Fusion

Fusion

Noun

     1.     The process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity.

A History of Lessons on Fusion

A little boy stands on the steps of his house looking out at his new home of Stoney Point, Ontario. His father sits inside on the familiar brown chair pouring whisky on his anger. His mother is lost and he can’t find her. He closes his eyes and longs for fusion.

A woman lies on her living room floor staring up through the tears at a crack in the ceiling. I have to fix that, she thinks. I still have to fix this home even though he’s gone and the home inside me has fallen apart. She falls asleep and dreams of fusion.

For a brief moment - a wrinkle in time - my mother and my father fused and they made me. I grew up in a house that was coloured with Jungian vocabulary. I would sit in my father’s car as a teenager - eyes painted black, swaddled in dark leather and lace - and he would tell me about the male and the female psyche. He would talk about pushing through the wreckage of his childhood by attending Mythopoetic men’s groups before I was born. I would sit in my mother’s office with my legs dangling from her desk and she would read me her journal entries about how she recovered her lost self after her marriage fell apart by dreaming of love - the unconscious union of her male self and her female self - coming together in effortless fusion.

Six months ago I had a dream that I was falling in love with a blue-eyed man in a cabin on a beach. I pulled out a leather bound book and I wrote, “I was yellow and he was blue but then we fused.” When I woke up I knew the process had begun. Years spent riding on the back of the beast, hiding myself under defense mechanisms and painting the walls of my soul with Jack Daniels. I knew my days of reaching inward were over and with or without my conscious consent I was now reaching outward. Saturn returned to the place it was in the sky when I was born and rebirth was under way.

Today I am 29. I sit on my bed with wet hair and the sun on my back and I write this. I think about Vajrasattva in Union. When I first saw the image I rubbed my fingers over the laminated edges of it and pictured it as me. I remembered my dream. I remembered all the transient and temporary loves I’ve had – that seemed to fall apart at the very moment that union was reachable. I wonder now if those things were meant to fall apart. If I went on quests looking for him and all that really reflected back was me.

My dad once told me that when a family falls apart, when mom and dad fight, when they give up on each other, a child’s male and female psyche are severed. He said that when his father left his mother and took their children to Stoney Point my dad began his search for his lost female psyche. I wonder if a part of me was lost that night at age 8 – watching my mother on the floor crying as my father packed his car and drove away. I’ve been searching ever since. I swam in pink oceans, I rode sticky hot trains in India, I unzipped my skin by candlelight and showed a stranger the skeletons in my closet, and in all of it I was looking for him. I wonder now if I never found him out there because he was always in here.

In the images of Vajrasattva in union he touches the small of her back with two fingers. He looks forward and she looks up at the sky but they hold onto each other with their arms and their legs. They sit atop a lotus draped in silks with flowers that grow all around them. Vajrasattva is one person – one whole person – a male and a female fused together to become whole. What an insight the Tibetan Buddhists had when they created this image. An insight into me – into what I’ve lost – what I yearn for.

A woman sits on her bed with the warm fingers of the sun touching the small of her back. She closes her eyes and listens to the whisper of a life growing inside her. Something new.

I am whole. 

I am Vajrasattva.