Always

She said there is always room to grow.  So find the fertile ground.

Perseverance, she said, is not a quality of the faint of heart.

War God

She told me that a part of me was waiting on the other side.  But to meet her, I must go further, deeper.  I would need to become braver.  Engage the power of the Will.  Battle to find my own Spiritual Warrior.

She said that throughout the quest, there would be harsh lessons of letting go.  Spiritual turning points of no return.  And losses that in the moment might not seem worth the climb.

She said pretty words would no longer do.  Inscriptions of inspiration would be irrelevant to me now, unless they emerged from my own heart.  Engineered by light, emanating from encounters with strangers and experiences I could yet believe possible.

I moved close enough to touch her.  I shivered, as though a cosmic ripple had touched me and tuned me.  I was radiant and persuaded.  The wanderlust of the gypsy rose in me.

And I went off into the night.  Seeking to find the Warrior.  In my dreams so that I might be awakened.

Be

She said she could see me across the room.  Glowing in an aetheral kind of way.   Laughing, my shoulders relaxed and heart forward.  Radiating out and inviting the world in.  She said this is the way I was meant to live.

Embers

She said she'd remember tonight years from now.  How they sat under the stars in the backyard.  On an unusually warm October night.  Watching the northern lights glow green hues across the sky and listening to the dry spruce crackle and pop as it burnt to embers.

She thought about those souls that wander the earth, unloved.  Yet in her own life, love abounded.  A wellspring without beginning or end.   And tonight her heart felt like it was radiating right out of her chest.  Humming with the fervor of the universe and humbled by such a noble gift.

Reflection.

She said I was well past being a coward.  In fact, she emphatically told me to drop that kind of language completely.  Because I know how to be strong.  And I know how to move in the world, and take care of myself without sacrificing it all away.

So I took myself to the bathroom mirror, got up good and close and told myself that I was ready.  And it really felt like I was getting somewhere!

Pose of Possibility

She said I was already breathing it in, that's how close it is.  That if I paid attention I could already feel it in my muscles, a subtle soreness from working them out to fatigue.  "Go back to down dog" she said, "let the energy move from the ground right up through your hands and feet at the same time... And for God sakes, keep your head below your heart and stop over thinking it so much!"

Recesses

She said that we could be many different things.  And we should.  Sometimes these things need to be experienced separately and at other times simultaneously.  Constantly expanding outward and strengthening inward.  But you must not limit yourself.  You must allow these things access to your soul with the same effortlessness as air rushes in your lungs and blood pumps through your heart.  Soon you will learn to not think so much about it all.  You'll just allow yourself to be and go with all that the soul is journeying through and toward.

She said there was still the faint aroma of fear, like a pheromone, but at least it was no longer stinking the place up or inviting the wrong kind of company in for an extended stay.  It was weakening rapidly, these things are born with a half life you know, so they diminish quickly but take a lifetime to erode in entirety.

Focus, she said on moving the joy of the adventure into the recesses of your mind, let it saturate all states of your consciousness.

Flow

She said things were starting to flow.  Move along.  Which was strange, given that winter seemed to be cat-calling from the north.  Letting everyone know that it was close on their heels.  Trying to make them all shake and shiver with the fear of what might be coming down the pipe.

But she told me to pay no mind to all of that.  To keep the summer's sun in my heart.  It would be more than enough to keep things moving freely.  With the fluidity of maple sap in spring.

Backdoor.

She said life should be full of good things.  Just good things.  So let those other bits go.  Open the back door so they can escape without making a scene or alerting the neighbors.  Soon you'll be able to close the screen door, cause all that's left with be so small they'll float right through the screen.

Mutations

I've decided that I'm going to keep loving you anyway.  Even though it is changing.  And perhaps by saying those words last week, and you know which ones I mean, I severed all that may have been future-possible.

But the future is both a short and long ways off.  And like all futures, takes turns that we never expect.  And life is not really full of mistakes and miscalculations ~ but rather opportunities to be beautiful in different ways.  Beautiful in pain and transfiguration.  Beautiful in joy and opening the heart to things that most of us are afraid to dream about or imagine.

So even though I'm transfiguring.  Morphing into shapes that hurt my body and mind and squeeze my heart in previously unimagined ways.  And make me doubt a sunny summer's worth of dreaming... I'm going to keep my heart open.  To you.

But also to the rest of it.

I don't Know

I don't yet know how to go on.
I thought I did.
But I don't.

I don't know how to make a life.
Without you.
And I feel like I've been.
Cut in two pieces.

And those pieces are weeping.
And bleeding.
Yet are whole alone.

