Life goes by so fast. I wrote the following piece in 1999 – it seems like a just few minutes ago- when my relationship with my then lover and now husband was fresh and shiny. I’ve heard it did that three bad relationships can do more for your awakening than one easy comfortable relationship. Somehow I think I’ve wrapped several tough relationships and a few good relationships into this one and have manufactured both pain and pleasure. For those who think relationships are the answer; they are not. For those who think being alone and single is Mecca, forget that also. Each state, alone or in a relationship, has its fire and its pleasure. Nothing in form, whether it be health, people, success or accomplishment, offers permanence or lasting satisfaction. What we seek through the acquisition or disposal of things, people and circumstances never delivers us to the Promised Land. All that said I couldn’t resist sharing the following. Here’s to life and lovers:
I am undergoing an experiment. Is life there to support me if I let it? If I stay in the moment will each succeeding now be enough? Will I give up the need to be guided anywhere because there is nowhere to go? Can I give up the need to have things different because I know deeply that the world of satisfaction is not reached through self improvement? Can I give up the need for change and variety long enough to undo my inability to see what is already here. What is here is enough, but because of my conditioning I look outside to others, to the possibility of money bringing freedom and to success as the conductors of happiness.
I cannot fault myself for this journey. True I have frequent failures.. I have enough frequent failure points to take my mind anywhere in the land of doom and gloom. Even free trips are often too expensive. I can no longer afford the luxury self criticism. It eats away at my aliveness. The mind can be like a reckless drive. I get in my mind, turn it on and then go for a ride, but it’s not a joy ride. I become a reckless thinker and my reality crashes. I believe that life is a series of problematic occurrences that need fixing. Oh what an endless web we weave when once we practice mental disease. Mental dis- ease is a practice and I have gotten so good at it that I forget there's any other way of perceiving. I suffer from perception deception.
So it’s true, "I am not soaring away into the boundless bliss of infinite love," but I am soaring. I have acted on the courage to free myself from my latest prison. I am roaming in a life that is more dictated by wants than by needs. I have met the challenge of my heart and have become open to new love.
When I was young it was so easy to surrender to love. I did not know who I was. There wasn’t much to give up or to give from. I gave myself in order to become someone. Now I know who I am and so when I surrender, I give into much more than hoping I will become someone. I know I am already someone. Now I give into allowing that I can become even more if my heart is open. I have known how to be who I was when alone, now the risk is the vulnerability of being myself in the presence of one who can see me.
I am both honored and afraid of this journey into intimacy. Sometimes my mind spins in a mad dance of potential outcomes. I get dizzy and spin out of control. Other times I rest in a deep contentment. I feel dizzy when I look into my lover’s mind and heart. There is excitement in the newness, but as I glimpse the purity of the daily encounter, my mind relaxes. I watch the tea cup brush his lips. These things are becoming familiar, but none the less they are sacred. Does familiarity breeds contempt? Who can look upon the sun closing her eyes and not be touched again and again? So it is with he and me, those familiar things I long to see and repeat for me a thousand times.
So here’s to all you lovers – a little mushiness, a little sanity and plenty of “when it comes to relationships, the experts don’t exist!”
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