Chapter Fifteen

September 1974

George and I had planned our workshops for the Whole Being weekend so that we would have more or less all of the third day free, for it fell on our anniversary, the 22nd, and we wanted to spend the day together. The first day we had our all-day workshops on fiddle-making and stained glass, from eight in the morning until four, so we didn't see each other much until dinner time; the second day there was George’s workshop on universal energy and I was doing concessions, and the last day were our music workshops, only two hours long.

The Wobbly was a deal of work setting up. From Lammas onward there were work days – mostly carpentry- for which we volunteered, as the whole thing was run on volunteerism. The fee for the three days was $10, and the food, all donated, was free. We were not paid for our workshops, but we didn’t have to pay a camping fee either. It was nominal, but the freebie was nice. We took our two-man climbing tent, camp chairs, a canister of paraffin and the stove; snacks, powdered milk and tea, treating it like a climbing weekend. Fergus was very happy to have his own zabuton beside us. He was used to camping out, and so long as George was there morning and evening with his food wherever we were, he was the best of best friends.

Early on Friday morning on their way to the festival site, James and Betsey stopped by our camp in Buckhorn under the pines, and said it looked very homey. George crawled out of the tent and shook the hair from his face.
‘Eh? No more Spartan than home, you mean?’ He was smiling.
‘How do you fit in there, with all that?’ Betsey said, peering into the tent, which was full of our instruments at the moment.
‘We have a ground sheet and tarp for that,’ George said.
‘Still doesn’t explain how you can cram yourselves in there,’ James said. ‘You’d take up most of it all by yourself.’
‘Tantra!’ I said, and they laughed. George zipped up the tent, whistled to the dog, and we walked with them through the trees for the day.

There were maybe a thousand people present on Friday, and at the morning meditation, probably six hundred sat on the lawn before the stage. We began with the Chenrezig chant – Om mani padme hum – for about ten minutes, and then everyone fell to silence, which became progressively more profound as time stretched into timelessness. Geordie and I sat spooned together, as we often did, his head resting against mine, holding hands, and flowing along in a sea of beautiful energy. The circuit was so complete that we could do the guru breathing in this way, one flowing into the other. The silence became a hum, then a roar, and the whole world was contained in it. Six hundred people, breathing peace together; it was so calm and loving and steady.
There wasn't any call to come back from cloud cuckoo land, it just happened, with everyone opening their eyes more or less at once and a lot of people laughing. The light was brilliant, a bright white-blue, and it felt like the first day of the world.
Wow.
'You look like a Thangka,' James told us.
'Danke,' George smiled.
There were seven people in my glass class, which was plenty. I set up the stations of the workshop along three tables with various stages of the work. The kiln had been going since the day before, and I used the old glass from our windows for painted work. They were a little freaked out at first at not having electric soldering irons, but they soon got the knack, and one girl, Beth, whom I'd seen in Maggie's, was ecstatic over making glass art in the way of mediaeval artisans. Here was someone who would keep it up, bring forward the old traditions. That made me feel very good. I gave them several design templates I had made, from pieces I had already sold, and it was a joy to watch their creativity bloom.

At the lunch break, which was only half an hour, I went over to George’s fiddle class, where the work was really intense. Six men and George were in the middle of sounding backs with a tuning fork, so I took Ferg for a walk and left them to it. When I got back the fiddlers had also taken a break and the water I brought was much appreciated.
George was laughing with one of the guys there about having to bail on the Long Climb on Ben Nevis in bad weather, so I knew that he was a climber as well.
‘Thank you darling,’ George said of the flask. He leaned his head against me and put an arm about my waist. His hair was sticking to his neck in the heat, and I found it awfully sexy. He poured some of the water over his head. ‘Rob, this is my wife Claire.’
The brown-haired man with the sharp face nodded. ‘Rob Bellamy,’ he said in pure Glaswegian.
‘Nice to hear a voice from home,’ I returned. I looked at George. ‘I have to get back to my class,’ I said, moving the hair from his neck. It was just an excuse to touch him. ‘Have fun, sweetheart.’
Well, he got the vibe, because in answer he ran his hand up my leg under my skirt and smiled.
‘See you, baby.’
Rob was at the celebration that night too, and sat with us and James and we all talked about climbing for a while, sharing the Glenfiddich Rob had brought. He was a lecturer in astronomy at UC Riverside and one of the Stonemasters, the local rock club stars, so I figured that we’d be seeing a lot more of him in the future. In the last few weeks, he was climbing close by when John Long made a couple of his famous first ascents, including on some routes that Geordie and James had done, and he told us about climbing on Tahquitz with Royal Robbins, which was great.

