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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.