I’ve been writing a lot of love letters lately. To myself, to love, from love, to life, to the humans I love. Cancer season had me swimming in gushing emotions. And now that we’re in the heat of Leo, I’ve got declarations pouring out of me.
I dropped Marcus at the airport last week. He finished moving out of the home that was once ours, readying it for a new couple to move in and start a new life. He left the island, maybe for good, but at least for now. It was the final closing of this chapter of the shared life that was also once ours.
It felt so good to be the one to send him off, a completion of so many things. I am still finding new gratitude and the gentle warmth of subtle pride in this ending. In our decision to part, we stripped away all the complexity and were left with the bare bones of raw, open love. Free and simple. And of course, this is from my view and my experience. But I feel comfortable enough to use “we” in some shared sentiment, because it has in fact, been shared. Openly and mutually.
I have truly been enraptured by the beauty of this whole experience. By the grace inside the truth when you can both allow it to be central and accepted. And by the familial bond that remains between me and Marcus, our dedication to the love between us still unshakeable, just now with a different proximity and orientation.
I had a moment of genuine celebration feeling him free of the pieces he had been carrying for us. And for myself, in the sloughing off of what I had been holding for the well being of myself, of him, and the relationship. The decision to separate, end our engagement, and allow another form for our relationship to reveal itself was brutal and ultimately liberating. We’ve had 7 years of weaving our lives together, and now we’ve loosened those threads to create different landscapes for our lives.
I am reveling in my own availability right now. So much beauty can pour itself into us when we are able to recognize and directly experience what it is to be in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world. Passages and transitions are crucial to this. Allowing that which must die, to fully die, to honor the life cycle of something and surrender to its completion so that we may unburden ourselves of whatever fuckery of suffering we’ve been looping in and actually get out of the way of freedom. And be more fully available for the depth of connection that will inevitably come for us when we are uncompromising in our love for ourselves, no longer needing to leave the center of the seat of our own souls to reach for love.
I’ve reflected on the dear friends who have passed in the last few years, the ending of precious friendships, the loss of my dog, the transition of my relationship. Each death releasing something in me while bestowing me with gifts beyond measure. It has felt much like an energetic inheritance, a bestowing of wisdom and love and soul gifts amongst those who can recognize and heed them in their sacredness.
Marcus evoked in me the gift of timeless, formless love. To share such profound intimacy with someone through a completion and a transition, to keep our hearts open to each other while finding the right form, the right proximity to be able to do that, is a gift of the highest order. And to find our way back into a friendship, to the place where we began, while also far beyond what we could have previously imagined, well, that is a blessing I will never stop counting. Like a certain other soul mate of mine says, thank god for you.
My life looks nothing like I would have hoped for when I was younger, but good god I love who I am inside of it more than I could have ever imagined. I didn’t know who I would need to be for this life and who I would actually become once I revealed myself to myself.
I often think of one of the last things my grandfather said to my mom as he was dying. He was in that liminal state between worlds, likely in some intense physical pain, and my mother asked him “Dad, how are you feeling? Do you need more pain medication?” And he replied by simply saying to her, “I feel…full of love.” What more of an ending could you ask for? And what better way to begin the next chapter.
The ache of nostalgia
And the sneaky ways life surprises you.
I found myself crying a lot this past month. I would be overcome with huge upwellings of grief, alone, going about my business, and suddenly a crack of sobs opening through my chest and throat. And without fail, I would find myself laughing in the midst of it. Grief merging with joy, soaking each other with the same ecstatic elixir. Out of my mind completely, into the virgin and ancient territory of the heart. I could make meaning while searching for the origins of all of this. Stop myself and probe into- where is this coming from and why am I crying- especially given all the recent changes in my life. Of course one could say it was precipitated by change and upheaval and loss. Death strips us naked and leaves us naked to the raw, beautiful, and brutal truths of life. But I didn’t probe the why or what while it was happening, even though I am doing that now.
In the moment, it felt like it was without content. And looking back, it felt like it was from some far off place in my psyche, originating at a distance too far to track precisely. Something accelerated in its movement from a tectonic shift in the foundation of my being, a sonic resonance coming for me in my availability made possible through inner movement, finally. And if I widen, it felt like a personal connection to the collective pulse of the heartbreak in all of us.