Foreign Languages

She said, the thing that was the heaviest, most significant, grave even, to learn was this:  Love doesn't alway have a feeling.  Or at least feelings that you still recognize.  So often it is silent and maybe even a little dull.  Its language becomes so familiar, we forget that it ever made your heart race trying to understand its unique dialect.

Love is simple.  Its when you go to bed and your foot drifts under the cover to touch him.  Or you curl your back into his side just to steal his heat and he reciprocates with a kiss on the head.  Love is picking up milk (and that special chocolate he knows you love) and taking out the garbage.  And seeing your person across the room at a party and knowing that you'd introduce yourself all over again, if today were the first day.

I have known real love.  Not the make believe kind.  But the kind whose language you forget you know.  Love that withstands all kinds of storms and leaves you ravaged and wrecked, but still worthy in his eyes.  Protected and safe and warm.

And I didn't know all of this until it went away.  Was removed.  No longer extended.  As though a web that I've been carried by just suddenly disappeared.

And lonely is like I never imagined it could be.

Sad.

She closed it down.  No visitors allowed.  And realized that what she needed most was a private space to grieve.  It's not easy, loving and not loving.  Wanting and not wanting.  Always being between these spaces.  In the gap.  The slice that separates the sides of the coin, so that one never knows if they are heads or tails.

You've gone.  Driving.  Hurting.  Thinking.  Away from this house of uncertainty.

And I'm here.  Wondering.  Missing.  Tired and half dead.  Feeling the ghosts of who we were, in other days,  hiding in closets and slipping down the hall to the bedroom.

I lit a candle for you tonight.  In honor of the multitude of things I love and have loved about you.  Begging myself not to hurt us this way.  And yet on I go, unable to turn back time nor (deep in the recesses of my heart) wanting to.  I don't know what comes next.  I don't know how to breathe.  I don't know how to smile or laugh.  I have no idea how to be anything but numb.

Right now, all I know is how to let the wind whip me and the rain pelt me.  And to be tired but not sleep.  And hungry but not eat.

Tonight.

On this cold dark night, wet with rain and abandonment, she stared out the window.  And had no words.

Damn You

She said she went in search of you.  But you eluded, as you always did.  Showing up on your own timing, expecting the world to bow down and make way.  As though you were Caesar or Adonis.  Demanding in your swagger that she imagine all of the ways you were capable of moving over and through her.

Now

It was the present, not the future that was playing on her mind.  Tears had been expeditiously replaced by a new set of personal freedoms.  She was prospecting for freedom.  Panning rivers of time, sifting through sediment, intent on gold and rubies.  The now seemed a good place to stake a claim and dig a little deeper down, unearth treasures that had been covered and forgotten.

Change

She said that everything still looked the same from the curb.  Friends continued to walk by and stop in.  The phone kept ringing.   The PVR kept recording.  The dwellers were still getting up and going to work on time.  And feeding the dog at 6pm each night, like she had become accustomed to and demanded in that way that only an old dog can.

And inside, everything still had a place.  The plates were still in the cupboard beside the sink.  The towels were still stacked neatly in the linen closet just outside the bathroom.  The washer and dryer went through its daily cycle.  They still vacuumed once a week and cleaned the shower every few days.

But where the eye could not see, where the hand could not touch... everything had changed.  And sooner or later, the outside would look different too.

Discernment

She said that I would fail her often.  So to forgive myself now and forget doing it later.  Cause if life is a river, it's full of a lot of back water channels and eddies that swirl around and look enticing but don't actually go anywhere.

Yesterday she'd taken pleasure in joy.  Something pure that she knew was hers.  There had been freedom yesterday from the cage of pleasing others.  But today lingered the censure of regret at having given too much away.  She wondered if she'd been played for a fool.  That was not who she was becoming.  That was the child not the woman.  Such antics were not for her right now.  Now was for beading together the facets of herself, bringing into harmony the tribe of women that had been sharing her spirit for twenty nine hundred years, and were now ready to be knit together.

So she realized that in becoming this woman, discernment would need to be her guide, her friend, her confidant.  The bridge to the other side seemed less figurative now, less like something she'd read in a book or been told by another.  And the courage to travel was welling up like clouds that billow into towering cumulus, aware that their strength has the power to change the landscape below.

Power and authority she reminded herself.  Take these affections and pull them into yourself, let them penetrate you fully, pervade you like a lover that serves your soul.  Not so you can judge other but so that you can stand in the light for which your life is calling.  So that you can feel the sun on your face and joy in your belly.

The New Exercise

She said drunk push-ups were WAY easier than sober ones.  So she tried it.  And she didn't lie.

