The day after rising to the ceiling of my bedroom dawned warm and
dry, and my mood was positively expectant as I drove to Bonnie‘s rented
beach front home in West Vancouver.
Arriving a few minutes earlier than our agreed upon time, I sat in the
upstairs living room until she finished putting on her morning face.
Minutes later, she appeared from her room at the far end of a hall, and I
stood to meet her at the mid- house stairway. Before I had taken two steps,
she cocked her head coyly, fixing he r gaze on the sofa behind me.
"Shit," I whispered under my breath, as I turned to fluff the green
accent pillow I had used to cushion my back.
Without further comment, as was often her way to cement a point,
we left the house for an upscale bakery on Mar ine Drive, one street up
from the narrow macadam =walkway‘ that was Argyle Street.
Seven minutes later, we entered a multi-terraced, open room through
wide wooden doors. Two lofty walls painted a light tan, accented by
flashes of green under which stood snowflake arrays of tub chairs
flaunting red slashes, generated two thoughts that were not mutually
exclusive, Christmas and tasteless. But the food was good, and the bubbly
servers were unintentionally entertaining.
Bonnie and I had toast and tea over an encompassing conversation
about the similarities between my personal development lessons—the
role-playing that had actually been real—and Carlos Castaneda‘s
meticulously chronicled encounters with the sorcerer, don Juan Matus.
Categorically, my faux apprenticeship had much in common with his, but
at an introductory level, and primarily focused on revealing specific flaws
in my thinking.
Bonnie repeated, as she had often explained during her game, that
her goal had not been to establish that I was irrational, but that the world
had confused me with social practices and political policies that did not
stand up to logical scrutiny. She claimed this was because mankind is
ignorant of our true essence of conscious energy, or spirit, and that to learn
the means and tools available to us in a physical manifestation would be to
drastically change how we think, and so how we behave. We had lost
touch with our source, thereby artificially isolating us in time, and from
our purpose.
