Companion to Our Demons

And I fear

I have nothing to give

I have so much to lose

Here in this lonely place

Tangled up in our embrace

There's nothing I'd like better

Than to fall....

I've felt for so long that I have nothing at all to give. For so long I've been an empty shell, a shadow of the me I used to be. Now I have grown into the fullness of the woman that I've always been inside. It's taken time. It's been slow. 

But now that I have so much to give, you quiver at my touch. The sound of love falls like clashing cymbals down a set of metal steps, blood-curdling and inducing a fight or flight reaction. These are the demons you live with, the demons I share. We all walk hand in hand with the deepest beast inside of us, though at times we choose to bury it. Bringing it to the surface to coexist with everything that we are is the only way to take the sting out of its bite. Exposing it to the light of our lives and our love boils it down to nothing more than a sticky sap, something inconvenient but bearable. 

I've cried like you, I've died a thousand deaths like you, though our demons may be different. I've hidden myself away, unnoticed by time, unnoticed by love. Too afraid to feel the pain, even the most wonderful feelings get buried in the rush to avoid what is so unpleasant. The larger part of you is trembling at the touch of love, terrified by the pinprick of its searing heat. Even the smallest show of love throws up your walls, the pain too much to bear, even to endure the beauty of love. When you've lost too much, this is the response. It becomes a twisted knot to untangle the pleasure from the pain, so the pleasure dies with it. But deep inside the soul there still lurks an innocent; pure and beautiful and bright, it is your essence waiting to be rediscovered, uncovered, brought to the surface, no matter the consequence.

Wind and time

Rapes the flower

Trembling on the vine

Nothing yields to shelter it

Without taking a leap of faith, without the risk of losing, there is no life. Trees don't cease to grow because they fear losing their leaves; crocuses don't stop forcing their way through the late winter snow because they fear the cold; caterpillars don't decide not to become butterflies because they fear turning to liquid inside their chrysalis. Love is in our nature and we cannot stop it, no matter how our ego tries to protect us from whatever baggage we have attached to love over time. Keeping this in mind, feel love in your life and focus on any other feelings that surface along with it. If love produces anxiety, ask it why...if it produces anger, trace it back and find what happened...if love causes fear, consider your life and your history. The things that have gone wrong in the past when we've loved and been loved become attached to our expression of love no matter how outlandish or inappropriate they may be. It's called conditioning. 

We then avoid love because we avoid the association of what we've learned accompanies love, even when we're wrong. The avoidance is our mind's way of protecting us. But we are so much more than our fragile egos say we are. Our hearts and souls speak so much louder than our minds. Our inner life force comes from those places, sometimes so quiet it is softer than a whisper; sometimes we have to strain to hear its voice. It's hard to do over the constant chatter of our hyperactive brains, but it is possible. When we can silence that chatter or at least hear past it, we can feel the presence of our essence and from there we will feel the pure exhilaration of love without the baggage, without the fear and the pain. 

These beasts will always be with us. Learn to love your demons because they are your constant companion. But then tell them to take the night off. You and love are going to spend some time alone. 

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. ~ Bertrand Russell  

I am so ready to fall....

Beatific Vision

You've opened my eyes

to a world inside you

a world I never knew existed

someplace beyond this earthly realm

that I never dared to dream about

You bring together all of the hope

all of the love

all of the ideals

that I have ever witnessed

and exalted them beyond my wildest dreams.

You are the mirror

through which I can see God.

For what more is the search for love

in this earthly life

than to have some tangible reminder

that we are loved by God?

Silent but Deadly

The downfall of almost every man is his inability to communicate clearly how he feels with the women in his life. This has been my experience in so many of the relationships I've had. I continue to wish that we could all feel free to simply express how we truly feel without fear. There is no worse feeling than getting into a relationship up to your eyeballs with someone, only to have them backpedal their way out because they misspoke early on. You know what, It's OKAY to say you don't like me anymore. Let me move on and find someone else! I'd so much rather someone say that to me than to string me along out of fear of speaking the truth.

The pinnacle of this callousness is to have someone profess to LOVE you but then start to worm away from you - not for lack of love, they say - but because of random, nonsensical reasons that don't add up, like being suddenly busy all the time. Oh my GOD! Just SAY IT! Whatever it is. It could be that "I said I loved you but I was really just excited by the sex," or perhaps, "This is much more complicated than I wanted it to be." You get the idea. Making stuff up is no way to end a relationship. I'd so much rather someone be honest with me about how they feel. But that is another downfall of man, that the mere SPEAKING of a feeling OUT LOUD is tantamount to emasculation.

"Oh,no! I said 'I love you.' Now what if she expects something from me?"

OR

"I told her she makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Now I feel stupid."

Part of being in a relationship with someone is sharing your vulnerability with another person. If you can't make yourself vulnerable, there is no relationship. When women sit and cry around a pint of ice cream, we are being vulnerable with each other and it creates a bond that lasts forever. Men could take a lesson from this.