Morning Coffee

She said it was the best cup of coffee she'd had since their trip to California.  She'd loved it there.  The wind in her hair from the ocean and the foggy nights filling up all of the space between them.  Dropping temperatures that made them huddle for warmth and appreciate those jeans like it was November, when in fact it was just another July in San Francisco.  The sound of trolley bells outside the hotel window and the hot taste of Thai food still on the tongue.

There is a difference you know between crying and weeping.  She said she'd learned it from personal experience.  And that if you were ever in a position to know the difference yourself, you should take it.  Weeping, she said comes from your soul.  It is like sap that flows from the roots of an ancient tree, moves through you with this fierce gentleness and makes you remember everything good that's befallen you, everything that holds you grounded.  All the people you've loved with your heart wide open.

She said she'd taken chances where others had fallen short, been afraid.  It helped, thinking this way.  Otherwise she was just a ponderous fool.

Untitled, Unwritten

I know I'm getting what I want, she said through a cleanse of tears.  I just wish it didn't feel like I'm losing so much.

Disposable Income

She said that she'd found a little peace today.  As though it was the kind of thing that could be acquired in the personal care aisle of the grocery store.  Perhaps you should keep the receipt I told her... just in case tomorrow you need to return it for some milk and butter.

Brushing Destiny

She said things to me that I can't set down.  I keep carrying them around in my belly, they've not yet penetrated my thinking mind, only the part that can feel and cry out for more.  She said that my soul is 290 and 2900 years old and that there have been many female lifetimes between then and now.  Lifetimes of power and authority when women had no power and no authority, yet I managed to live with such.

But she found a girl hiding.  A shadow almost missed.  Covering her own beauty so as to give none of it away, offering platitudes to make me believe that safety is more important than the limitlessness of my being   She said I must go to her with the soul of my 2900 year old self.  And if she she rejects us, then we must go back and negotiate.  Using the wisdom of the crone to whisper words that have no sound, only meaning that echos to the very edge of where time began.  The spark that birthed us all and ignites us fearlessly to bring us to this place.  The girl must come out of hiding, she said, or it will all be for naught.

She said the project of my life was beauty.  The idea of it shattered and rebuilt me anew in an instant.  A beauty so rare that only the heart of a few are permitted a glimpse.  But I must first loose myself from this cell of pleasing...

She said you were a warrior that had laid down the sword and was now at peace in the world.  Well, mostly at peace.  And that the words you spoke were without deceit, the truth as you know in your heart the truth to be.  You're still trying to figure me out, she said... because I'm the cage rattler in you, when all the others have been in submission.  And the dance between us will forever be me moving and changing... you, adapting but keeping up.

One Night

Later, when we went outside for air, we just stood leaning against this very old, once a castle, wall.  Our heads together.  The coolness of the stone on my back, bringing my temperature down from the twirling and dancing we'd been at for hours. 

We were there, talking for a long while.  Content to be away from the frenzy of a too fast beat and indiscernible lyrics.  I found myself in that sweet spot of gentle intoxication.  Wanting to be exactly where I was, for as long as the night would allow it.  I soaked in like rain his intelligence and the things he chose to tell me about himself.  He was letting me be a part of the wholeness of his person. I marvelled that life is the dance.   And from a room full of strangers, we felt anything of the sort.

On occasion he would turn and kiss me.  Hi mouth hesitant, forbidden, bewildering.  My stomach turning over itself, silently begging for more.  I'd told him earlier that I wasn't at liberty... tried to leave it at that.  Wanting nothing to exist outside of this delicious bubble of chocolate coated time. 

"I like you" she said.  Exhaling, words falling forward.  And she knew he liked her back.   A two-way divining spell having encapsulated them both.

"So who is he?" he asked quietly.  Unable to take his eyes from her. Her heartstrings wrapping and winding with his, invisible knots of pleasure and pain weaving them together.  His fingers entwining her own.  Hinting at all that could be.  But never would.

Beauty

"I feel nurtured and satisfied" she said.  "For so many years it was only the wounds of pruning that defined me.  Perhaps I even cut myself too deep at times.  But it seemed necessary."

"And now?" he asked.  He took hold of the Zinfindel and refilled her glass. 

"Now."  A pause to reflect and savour the wine that had been strenghened by time and the care of a young  vintner.  "Now. I do believe that I have bleed out, scabbed over and healed up.  And you know, as ugly as that all was for a time, HELL, as ugly as I was for a time, it's woven itself to become the most beautiful pieces of me."