Saturday
I spent the morning after the meditation at concessions, doling out buns and baklava, scrambled tofu and herb tea to people who were in such a high and loving space that the ordinarily mechanical chore was full of God. As I made tea in the back for the second time, in a big stock pot – I knew that this is what it was like to be a monk, forever enmeshed in God in prayer. It wasn't chanting or reciting Aves- I smiled to myself at that because I had used to go into a meditative state at wakes when long rosaries were said - it was being in God, or God being in one, very simply. When we were at Findhorn, George and everybody else had talked a lot about living in this manner – breathing in the breath of God, and I really got it now.

At about ten, I left the work and scuttled in the back of the tent as George began his workshop. He had changed into his white ruffled shirt, but he still wore jeans, and a red silk scarf for a belt. He was deeply tanned from all the summer's climbing, and so looked rather like a gypsy. I'd have to remember to tell him later that he looked like an ould tinker fella. There were about thirty people present.
'My name is George and I am an asshole,' he said. About half the people laughed. Some looked perplexed.
'All right,' he said, holding up a hand. 'Some of you get that and some don't and that's okay. But it is the truth and we will start from there, because connecting with the power of divine force starts from accepting what you are, as you are, right now, and not pretending you are holy or spiritual or ascended to a higher vibration.' That got some laughs too, from a different set of people. 'And however different you become from what you once were, you cannot ever forget that the potential lies within you to fall back into that negativity...

'I'm not talking about mortal sin here –' I laughed and he raised his head, smiling. 'That is my Irish Catholic wife laughing at me back there. Thank you darling. It's important to have someone to laugh at your jokes.... I'm talking about awareness. It's easy to get lazy and think you are being high and spiritual when you're really just fooling yourself. ' He went to the small table and took up a basket of smooth stones we had collected on the shores of the lake, and walked along, giving one to each person from the centre of the row as he spoke.

'I want you to sit for a moment and centre yourself. Hold this little stone in your hands. Be with it. You and it are the same thing, come from the same source, and the same stuff. What made the stars made you. And that source is not uranium and hydrogen; it is Love. Chi. God. We are that.... This little stone has come on a long journey, from the creation of the universe, through the heavens, to this place, to you. It is part of a vaster whole, a great mountain that once was. It is little now. Yet it remembers being a mountain, being a gas in the centre of the universe. Its body is small now, but it is older than ours. Compared to it, we are transient, as bodies. As consciousness, we are at one with it, the same, no older or younger. It is our brother. Be with it. Let it speak to you.'

He had come to the back of the tent now, and came and kissed the top of my head. His hand on my cheek was hot. He stood for a long timeless time at the back, then walked slowly, mindfully, to the front, through the echoing silence, the soft sighs, and the Presence that had dawned in the room. Someone started to cry. He smiled, his beautiful gentle smile.
'You can come back into the room when you want,' he said softly, and waited for a long few moments.
'"Be still and know that I AM".... That is God, what we are, speaking to you, in whatever way you felt or heard it. That is universal energy. It can change your life. It changed mine.' He glanced at me and sat on the table. He went on softly, so softly and evenly,

'When I say to you that I am an asshole, I don't want to draw a lot of glamour to that. I tell you truly that I was a heroin addict in London, running dangerous games with sharps and pimps and every low character. I was that far from selling my soul to the devil. I thought I was an atheist. Why? Because I was so gifted and by the age of 20 had come to the end of the road. Philosophy had led me to despair. Talent had made me contemptuous. Politics had made me cynical. All I could see were decades of the same and more of the same. I knew there had to be a better way, but I didn't know that I led myself here, that it was my own doing, by how I thought, about myself and other people. I had shut them out – any real communication just didn't happen. I was a train wreck on the inside, and a cocky asshole on the outside.

