Written in a conversational style of writing requested by a friend who has encouraged me to break apart my ideals about marriage for many years. I’m a slow burn, but I usually get there.

Marriage; I want to get married. Mike is less interested in the idea and also willing to figure out why. This is the great thing about how we both go about our growth; we look at why we do and don’t want to do something and what is getting in our way of getting to the other side. In this case, Mike is working with his old stories about marriage and its utility and meaning. For me, I’m unwinding my conditioning about why it is important and what it means about me, him, and our love. Inherently, marriage isn’t any more valuable than anything else we pursue as humans yet most of us have convinced ourselves otherwise. It has long been entangled with security, money, and power; and a younger history with the additions of companionship and care. Now-a-days, most people marry for a little of each even if they aren’t willing to admit it.

Are they why I want to get married, too?
“I want to make official what we already are.”
Why?
“So, I’ll be able to claim I’m as important as I want to be” aka “I want to feel special, different, the one he-overcame-it-all for.”
Do you feel special/as important as you want to feel now?
“Yes, in so many ways I already do. And no, in other ways, I don’t. I’m realizing Mike can’t really do anything to fulfill those, no matter how much I want him to.”
So marriage wouldn’t change that?
“No, it likely wouldn’t.”
…fine, but there are others reasons…

“I want the experience of being married.”
What is the experience of being married?
“Loving each other in the day-to-day, planning for our future together, helping each other grow, being partners in the taking care of our kids, having fun together, going on adventures, pushing each other out of our comfort zones…”
Is this any different than what you have now?
“No”
…another dead-end…but…

“Marriage is an important step of commitment.”
Says who?
“Society, and my family, and friends. There’s an expectation that I feel that isn’t mine but also seems like mine. The story says that if he wants to marry me, it means he’ll be loyal and committed.”
Do you think that’s true? Is that the only way people show loyalty and commitment?
“No, many married people don’t show it that way, and many do. It’s not based on marriage.”
What is it based on?
“Choice.”
…I can see where this is going. Nowhere different than where we already are..and yet...

“Marriage is a sacred union of two souls. I want to celebrate that.”
What is stopping you?
“Nothing really, we already honor this aspect of our partnership.”
So, what is missing?
“Going even deeper, letting go of all of these notions and being in the unknown together”
You’re getting it.
…argh, fine, but…

“I want to wear a pretty white dress and love my beloved in front of all of our family and friends.”
Why?
“So we can beam love bright. There’s so little of it amongst life’s darkness. I want our love to be a beacon for what is possible. I want to share it.”
So, go do it.
“I can’t…not if he doesn’t value marriage. He has to want it as much as I do.”
Is that true?
“No….”
What is true?
“He loves the way he loves and I love the way I love. There is nothing missing in each of our ways. We already have the marriage I’ve always wanted.
…It’s hard to stop the conditioning of wanting enough to realize there’s nothing more to truly want.

Over the years, the more I’ve learned to fill myself from within, and from within the true beauty of partnership, the less external pressures and external meaning have meaning. We live in a fairly flat world, a world that doesn’t want to see how much it values superficiality and the illusions of wellness rather than true wellness. It doesn’t want to do the hard work to get there, perhaps it doesn’t even know where “there” is, nor how to get there if it did. It doesn’t know that to be rich, you have to be willing to feel rich with exactly what you have. And this takes practice, persistence and a lot of grace.

When I really feel into why I want to marry Mike, besides the vanilla buttercream cake and my mother’s still-in-style halter neck dress that she wore fifty years ago, the only thing I can truly say that isn’t marred with cultural expectation is that I love Mike beyond what I thought possible and I want that love to be witnessed by the open hearts of others. Sure, I want recognition and specialness, but what I want most is the reflection of love. This isn’t personal, it’s vastly universal and transformative. Be in witness our healing love. Let it be known that it is possible, that it is necessary and that it is holy. Be inspired by it and through it. Love bigger and wider and deeper because of it. Realize that there is nothing else than it. If I can’t be reflected in that, there’s little I’d rather be reflected.

I went to bed in need, the old school kind that can’t form words but is desperate for just the right touch and just the right gaze. It’s young and alone, yearning turned to wild hopelessness in a rather loud, yet silent plea for rescue. Fears of being left there forever. When I woke up in not much better of a state, my attempts to reconnect with my beloved remained flat. The depth of my sorrow pulling me beyond my capacity to climb my way out. Sometimes, during times like these, time is on my side and these moments, caused by trigger-response, subside on their own. I imagine my own demons walking slowly backwards into the night, not quite healed but slightly less intense than the last time they were seen breaking dawn. Even though I laid in bed hoping for this morning’s retreat, I knew more direct handling was needed.

I know after years of deep trauma work that surgery is sometimes necessary to release pockets of trauma; energetic abscissions of which I am in the role of both the surgeon and the patient. Today was a surgery day. I’ve found that trauma healing is both bloody and beautiful, as if there were really a distinction. Tragedy and perfection in every bit of unfelt pain, usually followed by a flood of relief. In the past, I’ve used humiliation as a surgical tool, cold disconnection as a method of retrieval, and various other injustices that I’ve told myself are only further traumatizing when, in fact, they’ve each held a key of freedom that only that particular instrument could. And then there’s pleasure, which has little distinction from the pain felt above but is usually more palatable against the flesh. It, at least, promises some enjoyment.

