Juxtapositioning

He

He is a good, loving man. I have lived a long time in search of him, of the man who melts me, of the man who loves me like no other, of the man who is himself such a magical being that I weep from the beauty of his magic and from how magical I feel when I am with him. I have lived and I have loved and none of the life or love was like this. Destiny.

This man, the one I see my sunset with, the one I see in my dreams, the one I felt and knew and received months before we were ever even in the same city. This good, loving man. He feeds my heart, nourishes my soul, calls me to be my magical self, receives my inner being, my warrior queen nature.

And oh, how I love this man.

One

One year ago today, my life changed.

It happened in the evening. I was in Houston where a client had flown me to work with her and her clients for a week, Houston where it was still summer and still humid. I was in Houston still processing the recent formality to the inevitable slow painful unraveling of the previous three-plus years spent with a boy-man that morphed into ten teary shower minutes feeling what it might be like to be me if I had always felt loved. I was in Houston feeling my Self for perhaps the first time, my Self tall and pale among the Chinese community I stayed in and shopped in that week that cemented the sense of alienation and solitude I had brought with me.

It happened in the evening, in Houston. I was sleeping on the hard hotel bed and awoke, hard. I was no longer alone. I felt something with me — someone? — and it felt wonderful. A palpable presence. An energetic force. My heart twined the feeling into arms and lips and I lay curled on that hard bed, no longer alone. Loved.

The feeling followed me home.

I thought it would dissipate, disappear, disintegrate, but it did not.

Weeks went by. Then more than a month. At first I was determined to attach a face, a name, arms and lips to the feeling but after several wrong turns and missteps I decided to let it go. To be content with the feeling, the ghost-arms, the love from somewhere, and to continue moving on and being me.

After that it didn’t take long for him to find me.

One year ago, my heart opened. One year ago, I began to believe. One year ago, I wept from feeling beauty. One year ago, I started walking to where I now stand, hand in hand with my soulmate, embracing the feeling, wanting more and more.

And my Soulmate writes this on my laptop — yes I am allowing him to contribute to my writing for the first time — “I love you with all my heart and Soul – and it is scary to even write this… but I am WITH you, Soulmate!”

One whole year he has been with me so far. And we are. One.

Extraordinary

“Living with you,” he said, “has been extraordinary. Extraordinary.” His heart filled his eyes for a moment, then became playful. “That’s a highlight for you, me saying that.”

Why yes. Yes it was a highlight, and in our morning coffee ritual the next day, feet on lap, I told him so.

Extraordinary.

1. Beyond what is ordinary or usual.
2. Highly exceptional; remarkable.

We have both lived with others. My experiences then were those of survival, maintaining, staying safe from being hurt, trying to assert control where I felt none. I wanted love but didn’t know how to ask for it. Or where to look. Or I stopped believing it was possible. I had love but it was fleeting. Or conditional. Or just muted, colorless, lifeless.

I think back now and remember exactly how I dreamed extraordinary into being. Did I do that? I hope I did. I told the universe that it was time my soulmate showed up. And then there he was, standing on a borrowed Seattle porch, and my heart said YES. This is what I said to the universe:

What I want is that beautiful, all-encompassing, glorious passionate love where we are so completely in love, so completely and utterly enthralled with one another that the merest, simplest action together (walking down the street, choosing that night’s meal-to-be at the market) is a sweet dance and an expression of that love.

Extraordinary. I HAVE that. I have all that I asked for, and more. And every day I am so incredibly grateful. I breathe it in and from this place I believe we will walk into being extraordinary, together.

Integrity

I have been unfair. Specifically, unfair in my last post. Unfair to what is really in front of me. I wrote from the place I am in — which to me in this moment seems vast and unconquerable — but not from the place I have been.

I have at my bedside a book containing now more than 200 elements of awesome, reasons for loving and living, and I forgot to look at it. Or think of it. No, in my inner emptiness I neglected to feel into the fullness of the Summer of Love, of my soulmate-beloved, and instead I saw the half-empty glass walls I had erected around me.

I lack integrity. It is a thing I am working on, coming smack up in my face time and again, but dammit, I am incomplete. I lack and the lackness is of my strength, or in plainer words, strength of character and faith is what I lack.

Integrity. Holding together. Structural goodness. Also, integration. I fly into pieces, chaotic, scattered, at the least provocation. My beloved hurts and retreats and I treat this as hurt to me, retreating farther. How dare I! Where did I go? And why?

I chose to not remember in that small moment that We are We. That such a one as my beloved, who may not in every moment see himself as the amazing warm-hearted loving man I know him to be, may not see me in the light I now see myself: lacking, cowardly, lonely, alone. How can I be alone, except as choosing to be so? Together we wear self-directed bleak-colored glasses, my beloved and I. The irony of this nearly escapes me.

