Brutus...... I watched when he and Blue fell in love instantaneously in  field on the top of Blue Mountain overlooking the Beaver Valley and Georgian Bay,  the moment they met.  He was half Clydesdale and half thoroughbred, and though he was a big heavy horse, she was taller and faster and could jump higher, and still and all, she would never pass him on a gallop or do anything that might challenge his pride.......'Females are submissive in nature', my mother would tell me, and my young feminist brain would seeth and foam, "you've gotta be kidding".  Yet for all her talents, Blue did not hold a candle to Brutus.  He owned himself, he was a 3rd stage man-horse..... he could stretch himself in a long lazy energy river,  plodding in a butterfly- filled field, and in a moment transform himself into a steed, prancing, doing half passes and ready for battle.  His spirit could not be broken or tamed..... the out of control rides I had on him, trying to prove different, took me beyond accepting the flow of forces greater than me.. 

If any of us could really see without the attachments to these forms of being, and learn to live in the utter impermanence of being,  we would see this magnificent kaleidoscopic unfolding ever-changing. 

It is a beautiful Wednesday morning here, and having got the sprinkler on the garden, and the tea made, and had the usual discussions with Rosie, I am still thinking about intimacy and romance and the interpersonal line…..and what myths are…..what these roles are….what Being Vulnerable is….

 In a spiral dynamic map, the distinction between 1^st and 2^nd tier on the interpersonal line, like in the other lines, involves an awakening to the ‘storyline’.  Oh, I need to get my Wilber books out again and remember the Wilberese, but it has to do with the ‘subject of one level becoming the object of the next’.  It has to do with a firm stance in being able to relate to our storyline, beyond the place where we have hitherto been relating  from it.  Suddenly,  the possibility emerges to ‘drop’ it.   I don’t think 'drop it'  means to stop everything and sit on a park bench as much as it is to claim the awareness and the freedom to be both the witness and the player at the same time.  Chop wood, carry water....chop wood carry water. 

 Joseph Campbell was very good about clearing up the unfortunate misuse and exchange  of the word ‘myth’ for the word ‘lie’, as if a myth is shown to be ‘untrue’ as we proceed up the spiral levels, as if decoding a myth from its pre-rational, literal interpretation suddenly makes it irrelevant or disposable or false in the rational world, and something even more dilute, or inane, in the trans-rational world. To contrary, myths are cosmic grooves.  They are metaphors that draw us into a dance that emerges out of chaos yet has certain predictability; “the steps go this way and not that way”, even like the spiral dynamic map itself.  Myths are to the emergence of the psyche, what Pi and Phi are to the emergence of the physical world. There is an evolutionary impulse that compels us to embody these patterns, just so and not otherwise; and the question is not about whether or not a particular pattern is ‘true’, but whether we can wake up to these patterns and be conscious within them; indeed, are we able to find ‘our freedom within our chains’? Can we experience our freedom in each and every moment, even  when, having pushed the eternal rock up the eternal mountain,  we watch it teeter precariously and plummet with gravitational predictability back to the eternal valley floor?  How much freedom can we actually imbibe in before we are collapsed and brought back to the cosmic composter?

