Passion is the fuel by which we live. It can warm us, it can inflame us, it can destroy us. Without it life is dry and pointless. We are born with majestic passions that seem ungovernable.
Our specific passions may seem strange to other people, but no one’s yet been born with none at all. The trick is managing them and making them work for us. A complication is that our passions change and evolve. Fantasies that kept us warm in childhood seem empty to us now. Sometimes in the busyness of life we find ourselves working so hard for other people’s goals our own seem to vanish and life becomes dry and tasteless.
What do we really want? What makes us happy? What ignites our best self and completes our growth process?
It isn’t too soon to imagine how our eulogy should read! Explorer? Poet? Dreamer? Lover? Person?
Passion gives us courage. Courage is hard-won. Whenever it seems to come “naturally”, that’s because we didn’t assess the possible consequences of our actions. That’s not courage, that’s foolhardiness. When we understand the dangers and move forward anyway, that’s true courage.
When we contemplate sharing our deepest self with another, what do we risk? We risk exposure, humiliation, misinterpretation, minimization, stigmatization. Those are serious risks, but the only way forward is through. Don’t pretend you don’t care or it doesn’t matter; hardening ourselves only devalues the very prize we seek as well as our ability to enjoy it and be transformed by it.
To seek depth we must give depth. The secret is self-compassion, to accept our own humanity. Once we can do that we are given the key of seeing deeply into others. We are not interested in those pretending they are less than human – they can neither help us nor themselves. We resolve to keep going – courageously – in our search for The One.
Diaries
I don’t remember anything – Amnesiacs Write everything down Stuffed in my closet Among discarded gowns (Smelling just the same) Useless but Too beautiful to throw away. How I recollect & treasure The act of writing An up and over downtime scrawl Recall the surgeon Cutting at my flesh Tugging splitting sweating Recall liftoff – finally Airborne ; my Hawk’s-eye vision sees Backwards & forwards – Past into future. Too much dig is spoilage; Freedom mined is Priceless.
Sometimes we are stuck. Can we even envision the place where we would rather be? There is a yawning chasm between there and here. What we need is a Bridge but nothing is visible. Looks like we might have to build one, but what tools and materials do we have?
Are there any similarities between where we are now and where we want to be? We want to approach from the closest possible point. Maybe the distance is illusory, maybe the place we plan to get to doesn’t exist at all. The Bridge, on the other hand is ours. We built it and we can own it. The Bridge itself may become the place where we want to be.
Discipline is our resource. Discipline means doing something we’re committed to do even when we don’t want to do it. We’re forming new skin to become the person we want, need to be. It’s sore and tender at first. We’re charting a new path to finding our soulmate, but we lose confidence fast.
The psychic rebellion starts early; right when we open one wakeful eye. Do I really have to get up? No one cares but me. I could make a new rule, a new plan…But we know the truth – this is just our devil messing with us. Trying to see how much it can get away with.
The saving grace here is to fall in love with discipline. With path making as an art. Discipline is order. It’s building, like music. It’s the Beautiful Thing That Comes Next. If everything’s chaos then life is purposeless and nothing matters. Naturally we can change our plan – any time. Our real self always has the chance to make and change informed decisions. But is our Real Self, this niggling, seductive saboteur? No.
We are on a journey to our real self, the self embodied by the Other (which is tantra) and the self we create together (Tantric Attachment.) We’re committed. And we’re excited! We’ll never get there if we sit by the side of the road in a bundle of sobbing bones and blubber. Here’s the kicker – it feels better the more you do it. You will come to the understanding that it’s all inside you. And you love it!
LOVEWINGS
My aunt’s a dancer She said “Feel my thighs Ain’t they hard They’re my love-wings Hard as heartwood I’m flying on ‘em half the time. Practice making perfect I’m Tightening up my style in case a valve On this here pressure cooker blows And splatters darkness like a Damsel in a murder case we might Solve someday.” She laughed and did an arabesque. My aunt is thirty-five. I said What beautiful thighs you’ve got
Youth is hungry long before dinner is ready. We recall youth as a rollercoaster of highs and lows, a mix of aspiration, beauty and joy keen as a knife’s edge. Let us never forget that sense of Spring when all things were possible and we were the linchpins holding up the universe.