And now I weep because he read the headline Lonely and read no further. How can I not write all the bright magical wonderfilled days we have shared and wait yet to share and only chronicle this one dark dreary eyeblink? I have hurt my love’s heart, I think, and I weep. I did not wait to tell the whole story, to be in integrity with the wholeness of my heart. I wrote only the piece, the little piece that in my pain seemed to be calling the loudest.

Words have power and it is my wish to use them for good, a healing balm, a beautiful story, an inspiring heartsong. In my quest for self integration, for true integrity, may I find that this is so.

Soulmate

He is cringing already at the title, I just know it, but it is far too late — the word has been said, not once but many times and not just in jest but in the deeper truth that lies beneath the fear. Soulmate.

Not only have I never used this term with anyone in my long and not-so-illustrious relationship history, but I use it now with such certainty, such abandon, such restfulness that I can safely breathe past the wild pounding of my heart that tells me I am walking in uncharted territory. Soulmate.

Not only am I his soulmate but he is mine.

(Does that go without saying? Are there such things as unrequited soulmates? Is there anything more sad than that?)

My love, my beloved, walks with me in ways I have never before felt. Dreamed of, knew was possible, but never before experienced. Last week we walked in a literal circle, in a stalking meditation, around and around one another. This is a practice, the true effects of which we still have yet to learn, of increasing internal fire. I experience it as spiraling heart connection between us, growing stronger with every step. We practice this several times a week but last week I noticed how every step of mine was a step of his. We were perfectly matched, step for step. I felt his breath in mine, mine in his, our hearts beating in sync and our path the same, a growing spiral that emerged from some unseen central core, our lives linked in such a way that we met the day after last Thanksgiving. The shock of recognition of meeting someone I had never seen but who was already in my heart woke me up, seeing him standing that day on a porch in Seattle as I parked my car. The paths that drew us both to this place at this time were circuitous but sure. Step after step.

Soulmate.

Partner

Once there was a girl who learned not to trust. She was hurt by things — big scary dogs, loud people, being left in strange places that didn’t smell like home, people who tricked and lied — and learned to go deep inside. She thought that deep within, she could stay safe. The girl built walls and thought they would protect her, thick tall strong walls.

What she built instead was an entire world that wasn’t safe. An uncertain world lay beyond her walls. Staying small and deeply hidden, she forgot about her magical powers caught outside the walls she built. The girl felt so alone. She believed she would always be that alone, always need to stay small and deeply hidden.

The girl was wrong. One day she woke up and remembered about her magical powers, but they lay out of reach beyond her walls. In order to reach her magic, the girl had to do the unthinkable. The walls she had thought were protecting her had to come down. She had to let the world in.

But how? The girl knew what she needed to do but did not know how to get there. She called to her magic, just outside the walls. The magic told her to open the door in her heart, that once she did this she would no longer feel alone or afraid.