"Impossible for me to conceive of you ever be anything other than beautiful."  His voice calm and seductive, the hours of the day beginning to stretch their way into the early morning but yet to see the light.

"Ah, but you and I" pausing for another sip of liberation "declare beauty quite differently.  These breasts and this skin along my neck are reminders that beauty is a flower whose bloom is in youth.   Fleeting.  Illusion.  Proof only that we have this temporary power to lay men at our feet, hopeful that we might spread ourselves before them."
 
She held the glass upward, intoxicated by both the words she spoke and the shadows that swirled around them.  "We are all in the grip of time's embrace."  Philospophical now, her words walking the razors edge of two worlds "She my friend forgets no one and waits for none.  But she does, if we are priviledged enough and brave enough, show us that beauty is everything, even the things most of us can't bare to see in others, let alone ourselves."

On The Wall

She searched her own eyes in the mirror.  Looking beyond herself, knowing that he was in there and if she could just say the words, somehow they would reverbrate.  He would feel them even though he was too far away to hear her.

"I'm not finished" she said in a low and pleading whisper.  "We're not done yet.  Maybe we haven't even started.  Are you going to be this ghost?  Invading my dreams and waking me only to ask if I will forever be wanting you?"

Drawn closer, fogging the glass she closer her eyes and exhaled deeply.  It was his breath that returned to warm her face.  The salt of her tears at the surface now.

"Feel this.  Feel me."  Her hand fisted, instinctively rubbing over the hollow of her breast above the heart.   His face filing up her mind's eye.  Her flesh burning in sensation as though he were touching her the way she'd imagined it had always been between them.

"We're not done.  We are not done."  And with that she tried to let go of the pleasure she sought from the pain, in search of some joy that had mostly eluded her.

Mustard Pickles

“What would be great is if we could bottle this like preserves.”

She nodded in agreement despite the impossibility of it.

“And on about mid November start opening up jars of the stuff and eat them like mustard pickles with supper. Or, you know, like peanut butter off the spoon.”

“Forget supper, maybe I'd drink it mixed in my coffee and have it for breakfast.”

She couldn't stop herself from laughing at the idea. And not because it was ridiculous but because it was so inspired. And immediately began to wonder how large a bottle might be required to capture the moment, let alone the day.

Making Sense

“It's okay with me” she said. “That we're, you know, making this up as we go along.”

“You don't consider it a lot of unnecessary not knowing?” He'd always been the kind for plans and formulas and wanting to have a clear idea of where things were going before they actually got off the ground.

“I guess I'd rather look back someday and connect the dots than road map the future. Besides, the latter seems so dreadfully boring” her eyes rolling involuntarily. “ I want to wake up in the morning and wonder. And in the end, when we do get to where we're going, I want the satisfaction of surprise. Like no one, not even us could've imagined we'd get so far.”

His lips twitched in a semi-smile. She's completely nuts, he thought. And he was unable to decide if anything she'd said made sense. And it all worried him just a little.

Apart

His voice was heavy with sarcasm. So much so that it was impossible to trust the words he said. The undertone of frustration and annoyance, that to his credit he tried to conceal, negated anything resembling the peace offering that he was currently making.

It's difficult to counter that kind of contempt, she thought. So she opted for silence. At least until she could detect that his high-wire emotions were beginning to wear thin. Knowing him, his anger would not be sustained for long. Hell, he was after all attempting an apology. Not a good one, but just the same she appreciated the effort and knew it was more than she deserved. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, pleased she had not thrown fuel on his flames.

Soon his bluster of fury came to an end. The tempo changed and they both held onto the silence for a moment.

“I love you baby” she whispered into the phone. And those words seemed to ring so true in that moment it was hard to hold onto anything else.

“Me too. I love you too.” And it was impossible to imagine that anything in the world could keep them apart.

The Story of Us.

They sat in the shadow of the full moon's light. And when she looked up it was ringed by a prism halo, spilling colours that were generally difficult to see in the dark. And it shone so bright the other stars forgot their light.

“Do you ever wonder how we made it this far?” His hand tightened around hers and he pulled her in a little closer. Knowing she was prone to asking existential questions, he hesitated to give an answer. “Yes” he finally acknowledged, as though that one word might be enough, when in reality he had no idea what she was probing for.

“Really? Cause I have no clue!” And with that she laid herself out across his lap, hugging his knees to her chest. “But somehow we did it. All these years and here we are.”

He kissed her on the forehead, lingering for just an extra second to smooth her hair. And he wondered, albeit to himself, how the gods had chosen him to love her. Somewhere, somehow he expected there must be a plan greater than the moon. And was thankful to be a part.