This is a Love story – eyes meeting across a crowded café; love at what was literally first sight; instantaneous recognition; Soul Mates re-united; a relationship in which the whole has proved to be greater than the sum of the constituent parts…and the best part of this story?

It’s all true, and it’s on-going – 25 years on actually, and every aspect of the relationship is now as good or better than in those first deliriously delightful days of wine and roses, “rocketbells and poetry” (with apologies to Mama Cass Elliot – we will share some of the poetry in our book*, the rocketbells are ours alone…)

What is a Soul Mate?

Well, everyone has their own idea, and in our book “What is a Soul Mate and How to Find One” we address this question in more detail.

Suffice it to say here that (we believe) the reason you can be powerfully attracted (often instantly or with indecent haste) to someone you have ostensibly known for only a very short time (or just met) is that finding a Soul Mate is actually a re-discovery – there is an inherent recognition as you become re-acquainted; you have known each other before.

It has become apparent to us that the doctrine of reincarnation and karmic law are both relevant (indeed karma is unavoidable) and can be especially poignant in this context – you are encountering someone with whom you have had a previous relationship (and there may well be unfinished business between you…).

In mundane terms this is the story of two people who were unlikely to have met in the ‘normal’ course of events…a visionary artist and a sports broadcaster – she never went to football games, he never went to art galleries and preferred to stay home playing video games which he still do with the help of professional Overwatch boosting, but their lives changed dramatically on the 1st of September 1989…

As Pamela remembers it: “In 1989, my situation was similar to that faced by many women of my generation – after a long struggle to liberate the mind and spirit from millennia of repression, it was apparent that our male contemporaries had mostly failed to make a similar quantum leap.

There seemed so few men interested in spirituality and the new Age of Aquarius. The men all seemed to be still in the ‘waters’ of the Piscean Age while we spiritually active women were reaching for the stars in the new ‘air’ Aquarian Age

We needed to be more assertive and men more receptive in order to reconcile this diversity in attitude. Having been born during the war (within days of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941) my male contemporaries were ‘old school’, sometimes pretending or attempting to be more liberal but constantly giving themselves away in subtle (and not so subtle!) ways, always slipping back into the old assumptions and conventional roles.

Post war ‘baby-boomers’ who were born about 6 years after me were significantly different from war and pre-war people. This was the feminist, ‘flower-power’ rebel group and far more open to new attitudes. Since my marriage break-up, it was often this group who were my friends.

As an advocate of various techniques such as visualisation, treasure maps and the growing recognition of the power of art to manifest and reveal, it was time to put my theories into practice. An old sketch had ‘winked at me’ and it seemed like the blue-print for my prayer. I began to paint quite a large canvas: a spiritual woman from the stars (Age of Aquarius) drawing a young man out of the waters of the Age of Pisces.

This work became known as “Reconciliation of the Sexes”, a prayer to the ‘divine lover’, to come to me – at least in spirit, if not in physical form.

As I worked on the painting, a number of different components were shown to me: primarily a call for men to ‘arise’ from the old ways – to emerge from the water of the old age of Pisces, a patriarchal era, into a new way of being: whole, equal and mutually supportive with women.

Emerging from the sea, the man in the painting is tender, even vulnerable; new to this “air” environment (the age of Aquarius) and receptive as never before. The woman, representing the resurgent Goddess energy, is gentle but also able to be assertive; breathlessly they anticipate their first kiss: a new era begins…”

As Richard recalls, 1987-88 was a traumatic period: “Cuckolded, separated, divorced and orphaned, I returned home to New Zealand (from Australia) early in 1988 and invoked the Old Mates Act – hospitality, sympathy and advice on where to eat out were all provided: ‘try the Kitchen Sink Salad at Dominoes Café, the food is excellent and you’ll also meet some good people’.

Never a truer word (thanks Steve!) – the salad really did have everything in it, but the many colours of the vegetables paled alongside the variegated splendour of the woman sitting alone at a nearby table…

As I racked my mind for a semi-sophisticated (or at least not completely gauche) opening gambit, a sparrow flew in from the al fresco dining area and flitted around the café, conveniently acting as a conversation-starter and touchstone between our adjacent tables.

Helene proved to be an excellent conversationalist and we struck a harmonious chord immediately. She and her long-time partner are prominent New Zealand painters, and towards the end of 1988 Helene suggested that I would get on very well with her friend Pamela, a ‘lovely lady artist’.

Alas, in the interim I had embarked on a hedonistic relationship with a fellow journalist, the Fashion Editor of a daily newspaper and a socialite of some renown. While I enjoy a good time at least as much as the next guy, carousing is for me not an end in itself. The demise of this relationship was both inevitable and dramatic, with the trauma compounded both by the loss of my position as Sports Editor at one of Auckland’s leading FM radio stations (where management felt good ratings may be improved even further by employing a television sports anchor in order that our audience might put a face to the name); and the need to find a new address as I had been living in the house of the lady concerned, while my apartment floors were fixed, luckily they learned to drilling tiles from atlas ceramics so the job was going to be finished pretty soon.

No home, no partner, no job – perhaps it is when we are on our knees that we are most likely to seek intervention, a concept I was not unfamiliar with given that my father had been a clairvoyant and healer of some repute, often working closely with the Maori people in whom spirituality is often highly developed and who regarded him as a tohunga (visionary priest/healer/medicine man) and accorded him great mana (respect).