The Perplexing Mess of Relationship

Well, it’s official… Athena Grace LMNOP does not know how to win at the sordid game we call Relationship.  Which is ironic, because I remember like a year and a half ago when my eyes were still all clouded with operatic stardust, telling a man behind me in line at Trader Joes that I was really good at Relationship.  I might have even told him I had a gift at it.  Ha!  That’s embarrassing to admit!  That was back in the days when my Love was still running on the fossil fuel combination of lust and moon honey.  That was back in the day when I my well of devotion-stained patience seemed to slice right through the core of the earth, stretching not just to China, but beyond our very own Milky Way.

I used to feel like such a spiritual, enlightened bad-ass during those mile long fights with Mykael where I would just keep switching from reserve tank to reserve tank to reserve tank, draining each of them without a fret or a care.  And now?  And now… I am the camel with the perpetually broken back.  I am the bomb with the fuse almost as big as a microscopic splinter.

Remember back in the day when this blog practically revolved around all my churnings in relationship with Mykael?  And then suddenly, apocalyptically, his presence here on the page mostly blinked out like a dinosaur.  (I just had a really long pause while my mind’s eye tried to conceive of the image of a dinosaur “blinking out”.  I wondered, “Is that a good metaphor?”  I heard myself say, “It doesn’t really make sense”… to which I replied, “yeah, but I like it…”  I love being my own boss here on the page.  Whatever I say goes.  It’s a pretty sweet deal.  Anyway, I imagined it would be a drooling tyrannosaurus rex  that blinked out… one that was charging toward me, poised to DEVOUR… and then *BLINK*…*poof*… suddenly he is gone without a trace, only some rainbow colored neon psychedelic smoke remains.  And it smells like rotten eggs, like when you light those little colored smoke bombs on Fourth of July.)

Why the sudden out-blinking of my gratuitous mention of Mykael?  Well… because so many of my thoughts and feelings have been delicately fetal, not wholly formed and potentially damaging.  Not to mention so mercurial.  I have not been ready to commit to any of my view points for more than a day at a time at best.  And given that, I have realized that it’s not even a healthy subject matter for me to focus on in the privacy of my own mind.  I have been cultivating the self discipline to focus on myself and my path.  I have been spending much time in quietude as well as investing myself in other relationships.  (He too has been focused on matters of deeper purpose.)  It feels like a slow, gentle pulling apart.  But it’s really confusing in some moments.

Confusing because he has been so beautifully virtuous and generous toward me.  He has been giving me so much space to free fall through all the myriad of emotional spaces I have been breathing my way through… with such a sincere spacious generosity and unconditional love.  My greatest fear has been that because I am not committed to a future with him he would take his well worn, conditional love and lock it away behind the door to his own, private bedroom.  I should be afraid of that.  I have done it many times over the course of our relationship… always secretly hoping that HE would be the one to muster the courage to choose generosity and come back to hardened, sour me.  And mostly he has come to me… He has taught me a lot about being generous.  Staying.  About loving.

But I guess not enough, because I still don’t know that I want to stay and love.  That is what is so damn confusing.  I love him.  I LOVE HIM.  And… our relationship feels like perpetual hard work and fights and disappointments… and I think I might be crazy to keep choosing that.  But then I think I might be crazy to let it go… because are these lessons that I’m gonna have to face somewhere along the line, no matter what???  I don’t know.  Probably.  But there is some value in being alone for a while too… it’s been seven years since I was alone.  I did not even consider myself a woman back when I was twenty three.  (I started to feel like a woman at 27.  And since then, I feel more and more like a woman as the chorus of clocks tick me riper and closer to death.)

So you see… I’m in a tangle.  It’s confusing.  I’d rather think about other things, like cream colored ponies and schnitzel with noodles and… what it means to really feel intimate with God.  What it is to really give my life over in service of Love.  What it is to really surrender to the truth of ultimate aloneness… and the ironic connection to all life implicitly nestled at the core of that.  These inquiries are a far better investment of my energy and time and mind these days.  But then… Mykael is in the bedroom next door and our lives are braided together in so many ways and every once in a while, that causes some friction or an accidental milk spill.

Like yesterday.

I was wanting more from him than usual.  I guess I was just sick of aloneness and wanting to sooth myself with the salve of being loved and loving.  But mostly stepping into a space of intimacy with him just felt like trying to drive a wrecked train.  Unless we just held each other.  Anything else proved disastrous.  Which naturally amped up my perplexity to the next level.  I feel him so deeply.  Resting in his arms feels like a deep, ancient home.  Everything in me ignites and flows and comes alive like vibrant starlight.  It feels so right and natural.  Until we try to talk… and then it’s all sparks and flames and flying grit.  Shrug.

Finally, after quite a few stabs at moving closer, we just had to do our own things again.  He carved (like always) and I went for an evening hike in the immaculate earthy cathedral otherwise known as Redwood Park.  I remembered the wisdom of Little Grandmother, advising us humans to get our energy from NATURE, rather than other people… and even though I left the house sobbing, soon enough I was full on sweet scents of dirt and pine and cooling air.  I emptied myself out with every fresh footstep.  I released myself to the silence of the forest.  And then, near the end of the hike, All Pervading Grace offered me the sweetest gift!  I came to the top of a hill… my eyes snuck left to the plunging valley which gave way to a copious helping of open sky… and was smacked oh so softly by vibrant pink, lavender and blue lullabies, wafting soft to meet my weary eyes.  And a near full moon passively dripping with breathing gold.  This tidy little pearl, glowing.  Purring and glowing with unconditional smirking revelation.  Below the sky, was a montage of variously colored and textured distant mountains, laced with rivery ribbons of soft fog.  Lucid.  Dreamy.  Medicine.  I breathed it.  And breathed it some more.  I let it flood all the secret crevices and empty spaces and hungry places inside me.

I am doing my best.  I really am.  I sorta wish my best was better… or less messy and confusing… but… as my dad would say, “It is what it is.”

Amen.