This morning, my tenderness needed warm tenderness, not a cold, blunt object. It needed lightly intensified touch. It needed to look into my beloved’s eyes. It needed a loving rope thrown my way and a gentle tugging back towards my boat.

We often don’t talk about the power of sex beyond its reproductive contributions and its pleasure-giving possibilities. But it’s a doorway that is wells deeper than sensation and spawn alone. A lifetime…lifetimes…ions…live inside us and are best accessed through coming together sexually. In the world of tantra, they’ve long known how using sexual energy makes it possible to realize new states of consciousness and find union with the divine. Somewhere, in the slightly more murky in between, is where the power of divine meets the vulnerability of our human nature. We get healed as they meet.

Making love with my beloved often brings me to tears, sometimes in ecstasy and relief and overwhelming states of love, and other times, like this morning, the dam of the past breaks by the power of our embrace. Just looking into his eyes bursts the gates, the incision that commences surgery in what is relatively gentle yet irreversible in its impact. This morning, the first tears came without bliss. They were painful agony to feel, contentless and full of old stories just the same. The past and current pain of being misunderstood and harmed for it. The cries of innocence and yearnings for truth. The wet roars for a new way of being and relating.

I’m lucky, my beloved can hold these cries without being drowned by them himself. In his receptivity, I’m given the ultimate gift of presence and relief. What starts out as pain quickly, yet no less painfully, transforms into equal parts clarity and embodiment. A voluntary emergency surgery for the heart, made possible by each of our very human tools of love. The experience of coming for the sake of coming home, hopefully with one less unmet need to contend with in the future.

Not surprisingly, willingness is very much linked to our constitutions as humans. In physicality, I’ve always been rather thin boned and weak muscled. Even in the years when I was much more fit than I am now, my threshold for pain and tolerance for physical discomfort was pretty damn low. Waxing and walking, fine; electrolysis and endurance racing, no thank you. Mentally, on the other hand, I’ve always been up the challenge. In fact, I often seek it out. I like to stretch my mind in directions it doesn’t want to go. I’m willing to try on perspectives and alternate ways of looking at reality. I love layering them on top of one another to create a matrix of existence that can never quite settle into clear view. It’s fun to “see” life through my mind. Spiritually, I feel the same. It’s incredibly pleasurable for me to wonder and imagine and sense what else is at play that is out of human vision. Very rarely do I get stuck on a concept that I can’t fit into a grander plan. Where I do falter are those spiritual doorways where I am out of my element and don’t believe I have a right to be. Spirits and angels sound both wonderful and scary; still held at arms length and fear deep. Somewhere in between, for me, is the emotional world of past hurts, current feelings and future hopes. It’s a vast ocean that I was very slow to enter in my early years and only more recently willing to wade into more deeply. This is the area of my life where my own willingness is more muddied. On one hand, I’ve done a lot of work to reduce anxiety, stress and worry in my life in order to feel pleasurable emotions. As a little girl who only visited joy in select moments, I now successfully choose to live there much more regularly. Laughing, joking, finding beauty in small moments is easy and true. Lightness is finally possible. Sadness, who I’ve known well for decades, has also become more natural and mature friend in my adulthood. No longer an excuse to remain lethargic and lifeless, my relationship with it is a touchstone into the heart of suffering; the very thing we all share and are fighting to free ourselves from. Secretly, it is my greatest love affair, where joy and sadness meet. The bittersweetness of every moment, if we let it. Anger, on the other hand, and all of its associated emotions are foreigners to me. They are less invited guests in my nervous system, more sly and silent intruders. Usually, it takes me hours, if not days, to know that I am angry. And when I do realize, my body’s reaction is uncomfortable heart-bounding quickly turned to mental rumination followed by a fog-induced desire to sleep instead of feel. While I’m mentally willing to go to the mental places that trigger these emotions, it’s an incredibly difficult practice for me to find the same willingness in my body to feel the sensations associated with actually feeling anger. In many ways, this requires a particular journey into embodiment that I can imagine yet can’t quite embody. It’s a funny conundrum, knowing the necessary destination but not having a clue about the path to get there.

What I’ve found about willingness is that it’s layered, and it’s different for each person. Usually, I need to commit to something new mentally and spiritually before the rest of me opens up enough to meet the challenge emotionally and physically. For others, the body is their doorway. Through feeling and sensation, they find their capacity to meet their own resistances to mental and spiritual change. They need, even if through physical pain, to feel deeply within themselves before they can make mental space for new concepts. They are our world’s metabolism for those of us who don’t yet have that gift. This is why I love the lens of willingness so much, because it is a map of which there is always a door and always a key. When we learn what those are for ourselves, living more fully is possible. It’s as challenging, yet simple as that.

We wipe away tears because we think we can’t see with them. But actually they make us see what we usually can’t; our humanity. They are tiny miracles.