Youth’s sense of power is so disproportionate to reality it almost seems as if wisdom prohibits action rather than informing it. Like the smarter you are, the less you can accomplish! Youth rushes in places Wisdom fears to even think about. Yet the sense of possibility and the delight in discovery are so heady nothing balks Youth for long. It’s all over far too fast.
We have discussed the fact that if you want a soulmate, you will have to kill dragons – both yours and theirs. There is trauma potential, to say the least. Every one of us have experienced trauma, many of us have forgotten it, most of us deny it. How we represent the scars of life to ourselves has everything to do with how we represent ourselves to others.
Today’s meditation is about “snapping back,” not just “recovery” but Plan B. We may need a Plan C, D, and E. The fact that the dragon got the best of us on one or two occasions is no surprise. Remember learning to drive?
We are really about learning to learn, learning what to fear and not to fear, learning how to react to constantly new sets of circumstances. We are resilient, we are flexible. We are cagey, we are wily.
By the time we meet our soulmate we will have our own dragons under control, and we will have many stories to share about The Ways of Dragons.
A BRUISE A CUT A FEVER
Dragons exist. From my tree perch I watched them Uncaring of rules and bored by Their games, I wrote down Statistics In gold crested diaries. Fairy-tale beginnings Augur sour endings. Pole-axed by Europe. “This stuff matters frightfully” And I was affrighted.
Culture-mad-Mother Forced us to look Then forced us to blink; Her timing was off. Dad sought his oceans In history, in pictures, in The madness of Nature; Encapsulates daughters in Unsinkable Fiberglas; That captain lied when he said We were all going home.
Loathed masculine privilege I disliked you on sight Teased your editorials Insulted your proctoring Reviled, you prevailed. Kindling a clove-scented ecstasy; Inflaming my fevers at the same time as Quenching them.
Sweeping West you Pulled the Atlantic behind you, smothering Both of us; I fought back with Monogrammed luggage.
Swimming nude in your rapture we Posed for Swedish love manuals Under the falls. I thought I knew everything till I met your parents; Your father’s impressionist: Your mother convinced me That monsters can flourish.
I dust you with my glitter as you peel my shock-pants; Our children wait impatiently To get their lives started. “Ask him to marry you Mommy! Ask him! Ask him!”
Mourning = DETACHMENT “Hide & Seek in the Museum of Modern Art”
“Perfect is Enemy of Good”
After a loss, Mourning is required. Don’t recoil. Mourning is a growth process which, because it hurts so much, feels like retrenchment. But in the Garden, pruning IS growth.
Artists try to convince us that spaces – which may seem blank or even empty to us, are part of the design. But what is the design? It makes us hurt – it makes hearts and brains hurt – even to attempt understanding of all this emptiness. All this change.
Physicists remind us matter transforms; it doesn’t “vanish.” As we contemplate the empty spaces with a sore heart and a buzzing brain, we will need peace and compassion to appreciate the majesty of the whole design.
We expect sore muscles after exercise, but, oddly, we don’t expect a “sore heart” or “sore mind” as we struggle along our Soulmate path. Sometimes it’s a “sore spirit.” We’re not doing anything “wrong”; life is a rhythm. The “perfection” in our imagination is actually STASIS – the opposite of “life”. The nature of the Other is to break our immature expectations of Perfection with the Wildness of their Mystery.
If we are to create a New World together, the old world has to go! For a long time – possibly our whole life – we will be honoring our Loss. We may search for ways to reframe it (sometimes it is a blessed release) sometimes it was the shedding of a constricted skin.
Mourning means this is not an effortless adjustment. Even joining lives triggers a loss. It is scary and new, the loss of our proud loneliness. It can feel like sadness and there is sadness that our privacy will be invaded. There is terror: we will be exposed.
