From Friends, My (mostly fantasy) love life before Mary and Hathaway

I realize now that Lou Ray was another magical threshold ally in my life, appearing at crucial crossroads to influence the course of my life, somewhat as John Dufford had done at an earlier time. She is also the first of my old friends to pass away while I’m working on this writing project. I’m writing this still in the first stages of absorbing the news of her death.  On 12/28/17 I received this message from a mutual friend.

Ed – letting you know – Myoko passed late last night. I know she held you in her heart. Wanted to be sure you knew. 

Not long after I moved into my apartment across tne street from the Zen Center in 1972 I started hanging out with a group of zen students who lived in a communal house a block away. Most of them were paired up in couples. They had an old friend living in Oakland who was thinking of relocating to ZCLA, a single woman about our age. In my mind I had her blissfully paired up with me even before I met her, especially after I heard the wonderful stories they told about her. As I wrote in my 1976 Antioch Portfolio, in the Individual Psychotherapy section,

I was interested in a girl who had come to the Zen Center, and was chasing her all over, but she was not interested in me. Finally she got so annoyed she suggested that I would be better off working through my dependency in psychotherapy rather than taking it out on her. I wanted her so much and she was telling me to go into therapy, so maybe it was time to try therapy.

So chasing after Lou Ray set me off on an adventure of successively deeper openings after starting therapy in 1973 with Pat Sutton, culminating with finding and marrying my life partner.

Along the way, in 1974 I was working at Ingleside Community Mental Health Center as a Psychiatric Nursing Aide.  I was uncomfortable with the medical model there for dealing with troubled youth. Lou Ray was working as a Houseparent at Hathaway Children’s Village. I liked what she told me about the more humanistic context they were working in. She was helpful and supportive as I made a smooth job transition that felt like a possibility for real growth.

I ended up clashing with the Hathaway  administration over how we were to treat the kids. She was very supportive during that turbulence, as you can see in the evaluation she wrote at the end of that section of my Antioch Portfolio.

After we both moved away from ZCLA I lost touch with Lou Ray. Then on July 10, 2010 , while Mary and I were having dinner at a restaurant on a northern California vacation, I got a voice message from Lou Ray on my phone.  She said she had a distressing dream that I was yelling for help about a very serious health issue. She found my phone number by calling the Zen Center to find out my current contact information. She had no way of knowing about my diagnosis other than her dream. She had been studying at the Healing Light Center and apparently felt my cries for help on a subtle plane. This uncanny beginning led to renewed contact, an email correspondence in which she recommended a healer she knew named Emilie Conrad, who I went to see.

When Mary and I went to very special events we would find Lou Ray already there. Luis Rodriguez held a graduation event at the end of a week-long workshop for at risk youth at Rebecca’s college. We were surprised, but not surprised, to find Lou Ray there. And the first time we went together to a weekend teaching by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche after Maezumi Roshi died,  Lou Ray was already part of the sangha.