8 - Initiation, Part 3: a new beginning

Prelude #1

One of these posts will eventually get around to really describing fully what I mean when I use the word "initiation." I was being drawn into something that I didn't see the big picture of when I started, and along the way I would encounter books and friends and teachers that helped me to put a framework to this journey.

One of the most potent frameworks that emerged was the indigenous concept of initiation as described by Martin Prechtel in his incredible book, "Long Life, Honey in the Heart." This book describes the year-long initiation of the young people in the Mayan village where he lived, and his part in leading this transformational year for the adolescent young men. One salient feature of initiation in this village was that the young people were chosen and yanked from their families when they were seen to be falling in love for the first time with another young villager. The potent energies of falling in love with a human were harnessed for the bigger purpose of learning to court their own "spirit bride" as well as for learning to literally court the Goddess of the land and bring her back to the village so it could be re-birthed every year. This is all rather abstract when laid out in this bare-bones way, but I'll leave it at that and get back to my own story.

I didn't know any of this when my marriage ended, and had no clue that I was being yanked into a similar initiation at age 42. Better late than never!

Prelude #2

I'm going into a lot of detail about relationships at this time in my life, because the paradigm that arose in my mind as a result of these relationships is not something that can be felt and understood just by laying out the abstract ideas. I arrived at my paradigm, not because I read about it and it made sense to me, but because it HAPPENED to me. I don't feel like my analytical mind could have come up with this paradigm. It even felt like I was pushed into some of the most important pieces against my will.

Prelude #3

I'm also noticing that my original motivation for writing all this seems to be getting transmuted as I write. I thought I was writing in order to share my story and worldview with other people, but now that the ball is rolling, I'm finding that maybe I am actually writing all this for my own sake! When I time travel to put myself back into the "me" that lived through these things, and take the time to really feel into the experiences in order to write about it vividly, I find parts of myself connecting to other older parts, and I find other parts I had forgotten about, and I feel my past and my present becoming more integrated.

I hear people talk about how we should leave the past behind because, you know, we can't change it, we should shed the things that no longer serve us, etc... I whole-heartedly disagree. I DO think it's important to constantly up-grade my conceptual understanding of myself and the world, but leaving parts of my experience or energy behind feels un-loving. It feels akin to how we treat the things we "consume." We take from Nature and the Earth, (without asking, mind you, and without giving thanks or anything in return, for the most part,) and use parts we think are useful, and then we throw them "away" when we are done with them or they "no longer serve us."

But just like there is no "away" in nature, there is no "away" in my internal landscape. Nature composts and recycles everything, eventually, and transforms it into something else. There is nothing that "no longer serves" Nature. In a similar way, every part of me and everything I've ever experienced can be integrated into the person I am today, if I have enough Love to include it. If old energies get transmuted in the process, that happens because I have made the space for it to be truly exposed to the light and oxygen, and get digested in my body. I can do that much more now than I could earlier in my life. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only change form. 

The Mayans, according to Martin Prechtel, see each individual human as a miniature fractal version of the whole universe. If I am indeed the universe, then I also have enough Love to be with all of me, and it feels heartless to leave any part of me behind, even if I could.

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With all that said, I will continue where I left off in the previous post.

After 12 years of struggling to make a relationship work with Ed, and then having him decide he didn't want to be married to me anymore, which enraged me and which felt like "abuse and then abandonment," I had just had the Love valve open in my heart, and I was relieved to be able to let go of Ed, to send him off on a current of Love, instead of agonizing about not getting what I thought I needed from him, because he was in love with someone else, and wanting to leave.

This Love valve opened unexpectedly, like it had when I was a child. But, unlike the childhood glimpse of this, which, though it felt like my true nature, had disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, this time it stayed around for awhile. This time, I still didn't feel like I was in control of it, but it felt really good, and I was able to keep generating it at least until the following day, when something else remarkable happened.

My friend had invited me to her birthday party, and told me that there would be someone there who I should meet. The party was the day after the Love came along. For some reason I had a feeling that she was on to something, and was in a state of excited-but-carefully-moderated anticipation all day until the party started. Ed and I had both been invited, and Ed's new girlfriend was also a good friend of the birthday girl, so the three of us went there together. It felt REALLY good to be at peace with that whole thing finally.

When we got there, and I looked around at the other people who were already there, I could tell immediately who my friend had wanted me to meet. He and I were magnetized to each other the second we saw each other. I'm getting goosebumps now, remembering what it was like.

We sat next to each other and talked for the next several hours. There was a mutual warmth and ease and connection and openness that was unlike anything I had ever felt with anyone before. It was intoxicating, and I hadn't had anything to drink. I don't remember what we talked about, but we seemed to have a multitude of things in common, and a willingness to share and to listen. He was gentle and soft-spoken and kind. And handsome! It was amazing to have the rapt attention of someone who was so attractive to me. It felt magical. For this story, I'll call him Nick, which is not his real name.

We must have talked for 5 hours. He lived an hour away, and finally he decided he should tear himself away and make the drive home. It was after midnight.

The first thing I did when I got home was email him, to tell him simply that I missed him! I was amazed at how quickly he had made me feel warm and connected. First thing the next morning, I had a reply from him in my inbox. I was completely smitten.

We both were eager to see each other again, and made arrangements to meet halfway between where I lived and where he lived, the following Tuesday. Three long days before I could see him again! We emailed each other and talked on the phone numerous times in those three days. 

Finally Tuesday evening came around, and I drove to the town where we were meeting and found the restaurant and parked. When I saw him drive up and park, and get out, I felt like I had never seen anyone so beautiful in my whole life. I could feel his warm glow from across the street. We sat across from each other in the restaurant booth and both of us were a little shy, and a little bit in disbelief that the other person was attracted to us. After dinner, I rode with him in his car for a little excursion out onto the ice of the nearby lake, and we had our first kiss...It did not disappoint...