Happy Valentine’s Day, love. Much to my surprise, it all comes down to you. Humbly, you are the only aspect of life I’ve found it’s worth making any fuss over. You’re strong while subtle, acute while everywhere, and sacred while playful. I’ve spent years following your every move yet deeply afraid of feeling your touch. Thank you for sticking so close to me. You’ve always been in every sparkle of light, every crashing wave, every airborne bird, and beyond. I feel yo now in my partner’s presence, in my stepsons’ growth, in my niece and nephew’s innocence, in every stranger’s friendly smile, in every tear, my own and from others. You’re in my nightly dreams, you’re in my flowing words, you’re in my expanded heart. You’ve taught me patience in the face of frustration, devotion in the face of distance, and heartache in the face of loss. My relationship with you is better than any relationship in my life, and you make every other relationship better. Never needing to be found, searching for love ceases to be possible knowing you’re always right here.

I feel heavy with sadness stuck behind my eyes. It’s the kind of sadness that is pervasive, long lived in me and likely long will in the future. I don’t mind it, per say, other than what it does to my energy levels. Two weeks of clear creative upsurge through the time of ovulation decent-ed downward into the following two weeks of increased internal weight and fog. This sadness, while always present like the moon, felt more deeply when the sun rests. I attribute it to varied mix of human existence — part existential, part collective and part personal. In its presence, I have easier access to the angst of not being able to truly know what it is that we’re all doing here; an eternal answer-less question of which I think I can sometimes see an inch more clearly only to be brought back even deeper into the unknown of it all. In the sadness is, too, the grief of our shared world; the misconnection, past and present, suffering in the same timeline, genuine worry for whether or not we’ll be able to discover another way. And then there’s my own sadness, the tears of old pains, sometimes quite loud in their wailing and sometimes a faint cry that I easily mistake for unnecessary cares. Today, and yesterday, and maybe even the day before, my personal sadness seems dense and foggy. I can put my finger on a few immediate life items that have my heart in a crunch and yet I don’t feel willing to get close enough to any of them to see if they’re the true culprit. In that way, I paralyze myself with my own unwillingness.

Usually, I let my sadness run. I love to cry, especially when in witness by a trusted other. After many decades of bottling them to the point of extinction, I’m rather thrilled to have learned to un-dam their flow. The only problem, I find, is that my nervous system won’t always open the gates. When certain parts of me feel threatened, my response is to batten down my hatches rather than release this trauma-induced reaction. For my personal mind/body/spirit connection one of the ways I know I’m under a trauma-response, big or small, is when my physical energetic environment irritates me. Even while in gloriously sunny Mexico, the sounds of the birds chirping loudly are a high-pitched attack to my ears. So, too, are our neighbor’s loud music, the opening and closing of doors, a speaker for ambiance right above my head at dinner. I’m surrounded with irritants, and in such a state of hyper-awareness, they irritate me even more.

Somewhat un-humbly, I’ve long thought of myself as Buddha-like. Since I was a little girl, I’ve been lucky enough to see through the eyes of truth, first in others and then more slowly in myself as I’ve peeled back the layers of my own healing. But I’m also just as human AF. No amount of vacation snacks, sex and sleep is softening this hardened part of me. While Buddha sees the bigger picture, her human-counterpart can’t quite see past this sentence. I know better than to pressure myself into relaxation or to force myself into “joy-inducing” experiences in an attempt to find more ground. Just a small portion of it is accessible right now and that’s okay. As a nod to one of my all-time favorite sayings goes, wherever I go, there all of me is, whether I like it or not.

I sat down this morning in front in my new she-shed writing room in our home. There’s 12+ inches of fresh snow on the ground outside the window with more falling every second. It’s heaven. Time standing still making space for knowings to arise and be felt without the rush of everyday life to squander their intelligence. Of course, I expected to use this time to embark on a new endeavor inspired by my beloved. Just a few days ago while walking around our neighborhood lake, we talked about our mutual struggle with participating in all of the buckets of life we each want to participate in. For Mike, they differ slightly then mine. Where he wants to take a certain kind of action, I want to settle more into being. For him, buckets of adventure, exercise, nature and success. For me, buckets of creativity, flow, stillness and romance. For us both, buckets of travel, growth and rest.

In the past, when I’ve bucketed aspects of my life, I’ve color-coded the shit out of what I think matters to me. I’ve relied on bullet points and organization in order to create a carefully coded script to follow that would put me squarely on the path to wherever it was I thought I should go, only to usually leave the map where I created it and float unknowingly in another direction. Today, as I was working through my first two bullets, I paused with growing anxiety. Each bullet, yet again, just another colored-pencil attempt to control and systematize what doesn’t want to be controlled or systematized. It wants presence, willingness to be in the experience and not describe it or plan for it.