And that place is vast. The horrors are many and the beauty is profound beyond what one heart can hold. It’s there that I keep finding myself sitting outside my room, looking down at the ocean and grateful for the explosions of waves crashing on the coast. Lulls of gentler waves and then a sudden swell meeting the shore and sending water 40 feet in the air. How long did it take for that wave to get here? How long has my heart been waiting to heave up the heaviness stored from when it was not safe enough, too confusing, or too inconvenient to feel? Will it always feel like a tiny death every time I open to more love? Will it take a global tsunami for our shared heart to break open to that swell of beauty/love/grace/life? This is why I didn’t probe, because it compounds something that for me at least, still diminishes the purity of the emotion. Meaning muddying the wave passing through.
I know a wave metaphor for deep feelings can feel cliche, but these things are that way for a reason. I am reminded of being in Tahiti, and the pull I felt in the water there. I was out in the open ocean and dove down only about 20 feet. Nothing but dark blue beneath me. I remember feeling like I could just keep diving, eventually sinking, being pulled down by density, and how seductive that was. I used to play a game with myself here in the Kona waters. I’d dive down deep enough that it would get a little dark, do some flips underwater with my eyes closed to disorient myself, open them and try to determine which way was the surface. Mostly I would know immediately, but a couple times I couldn’t tell and I’d have to blow some bubbles to figure it out, following them back up until I could see the surface clearly again.
The abyss has always been terrifyingly alluring for me. Not the metaphorical one- that one too- but real, encasing the planet, oceanic one. The one surrounding me for thousands of miles in every direction from where I am on this island. When I die, that’s where I want to be buried. Feed me to the deep sea creatures, laid to rest in the seabed graveyard of whale bones. That image brings me so much joy, decaying on the ocean floor. That’s my kind of lighthearted depth.
And in this moment, I find myself missing something I’ve never had. Without naming what that something is. Without attaching it to an idea of love, attainment, success, relationship, or an oceanic connection. Because I know when this missing arrives, it’s a signal that I am missing myself, and it’s time to check my pockets for holes, stitch them up, and fill them with all the fertile seeds of me.
Because what a joy it is to fall in love with yourself over and over. I am drinking in the air of sunlight these days and meeting this complete freshness with total delight in what I am finding in myself. She’s got a lot more trust, this one, and a whole lot more grace at her back.
In the now-ness and the next-ness
And the holy fuck-ness
Now, as I find myself looking towards moving to California, in a part of the country a previous version of me boldly stated I would never live, I find myself yearning for an unknown chapter that has yet to start. I am tying up all the loose ends of my life and succumbing to the parts of me that have refused to align with my soul. The same ones who in years past said they would never live in New York again, and somehow found myself gravitating back there, completing some unknown, unfinished business. Or the same ones who have tried hard to stay in Hawaii, and yet somehow could never quite carve out the life that deeper places in me long for.
Life keeps looking at me square in the eye and saying, joke’s on you babe. Or rather, in me. What would have once been confusion in me, now feels like delight. The joy of uncertainty, with a field of possibility before me, and enough experience behind me to know that we are not at the full mercy of fate, and yet we live within the inevitability of our soul’s path, and all roads eventually lead us home. But we still get to choose how long it takes to get there and how frequently we distract ourselves with side quests, because god I love a side quest. And thank god for the imaginal realms because my longing to be a ceramicist who lives in a cabin in the mountains in Wyoming or to be guide on a liveaboard sailboat searching for orcas in Norway can unfold there. In theory I could do these things, but my soul has other plans, and my fidelity lies there.
And distractions become nearly impossible and certainly irrelevant when we choose to be in the holy fucking intimacy with what’s here now, and in the radical newness of the never-before-known-ness. It’s an edge of ecstasy rooted in the quotidian. It is something I keep writing about over and over, for years now. Coffee’s getting cold. My eyes are irritated because I’m still denying that my sight is changing and I should really be wearing readers. I’ve forgotten to go to the post office three days in a row. And there it sits in the middle of all of it, in the middle of all of me. The holy ordinary, erotic extraordinary.
My grandfather didn’t ask for a better view or more time, there was simply a recognition of the fullness of love. And it thrills me that this presence can still sneak up on me and take me by surprise, when I’m driving, when I’m folding laundry. Same fullness, lower stakes, maybe. A rogue wave explodes onto my shores, and I’m in the intimacy of the meeting.
I’ve never been this person, sitting here, typing these words, ever before. And to be honest y’all, she’s pretty fucking incredible, drenched in a magnificent wave.