Dissolvo
A Divine Comedy about Dissolving after Loss
SCENE: Easter Sunday, March 2025. Bruce has been talked into attending the “Queen Street ReLeaf High & Healing Wellness Festival” — your typical ganga festival on the west (Afro) side of Atlanta.
Bruce takes his seat with Tarot reader Cidnee — a young black woman with two cantaloupe-sized Afros. Bruce tries not to stare, but imagines them as high-frequency satellite dishes divining his future. He’s never done this before. (Book a reading with Cidnee. She’s great!)
CIDNEE (turning over the cards): “Now, this is fascinating. A woman was here right before you. I feel an overlay of energy in your reading with hers.”
Bruce turns around to see Alice in the back of the room, scrolling through her phone. Bruce rolls his eyes; Alice looks up and shrugs.
CIDNEE: “That’s so interesting, Cidnee continues. “The woman even chose a different deck.”
BRUCE (being helpful): “Maybe I know her.”
Cidnee starts to shuffle again. Bruce presumes this is the finale. Cidnee pulls a card and turns it over: “The Lovers.”
CIDNEE: “I don’t know what this means for you, but this card can represent a spiritual connection or a deep love that changes your life. Think of it as Soulmates.
Alice walks over to see the cards.
BRUCE: “Cidnee says, Soulmates. (Bruce smirks) See, the cards don’t lie.”
Alice counters with a caustic rimshot:
“You don’t have to be partners to be soulmates!”
For those of you following at home, that’s how my life-upending, emotionally devastating, two-year grief journey culminated — with a moment of Bondo Ambiguity that pulled the rug completely out from my Grand Plan.
Karen and I invented BONDO — a farcical term to describe the capacity to form and maintain intimate relationships. After she died, the farce was over. My sudden lack of Bondo filled me with despair and catapulted me on a two-year quest for a cup of the love potion (well-documented in my book, and in these pages).
Alice’s caustic quip, while a casual rimshot for her, sent me into a tailspin of perplexity.
A Sufi sidebar here:
In my previous life as a Sufi, we studied the work of the mystic Ibn ‘Arabi extensively (1165 - 1240 AD). For ‘Arabi, perplexity wasn’t the garden variety confusion of Google Maps going off the grid. Perplexity is the main course on the menu of Spiritual Love.
Quoting Sufi academic, Nikos Yiangou “Ibn ‘Arabi equates love with a state of perplexity, representing a dynamic condition of longing and abstraction that complicates the lover’s identity.”1
You can spin a million love songs, and unlikely find one with this verse:
“She smiled at me
and I tingled with perplexity.”
After Cidnee pulled the card, I sank into full-on perplexity.
This morning at yoga, while resting in savasana pose (the pose where you’re not supposed to think), I imagined an alternative Bondo Card titled “DISSOLVO” — listing the Seven Solvents that dissolve the quest for Bondo.
Here’s a scene from the BONDO Epilogue to demonstrate the fast-acting properties of Dissolvo:
SCENE: Bruce has spent the evening helping Alice order lighting fixtures for her new house. It’s very late. They retreat from the computer to the couch.
BRUCE: You seem keen on Bondo, so let’s talk about us.
ALICE: Us?
BRUCE: You know I want to be in a relationship. Do you see us moving in that direction, even slowly – or ever?
Alice coils like a cornered cat.
ALICE: Don’t you understand? I can’t be in a relationship! I’m sorry. No relationship! I care for you, appreciate you, but I can’t be tied into that, not at this time.
As you can imagine, that scene freaked me out, but now with Dissolvo, my need for Bondo has completely dissolved. It’s magic.
My initiation into “ashes.”
Let’s pull up my memory machine from thirty years ago with this scene from Fortune. Dissolvo hadn’t been invented yet, but it could have saved me from a terrible tailspin.
SCENE: It was the seventh year of our marriage (Si-Do) and three years into our house adventure (Mi-Fa), and forty-two years into my life (the note Sol) when all of these octaves and intervals lined up, and my midlife crisis hit. Karen sent our child off to another room, closed the door, and signaled that weird low pressure that precedes a storm. Without a southwest corner for escape, my emotional body felt exposed.
KAREN: “I want a separation.”
With Karen’s announcement, I sank into an emotional vortex that forced my heart’s brittle casing to crack.
You can imagine the shock. As Robert Bly wisely explained:
The naive, passive man must travel the road of ashes, descent, and grief: The naive man will lose what is most precious to him because of a lack of boundaries. This is particularly true of the New Age man, or the man seeking “higher consciousness.” Thieves walk in and out of his house, carrying large bags, and he doesn’t seem to notice them.2
There’s a lot to unpack there. For simplicity, you can put it under the category of spiritual bypassing — or read this:
“Ashes present a great diminishment away from the living tree with its huge crown and its abundant shade. The recognition of this diminishment is a proper experience for men who are over thirty. If the man doesn’t experience that diminishment sharply, he will retain his inflation, and continue to identify himself with all in him that can fly: his sexual drive, his mind, his refusal to commit himself, his addiction, his transcendence, his coolness. The coolness of some American men means that they have skipped ashes.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men
Last Thursday would have been Karen’s 72nd birthday — a heavenly one.
I wrote on Facebook:
Happy birthday, Karen Sue, Suzi, Suzette.
Her life was a triumph—leaving Tennessee after college to live life fully: Hawaii, New York City, Playa Del Rey, on a sailboat in Marina Del Rey, Santa Cruz, Big Sur, West LA, and Decatur.
