I never thought I’d be back in this house. Walking in was a shock to the system; I hadn’t prepared myself for the sadness. The feeling of me missing from the scene. Hollowed out from the place. The sense of what I had left Damon to contend with. The emptiness I felt. Wanting to immediately fix the place up, add something, some warmth, some femininity. Some me. I was here in some ways. I had picked everything out that was still standing: the couch, the tables, the bed, the few pictures left on the walls, the curtains. Looking through the kitchen was like staring into a past life. Every item, be it a lemon squeezer or a potato peeler, brought back memories. Spatulas, cookie sheets, spices. More memories flooding into my psyche. The items had all belonged to me. Now they were his. Many things were going unused. Baking mixes, jam in the cupboard, supplements for women’s needs. Many of my books are still here, the office area I spent so many unhappy days in. The house felt cold and dark, just the way I remember it. I immediately longed for my home in Colorado and sat out on the deck where I could get a glimmer of sunlight coming through the tall branches of the redwoods. The sea air lifting my straightened hair into frizzy waves, even with two days of grease holding it down. The drive had been an easy one. Compared to previous drives that were more like chasing tension than going somewhere. Even though I had been trying to flee tension, often my consciousness was chasing after it like hell on wheels. So enamored, so interested the mind becomes over problems.
Damon and I went out to the Crowsnest for a drink last night. Moments after the tequila kicked in completely, I found myself very unhappy and expressing my fears. I had gone back in time, revisiting old fears and now new ones. The sensation of being trapped in his indecision, my mind entered a familiar struggle. Wanting freedom, wanting autonomy, wanting to affect positive change. His face was colorless and droopy. Confusion and sadness swirled in him as I delivered all of my complaints and worries. The mood erupted from me like an old ghost, entangling into the present moment in a surprise appearance neither of us expected. Or appreciated. I searched for his efforts to make me feel better, for things to feel clear and simple and not exactly the same as they always had. I had frustration at his long standing inability to smooth things over in my own mind. He stirred at things and made them vaguely worse at moments, and with other moments he did accomplish a little big picture smoothing. I could tell he had no idea what to do, how to talk his way out of my attack.
By far, my largest complaint was waiting. The mental story I had written and lived by as my personal religion had always reinforced that waiting was excruciating: I had waited for so many years for him to decide what he wanted to do, where he wanted to live, what his interests were, and all the while I knew exactly what I wanted. I had felt silenced and paralyzed, helpless and powerless, totally impotent in our lives to create the type of change, the type of beautiful life I was dreaming of. I couldn’t do it here in Aptos, California. I told myself I couldn’t do it under this thick canopy and without sunlight and moonlight powering me. Held by the fog, my dreams remained invisible and obscured, just out of reach but so far away. Convinced that the dampness here weakens my spirit, I felt my energy scattering and letting in confusion and darkness. All of this was my unfinished business. And, apparently, it was time for me to wrap it all up in a bow and gift it to him over a drink.
As we sat on the Crowsnest outdoor patio, watching the sailboats and sun setting - not the epic colors Damon had predicted, but a smoggy haze of burnt orange and liquidy blue – I came to. I snapped back into some realm of my normal self; the self I had come to live with in his absence, the stabilized version, the one who watches thoughts as objects of awareness, she who creates beauty and harmony and healing and peace. I immediately acknowledged what had happened. Those thoughts must have been in the back of my mind, unconscious, and out they spewed. Like a child happily playing one moment and vomiting the next. It was a lapse of consciousness and coming back to this scene I had just painted in my own absence filled me with remorse. I kept apologizing, reassuring, and I let him know that is not generally how I am feeling. Those were rogue thoughts and not representative of how I view our situation. They were based in the past, old hurts, old pains, old ways of viewing my life. I’m no longer trapped. I am free to live in the sun and create as I so choose. I have shifted my life to become who I want, where I want, living exactly the type of peace I knew was possible. Creating the kind of beauty and change I always knew I could.
Being here, in Aptos Revisited, has been much harder than I anticipated. Stepping into an old cocoon. I hid here, I became reclusive, I dissolved my identity in this place. Then I spread my wings and flew away. But there is still a part of my heart here. There is a golden thread to my love, my sweetest, my beautiful man who still resides in this old shell of a home, now making it his own. A museum of past feelings and energies, still alive in the cutting boards and bathroom products, the orchid that’s been blooming for over a year is still blooming. Blue glass candle holders, a jar of sea glass and seashells I’d been collecting for years, now seeming to be ancient relics of a rejected time. The plants on the deck have changed their shapes and grown odd-looking, reaching out past their pots for sun or water or affection. I never expected to return to these things. I had kissed them goodbye, along with my husband of 8 years.
But now I was back. Walking these same steps, finding everything exactly as I had left it. Some things were new; Damon’s fireplace and wood stacks, his axe in close proximity. His incense and candles, the altar he had just begun to design, a flute, sage bundled with string. New books nestled among my old ones on the windowsill. He had a new coat, blue and handsome, the color that pulls the beauty forward from his eyes. Most of the changes here in this house are invisible. The way he spends his days, in peace, just like me. The reading he does silently as he sits alone, as I do. The deep inner journeying that has given him such satisfaction, the loving plunge into his own heart. We are two souls on a similar path, living separately.
In most ways, I am deeply accepting of our situation. Intermittent fears pop their heads up at times. Other times I feel the ache of not creating a life together. But perhaps that’s not true. We are creating a life together and this is what it happens to look like. There is distance, there are two homes, yes. But our creations have similarities: peace, inner journeying, heart opening, growing more and more conscious, meeting our shadows with a handshake, welcoming emotions, listening to nature, feeling energy, connecting to ourselves and others. We are, in essence, for the first time creating the same life. We do so individually. The skill arises in the ownership, having to cultivate the inner resources and watching the creation take form. But not only physical form, the energies inside transmuting, our ability to be with stillness, to watch our identities silently falling away, to feel the inner budding of some new way of living.
Hope’s edge is dangerous. Ego is hiding in wanting things for the future, in growing discontent with the present moment. Eckhart says the ego wants to want more than it wants to have. Always keeping the dream out of reach, never being satisfied with what is here now. In order to feel hope about the future, I must dance with peace now, enjoy this dream that is unfolding now. There is no more waiting for the future to be happy. I can’t know what the future will bring. I can’t know where Damon and I will live in 5 years. If it is still apart or if it is together on an acreage in the mountains as my visions declare. In the meantime, this is my life. This is the only life I can know and be with.
The practice is in noticing that what we desire is already present. Freedom, love, peace, presence, connection. It is all here now, but if we allow the mind to tell a different story then the ego goes wild. This is the ego’s strength, to generate and set into motion an altered state of reality in which you can only identify with wanting more. It will hold you, imprisoned in a story of lack, of never enough, where things aren’t right and it brings great sadness and longing. This is the favored tale of the ego, and it’s important to know that it is not reality. Open completely to what is. I notice that what I long for is only held away from me by mental constructs.
There are no physical barriers to accessing the world of love.