Vulnerability = intimacy.

TRUTH.

Then there is the perception that most women are just one nervous breakdown away from boiling your bunny. I'm sick of men using that as a defense. How does an otherwise competent, intelligent woman suddenly morph into a bunny-boiler? Because of a man who toyed with her emotions, maybe even used the "L" word, made her feel adored and special, and then suddenly started to withdraw to the point that he's almost invisible. WHAT HAPPENED? For the love of all that is holy, own up to your feelings! I'd much rather you tell me that you just aren't feeling it anymore, or that things are moving too fast and you want to slow down, or that you feel overwhelmed. I'm not a mind reader; you have to tell me what's going on inside that head. Let's talk about it! It's like magic, I know. We can actually TALK with one another about our concerns and VOILA! A solution might magically appear!

You see, women know this already, we know that if you'd just spare us your shrinking and worming away and withdrawing and generally acting like a scared little girl, and instead used your BIG BOY WORDS - even when it's to convey something unpleasant - that, ultimately things turn out better in the end. Honesty can hurt sometimes, but generally speaking (and exempting true psychos) no one is going to boil a bunny when they feel they've been treated with honesty and respect. But when you try to worm out of the difficult conversations, then bunnies may sometimes be boiled.

The thing is, women are very good at reading non-verbal communication, or reading between the lines of your "heartfelt" text message or email where you supposedly expressed your deepest emotions. We can tell when something just doesn't add up. That's when we start to get paranoid and pissed off. We know something isn't right; your body language tells us something isn’t right. And nothing is sitting right with us.

This is when we throw our hands up in frustration and say, “JUST SPIT IT OUT!"

Stop being afraid to say how you feel. Don't insult our intelligence or placate us with sweet talk. If you're done with the relationship, just say so! Trying to dress dog shit with frosting and sprinkles doesn't mean it's not dog shit; it just means something is really wrong with you that you'd even do that!

And EW you touched DOG SHIT!

I'm exhausted with trying to get men to communicate and I'm tired of the bullshit "men are from mars" blah blah blah. Enough with the euphemisms; grow a pair of cajones and SAY HOW YOU FEEL! It's not rocket science. Even a preschooler knows how he feels, it's just as he's socialized that he learns to beat that impulse out of himself until he's left simply drooling on himself out of utter confusion as to what to do and how to talk to a woman.

It's not the things you say, it's the things you DON'T that cause us the most pain usually. It's your reluctance to share that hurts so much. In the end, it's your silence that ends up being the death knell to what was once a promising relationship.

Movement of Soul

The parts of you that you keep hidden
that you think no one else can see
I can feel them resonating deeply
Your power is not lost on me

Singularity

There are really and truly just way too many people in the world. I’m not making a value judgment in saying that but rather making a comment about the limits of one lifetime to truly discover the nature of humanity. How is it possible that we say we know what we like in another person when we could never meet most of the inhabitants of the world?


I declare I have met almost half of the inhabitants of the world. Oh alright, maybe just a fourth of them. Or at least a good number of the males clustered around the Washington DC area over the last two years or so; that’s still a lot of people. I long ago stopped keeping track of those kinds of numbers and, in terms of dating I have no earthly idea how many men I’ve met and rejected right out of hand, but I dare say it’s about three times as many as the number who made it to a second date – and probably ten to twenty times as many as those who made it to something more intimate.

Put that against the number of men who didn’t even pass first muster based on whatever medieval precision instrument it is that I use to gauge such things as suitability for dating. That adds up to a lot of people who didn’t feel “right” to me for whatever reason.

Everyone goes through a similar vetting process; I’m not claiming to be unique. What I am pointing out, however, is how truly special it is when you DO meet someone who makes you feel wonderful. Of all the people there are out there and of all those who might be attracted to you in some way, narrowed down to those you like and find attractive, then further narrowed to that person who sounds all the alarms in your body alerting you to the fact that someone special has entered the area. Narrow it down AGAIN if you make that person also feel the same way and it becomes clear that love is a total crap shoot. When we are lucky enough to find it, why do so many of us treat love so badly? What has love ever done to us? It’s not love’s fault that our brains are so limited that we can’t untangle the difference between pure love and disappointment, fear or jealousy. Yet we blame love.

Our human limitations are not love’s fault. Rather than blame love, we should be bowing down and thanking love every time someone loves us, every time we share a special bond with someone.

We would never mistreat the other rare things in life. Think of a diamond. It’s given special treatment, high value, a place of honor, a delicate yet strong space for storage; it’s highly prized and gently handled. Because the process of finding a diamond is so intense, when we are actually privileged enough to have one, we treat it specially and with great care. Why is this not true of love?

Love is rare and beautiful. It is a gift of the highest order. Love squandered is a tragedy of divine proportions.