Everything, I am realizing, is an opportunity to dive deeper into experience just as it is occurring. I can list what I believe is important to me in hopes that I will better prioritize it into my life or I can make it a sacred exploration in the very moment I’m exploring it. I can bum-rush the supposed destination or I can make each experience the destination. I can continue doing without being, or I can learn to truly be while doing. This, I believe, an initiation into sacred territory. A holy pause, an opening of the heart, a waiting for God to join me, so I can cease doing things alone, and instead, endeavor to do anything, and everything, with God flowing through me. On rare occasions, this is easy, but most times, it is not. Inertia, monotony and unconscious pattern all take over. They know the destination well, even though they know not the sacred way. They ensure a means to an end rather than a meaningful end. For me, this is the cusp of something quite new. A new era that doesn’t have a map, but rather a simple invitation let nothing go by without a check-in of depth. When it comes to my map of what matters to me, I already know the key destinations, now it is simply time to go with more of me in toe.

I’m grateful that my old ways of doing still take hold but now dissolve quickly before I’ve gotten too far down the road. The listening is subtler now, yet also louder than ever. Even though I’d like to fight it, nothing is as important as what wants to be heard. While I’m not particularly practiced at creating heat with my well-placed logs of life, I do know that the sacred fires of life ignite most powerfully after the settling and after the beautifying is complete. They happen after I’m willing to open the door for God to enter, and stay a long while.

There is something moving through me that I don’t yet understand. I’m unfamiliar with it yet also quite drawn toward what it quietly promises. I just have no idea what that is. For the past several weeks, I’ve been trying to identify it. Am I depressed? Am I anxious? Am I sad about the state of the world (and certain aspects of my life)? Am I stuck, blocked, over-thinking things again? Every time I inquire, I assume that answering these questions, even if some of the answers are yes, will set me free. Yet, upon inquiry, none of the identifications seem accurate. They all feel mildly true while not-at-all true at the same time.

I know now not to change these bouts, not to fight them, not to deny them and not to rush them. They pass in their own timing, sometimes with new knowledge and an eager excitement to see them go; sometimes they leave quietly through the back door without saying good bye. This time, I have a hunch that we’re going to be acquainted for a while. This isn’t just morose, it’s intelligence trying to move through me. While it would be nice, it’s not the kind of intelligence that delivers the answer swiftly and moves on. It makes me work for it. It’s another chance to know myself a little more, and open myself a little deeper to the pleas of being a human in our world.

I hear an invitation to listen. To hear something that wants to be said that my usual doings distracts me from, and my usual awareness hasn’t yet been ready to hear. Surprisingly, the need for slowness isn’t present, nor is the need for silence. This is a listening that is faster and louder than I’m used to, a rumbling that I’ve mostly attempted to hide from instead of face head on. Now seems to be the time for the latter. Also surprisingly, I don’t feel much fear this go around. I’m armed with a confidence and excitement that mixed in with my usual resistance has me ready for battle in a way I never thought I would be, or want to be.

Battle for what exactly I’m not sure. If my hunch is right, what is calling to be listened to is a deeper reunion with my own knowing that is vaster than my current cognition and deeper than my current relationship with who I think I am. It’s a time of deep realization and even deeper trust in the ground that holds these realizations. The days of seeking safety above expression are waning, as are the days of knowing and staying silent with these knowings. The days of sharing truth are upon me, scared as I may be about what this means for my safe life with my safe relationships. I am fairly certain it won’t look like I think it “should,” and I’ll need to grow quite to meet my own fears, areas of mental rigidity, and tendencies towards perfection in lieu of letting it all spill out the way it needs to. I’d like to think I can still tie things up in pretty little bows, if I promise to untie just as many, if not more than I make.

Now I understand why I sometimes am afraid to write. I never know how quickly the train is moving. Some days, it’s only just left the station, so I can jog leisurely to meet its pace. These days, I pick up speed quietly and naturally just as the content requires. Other days, its speed means helicoptering in and jumping out without a parachute. The content demands from me to hit the ground running, and I know I need to meet it at full force. There’s little time for ramp up. And then there are the quiet days, when we are all in slumber and I need only sit quietly within the parked train car waiting for the muse. Here, slowness is the key, no rush and no demand as the content becomes emergent in its own timing.

Overall, I like the diversity of expression and I also fear its unpredictability. Fairly often, I intend to write one thing and another bangs on the train car door, or I set out to write anything at all only to find that all the trains are dormant for the night. It’s an erratic outlet; always seeking for articulation yet finicky about the particulars of when, how, why and what.

Today, the train station is chaotic; comings and goings, different speeds, divergent destinations. I am required to jump from train to train with very little reason or momentum. It is a day for listening and a day for movement, two things that seem to be in opposition but are mostly a skill in simultaneous practice. How to be a passenger on the train while also the conductor of it? If I’m honest, it feels lately as if I’m at the mercy of it all, needing to please my own writing instead of it being a trusted release that it once was. These days, we’re more separate than ever; what gets created and who is doing the creating. A giant ball in the shape of fear of rejection mixed with the intelligence of wisdom itself, yet again.