Mourning is Detachment – you can see the Lost Past drifting away from you like a child’s balloon. It is not just “OK” to mourn, it is necessary and there is no substitute. The fact that you had a worthy self, a worthy past, a dignified life and were “fine on your own” is part of what makes you Beloved.
Your Soulmate is feeling this too. This is another thing you can share, and there are all sorts of ways to honor it. Some Soulmates need at the beginning of a relationship to keep to their own schedule. You will always need your own room, or private and alone times for retreat. It is necessary to establish boundaries such as private journals, private phones, private work. We are developing trust, as well as changing at the same time.
Honor those sore muscles of honest effort. Just as sore muscles will slowly improve, so will this sore heart/mind/spirit. We must rub it with the liniment of love, trust, sharing, hope and self-regard. We are brave, and no mistake! Remember the promise “those who mourn will be comforted.”
HIDE & SEEK IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Life class; It’s my game but you started it. Here we are, lost This place resembles me, a Swollen storehouse where Nothing can be explained, Everything’s left Open to interpretation.
Outside a single tree flowers in Smug delusion; all this whiteness Weights the soul. Mastery bites Like teeth on lip; my Throbbing inner elbow Where the blood lies gathered. Lies gathered. Let’s admit it. Take Responsibility
For once, leave no work Unfinished. Anonymous Entries win no prize. Pan-flash –
Loss = SUFFERING “Two Lovers Contemplate the Seawrack”
“Hostage to fortune”
Something vital you have relied upon is simply gone. This Loss creates in us an almost hallucinatory state of core wrongness. The world must be rotten if such vibrancy can be destroyed. Einstein says matter cannot be erased, only transformed, so where has our Precious gone?
Possibly it never had a physical manifestation; perhaps it was an illusion. Or do we identify the Beloved with it its physical presence so totally that even change or sickness or age will turn it into something different? We must think about the unseen world as well as our more familiar evolving world to understand Loss.
Loss changes us; clearly, we will never be the same again. Loss is an opportunity to confront Reality; the Reality within our heads as well as in our hearts.
The one thing that scares people so much about Soulmating is the prospect of loss. This is so frightening some of us would rather opt out of emotion altogether rather than even imagine experiencing the pain when Precious is lost.
What is really happening here is that we are re-viewing memories of terrible past traumas and our Soul is thinking, “I can’t go through that again.” These are unresolved terrors; we need to resolve them. Our Soulmate – just the knowledge that Soulmating is possible – is one of the ways we can do this. You need the belief that the two of you can create an eternity where you will always be together.
Yes, the prospect of loss deepens when you love, as does Love itself. It will give us a new heart, fresh eyes, stronger hands. Love teaches us that the Universe is our Soulmate – we were born for it as it is born for us. Love can never be erased – it can only enlarge us.
TWO LOVERS CONTEMPLATE THE SEAWRACK
He lost her Spoke too soon As men are wont Affinity flew overhead Danced with gulls A jazz-mad snowflake. His words Freighted by their inner logic Fell to earth and lay Prey to busy bristle-footed worms Who tidily dismantle Subject, verb & predicate; Sucked out the sense and left The elegiac bones to rot Amid kelp-wigged rock & glass-rope sponge Cheek by jowl with Long dead fishermen’s wives Punished now for ill-set dough and Worse-set hair Mouths agape in imitation of The badly sutured wounds of childbirth. Secrets told; corpses left to nourish Nature’s counting-house One season only; sharing space With shattered petrels Feathers spewed like pillow-stuffing Frenzied passade of love-struck boys – Strewn among the shavings of these once great ships Built by hearts & backs of men Who loved their daughters far too well Losing them to sailors Crueler than the great sea-god himself; He who stirs our sleep these nights With grief-crazed cries of loons Casting on the waters for their Far-flung children Lost forever now As we are lost as He lost her.
The Chrysalis looks dead; that is its disguise. A simple, broken leaf, soon to be swept away by wind or rain. But in fact, it’s a puzzle box that holds the whole universe inside itself; an unbroken chain of DNA, an augury of “becoming” dating from the dawn of Life itself. So is each of us a Chrysalis…of what? For what?
