9 - Initiation, part 4: "new beginning" meets "new challenges"

The beautiful new relationship that began when my marriage ended ran into its first little bump three months after it started. It seemed like a small bump that was easily recovered from.

Nick (not his real name,) and I and my 11-year-old son spent a weekend in early June of 2007 attending a gathering called the Wild Food Summit, held on the White Earth Indian Reservation. We joined a few dozen people who were camping for three days and learning about foraging from several experienced experts from the region. It was an exhilarating and fun time, poking around in the woods and swamps and fields and making meals together from the things that we had found.

I was feeling very much in love with Nick. We hadn't spent much time together in the presence of crowds of strangers, and I was admiring how he interacted in his warm and friendly way with the other participants and with my son. I was very happy to be there as his partner. As for myself, I was feeling a bit shy and weird and alienated from people, and instead of trying to suppress this, I was just letting myself feel shy and weird. At one point I expressed to Nick that I was feeling sort of wild and alienated. I was feeling safe with him and wanted to let him in on my internal landscape. On the third and final day, I saw a sadness in his eyes when he looked at me, and I asked him what was going on. He said something about how the event was ending and he was feeling disappointed. I accepted this explanation and left it at that.

As we were packing up our camping gear on the last afternoon, I started getting a headache. By the time we got home, I had a fever and was feeling achy all over and exhausted. It was Sunday, so I didn't go to the doctor. Nick was supposed to go to work on Monday, but I was feeling even worse, so he stayed with me and brought me to the doctor. Fortunately, this doctor was aware of the symptoms of Lyme disease and knew that our area was one of the hotbeds of it in the state. I had found a deer tick on me about a week previously, so he didn't even test me, he just gave me a week's prescription for heavy-duty antibiotics and sent me home.

I was feeling somewhat better by the following day and Nick needed to go back to work. But before he left, he told me that the real reason he had been feeling sad at the gathering is that he'd felt that I was attracted to one of the other men there. I'll call him George. He'd seen me talking to this guy, and then had arrived late to a mushroom presentation in the woods and had seen me and George standing next to each other. This suspicion was compounded when I'd expressed to him how I felt alienated and wild.

I was taken aback. I had had a couple conversations with George, and was interested in being in touch with him because he lived in Duluth and I thought he might be interested in occasionally looking in on my cabin that was standing empty over near Duluth. But I hadn't felt any sort of attraction towards him beyond that. And standing next to him had been completely by chance. I told Nick this. I was still feeling quite weak and distracted by my illness, but I rather weakly assured him that I loved him and that I had been appreciating his company and personality with strangers. And that expressing my own weird feelings was a sign that I felt safe with him and wanted him to know what was going on with me.

This incident passed and we went on with our romance and our lives. It was clear as day to me that what his gut had been telling him about what was going on inside of me was not based on what was actually going on in me. It felt like paranoia stemming from insecurity. I knew what this felt like because I had felt this way with Ed numerous times. But I thought that the love that Nick and I felt for each other and expressed to each other copiously would make such insecurities eventually disappear, so I didn't think any more about it.

A couple months later, I could see this sadness creeping into his eyes again once in a while. It felt like a cloud covering up his light. I asked him what was going on. He said he loved me so much and sometimes he was afraid of losing me. He'd been married in the past, like me, but it had been years before we met. She had betrayed him in a way that really hurt him. He had told me this not long after we met, but I hadn't expected that he would be afraid that this might happen with me.

This made me sad. I could tell that this fear of betrayal was something that he was carrying around with him, and had nothing to do with me or my feelings for him. I could feel it like a few drops of poison creeping in between us occasionally, because he no longer trusted me, and I sometimes I felt like I had to prove to him that I loved him, in a way that I hadn't had to do before. I wanted to be able to freely feel and express the love that I felt for him, without feeling like he was trying to extract it from me because he was afraid. But it still felt like a minor, but sort of simmering, aspect of our relationship.

That November, I found out that George from the Wild Food Summit was going to be giving a talk about wild mushroom foraging at a school near my cabin one evening. I wanted to go, partly because I was interested in mushrooms, but also because I wanted to touch base again with him about spending time at my cabin. I consciously chose not to tell Nick that I was going to see George. I didn't feel like dealing head-on with the paranoia. I had a distinct feeling of wanting to have some autonomy about who I spent time with, without needing to keep Nick in the loop because he was scared of losing me. I did tell him that I was going to spend a night at the cabin, which I did occasionally, and which was true.

When I got back, I was confronted with the sad Nick, only this time it was quite intense. He said he'd had an image of George pop up in his head when I was over at my cabin. I was impressed with his telepathic tuning in to me. I told him that was amazing that he had seen that, and that we must be connected in a deep way. And I told him that it was true that I had seen George, and I told him the circumstances.

I could feel distinctly the way his fear from the past was creating this sadness in Nick. After we spent a little time together that weekend, he sent me a long and vulnerable email laying out in more detail his fear and his sensitivity to the pain of betrayal, and his desire to be able to trust me.

I wrote him this in return:

Trust
Is it you or I who makes it possible for you to trust me. It is both.
I must be trustworthy, and you must be free of fear. I must be honest
with you, and you must believe me. I must love you, and you must trust
that you are lovable. And above all, we both must trust in the Love of
the universe, that we will be loved no matter what happens to anyone
in our lives. We must know that we are here to give love, not to be
afraid of losing it.

I was acutely aware of Nick's feeling of not being lovable. And I began to get inklings of what Ed may have been feeling with me: wanting to be free from that feeling of me trying to extract love from him. I was also remembering how empowering it had felt to have the Love valve turn on the day before I met Nick, and how I had not been able to let love in from another person until I had felt the Love flowing through my own body from Source.

When I read this email now, 15 years later, the thing that jumps out at me as something that I would never say now is that "you must be free of fear." I didn't realize then that this is not the point, nor is it even possible in a human body, especially one that has been raised in a society that doesn't know how to do emotions when they arise. I didn't realize just how much fear of rejection and abandonment I was still carrying around in MY own body, nor did I realize the power of that "buried treasure" to magnetize situations to myself that would bring that to the surface to be loved.

I had learned about the power of being a conduit for unconditional Love. But I had yet to learn about where that Love really needed to be focused.

It would take several relationships, or desired relationships, that mirrored my own reactions back to me, and that showed me what it felt like from all sides, before I finally learned that my focus needed to be on my own internal emotional landscape, and all the layers that were buried in my own miniature fractal version of the universe.

But I'm getting ahead of my story here. Something happened at around the same time that I wrote this email, that blew my conceptions of myself into the stratosphere, and precipitated this whole new phase of learning that I was just describing.