My brother has two rescue dogs that are siblings. Max is the older of the two, while Ruby the slower and wiser. She has a look on her face that teeters between dumb-founded and all-knowing, and I’d place my bet that both are occurring within her at the same time. These two haven’t had it that easy — born to a four-legged mama along side siblings, only to leave her and them ten weeks later for a new home, with new walls and new floors and new two-legged humans to find home in. Several years later, one of those humans became ill and the well human couldn’t look after the ill human along with Max and Ruby, so they were sent to live in a new house with a new walls and new floors, with other dogs and other four-legged humans they didn’t know. My brother drove half-way down the country to meet them, knowing his walls and his floor would be far warmer and more loving than the metal cages and concrete ground they found themselves on. When they got to his home, it was clear they were bonded, not only as brother and sister but best friends in battle; the comfort of knowing someone in a world where they know not many. I love watching them rest together, the naturalness of how they lay with their limbs intertwined. It’s a beautiful reminder of how the heart knows what it knows, even if triggered by trauma and a sordid past.

In the early days, there were also bonded in their neurosis; other cars, delivery people, small leering children, a squirrel. As they mellowed, Ruby at a pace faster than her brother, anxieties of the past still plagued Max; a loud noise, a bad dream, an odd visitor. When he woke up from a nap enraged with his teeth on the side of his sister’s neck, it was clear his demons may be older in age but aren’t calmer in intensity. The ever so slight difference between something being dormant versus the same thing dead. After weeks of solo healing for Ruby and the same weeks of muzzling for Max, they lay together again, paw in paw. I can still see the comfort in their togetherness. Whether they “know” what has happened, we can’t know, but it seems it matters not. As their humans, we can’t understand how a brother could harm a sister he seems to adore, yet it is easy rather easy to understand how she can still love him. Isn’t this how we “let” those we love get away with things we swore we would never excuse? If my brother attacked me in the same way, I’d have a hard time being in his presence, let alone laying with him in solace. If my partner did something similar, I’d like to believe I’d be out the door as soon as I could open it. But would I? How much of Ruby and Max’s togetherness is driven by love versus driven by survival, and how much difference is there between the two? As humans, we have a lot of stories about what it means to stay or go, what a healthy response to a traumatic event is versus a traumatic response to a traumatic event, and how cognition and choice factor into the whole mess of the equation. Yet, when I see Ruby and Max together, I see two beings who are crazy for the other, no matter how they came to the circumstances of this craziness. Perhaps that makes them stupid, or perhaps that makes them open-hearted in a way that humans strive to be but simply can’t.

How can I write when I don’t feel the urge to express, when the thoughts are swirling but haven’t fallen into a shape capable of words needed to match it? These are the days, and sometimes weeks, or even months, when writing seems a chore and not a gift. I don’t always have something to say, and I’m so glad for this. I observe peers and strangers on social media who rip out content at a rate that my being can’t match. Sometimes I am a well of wisdom, and sometimes I am listening, or merely just on pause from even that. I like the ebb and flow of this gift, even though modern culture would have me question how helpful ebbs are. No one is urging me to write daily, and yet, I still hold a story that says I should have the juice to piece together even a small paragraph of well organized words. Sure, when I sit down, my fingers move from osmosis and familiarity, yet what is written doesn’t come from a place of need or wisdom, it comes from knowing how to string words that sound well together; the difference between loving with an open-heart or committing with a determined-mind. Neither on their own particularly better but together make for a creation not possible without the other hand-in-hand. So, today, and yesterday, and maybe even tomorrow, I listen for the tiny urge of expression to tug, and then I’ll speak.

Since I can remember, I’ve never had energy for much. I have always had lots of fleeting interests; gardening, designing, yoga, travel, all of which have ebbed and flowed with current desire to focus and/or maintain care. I’ve also felt free to dream, to start businesses that felt inspiring, to write a book or two, to discover a passion that fueled me. And then there are those that we more like lifelong pleas, to experience what life feels like with more life force running through my veins, to get up in the morning and know what to do, and want to do it.

I particularly liked the structure of childhood because at least I could hide within the expectations of school days and assignments. Even though getting up early didn’t suit my particular biorhythms, remembering information and regurgitating it on request did me perfectly fine. And I enjoyed learning, so my educational years didn’t just keep me from getting lost, they helped awaken small pockets of interest that only new knowledge can. During my initial college years, it became very clear that having the opportunity to make my own schedule was a curse, not a gift that it should be for someone of my age. While I love the experience of timelessness, and always have, I have no idea what to do with unstructured unlimited time. Beyond the rudimentary basics of self-care, then what?

Nothingness was a black hole that I was fascinated by yet just as often succumbed to. Ironically, the experience of nothingness is something that I’ve striven for since I was a little girl and also is the very experience that knocks me down and disorients me into a near catatonic state almost every time. What I used to assume was mild depression, I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older isn’t so as much as it is a tetherlessness that isn’t sad or hopeless, it just isn’t tethered.

To make matter worse, I’m adverse to self-imposed structure aside from the comfort I felt during my scheduled school years. I don’t like being told, by myself or others, to go to a particular exercise class, to perform a morning ritual, to write for a certain number of hours per day, or to eat in a way I don’t want to eat. I’m equal parts stubborn and smart, I can poke wise holes in most regular human activity all while adamantly avoiding even trying to dig myself out of my self-made hole. Although I still tried, sometimes.