We are powerhouses seeking ignition. We can feel the slow-gathering strength within, but we are still mysteries to ourselves. We need the Other to become a Full Being. Plato posited that man/woman are separated angels endlessly seeking their other half. Your duty is to protect the chrysalis so that it can unfold in its own good time. Be patient, your day of flight and connection comes ever closer.
HOT PROWL
Don’t wake up. Surveilled by night Your chiseled torso Slackened with exhaustion. Touching things that once You touched, Listening to your apnea; I turn away before you turn. Making peace with all my choices. It’s been worth everything – Winning in divorce a Hard-won superpower: Invisibility
Marriage can be a spiritual partnership of equals, a conscientious joining of two lives seeking to shape a common purpose animated by love. If either partner is looking for a mule, hostage, trick mirror or foot soldier, the partnership will fail. The fact that our higher purpose can only be discovered after we have sealed the deal makes marriage the riskiest enterprise any of us can expect to tackle in a lifetime, but if we succeed, the payoff is tremendous and all effort, achievement and joy will be raised to the greatest power.
Alliances: Very little in life is accomplished alone. We long to double and triple our efforts, to see 360 degrees at once , and to work while sleeping, like some double-headed god! We spend years fantasizing about the perfect partner who will provide the invisible cloak, the seven league boots, who will take over from us in the relay race while we are fainting or shivering with fever psychological or physical.
And then there’s the love that give us x-ray vision; loving the person we learn from, seek comfort from, who gives us strength. Marriage is a blending; our partner bringing out gifts we didn’t know we had.
Who can we partner with for today’s challenges? What does our soulmate seek in us? What can we do to be worthy of their faith? Marriage Card is a multiplicitous maximizer of power and potential as well as risk.
Alliances are critical in life. None of us can survive, much less flourish, without some kind of team. The size of the team often determines our success, sometimes called “social capital.” This presents a special challenge to introverts, like me, who not only like but actually need to be alone, just to recharge, work and hear our own thoughts. The Fully Committed Other therefore has even more importance in our lives.
Marriage is the ultimate commitment, publicly forswearing all others unless you specifically rewrite your vows differently (or take no vows at all.) Is marriage too great a step for you? Unimaginable, in fact? Or is this the future towards which you have been working? If so, you need a Beloved who truthfully companions, instead of pretending to agree.
Marriage License
This policy does not insure against disfigurement (controlled or uncontrolled)
delirium; anguish approximate or anguish remote; dismembering scars that fever-chart a graph of life immutable to prayer
intransigent of purpose; does not insure against my someday knowing you
forcing pores to open where once you had no skin dining on your heart while you
dine out on mine. When I forget this I know You will remind me
Solitude is required for reflection, and reflection is required for growth. Growth is required for choosing a soulmate, because the choice cannot be haphazard but the result of self-knowledge.
Solitude is not loneliness; it is the Art of Being Alone. Wise Ones have told us that ultimately each of us is only alone; we are born alone and we die alone. Plainly, this cannot be true. We are as social a species as the ants and termites. But just as one could argue that every worthwhile achievement has been a collaboration, one could also argue that every worthwhile idea was conceived in solitude.
I prefer to think of our “mental, emotional and spiritual pores” having both an “on” and “off” position. There is outflow, there is in-flow and there is no flow. All are necessary to the health of the human being and all are necessary to the maximization of human potential. Depth psychology merely systematizes the layers of human consciousness and sub-consciousness whose existence dreams have always demonstrated.
Meditation and mindfulness seek to capture the exact moment when the soul experiences itself. This is not possible without regular periods of scheduled and enforced solitude. In-breath must equal outbreath until suddenly the lips of the psyche part and, as in a “magic eye” painting; the familiar world dramatically shifts to reveal under-worlds and over-worlds of multiple meanings and intense possibilities.