'... When I was at Findhorn in the winter of '72, David Spangler, who trained as a molecular biologist, told me pretty much the same thing I just told you, and it cracked me open to feel, really feel that I was a part of something, something old and deep and infinite, and it was calling to me.' Some people in the group were crying again. 'Now, I didn't have breakthrough as some of you did here, not then, but I felt it – warm, and benign and present. I was elated and ashamed at once – I felt joyful that I had found what I had been missing, but ashamed because my whole life up to then was a lie... but God is so merciful. It loves us and calls us home, always, like the Prodigal son....

'We'll continue with how to keep this going in a few minutes, but I want you to break up into groups and talk about what happened to you with our brother stones.'
The crowd dispersed into six groups, and for forty-five minutes everyone shared their experience. George moved from group to group, listening, asking 'how are you doing?' and giving hugs where needed. Some people were wide open and crying. He embraced them and told them with shining eyes that they were beautiful. In my own group, a man who was about sixty, for all the world a longshoreman, cried like a child and told a story of how as a child he had had imaginary friends in the woods of Arkansas – and had been made fun of at school, so closed down emotionally. The room was swirling with emotion – love grief, gratitude, anger. It would have been easy to lose control of it. But George did not.

He clapped his hands, softly, twice, from the head of the room and began to speak again.
'Thank you all, for your sharing. It has enriched us all. Now, how do you keep this, when the boss is breathing down your neck or the kids are fighting or your husband comes home drunk or your wife is nagging you? –Not that mine does,' he smiled, and got some laughs, which was his object.
'I'm not going to tell you to walk about with this little stone in your pocket, although you could do that. I'm going to tell you to close your eyes – do it now, with me – and breathe in. Breathe in the Presence. And breathe out all those tumultuous feelings. Do it more than once if you have to. You may not feel the Presence, but think it. It will come.... There,' he smiled. The room was peaceful again.

'We are creatures of habit,' he continued, 'and it is so easy to come away from a weekend like this feeling so high, and it lasts for a few days or maybe a week or two, and then our everyday life keeps happening and it brings us down and we get back into the same habits of mind and of life that we had before. So we become enlightenment junkies, chasing after every trick and workshop. This is a pointless circle.' There were laughs at this. 'Because all we ever do is confront ourselves. We come up against the same issues and difficulties again and again – and if we never stick with something and break through then we can spend our whole lives in this place. And that's a kind of hell too.

'So if I have the same fights with my husband or wife over and over, or with my secretary or whatever, there's a fairly good chance that I'm the problem, or to put it another way – the situation at the moment is not what's bugging me; rather it's reminding me of something in the past that I haven't worked through, confronted, let go of. I need to find out what that is – and then what is now will stop hitting me in the face. Mostly importantly, I need to remember all the time to listen for the voice or feeling or sense I had in connecting with the Divine and ask it what I should be understanding at the moment. It will tell you.'
He smiled. ' We all know that it's easier to do this when we are less encumbered by stuff, less hung up with getting ahead in the rat race, we all get that, or we wouldn't be here. But it can be done anywhere.... If you want to break up into groups again and talk about this you can, or ask me anything privately, or just be for a while, that's fine. Thank you so much for being here.' He said the last with his warm smile, and several people laughed. They got it.

