ACCIDENTAL MYSTICS: A Journey toward Intimacy

At the Edge between what is knowable and what cannot be known, each of us has access to personal vision. That vision can lead us to a treasure, ours alone to claim. But, as the Dragons impishly remind us, the only reason for claiming that treasure is to give it away.

We invite you to join us as we re-trace the steps of our somewhat unusual journey toward deeper intimacy. On that journey, our personal visions merged into a single vision, creating a third energy that is more than the sum of its parts.

This is also the story of our discovery that, without having intended to, we two, ordinary people, were becoming mystics.

Our intention as a couple has been, and is, to more fully know one another–and ourselves–and to be more fully known. After years of trial and error in relationships, we had come to understand that each of us would have to be willing to experience and share our deepest fears, vulnerabilities, and secret joys–and hear those of the other. True intimacy, we finally realized, would require us to shine light into those shadowy places that couples normally avoid.

As our journey unfolded, we stumbled into non-ordinary means of knowing. By contrast, ordinary means of knowing consist of paying attention to what comes through the five senses and through the amalgam of human observations over time. But non-ordinary knowings do not seem to come from rational thinking. They unveil less obvious truths that surprise us and also help us make sense of everything else. They put the crucial piece of a puzzle into place, so that we finally see a picture. They have an inevitability, an "of course" quality, a sureness.

Although every individual perceives and experiences reality in a unique way, we all inhabit one great, all-encompassing Reality, one essential Truth. But the discrete piece of Truth which is ours alone to know, our "treasure," can be found only through access to the Great Unknown, where parts of the ordinarily unknowable become, by way of personal vision, manifest. Then, the question becomes: What do we do with that treasure? (And yes, trying to express, in words, this wispy, unfathomable realm of knowing is a little like trying to give shape to the wind.)

No retracing of the steps of our journey as a couple would be complete without an acknowledgment of two crucial, and colorful, participants. The saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear," was true for each of us, in vastly different forms. Kate’s Dragons made themselves known as she wrote in her journal, and Leon was led to Chaco, who helped him see his life’s path from a vantage point outside himself. These two "meetings" occurred within six months of when our adventure together began.

Those "helpers" added their wisdom at many alpha moments, in the indirect and subtle way of all true Teachers. Each made it abundantly clear that personal vision comes with a responsibility: to offer our piece of Truth to the collective understanding of the larger community. Since 1993, traveling our unmarked road step by step, we have been finding our way to the treasure which is ours to claim–and give away.

May what you find here add depth and meaning to your relationships. By chancing upon "Accidental Mystics," may you see ways to more easily recognize that which lights each step of your own journey. And may you learn to trust what you discover.