Juxtapositioning

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.

Lonely

It dawned on me just now, as I contemplated logging in to Facebook to see what’s new in my stream with all the people near and far, real and virtual who have come to populate much of my online life, that I was doing so in order to keep from feeling. Specifically, to keep from feeling lonely.

The thought — I am lonely — blindsided me. I am lonely? Really? In this house with my soulmate, the man who now calls me his beloved, his twin flame? How can I be lonely?

I am, and I am afraid.

My bed calls to me, yards of white fluffiness, pillowy billowy down-filled whiteness. Come to me, it says. Rest in me. Sleep. Fall into oblivion. And so I do. I want to. I want to not think not feel not hurt not remember how alone I am. Not.

And I am angry. There is far too much Not in my world, I think, too much that I am Not. Too much that I will Not. Too much that I can Not.

I am. I will. I can.

Not?

So what do I do other than plow through this? One foot in front of the other, one breath, one heartbeat. The space between the footsteps, the breaths, the beats seems enormous. Stretching wide and far and deep. A chasm yawning into loneliness.

Burrowing into whiteness, blocking out the insistent voice of Fear, sinking deep into quiet. If you need me, that’s where I will be.

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.

Spectrum

I’ve been teetering between two ends of what sometimes seems like a vast spectrum. Black and white. Good and bad. I try to squeeze my dualistic world into at least the gentler version, yin and yang, but it evades me. When at one end of the spectrum all I feel is the lack of the other. Pain. Emptiness. Heart-hurt.

The way through this, I know, is twofold.

One, I can believe in the concept of annica. Impermanence. What I hold in my hand today, in my heart, is fleeting. It will pass. The spectrum expands with me inside it, and I melt into one end from the other.

Two,  I can work toward thinking in a more non-dualistic manner. Advaita. I can believe that the black, the bad, is not inherently black or bad but that only my perception of lack creates such pain when I am at that end of the spectrum.

Perhaps it is not a spectrum at all but a path. A labyrinthine path. Sometimes we pass one another on that path, feeling oh-so-close, and then, still on the path but occupying different points, we move apart again, bound perhaps in an endless vector that leads us yet again to oh-so-closeness.

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.

Adrift

My feet are still floating free, unmoored. The horizon shifts every time I gaze into the waning sun. All I can do is look inside and try to breathe, every breath catching in my exploding heart. Soon I am pieces, shattered remnants, adrift on the current. Exposed. Ungathered. Withering.

Or, floating, my feet tangle in miles of kelp, deep green Medusa hair ensnaring my ankles, drawing me down. A long stream of bubbles surfaces, each one merging with the wind, rising into gray clouds drawn closely down, adrift.

Or, my breath floats around me, encircling me, motionless. Last night’s dinner sits on the stove top, encrusted, unwanted. Laundry waits in corners. Silent dry tears fill a bathtub, an ocean, adrift.

Blind

I am watching my life pass before me from behind an opaque screen, my eyes straining in vain to see something they cannot.

Once in a great while, once a year or so, I sleep the sleep of the dead. A whole day when I can do nothing but sleep. Oh, I try to make it through wakefulness when this happens, but after an hour or two awake — even after coffee — all I can do is collapse again, gratefully, on my bed. Comatose.

And I begin dreaming.

No, not dreaming, exactly. More like falling into a world that I cannot escape. In this state I find myself dreaming that I am sleeping and want to awaken. I try and try to open my eyes but cannot. They are glued fast shut. I call out for help again and again but there is no sound. I am seemingly forever doomed to my endless dream.

That is what I am living now. Sleeping, yet knowing that an awakened state is so close yet seemingly unattainable, if only I could open my eyes.

The days pass, growing longer as we approach the Solstice. Then they will shorten again. Meanwhile I will be crying out soundlessly, trying to open sightless eyes, feeling the world move past me.

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.

Feeling

After a lifetime of feeling but not knowing (or wanting to know) what I was feeling, I am learning to do a check-in. This is what I am feeling right now:

Sad. I feel the loss of something I really really wanted.

Angry. I had expectations. Made choices based on them. Was I imagining things? Fooling myself? Did I believe in something that wasn’t there?

Afraid. Now what? I don’t know anymore. I thought I did. Today I want to try to find my foundation again, but I don’t yet know where to look.