For all of my 20s, I used whatever life force I had to create a sense of normalcy where there wasn’t. I worked in jobs that I liked for a little while yet didn’t have the energy to turn into something more inspiring. I forced myself out socially with my friends in an attempt to enjoy socializing like 20-somethings do only to mostly go home early, and usually hungry, while everyone else whirled around me stomachs filled with vodka soda and hopes of going home with a cute stranger. I humored my creative desires with brainstorms on large rolls of white paper and colored markers, making outlines and flow charts with big dreams and little follow through. Even when I did, whole projects thrown into the fire months or years later, dead in the waters of nothingness before they ever really began.

Now, in my last few years of my 30s, I have different expectations of myself and my dreams, which have transformed more into hopeful friends than slave-driving dictators. I don’t expect more of myself than I know I’m willing to give; what is left is a quiet tug for more rather than roaring disappointment. Yet, I avoid the former just the same. Even with now over two decades of personal development work, and in many ways more contentment than ever, the origins of this quiet tug remain intact, having more years for more root. I thought rather naively that if I cleared out my life of certain desires, those roots would die off in a natural dissolution of man-made aspiration, but they haven’t. Thankfully, I no longer believe that accomplishment equals contentment; a rather sticky societal belief that is laden with ego and self-importance. But, I’d be wrong, and rather stupid, to believe that the desire for something-ness is fueled by ego alone. I just haven’t yet experienced it in its purer form.

But I want to, deeply. And I don’t know what will help get me there. A changed diet of nutrient rich food, a short walk every morning in the sun, a ritual cup of tea, not rising from bed until after the hours of fog lift, writing first thing, listening to my intuitive impulses? They all sound nice and they all seem useless just the same. What is my impetus for passion? What can light a fire within me that my own sense of knowing won’t distinguish with its clarity of skepticism and truth? The truth is, I’m afraid to really open myself to this inquiry after almost four decades of thinking I was in question when in reality I’ve never been willing to hear the answer. Maybe now that I know this I’m more primed to listen, or maybe the next years and decades will be more of the same in different dress.

Beloved,

5 years ago you met a young 30-something woman who didn’t know much about love in relationship. I was filled with attachments, stories about how things should be, and expectations that didn’t match reality. I was also filled with willingness to grow up and discover love in its deepest and realist form. 5 years later, what I want most is to live my life from the purest expression of love. The opportunity to love you so whole-heartedly has made this possible beyond what I ever imagined.

Thank you for five incredible years; years of growth, of finding strength in one another, and of embracing our perfect mix of joy, laughter and just enough human angst to make it all feel real. Mostly, thank you for trusting my fierce conviction of our “we.” There’s nothing I’m more proud of standing strongly for. Thank you for meeting me there. I am deeply honored to be your other half, and I am grateful beyond words for the version of myself I get to be beside you.

In the great meaning-and-timelessness that we share, thank god that we’re here together. To the next five, fifty and forever. I’ll find you in New Jersey, or wherever the journey takes us.

All yours, truly.

Lately, I tear with little warning. I’m touched by our humanness, the little things that bond us, the seemingly universal emotions we share. I love to know I’m not alone in what I deem the most important aspects of being alive. While watching the docuseries, Cheer, I was overcome on multiple occasions with a feeling of love for these devoted strangers. I’m in complete awe of their commitment; to give of your body, mind and spirit to something you love so much seems a gift and a curse. I can see how they can’t not be in such devotion to cheerleading, and I wonder if actually what they are truly devoted to, is a rather direct shot at god. I speak of god here not as a person, or as a diety, or any other concrete notion we think we have, but more so of the energy of what I imagine is almighty. When I watch these incredible athletes practice and perform, what oozes out of them is a greatness that isn’t just physics; it is spirit in action. As someone who is mostly rather stationary in my life, I can’t help but wonder how it feels to be in the embodiment of such life force. To me, it seems a communion with god that is deeply intimate, as if they are both in possession of god and an expression of it. To love something so much is to meet yourself in god, over and over again. I know that from my relationship with Mike, how I’ve opened my heart to new layers of love and commitment that bring me closer to Mike, and myself, and to this other thing I only know to call god. Maybe this is the point of making commitments, not just because they build integrity in a way that other life experiences can’t, but because they are one of the most direct doorways to a power that is beyond any of us alone. It is found within the adrenaline of winning, within the heartbreak of losing, within the resonance of each human heart who tries, and within our drive to keep striving for more universal love, even when we have no idea that being with god is the only thing we’re ever really striving for.

It’s no wonder we hold onto things…it feels painful for experiences that we enjoy to end. Just today, after watching the conclusion of the television series Station Eleven, I felt the same touched bewilderment that I do after other similar experiences of beauty. It’s a mix bag; gratitude for the ride, sadness that its over, slow integration back into the reality of life although changed none-the-less. Beautiful experiences offer an upgrade of the purest sort with very little effort needed other than our willingness to let them move us where we want to be moved. I find art, in its many forms - film, television, music, painting, writing - does that for me in the most easeful of ways. And I love that I let it. It can be easy to deny ourselves the experience of being moved by beauty because of the existence of fear that such beauty won’t always be present. Yet, that is missing the point of beauty altogether.