Her career path included: a rural clinic in Madison, TN; Santa Monica Hospital Med-Surg, CA and GA Labor & Delivery Nurse; Emory Chaplain; Presbyterian minister; and Director of Pastoral Education.
Her spiritual merit badges were impressive: Christian, metaphysician, Sufi, whirling dervish, Baba Lover, Advaita meditator, Chinese healer, Yogini, Bach flower practitioner, and 20 years in Diamond Heart.
Her lusty life included at least a dozen boyfriends - but she stuck with me, maybe because I could reach the top shelf.
Her crowning achievement was to surmount a host of traumatic hurdles into alchemical love — using the heat and pressure of the marriage crucible for transformation. I wish she were around to help the young’uns understand this. She would advise, “Hang in there. You have no idea what can happen.”
For all you Scorpios currently enrolled in “Wild Child 101”, she’s your patron saint.
Sounds magical, but life is more complicated than a fairy tale. The flip side of Bondo demands the sacred solvent Dissolvo.
This week, I remembered my journey from the “passive man on the road of ashes, descent, and grief.”
In that spirit, I wanted to celebrate Karen’s heavenly birthday. She cracked open my heart (like a train wreck) so I could understand what Robert Bly meant when he said:
It’s okay to grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly
I texted my close friend Bridget.
“Tomorrow’s Karen’s birthday. Wanna go out and celebrate our girl?”
“Sure.”
Karen and I feted nearly every anniversary since 1999 at Cafe Lily in Decatur. Angelo, the big-hearted restaurateur who started Lily, died years ago. Karen even attended to him at the Emory oncology unit as a chaplain. Angelo’s son, Executive Chef Anthony, is now semi-retired. Time flies.
Cafe Lily serves as a microcosm of Cyclical Time. If you don’t know about Cyclical Time (Kalachakra: the concept that time is not linear, but a repeating cycle of events, often based on natural rhythms like seasons, lunar cycles, and birth and death), then closely study Mr. Natural’s 219th Meditation like an ancient scroll (R. Crumb circa 1970):
I walked the one mile to Cafe Lily wearing my Bluetooth headphones. I clicked on MSNBC —yuck — then flipped through my regular podcasts. I wasn’t in the mood for politics, so I switched to an old playlist (Fortune Teller), the one I created three years ago after Karen passed. Back then, Fortune Teller regulated my nervous system, seemingly 24/7, to keep me emotionally afloat during my passage through ashes and grief.
There is one profoundly downbeat cut on the list (#22) — the Ballad of Fuck All by Malcolm Middleton. Every time it came up, it sent me into a sobbing fit. I wish someone had suggested, “Why don’t you delete it from the list?” As it turned out, the Ballad of Fuck All served as my Dissolvo solvent.
The Cafe Lily host seated me at the perfect window table.
I studied the Cafe Lily menu, which had shrunk to a fraction of the size I remembered in the Angelo era. I felt a bit like Mr. Natural observing the culinary passage of time.
Bridget approached the table, and I stood to embrace.
BRIDGET: “So good to see you.”
BRUCE: “Likewise. Thank you for joining me to celebrate Karen.”
BRIDGET: “So, how are you?”
BRUCE: “I’m still getting over the experience of walking to the restaurant listening to my grief playlist. I was startled by how different I feel now and how far I’ve come in these three years.”
BRIDGET: “How so?”
BRUCE: “That entire body of grief is gone —poof — as if it had been purged.”
BRIDGET: “Maybe digested is the better word.”
BRUCE: “How so?”
BRIDGET: “You can’t actually purge grief — like chucking it out. It gets metabolized, like feeding earthworm casings to your plants.”
BRUCE: “Maybe this is what Gurdjieff meant when he described food for the moon.
BRIDGET: “I think he felt the psychic energy we collect from our experience has to go somewhere.”
BRUCE: “I’m glad my despair was feeding the moon.”
We shared a bottle of wine and a tiramisu. When I got home, I tucked into bed and checked my email (and yes, my sleep hygiene sucks. I consume screens like crazy at pillow time). I clicked on an email from Rowan Davis of The Practical Jungian, which read:
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
– C.G. Jung, ‘Alchemical Studies,’ para. 335
Wow. It suddenly became clear that in my mad pursuit to refill lost Bondo, my subconscious was leading me in the opposite direction — to dive deep into the darkness.
Instead of light, I was offered worm casings.
And from those casings, the most remarkable light emerged from the inside — not from chasing moonbeams, but from digesting buried experience.
Another Jung quote hit me:
“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation
is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”
— C.G. Jung, ‘Aion,’ Paragraph 126
Making an inner situation conscious is the work of digestion. Unlike Bondo, which seeks to connect heart to heart, the sacred solvent Dissolvo penetrates — like WD40! — to unlock the door to our buried experience.
I created a mashup from The Worm | An Animated Horror Story to illustrate:
I’m pretty convinced that our central task past age 42 is to integrate life experience.
Integration is a fancy word for digestion. It’s pretty simple: Why carry a bunch of shit around when you can feel lighter, freer, and with more room for light?
There’s some heavy shit comin’ down, so let’s all get to work.
(If the reference above escapes you, watch this.)
Thank you for reading. I don’t charge for this, so if you’d like (in order of magnitude):
Click the like button.
Leave a comment.
https://journal.sadra.ac.id/ojs/index.php/kanz/article/view/47/39
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_John:_A_Book_About_Men
I’m a fan of Carl Jung … and Karen: “Hang in there. You have no idea what can happen.” 🫶
Loved the Robert Bly quote. I’m seeing it play out right now with so many people not caring what is happening politically right now. Sending love!