before my parents, before me.  I had to surrender to a limitless truth and in that truth include Mats’s women, their heartbreak, healing, and my heartbreak and healing; then transmute it all  In the end, heartbreak became more important, life-sustaining, and life-giving than staying with him could have ever been. 

Once, when I told my friend, who is also a Buddhist, about my relationship problems she responded by saying it was all about me. “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “He did this, and he didn't do that.”  I resented her advice. But it had always been about me -- what I failed to see, do, embrace, admit, release, forgive, celebrate…. Through, with, and without Mats, I dared to be divine, even though I could not appreciate it at the time. With its many faces, love had rescued, nurtured, emboldened, frightened, destroyed, resuscitated, healed, and transformed me--, and I was grateful.


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