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It was at this point in writing this story that I realized that I still have all the emails we had sent to each other when we first fell in love, sitting in two folders of my hotmail account. I haven't looked at them for over 15 years. Our relationship ended 28 months after it started, and not on good terms. I have had an idea in my mind of what I learned from that relationship, which were a lot of revelatory things that make up important parts of my understanding of human relations now. The way the relationship with Nick evolved, and then ended, has mostly overshadowed the way I felt when it began, and I hadn't really been interested in re-living the initial stage. But now that I'm writing about it, and trying to piece together how things changed, I felt like going back and seeing what I might find that I'd forgotten about, in those emails.

Super interesting! I can see my old paradigm showing itself in the beginning stages of that relationship, and many of the things I felt and wrote then are not things that I would write now. And I don't mean the things I wrote about how I felt about him. I mean the things I wrote about emotions and relationships and my worldview and my aspirations for my life.

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For the first several months after we met, I felt like he was the man I'd been waiting to meet my whole life. And he felt the same about me. Both of our mothers had died in recent years, and we imagined that our mothers had gotten together on the "other side" and had been pulling strings to get us together. It honestly felt like "a match made in heaven."

We had so many interests and beliefs in common. We both loved gardening, building things, making delicious food, poking around in the woods, botanizing and foraging and simply feeling the peacefulness and majesty of nature. We had similar progressive political beliefs, and were passionate about similar causes. We were able to share deeply about our challenges with past relationships, our parenting, and other aspects of our emotional lives. I admired his gentleness and warmth when we were with other people, and he admired my good heart and loving intentions for my son and my ex and the people I worked with.

I felt like I was finally safe to be myself without constantly butting heads with my life partner. It felt incredible, and it just kept spiraling upwards, and getting more beautifully and intimately loving. We emailed each other multiple times a day, talked on the phone frequently and were able to spend time together at least once a week. We were sending each other love letters and poetry that we'd written for each other, in the old-fashioned mail, and each trip to the mailbox was a lovely excursion of new warmth and excitement.

Within a week of meeting, we were envisioning how wonderful it would be to live together and share a home. It was almost spring and we were both thrilled at the idea of gardening together. Soon he began thinking about quitting his job, finding a new job near Pine River, and moving in with me. We started discussing with mutual friends about joining them on their land nearby and building a home and having a little "intentional community." I'd been dreaming about being a part of an intentional community for 20 years.

It felt like all the disjointed pieces of my life up to that point were suddenly all falling into place to make an actual real life with a beautiful person I actually got along with.

But a whole lot of things happened in the ensuing two years, internally and externally, that I did not see coming. By the summer of 2009, our connection had become so frayed, I could hardly stand to have him touch me. I'd had a brief affair with someone who lived far away, but still had no intentions of leaving Nick. But he had looked at the texts on my cell phone and discovered my infidelity, and, enraged, told me to get out of the house while he packed his things and moved out...

I could write a whole book about what happened in those two years. But I'm going to try to pull out the most salient things for the story I'm telling right now.

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Being with Nick in the beginning, I felt truly supported by a partner, and all the energy that had been spent in conflict was freed up to deepen into my own understanding of who I was and what I was here for. I was not only in love with Nick, I was falling in love with my own exploration of the dimensions of More that I knew were out there and around me and in me.

A couple of the healers in the area were having gatherings where they would share about spiritual concepts and those gathered would share about their experiences. I was intrigued with those who felt the presence of other beings, like nature spirits, or those who had out-of-body experiences, or who talked about their "spirit guides." I was hungry for experiences like that, because I knew there was more to reality than what our normal five senses could know, and I wanted to experience as much of reality as I could. This was similar to my childhood yearning to have a direct experience of God. That yearning had been answered the day I saw the face in the sky. I was hungry for more of that sort of thing.

I was especially drawn to shamanism, and though I didn't really know anything about it, I could feel a pull in that direction. I knew that it had to do with engaging with the natural world for healing in some way, and this felt right to me.

Nick would come to some of those gatherings with me, but he wasn't as drawn into the "metaphysical" mysticism as I was. He seemed to be content with the way he experienced the world, and was thrilled to be in awe of the reality we already were in touch with. I was not concerned about this difference because he was a good listener to what I was thinking and feeling, and he even bought me a fascinating book about shamanism.

Here's an email I wrote to him in mid-November of 2007:

"baby baby
I got some stuff to tell you about, stories from (one of the gatherings I'd been to,) all this
stuff is tied together, Black Elk Speaks, Ishmael...........all pieces
of a puzzle, more pieces keep appearing

I got a lot more to learn about, and then there's the "what am I for"
part of it all... but I feel it coming together and becoming something
becoming something

whew

no, "it" always was, and I am remembering and relearning

it's a big wild world out there but I feel the illusions-lies-forgetting fading away

you ready for a ride? cuz I want you to come along"

And Nick wrote back:

"My bags have been packed since March 4th. Will you be picking me up?
It feels like we should be driving west in a chrome-ey '57 chevrolet
but I'm ready to go everywhere and anywhere with you
my soul loves your company and knows what's good for it
tell me all...
gotta put the finishing touch on my presentation now
I would rather jump in that old chevy and drive on down
to see my baby"

So it wasn't really this difference of focus that started slipping some space in between us. The space started slipping in five months before these emails, in June, only three months after we met, and I didn't really grok at that time what was going on, and certainly didn't know how to deal with it.

I think it's time for an intermission again.