Beauty is timeless and time-sensitive. The beauty that lives inside the creation of Station Eleven can always be accessed now that I has been created. I can watch it again and again, if I wish, and each time, I’ll revisit old touch points while discovering new ones that touch each new me. And at the same time, nothing can bring back today’s tears; tears that flowed from experiencing something for a first moment in time. We simply can’t go back. I felt my rather forceful urge to pause my iPad so I could revel in feeling the incredibly joy of watching the plot’s two main characters hug each other after twenty years apart; my human attempt at prolonging the inevitable next breath. But I let myself go into the ride of the moment instead of fighting it.

I’m thankful for these reminders of beauty, of its great impermanence and great immortality, and I’m thankful for the interwoven moments of aliveness that I experience through the expression of aliveness in others. We need not go far outside of ourselves to experience the beauty that lives almost exclusively within us. We just need to let it.

Social media has many amazing benefits — the ability to connect from any distance, an array of creative inspiration, the opportunity to learn new ideas, laughter in a heavy world. But it is also a cesspool of disgusting human behavior. What gives any of us the right to speak to or about another human being with authority, judgment, hatred and rage? What level of detachment from our own hearts makes it feasible, and dare I say, desirable, to attack another human for their choices, their actions, and their expression. Who the fuck do we think we are?

Even opening the comments on a benign sponsored ad is met with a lack of respect and decency that it is almost impossible for me to swallow the reality of how we treat perfect strangers in today’s modern times. Years ago, it was a rarity to observe someone yelling face-to-face at a store clerk or shopkeeper. Now, the darkness that lives within each of us seems so easily expressed outside of us, whether in person or in the comfort of our own tiny keyboards. What we are ripping down with our ten seconds of hate are other people’s efforts, whether we agree with them or not, whether the price matches our own expectations or wallets, whether we think their offering is “worth” it, or whether we can find better elsewhere. Why do we feel the need to force our opinions, typically on things we actually know very little about, where they aren’t asked?

Perhaps this is the problem that goes in tandem with the value of the internet. Crowd-sourcing makes foraging through the myriad of choices in today’s world less overwhelming. It’s a brilliant approach to capturing human capital for free. Personally, I appreciate knowing the experience others had at a restaurant or hotel I may stay in. It leaves me with a lot less uncertainty when I get there. Yet, there’s a giant caveat to my interest in other people’s opinions. People who post for the benefit of others post with heart. Their posts show care for shopkeepers, waitstaff, and hospitality workers. They are posting to have their opinions be heard and utilized by others, not to be the loudest critic in the room. Barking loudly about our righteous judgments only fuels the fire that can never really be extinguished unless we actually want it to be. We look around and wonder why the world is so difficult to be a part of, and yet, can’t also see how we’re simultaneously making it so.

Within me is a enraged hurt heart and a plea for us to be different. Open your eyes. Become aware of what words you commit to the page and their impact on others. Care about others more than you care about your precious beliefs. Please, what are we doing here if not learning how to be better to one another before we die? You’re not getting out of this alive and you may as well not burn it to the ground before you go.

I plan a lot of trips. I also plan a lot of trips I don’t go on. The planning part is easy. I love to research where I’m going; unique accommodations, the flow of the itinerary, when to weave in fun activities with the space to do nothing at all. Once the location is chosen, I shoot myself out of a cannon and plan until there is almost nothing left to plan. I become obsessed with putting the structure together, like the exterior pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle, making the necessary shape to fill in with ease over time.

Then there is my experience of the trip itself. Strangely, I typically know before a trip occurs if I’ll actually wind up experiencing it as planned. Even if it’s months out, I can sense whether or not the future will happen as planned. Nine times out of ten, I ignore this intuition completely. I love to travel, I want to go where I spend so much timing planning to be. Yet, my knowing remains, nagging at me persistently in the back of my mind. No matter how much I can imagine aspects of the never-going-to-happen-trip, I just can’t feel myself experiencing it in the location in the time and space I’ve set it up to be there.

This was the case with the five-year anniversary trip to Italy that Mike and I planned to go on this week. Over the summer when Mike suggested that we go to Italy as a romantic gesture to celebrate our plans to buy a home there several years from now, I jumped on the sweet idea. Italy in January; damp, cold and magical. I’d wear head-to-toe black; all the pieces that get stuffed to the back of the closet in Colorado. Yet, I knew that would never really happen. As the months dragged on, I walked the streets of Florence in my head out of memory and nostalgia, but just couldn’t place us there together this winter, no matter how much I tried. Eventually, this foggy sense turned to subtle dread as the trip grew closer. Something didn’t feel right; I’d wake up to a passing article about COVID in Europe, or our flights would change ever so slightly making travel less convenient. It was time for help. Laying in bed I silently talked with whatever was listening. “Please, give me a louder nudge if we aren’t supposed to go. Clearly I haven’t listened yet.”

