Three: Travelling to the eye of the storm, Rev E and the Big Sur (originally published 6th February 2021)

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Pacifica New Year’s Eve …I watched through the reflection in the hotel window glass as huge waves crashed over the sea defence wall and washed onto my window. The restaurant sign outside the hotel rattled violently back and forth and the hotel seemed to lurch from side to side in the storm, like a boat out to see with my room at the helm.

Across the courtyard I could see a New Years Eve Party in full swing. It was its own microcosm of chaos, unperturbed but also a reflection of the wildness outside. I watched for a while as the the whole spectrum of human drunken ridiculous life unfolded before my very sober eyes. A woman was in messy tears as her handbag and emotions spilt open across the dance floor amid the stumbling feet and disco lights. Friends swayed to old favourites with arms around each other loudly putting the world to rights and dreaming the next year alive. a man insisting they loved someone over and over loudly down a mobile phone in the rain outside my window with his bow tie wrapped around his forehead.

It felt like it was going to be a long night. 

Above me I saw the flashing lights of planes leaving. On one of them was my (now ex) girlfriend flying back to the UK. We kind of already knew it was over before we booked. We hoped, as you do, that the magic of my faraway city would glue us back together. Instead it just shone bright Californian neon lights on the chasm between us. The whole sorry situation pulled out painfully for a week or so, like a nagging toothache as we both tried to pretend everything was not as obviously over as it seemed. Mary Corrigan kept lifting raised eyebrows and smiling nervously at me across tense cups of tea in coffee shop meet ups as if to say wtf is going on here?

It was like something needed to snap, but nobody could quite work out how that would happen, in the middle of a holiday, at Christmas, far from home. Eventually, life itself, was so fed up of us that it decided to deliver the perfect solution. This came in the form of a a timely sermon with Rev Dr E at the church Mary Corrigan’s attended .

East Bay was a magical, colourful, alive place unlike any church in the UK which became like a rites of passage tradition each time I visited. Full of affirmation, fabulous swaying, clapping and gospel singing and shouts of “I love me -yes I do”. A stark contrast to the dark tortured Catholic Church of my youth… “I am a sinner-yes I am”

Reverend Dr. Elouise D. Oliver was the Minister of the East Bay Church of Religious Science in Oakland, California. An iconic soul with the most fabulous wisdom, style and clothes I have ever seen. Her colourful head wraps and stunning rainbow gowns had me gazing in awe and waiting to see what creation she would sashay down the isle in each service. That is before the eloquent deeply distilled wisdom starts flowing out of her. One time we visited Alice Walker was in the congregation a few rows ahead of us and I later found a poem she had written to the Dr E which described her better than I ever could. 

On this particular week it seemed the good lord, all the goddesses above and Dr E had decided enough was enough and channelled through a juicy, spot on sermon and a clear perfect list of reasons why this romance was doomed. As the sermon finished with a rousing hallelujah my girlfriend took my hand looked at me and said  ‘I guess that is it then, you are too just too big for me’  ... my dreams were stretching larger into the future than hers and it was over. Dr E had delivered the miracle redemption and release we both needed. Hallelujah indeed.

She had decided to fly back to the UK late on New Years Eve, too painful to stay and pretend for a moment longer. So here I was, in the middle of a storm, in a lonely impersonal hotel room with two giant queenside beds and only one small bedraggled lost queen, feeling suspended between one place and another, between the years.  

I ordered bad room service and confirmed twice “yes thats all, yes that will just be for ONE (sad) person”. I turned on the white glaring computer screen. I was desperate to drown out the drunken revellers and find some sense of purpose to occupy the last few weeks of my visit.  I remembered I had always wanted to visit Esalen in Big Sur. I had long read about the magical landscape and hot baths in books by Gabrielle Roth, Joseph Campbell, Ram Dass, Anna Halprin, Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls…it was one of my wishes to go and I really needed a dream to chase right now.

I logged onto the web site and was overwhelmed by the choice of workshops. I hadn’t heard of any of the teachers ... but one seemed to describe exactly where I was…. “the eye of the storm” or as the title said “the ‘I ‘in the storm”  I pressed the button to book, spent the last of my savings and took the final remaining place on the course which started in a weeks time.  Mary C and Michele Feher keep me suitably distracted the week before I went with movie trips and juicy bookshops.

Michele before I turned green

The day before I was due to go I went for some over vigorous reflexology in a dodgy looking nail bar and was violently ill all night. Poor Michele got no sleep or peace in the Kabuki Hotel, with its stylish, but totally revealing and embarrassingly impractical, glass bathroom doors, as I held my head over the toilet for 6 solid hours !

I was still green and weak the next day and lay on the back seat as Michele drove me to Berkeley to catch a lift share from a stranger who Esalen had connected me with for the 4 hours drive there. I think the driver was the lovely Sarah Hellman but the details are all a bit of a blur now. I apologised profusely to everyone in the car .. lay down on the back seat, put my coat over my head and promptly fell asleep for the whole journey.

It was battering rain, stormy and dark and we wound and curved upwards, the car being pulled about on what is already a pretty, treacherous, wild, winding road. from the front of the car I could half hear my fellow travellers chatted excitedly, catching up on what programmes they were going to be doing and who they hoped to see and people they both knew.

I felt sick as a dog still and a little scared wondering what the hell I was thinking and just what lay ahead.

When we finally arrived 5 or 6 hours later it was pitch black and torrential rain. It felt like I had arrived at the end of the longest road into a different world. We pulled up at the little gate and I woke disorientated with a flashing light in my eyes …someone was being blown out of the entrance hut wearing a bright yellow raincoat and shine his torch in the car, handing us paperwork and keys and a big cheery welcome to Esalen. It felt like we had arrived at the eye of an actual storm. 

I can’t remember how I got to my room in ‘The Big House’ at the edge of the ocean. I couldn’t see more than a few inches ahead of me …but I fell straight asleep without no idea where I was or why the hell I was there...

East Bay Church https://ebcrs.org/services/

A picture of Dr E on Alice Walkers Website : https://alicewalkersgarden.com/revereve/

Esalen : https://www.esalen.org