Less than a month ago, I woke up one morning and was struck by the notion I was moving. Struck because, until that moment in time, I had no conscious realization that it was even on the radar.
And even though it made no logical sense – I mean, I’ve spent the last two and a half years stripping and building and thinking this place was The One – and all of a sudden up comes this moving thing and with it is the feeling that it is a dream I didn’t even know I had, a dream that is right here, ready to happen, coming up under my wings had having me soar through territory I had not even dared imagine.
So in all the ways that I have been possessed, filled with the rocket fuel of desire, I’ve also been noticing how there’s a part of me that’s been ‘off’. I’ve had awarenesses of thoughts and behavior that I’ve watched come and go, all with an underlying insistence to be heard and understood, to be right, to be in control, until all these moments have now become a thundering detonation.
Yeah.
Detonation.
It wants to blow everything up in my face. It wants to take this happiness and have it laid out in bits and pieces around me like body parts on the battlefield, cold and bloody and unforgivable. I know this piece, I’ve experienced it before. I’ve felt it in my mother the times she would be caught up in a fury at my father, grab me by the hand and, with all the seeming purpose in the world, storm out of the house to the car and, for all her determination to drive away, we would sit there in a seemingly helpless immobility, pulled between the will to leave and the knowledge that to do so would mean living the story that was the last story that, deep down, she really wanted to live. And then she would storm back in the house again and find the enclosed and boxed-in place where she could shut the doors – to her room, her heart – shut the doors that kept everything out and insisted on the kind of isolation that made my mother wonder if it weren’t better just to end it all. Be done. The same detonation that was alive in my mother, alive in me. It’s just it hasn’t been around for a really long time.
In the wake of the flurry of putting the house on the market and envisioning what might be, it seems that for as high as I would go, for as expanded as I would become, there is an equal depth and contraction. In the moments of partial lucidity that are nonetheless caught up in this feeling that it is all over before it is even begun, I’ve been looking at what’s at play, how everything seems to be tied into this exalted decision to move and all that it carries with it. Because, in my mind, this move is buying into certain things, things that are tied to the calling of my heart, things that I want so much that the idea of them not being woven into this new and expanded future is enough to undo me. Things about who I am as a writer, a teacher and film maker, things about the how my creations are coming into the world and, most importantly, things about who I am with my partner, who she is with me – who we are together.
Most importantly because, on some level I feel like I can handle the rest. I can assuage the fears that wonder if Stella Sky isn’t what I think she is, and notice those that insist there is an infinite number of people who can say the things that I might say, and say them so much better. But Rachel…well, how to navigate the fact that it feels like I’ve just upped the stakes and have no idea if I have the winning hand. Because this vision, this impulse, she is a part of it. Not a by-the-by part, but a real, quintessential, living and breathing one.
I’m invested, when surely invested is the last, most dangerous thing to be. Because when I’m invested, I care. And when I care, I can get hurt. This unexpected, free-wheeling, high-flying investment of mine is banking on certain fundamentals. Most importantly, it is banking on Rachel continuing to love me. Not just love me, it is banking on her wanting to live with me because I now know I do, most definitely, want to live with her.
And you see, what we’ve come to realize these last few months of living under the same roof, Rachel and I, is that things aren’t always rosy. Yes, there’s the practical inconveniences of sharing every single iota of space. And the edges of what it is for two strong women who have created and lived in autonomy in their own homes for years prior to have to find the middle-ground, these practicalities adding fuel to the fire of that which is essentially already being introduced to the raging flames of alchemy – i.e. – how to Be In Love. Because we’re not used to it. Not really. And I say we and really mean I, and yet there is the we part of it, that which is the bigger We of current humankind. The not being used to it meaning that this state of Being, the one of Being Love, is thwarted with all the patterns that have been dancing around and through the lineage of experience for an Age of Time.
I’ve lived on many an edge. Around money, survival and letting most everything go – edges that have buffed and beaten and polished the rough places – and just when the story books would argue that this is the happily-ever-after, just when I’m in relationship and have gotten over the fact that it’s with a woman (and whatever else might get in the way), and have fallen, really fallen, I find myself on this new one. This edge.
And so in one breath I can say this dark side of the soul thwarts and undermines. It what’s the point? and insists on full-blown detonation. It pushes and pushes away until, finally, one day, the very worst fear of Rachel actually being away comes true. And then it confirms, See? For all the ways she has told you she loved you, for all the ways she has wanted to love you, didn’t you know this would happen? Didn’t you know you can only open so much, give so much, allow so much? Keep her…keep love…keep the stirrings and awakenings of yourself at arms length, keep them under control.
And in the next I can say I am aware that, beneath this seemingly unshakeable insistence is a feeling of desolation…of despair, and it is the despair of my heart. The heart in me that knows how things are and can be, around partnership, around everything, around letting the walls down and letting Love. It is a grieving and desperation that begs for it not to be as it has been so many times before. With this feeling being my compass – the one that indicates the direction of my soul, I am aware of the opportunity for change. Change the decisions around the impulse to shut down and instead commit to doing the opposite.
And perhaps, just perhaps, this dark side of the soul, my soul, this part of me that I know I have shunned and chastised and let hold the reins, the part that, for whatever litany of convincing and justified reasons does not trust love, might actually be the potent reminder I need to head in precisely the opposite direction. And it’s not about taking up the reins and wondering how in the hell I’m gonna do it, steering the way and watching for the pitfalls and playing the games intended to keep Rachel guessing and doing the things that will surely make sure she loves me even more, it’s not about trying to figure it all out, really it’s about letting go. And all the while, perhaps, just perhaps, this part of me that storms and stomps and wonders how we, she and I will survive, is asking, longing to for me to cast caution to the winds of faith and, heart pounding, head spinning, let go of the reins and open into the warmth of the Light.
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