Self-Sufficiency: How panicked are we by the idea of being “alone”? Even those of us who are introverts are sustained by a complex net of relationships, any adjustment to which could drive us back to infancy. Are we alone even within our relationships? Are we alone on our planet? In the universe? It is surprising how much this fear can be seen lurking behind our consciously assumed states of mental “good cheer”.
Most of us work in collaborative ventures; nothing we do would be worthwhile without, at the very least, someone to assess or appreciate. It is time to take stock of our internal personal resources; those that owe nothing to the support of others.
Opportunity; Much of what we think during the day is in fact a dialogue. It is salutary to ask ourselves: who are we talking to? Is this person imaginary, dead, alive? Are they helpful – or cruel? It’s common knowledge that we speak more insultingly to ourselves than we might to anyone we know! Time for a “voices” upgrade. These are part of ourselves talking to each other; possibly parts of ourselves we could do without.
And is that the best way to accomplish our set goals? Now’s the time to understand that, given education and culture, we can never be “alone” in the sense of bereft of help. We have countless models we’ve been choosing from childhood up. Who are they? Do we need upgrade them, or just name them and learn to deploy them more effectively? Some of us are surrounded by a mix of celebrities (Humphrey Bogart in “Play it Again, Sam”) some of us by the loving dead (Granma and Grandpa) others by cultural icons (for me Shelley, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson) some of us by imaginary friends or even angels.
What’s working for us and what isn’t? After all, we furnish our own brains. Let’s decorate by design.
Danger! An important component of the confidence we desire to cultivate is freedom and self-determination. We all know how unsettling a date’s visible desperation can be. We instinctively back away as from a sinking ship whose whirlpool threatens to suck us in. In other words, the best way to gain a soulmate is to be able – visibly! -to live without one. This sounds nonsensical; but look at it this way, you ARE living without one. Is your desire to change your life based on the indisputable fact that your life is a mess? If so, we have to turn our attention to THAT first thing, otherwise we are the sinking ship no one wants to get near, much less, on.
Challenge! To increase our chances of finding the best person who is right for us right now AND in our future, we have to GIVE ourselves a future. No other person can be our “future.” We need to have a vision of a future we are working towards. That is what we want to hear about our date, and that is what they will want to hear about us. It’s time to become your own best friend, the one who really cares about you and gives such good advice
HEDGEHOG CROSSING ROAD
Spines erect as swords She waits To tilt the windmills rushing by Machined from hell to trap Her tiny weight of soul and fur.
She fears not. He who protects the sparrows Comforts her. The air is sharp With winter not With false regret –
She lifts her head to gauge The moment ripe for flight Unaltered in her captaincy of self. She’ll reach eternity or the pond
We were all born knowing how to fly. In dreams (and ambition) we recapture that lost knowledge, soaring gravity-less above our quotidian terrain. But in our daytime lives, Flight becomes lost art, a feat mastered by moths, a state of freedom we can only envy. If we want to locate a soulmate, we will need to develop “wiles.”
Ingenuity is a critical re-imagining of “same-old, same-old.” We need to release the rage behind our boredom and adopt fresh thinking in order to find our Soulmate. We need to consider some “unlikely” packages. Maybe you never imagined yourself with a younger person, someone with children, or someone from a very different background.
To turn our useless, stubby appendages into wings we first project ourselves psychically into the air. Discover the world from a new angle. What does the hawk see as he floats above our traffic jam?
Suddenly, falling becomes diving, lightness equals strength and floating becomes endurance. My old school had a challenge called “Night Problems” especially popular with daters – a blindfolded couple was dumped in the middle of Pennsylvania country and expected to find a way back to the school. Alert readers will recognize this as “orienteering”, a team sport in which participants’ true characters definitely emerge!
Back when I was engaged, marriage counselors used to recommend sharing the same toothbrush or wallpapering a room together! Believe me, if you’re going to split up, it will happen then. True character most reveals itself under these stressful conditions.
“HOW DID YOU MEET?”
You saw me naked I saw you too close- up. You hovered, teaching, You drank vodka, I drank wormwood.