The door opened. Two hands, a heart, reached in and walked with her through the door and out into the magic that always was there.

~~~

Last week I let go of something I wasn’t very good at and opened the door in my heart a little wider. I learned that by opening the door, what I received in return was exponentially greater than the small sacrifice of my fear of opening the door. I felt what partnership feels like. Opening myself to my man, letting him inside my walls, inside my heart, I felt safer. More loved. More loving. We helped each other by combining our strengths and walking together in the same direction. I have never truly had a partner before this, so it still scares me a little — will he go away? stop loving me? am I imagining this? — but also feels more Right than anything before now has felt.

Pathway

There is a way through. In the dark times, all I can see are the walls that close in around me, the fears that fill me with dread, the gross inadequacies of my wounded heart and soul. In those times it is sometimes all I can do to take a breath, and another. Anything beyond breath is simply too heavy, too hard.

I have been offered a path. A hand. A heart, tender and afraid as my own. And I am encouraged that this pathway may be the one that forever keeps the walls from closing in so tightly. This pathway, the one that is being created and crafted and emerges from the promise of sustainability and wonderment, may be what I need to stand on to finally reach the stars overhead.

I hold this path, a nascent bird-heart beating, fluttering, between my hands and his. If we breathe on it, it may grow.

Loving

I think I am beginning to feel what love is.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that after spending as many years on the planet as I have, I would have already known what love really felt like, but no. Not being loved like this. Not loving like this.

Oh, I had an idea about love. Many ideas. An ideal. A dream. A destiny.

And I loved, as best I could. With my whole heart, the part that was open. I really did. I loved and was loved to the best of my ability at the time.

I also knew a lot about what love is not. My heart stretched across the distance between the one (what love is) and the other (what love is not), stretching so thin and so tight that it snapped, thread ends dangling into space. Now I am taking up those gossamer threads and weaving them into a beautiful tapestry, strand by strand and color by color, my heart becoming more alive and more filled in every breath, every kiss, every intertwined beat.

And loving, and being loved, fills me. I am challenged and entranced. I want more: more love, more to love. Sometimes I feel dwarfed by the enormity of possibility, feeling this whole heart beating next to mine, feeling my whole self warmed by its presence. It is so big and I am so small. And other times I close doors because I fear they will close of their own accord, leaving me gasping and sobbing, alone, on the other side. But mostly I breathe and laugh and receive, feeling my cells fill with sparkles, beaming them out again into the universes multiplying beside me, feeling the warm reverberations deep in my soul that tell me I am walking with destiny.

Movement

There is something about looking westward into the waning light that makes me incredibly happy.

Once I drove through Illinois under a spreading wide field of fluffy white that extended into infinity, cottony sheep drifting gallantly and with amused authority over the highways through a sky-blue background.

Then, for a year, I watched purple merge with golden pink over the jagged silhouette of the Front Range, lost in Chief Niwot’s curse of the Flatirons. When the year was over I could still glimpse pinkgold over jutting mountains in my rear view mirror as I turned for east again.

Then for a brief time I saw gold in the brilliant dusk mirrors of the tall crystal buildings along False Creek in Vancouver, sighing every time I biked past the Burrard Street Bridge, glimpsing silvergold on acres of glass standing tall along the water’s edge. I sighed at the beauty of this city that wasn’t mine.

For two years now I have had the bay at my side, looking across gently lapping waters to the bluegrey low shapes of the San Juans beyond. One red building in my living room view lights up near dusk and I have often felt I could sit and look at that magic light against red brick for hours.

I have known now for six months that this home by Bellingham Bay would not be mine by the time the year is out. For a little while I did not know where or perhaps why this would be, why I would leave my home between the bay and the mountains, but I blame Picasso.

Picasso. There is a Ray Bradbury story that I read a million years ago about a small boy meeting an old man on the beach, an old man who wore a striped French fisherman’s sweater and drew amazing figures in the sand only for the sea to wash them away. People in the story whispered, “It’s him. Pablo,” and were devastated that the great man’s art could be so fleeting, that the ocean could come and take away the marvelous figures dancing on the sand and that no one could save them. I wondered what was the big deal. Picasso, an old guy who drew women with two eyes on one side of their face. No, Picasso I would save for later. I would allow Picasso to be a blank spot in my awareness, a door that would open at the right time, if the right time ever came.

On Black Friday I found myself sharing Picasso in a way I never thought art could be shared. A dance. Coming together and moving apart, then together again, words spoken but never said, glances, whispers, wonder. On Black Friday I glimpsed what life could be like, if only I let it. The dance, the wonder, the electricity, the aliveness, the shared experience of total beauty and something far bigger than two can create alone.

And so the dance unfolded.

Yesterday I merged onto I-5 as the sun waned, heading to the place where much of the unfolding has occurred. I glanced in the mirror over the lake and saw Seattle lit up, shining, hopeful, expectant. It was the same light that has lit so much beauty and joy, and this time Seattle was lighted for me, for the us we are creating, for the place that in a few days will be my new shared home, the place behind the door that Picasso opened. I saw all this in a glance and smiled, two eyes on one side of my face, and fell a little more in love with the Self who feels joy in a quality of light, who adores and is nurtured by the blue grays of the waters, the many-colored grays of the sky and the contrast of color against gray, and who loves loving and being loved by her man.

Every day now I will turn the corner and see the lake that lies below and across it the shining city standing beyond, and feel joy in the magic of creation so sweet that I will not mind if the waves come and take it every day, because I will know that it can be created yet again the next day and the next and the next.

Joining

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove…

In the morning I am awakened by warmth seeping in close to me, a breath, a heartbeat. I move slowly from dream into being, your heart-filled eyes inviting me into another day. Twin mugs stand by, steaming coffee’d warmth and life with each sip, feet on lap, talking of the day to come. The sun streams in through a wall of panes, inviting us to catch a scent of summer blossom through half-open door; or rain streams over, pattering, rivulets, and we two are snug inside with logs blazing into heartwarmed embers. Twin names on the mailbox, a testament that we walk this path in tandem, hands held, joining.

The day unfolds. I write. A painting emerges from my soul. I sing love into being. You inspire, inquire, clarify, evolve. We taste, we create, we experience, we harvest the richness of being loved and loving.

We dance separate dances, now touching again, now moving apart, always connected, always aware.

Wine glasses clinking, voices, music, shared conversation and laughter. Or reading far into the night. Or drumming, smoky fires, ancestral visions. Or sensual delights, a candy store. Our tandem dance continues. Finally darkness settles in like the purring cat between us, comfortably, contentedly. The world stills around us and we sleep, breathing, joined.