He spent the next hour talking with the groups or individuals, and when the tent was finally empty, I came up to him with a smile where he stood leaning at the table with his arms crossed with a blissful smile.
'Woman!' he said, lunging for me. I was gathered in and he gave me a long kiss.
'I am so high, and my head is buzzing,' he admitted. 'I don't know whether to say let's go somewhere and make it or fall down in a heap. I couldn't do this for a living... Oh come here, darling girl, and let me run off some of this energy –' he wrapped himself around me, arms and legs, buried his face in my neck, and held on tight. He was shaking deeply. I heard his unspoken thoughts, scalding and intimate, and couldn't have moved for worlds. The kundalini rush built with inexorable slowness, but it hit like a storm. It was complete oneness, as transcendent as sex. We hovered there for a long time, and we were one with everything and each other in that wordless, shattering place.

It ebbed slowly, his shaking stopped, and we were both drenched. He moved his head away and looked at me, his eyes dark.
'My God,' he murmured. 'That was remarkable.' He kissed me. 'Can you do that across the room?'
I smiled shakily. 'We could try.' I was as dazed as he.
'Bottle and sell it,' he said, and then sighed deeply. 'Now I'm hungry!'
I laughed. 'Well, that doesn't change!'
'Naughty girl,' he smiled. 'Let's go find something to eat now we've had our fling or I shall fall down. My God!'
He pushed himself up from the table with both hands. 'David never told me that running energy was like that! That could be a whole new career for him in marriage counselling.'
He shook his head like a wet dog to clear it, and took my hand and the empty basket in the other. And we ambled out of the tent.
'I feel like I've climbed the Eiger North Face,' he said ruefully. 'Really wobbly.'
I laughed. 'Maybe that's why they call it that.'

At the concessions booth we met up with Joe in the queue ahead of us, who turned and said, 'Hey there you are! Man, you've got the whole place humming about your workshop! They're all babbling about breakthroughs and totally blissed out.'
George smiled, and sang, 'little human upon the sand, from where I'm lying here in your hand.... I'm glad they liked it. They were so ready for it. It was beautiful.'
We got our food – George a heaping plate of what seemed like a full Indian dinner- and sat down under the trees, where the breeze far above in the pine-tops sounded like a waterfall.
'I learned something there,' George said thoughtfully as we ate.
'Eh?'
'A few things: I know why David left Findhorn; it was time yes, but it was also very intense and there was too much of a chance of being set up in the minds of the community as some kind of father-figure, as Peter had been... I know why also some relationships broke up there,' he looked at me frankly. 'It would have been really easy back there to fall into some game with one of those women, if I had been thinking with blind Willie in an "I'm okay you're okay" sort of way. It happened regularly. People felt all that love, and with the belief that whatever happens is God's will... they just didn't know how to handle it properly, didn't know how to disconnect love from sex, the person from the body – ' he smiled ruefully. 'Even though I felt mighty sexy in that high!' He paused. 'I'm so grateful to be able to step back in my mind and let things be, not do anything stupid.' He looked at me with those storm-coloured eyes. 'You are so precious to me, and what we have is so amazing. I wouldn't ever want to mess that up. I love you.' He touched my face, and I leaned into his hand. Perfect, perfect moment.
'I am so lucky,' I told him. ' And I feel so grateful all the time. Who'd have thought a spoiled rich girl like me could find someone like you?' The words sound so paltry. 'But I love you. You are my life.'
We leaned together there, with eyes closed, until we heard James say,
'Now there's a picture. Shakti and Shiva.' He was smiling.
George smiled too, softly, still in the high. 'Hello there Jimbo. What's up, man?'
'Can you come help set up for the bonfire tonight? We need another couple of guys.'
'Duty calls!' George said. He put aside his plate, got up and took off his shirt and the scarf. 'Can you put this in my rucksack, darling? I'll be back as soon as we're done.'
'It shouldn't be more than half an hour,' James assured me.