I like the idea of signs and I also like believing in them. But, lately I’m having trouble with all this spiritual “the universe only wants the best for me”-excuse-my-French-crap. This notion may be true, but it can’t possibly be in the way we humans have made it so. To think that the powers at be, whether one man in the sky or a flow of energy that we’re all a part of, are individually-focused as we’re making them seems self-serving and off-base. Sure, we all have access to infinite possibility and the abundance that is universal energy, but to call upon it for our own rather pathetic, at times, requests has me pause to better understand my own relationship with the “universe.”

When I was younger I found it quite supportive to lean into mysterious power beyond the human realm. I “talked” to the universe regularly in a unconscious prayer for comfort when I felt I had little capability on my own. As I’ve learned to comfort myself and heal many of the wounds that would once trigger such discomfort, I find I converse with the universe much less often than I used to. I believe in its existence, and I can feel my minuscule part in the whole, but I’m much more keen on passively riding our interconnected waves than efforting to make sure I’m on the right one. Lately, I presume the latter is a sure fire way to entirely miss the boat of the former.

When our extra travel-designated COVID tests didn’t arrive the day before our departure, my nerves shot into high gear. A sleepless night followed, when finally at 4:30am I opened my phone hoping for an email reporting a negative PCR result substituted for a notice about our hotel preemptively closing in Rome. It became crystal clear, my premonition true, we aren’t going to Italy. Hours of planning consummated with a final hour of cancellation communications. Rather disappointed, I took to the web for many more hours of research to find our replacement destination in warm and easy-to-access Mexico. Armed with the tests that ironically arrived the afternoon of our original departure, we felt safer and ready to shift plans, headed to bed with reinvigorated excitement for a trip saved.

As the universe would have it, Mike woke up in the middle of the night with COVID and tested positive using one of our travel tests a couple of hours later. Who knows why things occur or even if there is a why, but if we had boarded our plane to Italy when scheduled, we would’ve boarded with COVID being none-the-wiser until it was too late. Typically, I trust my gut almost completely, but any human gut in these pandemic days is marred with years of exhaustion, collective unrest and continued uncertainty. It’s hard to know what is actually what. So, even though I’ve been down on the universe lately, so much as to speculate aspects of its existence altogether, it heard my call and answered just in the nick of time. I’m sure there are many realities in which we could’ve made it to Italy unscathed and returned the same, yet in this one, we were clearly never meant to go, and I’m grateful I had a universal friend to help me realize what I already knew all along.

Without you, I wouldn’t know the version of me that you see.

My favorite time of day are the minutes between dusk and night during the dark days of winter, when the sky still has hints of lighter blue near the horizon and yet stars are shinning above it. My even more favorite experience is to awaken into the vast nothingness of this time after a nap on a weekend afternoon. To go to sleep light and to wake up dark still on the same day is a beautiful reminder of gift of timelessness. Time is a demanding drill sergeant, never divergent in its direction forward. Yet, when a day’s sun-filled hours are divided into unique panes of conscious, even the fastidious commands of time can be broken. A veil lifted into the quiet stillness experienced between both panes, not quite yet in one and no longer in the other. Everything can be explained in these eerie moments, and strangely, nothing really need be. All the bustle stops just long enough to feel the remarkable silence of the unwavering now.

What do we do when nothing satisfies the human hole of dissatisfaction? It’s a tricky conundrum - we can’t possibly not strive for more as part of our human condition, and because of that, we can’t ever quite feel satisfied. I find this dilemma both puzzling and incredibly interesting. After decades of filling my own particular hole with food, shopping, romance, planning and busy-ness of any sort, lately I find that I can’t quite feed the hunger like a I used to.

For decades, I really bought my own line of “if only” and “when I” yet time and time again they never delivered my entire order. Eventually, I gave up on the stories altogether — that when I found a relationship I’d feel complete, when I started a successful venture I’d feel well used, when my physical body was a certain way I’d officially stop wanting it to be different. Even though I fought leaving them behind for a long time, I loved it when they finally left my repertoire. The liberation that came on the heels of dropping the need to validate my own cracked whip was a reprieve I didn’t know I needed.

Yet, the human achiever’s whip is a clandestine sadist. It finds its way rather cleverly into little endeavors without us knowing. Like how it wraps its tendrils around my tendency to obsess as I’m redesigning certain rooms in our house. It knows that I seek perfection; one of dissatisfaction’s best wet dreams. Now-a-days, I’m onto it even while it has me. I know that after this round of decorating, I’ll feel exactly the way I did before I redecorated. Sure, the house will look cuter and feel fresh and cleansed, yet the dial on my own satisfaction meter of me and those of those around me won’t change.

This is when self-help books and quotes tell us to enjoy the process. I, for one, find that to be sound advice. If the process isn’t fun, and the outcome is likely not to reap the reward we hoped, why the hell would we do any of it to begin with? But, learning from and finding pleasure in the process isn’t quite enough. It’s a bonus gift acquired on behalf of the one we didn’t receive. It’s a feel chemical surge now for a serotonin dump later. And perhaps this is just the rub — no matter how much we do, wish, strive, hope, and envision, and even enjoy it, making peace with the hole is the only shot we have at any satisfaction at all.