DEVOTION Part 2

He loved God. I'm in love with God! There was no hiding it, there was no reason for it. He was not insane. He was not normal with normal desires, normal needs. He desired God with all his heart, a desire so real that he felt Her intensity like a plummeting two mile high waterfall and an 8000-foot volcano erupting blood-red streams of burning flow. All desires became this one desire. It burst his veins, his heart, his muscle, his mind. Where blood once flowed, light coursed his destiny. When would he let go into her? When would there be nothing left of him that could measure how far?

She frightened him. Was she devouring him from the inside out? Would one day the hollowness of his insides cave in his muscular skeleton and what was in his private parts be exposed as more silly putty? She peeled and peeled. He was less but more, and more and more something else. What was it to lie within her?

When he could think, he thought about her all the time. When he slept he dreamt of her. Playful, happy dreams. She flirted and teased, "Follow me, if you can catch me, you will have me."

His buddies teased him, "Did you fuck your Goddess yet? You gotta show her her place, who's in control." They laughed and sneered at him and thought his vulnerability and intimacy with her his lack of manliness.

Control her, how could I do that? I can not conserve her, control her flow like Hoover Dam. I am just a log adrift in her rapids." He was not looking to be preserved by her, to be worshipped by her. He lived, he loved to worship her.

She existed as a tangible presence that tasted the fruit as he bit into it, that turned on the light to his vision of her. When he touched his shoulder length hair he felt her caress. When he laughed, it was at her jokes of perception. She gave him everything and he never had to worry about food or any of the demands of the body. All his needs were met in his love of Her. He was a most fortunate man.

She rose from her bed. She dreamt of him again. She brushed her hair into place and touched the ends of her shoulder length hair. She felt his movement in that gesture. She lathered her body with soap and then shampoo and the smell of him lingered on her clean body. She watched herself brush her teeth in the mirror and the feel of him was so strong that for a moment his eyes were her eyes reflected in the mirror image. She lived him day to day and now almost moment to moment. He was that close to her but they had never met.

She spent all her days with him, too. Her life was a pleasurable one filled with activities of love and art. She drew and painted the forms of God. She hiked in the forest and by the rivers and enjoyed the play of light., water and sound. The creaking of the trees swaying in the breezes was a song she listened to and enjoyed. It set her into moods of bliss. She noticed her play of light in form and delighted in it all. Wherever she traveled, she shared with him the marvels of the canyons, the peaks of the valleys, the curve of the road, and the invisible airs that seemed to shine blue. She sang to him songs of yearning desire, touch. She was silly and teased him to make him want her more. She pretended to roam apart from him and urged him and joked with him that he could not keep up with her. "I'll lose you in a crack of lightning or under a rock in the caverns of someone else's mind. If I withdrew my attention it would be over and you would be like other men again -- looking for your heart's desire in the bastard forms of my love." But She was loving him more and more and yearned for the day his devotion would be complete. She desired his manliness and knew him as God.

She was tired of being a patient mother. She wanted to abandon her role of conservative picks. "Try this." She was tired of logic, of sex ownership. She was tired of their rule of confinement. Her children behaved in a conservative manner and never crossed the line, never passed into what was banned, prohibited, taboo. Her passion was against the law and she veiled her attracting force and became the benign mother - - a healer -- accepting all and asking for a few dollars from time to time. Love was not offered her. She began to die and gave up hope that she would really be loved. She gave all and all and they asked for more and more. She could hear their screams, "Me, me, watch me, give to me, I want all your attention." She lived with the dark plague of unreciprocated love and a hard tension, resistance, was her life of feeling. At the darkest hour when she tried to cheerfully resign herself to her fate, she felt a break in the tension and for the first time in months, she breathed deeply and her heart tingled with desire. She was surprised how it touched her, whole-bodily and even sexually, too. She wanted and watched for him to appear. The desire and attraction grew stronger over the months until she played with him in dreams every night and felt and lived his bodily energy every day and still, she had not even seen his face. She was crazy in love with him. She lived with another kind of tension now, his growing, all consuming desire to be with her. She sometimes weeped with the anticipation of it.

He did not know she was real, bodily present., flesh and blood like himself. He felt her as a spiritual presence, a deity of light, that helped and guided him. He called her mother. She held him at her breast and he drank her sweet milk of nourishment. He felt protected and guided. If he fell into dark moods she lifted him up and soothed him. She often sent him on errands and he returned with bouquets of wild flowers. She would demonstrate her pleasure with him by stroking his cheeks with the petals. With her love steady in his heart he grew up into his youth and then manhood. He was an artist and a musician, singing and painting her presence, her effect on his life's desire. In his search for her he fell in love with many women. He was wild and passionate, almost violent in his love, his need for her. Some women thought he was crazy, all opposites were exaggerated in him. He had been in the army, in the psychiatric ward, on the road touring. He had lived in retreat for a few years in a cabin in the coastal cliffs of Washington state where he followed his intuitions of her privately without disturbance.

He thought not of his future success nor of his past failures. He disciplined his mind to act, to feel, to think only of her; That was his yoga. He became more natural and in rhythm with his/her true nature. His love became purer and he wanted to please her and was ashamed that in his childhood fancies he had only demanded from her and lived in the luxury of her flowing grace. He did not take for granted that he was a fortunate man. He searched for any clue that would help him understand how to give pleasure to her. The more ways he found to love her, the more he felt her love was unbounded and it amazed him how intense and giving she was. He could not eat without offering the food to her. He could not write a song about anything or anyone, only her. A single chord would be held in embrace of her and sustained for minutes while his eyes rolled up and he heard her primal sound. "I am your Shakti," she sang to him.