We spent Sunday morning in the group meditation then meandered down to a workshop on manifestation, and had our auras photographed by a girl with a Kirlian plate. It was very interesting, as we did it individually and together, which was supposed to show the level of connection or friction between us. What happened was we each and then together put our right hands – the ‘energy hand’ she said – on the plate and it was exposed. When we made the mutual print, George leaned near and brushed my ear in a kiss, murmuring wordlessly. His hand beside mine on the plate was very hot, and I felt a rush of energy. It was completely spontaneous, and dead sexy.

Individually, mine was blue and purple, with a silvery colour in the dotted outline, but Geordie’s was a deep violet, with red at the centre and yellow at the edges. Amy read off the results, and said that he was a much more physical person than I, which made us laugh. She put it rather that I had the spiritual connection in the relationship, and he was the tether to manifestation in the world and that he was deeply emotionally attached, which was pretty close to the truth about how we operated, which was very cool.
When she looked at the joint exposure she gasped and looked at it for a long time before speaking.
‘Wow,’ She said, showing us the print,’ this is so totally cool! Look at this. It’s just what is supposed to happen if you’re attuned –‘
There was a complete blend in the colours: swirls of deep violet and orangey red with a perfectly golden edge– and the corona had grown from about half an inch to an inch and a half – it was a great fuzzy mass; the boundary between the prints had disappeared. It looked like a nebula.
‘Far out!’
George smiled. ‘Heaven on earth.’
It was a nice anniversary present – a confirmation from science that we were made for each other.

Amy told us that we could use this method to monitor our meridians, or chakras or check out how our meditations were affecting our bodies.
‘Biofeedback,’ George said.
‘Yeah,' Amy agreed. ‘You know, I love doing this here because people are so high and loving that the pictures are almost always really beautiful. Works of art. Thank you so much for sharing this! You guys are awesome. Do you mind if I hang this in my studio?’
‘Not at all,’ we said.
‘That was lovely,’ Geordie said as we were walking away,’ but we don’t need something like that to tell us how we are together.’ His glance was full of that deep speaking intimacy, and he swung my hand in his.

In the afternoon we Zen quilters hung the panorama quilt in the visitors centre with a little ceremony headed by Joe. The quilt ran around two walls and looked really beautiful. I did four panels in the end, all of the mountains, and was happy with the result. Afterward we went back to Wobbly for the closing puja. At the end, after all the prayers and chanting and dancing, we were blessing ourselves with the tsampa and George said, smiling, ‘no one threw rice at us before, so I call this fitting.’ He kissed my cheek.
Betsey leaned across James. ‘Is it your anniversary?’
George laughed. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’ll be, ‘ James said. ‘How many is it?’
I held up a finger.
‘Oh my God!’ Betsey exclaimed. ‘No wonder you two are so ... attached! Jeez! Oh, you have to let us take you out.’
‘I’d rather go in, if you don’t mind,’ George said.
I couldn’t speak for blushing.

The camp would not break up for us until the morning, so we spent the night in our little tent, with our headlamps glowing low in the corners. We were completely apart from the world. We could have been anywhere, and it would have been the same: love and musing and drowsy sleep in a beautiful cycle until the morning came.
'If I never live another day, lady,' he said in the hushing hours before dawn, 'I shall have lived in this year and day. And if I wake to find myself beneath the Eildon tree, then I shall speak the truth of this before the whole world.'
My breath caught, 'Good my lord of Erceldoune, Lay down your head upon my knee, ere we climb yon hill, and I will show you fairlies three. Take this for thy wages,' I kissed him. 'It will give the tongue that cannot lie. But ye maun hold your tongue, Whatever you may hear or see, For gin ae word you should chance to speak, You will ne'er get back to your ain countrie.'
His breath was also caught, ' I cry you mercy, lady, give not this gift to me. For how shall I counsel Prince or lord, or court a fair lady?'
I touched his mouth with my fingers, and he kissed them.
'Now haud thy peace, ' I whispered. 'For as I say, so must it be.'
Down then we went, into the bliss in silence, in that lovely game.