One supposes no account of this spiritual journey would be complete without mentioning the first attempt at building a new relationship—a step everyone in circumstances like mine must eventually take.
I speak of Rebecca, that special soul met in Haifa, on the very first day of the Pilgrimage. We have just finished a week in Arizona, visiting our mothers who live there and, to compensate for the difficulty of those reunions, making the acquaintance of the red rocks and the Grand Canyon. It was a week of wonder, delight, discovery, laughter and, at the end, an hour of sheer hell as we were forced to acknowledge that, however close we had come, her heart still belonged to the fellow whom she had known at the time we two met. Both of us mourned this fact, while both recognized its immutability: the heart is a stubborn thing, sometimes, and listens to no voice but its own.
It is an odd passage to which we have come. So much living was packed into those days that we both felt as if a hundred years had passed since we bade our mothers good-bye and began our own private adventure. So many gifts we have given each other; so much has been learned, so much that is precious shared and savored. I would neither have missed nor traded one moment of it, heartache and all.
And both of us feel that our story has not ended, though the terms of its continuation are unclear to us. She says her heart lies elsewhere but is not ready to make a life-time commitment to him or to anyone else. Is there a future for us? Can I be a friend, who would be so much more? We are bound somehow, we know this; the chance of our meeting, the intimacy of soul and mind that came so quickly, the depth to which we have touched each other, all suggest…what? God’s will for us? But what is His intention? And when will He make it clear?
I know it makes no sense to linger in this place: I must devote energy to rebuilding my life, my work, making decisions about the future—all postponed, really, through the all-absorbing possibility of having found a partner. And so I will move on, as I had to do after Amelia passed, and pick up the loose threads. Time we both need, to sort out, to process, to think, to evaluate, to rest, to remember and ponder the meaning of our days together.
It is the ravens that stay in my mind. I know they are considered by the native peoples of the West to be tricksters, the impish spirits of generations gone by, guardians and much more; but they are something else to me. When we went to see the second house in Sedona in which Amelia and I would live, I was struck by all the ravens in the trees outside and on the borders of neighboring rooftops: black, ominous figures, I thought, their shoulders hunched in brooding watchfulness as we entered this house, muttering to themselves and their friends in a rough, clicking, gutteral language I could not parse. Their presence gave me a sense of foreboding, as if they were messengers of some future sadness. I thought at the time that what I felt was a premonition that this would be the house where Amelia would surrender her life, and so I was reluctant to engage it; but she lived through that time, and on, until she could reach home where her unfinished business lay.
But it has been running through my mind these days that these dark visitors were, indeed, linked with sorrow, because the other man’s name, the one he chose for himself, is Raven. Playful spirits they may be to others; to me they are harbingers of sadness, and I was mistaken only in the timing.
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