The Lover
It’s spring of 2023.
Remember, I didn’t know what I was doing. I never know what I am doing, but on that so beautifully human spectrum, I was in the deep end.
I had just come off seven months working in Australia for the first time, having the time of my life on the Victorian coast, and had gone from living that life to living 3 months alone out of my car in the bush. I was light. I was free. I was awake. Picture, I had just watched myself materialize a dream. I felt the visceral astonishment of witnessing what can happen when you take that initial leap of faith. Terrence McKenna said it best when talking about how real magic is done:
"Hurl yourself into the abyss, and discover it is a bed of feathers."
I just had a backpack of things with me. I sold the car I had bought three months before, hitched a ride to Perth, walked the city for three days, and then took off on a flight to Asia for the first time.
In an attempt to make another statement of my faith in the great unknown, I touched down in Hanoi without knowing even where I would stay that night. I felt the excited anxiety of being so free, so unscheduled, sitting in that airport chair when an old man came and sat beside me.
“Wanna split a taxi into town?”
I looked at him and assessed his chances of being a killer, but quickly realized that no one even knows my name in this entire continent, and this was my first chance to make an ally in this new, ancient world. He was French, maybe sixty or seventy years old, carrying only one bag too. I was impressed. He went by Abbi.
I told him I knew of an even better option, and we hopped on the public bus and paid a dollar for our first adventure together into the heart of Northern Vietnam.
We got to talking, and he began to tell me things.
Abbi had left France and everything he owned to move to India after school in the late ’60s. While traveling through India, he stumbled upon a community that would redirect the rest of his life. They were following a yogi who would become famously known as Osho.
I had seen Wild Wild Country, the Netflix documentary about the rise and fall of Osho’s enormous commune in Oregon. I knew the stories—the controversy, the wildness, the strange collision of Eastern spirituality and American culture.
But now I was sitting next to a man who had actually lived it.
That night, we got into town, met another traveler who had stumbled off the same bus, and he swore he knew the best dinner spot in the city. we followed him through the matrimony of chaotic disorder to what was indeed the cultural experience everyone should have their first night in Asia. We sat on plastic stools that brought our knees to our chests, fumbling with chopsticks through the most incredible soup mixture, surrounded by a family who looked as delighted to host us as I was to be there.
I don’t know what heaven is, but I carry a curious, unwavering conviction that I have touched it before.
It feels like humanity as we were meant to be. Life expressing itself in perfect unison, temporarily including me in some secret place where the veil between worlds is torn.
This was my first night in Asia.
We found a room for the night by walking through the alleyways of downtown, asking around for any space available. I had no idea that we were soon to ecome good friends, listening to his stories and learning from the energy behind his words.
I didn’t have any plans besides arriving and seeing what would happen, and somehow neither did he. We ended up traveling together for the next three weeks, spending every day together. We bonded over our own unique wandering, and he took me in as his own.
At the time, I didn’t think I needed a teacher. I had spent years deconstructing a lifetime of inherited religion and building my own path. I had never believed in the great virtue of independence more strongly. My teachers were books and my own intuition, a magical apparatus I was still learning how to use.
And Abbi wasn’t trying to become anything to me. He didn’t give me lessons. He didn’t tell me what to believe. He just lived, told his stories, and I watched.
The Abbi I met was long past the wild years of his life in Osho’s commune. After Osho died, he left the ashram and moved on—to Japan, then Thailand—and eventually back into a life of wandering on his own.
But something in his eyes still changed when he talked about Osho. He told me about the transcendental feeling that would move through an entire crowd when the man entered the room, as if he had experienced it yesterday. Human psychology at its most fascinating. He no longer seemed interested in convincing anyone of the miracles or magic he had witnessed. What mattered to him was what he had learned by completely giving himself over to something greater than himself.
And strangely, what stayed with me wasn't really anything he said about Osho. It was Abbi himself. He carried this presence of freedom. Of true contentment. Of real joy. He had spent his life wandering through the world, following teachers, leaving them, changing countries, changing identities, and somehow arriving at a place where he seemed to need very little from life at all.
He was simply there, And I found that so incredibly contagious.
We explored the small towns of Northern Vietnam as if we were long-lost friends, as if there wasn’t a forty-year age gap between us, as if the world had stopped for a moment to let this experience happen.
We would often rent a motorbike to split for five dollars a day. we would rip that thing through the lush green Vietnamese hills in between the villages. I remember one night when we fit a girl who wanted to join us for dinner onto the back, making one 200cc motor to host the most gloriously random three-person dinner party that bike had ever seen.
One day, toward the end of our time together, Abbi became dangerously ill from a spoiled egg at breakfast. I spent the next two days taking care of him as he sweated in bed. On the last night of his illness, I was sitting beside him when he handed me his favorite book from his old teacher.
I spent the night reading something I still cannot forget.
On the practice of meditation, or prayer, it was described as:
“Creating space for the lover to enter.”
Creating space for the lover to enter.
How so incredibly beautiful.
It described meditation in a way that changed how I understood more than just meditation —not as a practice for reaching some higher state, but as a way of creating space for something to come to me.
We often approach meditation as another thing to do—to quiet the mind, find peace, gain understanding. But even the attempt to let go can become another form of striving.
Maybe meditation is something simpler:
Making room.
Sitting quietly.
Letting thoughts come and go without chasing them.
Releasing, for a moment, the need to arrive anywhere.
The “lover” might be God, existence, love, consciousness—or simply the mystery of being alive.
Whatever name we give it, we cannot force it to appear.
We can only become quiet enough to notice it.
It is the difference between searching and listening.
Not having to find anything.
Only leaving a little space for something to find you.
And whatever enters that space—peace, love, awareness, God, mystery, nothing at all—is no longer something I have to control.
Abbi healed, and soon after, it was time for us to part ways.
I didn’t know how to leave. How to say goodbye. How to travel alone again. How to thank someone for simply being my friend, expecting nothing in return.
He told me he only used email, and to write to him sometime. Since then, I have written to him once a year, on Christmas, updating him about my life and the strange, wandering path I have chosen to walk so much more confidently thanks to him
I think about Abbi and Vietnam often. I went in believing I didn’t need a teacher. I had spent years convincing myself that I needed to find my own way, trust my own intuition, follow no one.
But maybe that is what a teacher really is.
Not someone who tells you where to go, but someone whose way of moving through the world quietly changes the way you move through it yourself.
"The most beautiful things do not ask for attention."
Time to still.
Time to quiet.
Time to make room for the lover to enter.
our only picture together