Patricia Jamie Lee

It slipped by me but I want to celebrate here for a moment.  On January 6th Milt and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.  It feels like an important marker.  There is no way to describe what it is like to spend two decades with your soul mate.  In my twenties and early thirties, I thought perhaps it was not to be my fate.  I remember one night I was sitting in front of our little gas fireplace meditating and I saw a man come into my view.  I knew he was my soul mate, and I wanted so badly to be able to see his face, to have him come closer, that tears leaked out of my eyes and ran down my cheeks.  I’ve always been a lonely person and have felt outside of “normal”.   I remember when I read Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” and felt like Valentine Michael Smith.  Someone had dropped me off on a strange planet and left me there to wither. 

I have an urge to tell the story.  Milt was a friend of my first husband’s–yes, it is true.  Wayne used to tell me that he couldn’t wait until I met his new friend, that he knew I was just going to love this guy because he and I were so much alike.  

I was living and working down in Tucson, AZ  and teaching NLP workshops across the city.  Milt decided he wanted to learn NLP and so we engaged in a phone relationship.  In the meantime, I had been clear that one thing I wanted to get from my time in Tucson was a clear spiritual path.  I’d been shopping around but found nothing except trickery and false gods.  Sorry, but it is true.   I felt somewhat attracted to a form of yoga and had gone so far as to contact the national organization to get information.  I carried the letter from them them for a year without checking it out.  

In early winter of 1988, Milt called and told me that he wanted to leave SD and come down to Tucson to work with me.  There were serious things going on in my life like a failed marriage and a failed business, but he was a force to be dealt with and so I said, “Do what you want.”  Milt showed up a few weeks later.  It was strictly business between us–honestly.  And then one night I asked him if he would mind going to this yoga center with me and checking it out.  He said sure, and we got directions.  It was very strange because the voice on the phone told us to go to the corner of such and such in Tucson and somebody would pick us up.  Naturally, I figured some strange cult would kidnap us and take us to whereever.  But, we showed up and a car did arrive on a street corner and we got into the car and were carried off to the Catalina foothills.

And that is the moment my life changed.  The center was in the home of a nice couple who had emptied a large living room space for chanting and meditating.  The men and women were separated and the program began.  The chanting was in Sanskrit and I didn’t understand a word but tentatively began repeating the syllables and letting myself drift into the sound of a drum, a harmonium, a tambura.  Suddenly, the me that I knew dissovled and when the music and the chanting ended, I was changed.  Forever.

Milt’s experience was similar and suddenly it was as if a curtain had dropped and we saw each other.  It is so hard to describe, but I knew he was the one for me.  My life and my spiritual partner, the one who would help me to see myself and who I could help see himself.  It has not changed in 20 years. 

Milt–You and me.

SGMKJ.

Jamie