Between green glimpses You cut mountains down to size; I’d no idea that one could Take such charge of space.
Now I’m an icicle, Nostrils pierced by thorns, falling Face-first for every launch. You were the king the ghost pines saluted.
From this height, I see everything; How you dove and danced! Speeding through your love-drunk universe, Infecting me with your own whiteness,
I was dizzy, till all my blood drained out. You challenged God; I was the echo following after. Yet here I am after all this time;
The Garden we wish to share is an island in the universe that is Earth. As we travel, we soon find out that Earth itself is another Garden, almost too large for us to comprehend, containing many wonders.
We are creatures of this planet that nourishes us; but who’s taking care of who? Gardens need a lot of care. The quality of the soil, timing and positioning of the plants, their symbiosis and synchronicity are critical. If we block the sun and clog the air with burning smoke we all suffer.
Earth is our mother and we are her children. Mothers get old; they welcome renewal but they can’t last forever, so it is good to study sensible policies about health and healing. The key here is whether we even try to give back as much as we have received. If we make the effort, benefits will overflow.
Our care for the earth is a model of the care we offer the Beloved Other. Is it an attractive deal? Are we givers as well as takers? Or are we just searching for a complicit Other to despoil the planet with?
When it is a question of what we can give, we must examine our resources. This is the source of the famous kneeling offering of a diamond ring. Cynics would say a “taker” is hoping she’ll be so dazzled she won’t notice that’s ALL she’ll be getting. A honeymoon over before it even started.
So what are the resources we are taking for granted? Often, having earth under our feet and a roof over our head is something we barely even think about. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the saying goes. Our vision stretches so far down the road to imagined “somedays” that we are impatient with “today”. Today seems so modest, so ordinary. It isn’t until we really consider the people and places that have “always had our back” that we even form the words, “thank you.” A soulmate with contempt for the familiar doesn’t trust intimacy.
Part of the reason we lose interest in our humblest resources is that we’ve done nothing to deserve them. It’s embarrassing for us even to admit there are resources we have no control over, that come to us just by virtue of where we chance to live, or work, or who we’re related to. It makes sense to add them up and give thanks for them right now. Sometimes we find that we can assume the reins of these neglected resources after all; sharpen them up, improve them, modify and share them into an aspect of our life-plan after all.
A good example is the rude health that often comes to all of us simply as part of our youth. We can’t rely on that forever! Are there ways that we abuse good health, good sleep, warm familial connections and may even be unconsciously reducing our future opportunities of enjoying them? Let’s make them part of our conscious plan today and stop taking them for granted.
Why do we harm our own resources? Why can’t we use the resources that we have? Why waste our time pining for those we DON’T have? Descending deeper through the subconscious we uncover the powerful, devastating wish is to be the exact opposite to what we actually are. Our fantasy is so powerful, we can picture this person – us, but better proportioned, more beautiful, intelligent, relaxed, powerful, magnetic. Mustering all these imagined resources, we yearn to attract someone who is ALSO just like that.
Cat-fishers know this and try to lure us into their web with borrowed pix, false profiles and Fear of Missing Out. Fantasy not only WON’T save us, it makes us hate ourselves! Now is the time to study our REAL resources – they are UNIQUE. Is it our wonderful family? Our stubborn determination? Fantastic teeth? Interesting job? Ability to laugh? Interest in others? Generosity? Friends? Faith? All these things? Think about your resume, which describes where you ACTUALLY WENT and what you ACTUALLY DID. Now try to write one about what you learned and who you became and where that stands on the path to who you want to be.
Didn’t the mistakes lead to insight? Didn’t the suffering deepen your compassion? Are we stronger at the broken places? The further into this exercise you go the more likely you are to realize your soulmate will be lucky to have you!
Green Thumb
You tend my body so well you can’t Surprise me anymore You’re the surprise and I’m used to you Folding back my lettuce leaves with your tongue Coaxing the reluctant caterpillar While I lie awake giddy with Self preservation until The final firecracker moment When you release and flourish The fragrant butterfly
Alysse Aallyn 