 So romance and intimacy!  I am no expert on any of this, but it interests me to consider the claim that Romance was birthed somewhere in the 17^thcentury with all the romantic poets and such…. Before this, there was the survival grind and the mundane practicality of the day-to-day breathing down our necks; not to mention the God of wrath with all the fire ‘n brim stone rules; oh,  and also importantly, the unbalanced submission/subversion of the Eternal Feminine within the overarching power structures, be they religious or political.  Given the unfolding of our human history, it seems perhaps that Intimacy is only now truly emerging onto the comic menu as something that might be a possibility for the common person to be able to choose..... and I think Intimacy is a the mutual, conscious choice between two people ‘to see and be seen’, ‘to know and be known’, ‘to love and be loved’,  to both be the Beloved and to meet my Beloved…..   I think for the most part, this is brand new.  We have Rumi and a few beautiful, brave others who have traveled deeply into this territory, brailling their way into the glorious boon of the hero’s journey.  And still, these people have been few and far between, and even fewer have been able to report back to the fold. Of course, for those who have reported back, the reception has been mixed— as Joseph Campbell wrote, they have ‘played the fool in front of the sober eyes of the jury’ time and again.   It is no wonder if we are so tender and raw and timid and frightened, so quickly ready to retract back into our shells, our games so to speak, to glaze over our eyes and pretend that our name has not been called, to choose unconsciousness over the raw terror of Being Vulnerable….and  it is pretty clear that we have mostly be doing just that, over and over…still, even this retraction is getting old; it is starting to have a rote predictability to it; it becomes tiresome and annoying and disappointing and uh, boring….and so our  primordial yearning ( along with a big doses of boredom, the mother of curiosity) begins to lay the cosmic groove down for the next stage of discovery…..

 When I was a young girl watching our black and white TV that had one channel and a knife stuck in the ‘vertical’ hole to keep the picture from repeatedly moving up the screen, I remember watching the Breck commercial, mining it for clues. A Breck Girl had beautiful straight luxurious hair, and would hide in a hanging wicker swing as a gorgeous young man looked for her.  Wanting to be sought after, I wanted to be a Breck Girl, and have that hair, and that impish way of smiling in surprise when I was discovered!  I used to practice that way of smiling in the mirror, and I used to wonder where those wicker hanging swings were! Similarly, my brother Andrew watched how Simon Templer, The Saint, took his cigarette out of the package and deftly tapped one end of it before casually putting in his mouth, and lighting it just so—o, the icon holding the hope of total sexiness, so irresistible!.…. And likewise we have mined our mentors lives, played games, latched onto roles, embodying this deep yearning to meet our Beloved, and in turn be met—such as is possible on the way through the early stages of the spiral.   

 So what does Romance look like when Intimacy flickers and begins to dance, picking up speed and light in the 2^ndtier…This is the story in which we suddenly begin to find ourselves. Sam Keen’s grandmother gave him the simple advice:  “Love and do what you want.”  Bob Dylan wrote:  “I’d go crawling down the avenue. There is nothing I would not do, To make you feel my love.”  Reporting in from my glimpses, from my bravest stands in this place, from Rumi’s field, this:  All the diamonds in the world are suddenly sparkling dew drops caught and cascading  in the early morning sun, becoming this Beauty turning in Your love.  It ALL transforms in a blink of an eye into an eternal, exuberant Yes, this wild adventure of Being that we share. The heart has no choice but to open.....   

 

It always amazes me, how it must have happened.....so many fathers and would-be fathers off in exile doing something(oh, yes so important!), coming home to inhabit another kind of exile.  Out of loop, even if privileged, even if apparent with power to control, even if the rich guy of the block, still not belonging...... Even that a million sadnesses grew from this not belonging, and even though as women, wives, mothers, and children of both sexes we have been appalled by the sadnesses, it is time for you to come in from the cold, time to call the exile off, time to come in to the hearth and the heart to where we all belong.  As Allistair MacLean wrote: "We are all better when we are loved."  You are that important to this circle.

After months of sun shining, the gentlest rain is falling today. The springly hew of green emerges as an emanence, soft and present, suddenly presiding over a bedraggled, late night blues band of yellows and browns. There is a bussle in the Riversong Tavern: "Put those cigs out, clear up the dirty scotch glasses, open those windows. Transformation is at hand. Our nurturing momma has returned, our benevolent Queen! She will make short shrift of all these shenanigans, just watch her!"

Indeed, the snow drift that gathers each winter at the path leading out to the beach is all but gone. The transplants are in their boxes, not much evidence of action yet. My garden if full of all sorts of perennials.... the hyacinth and tulips are only peaking out now, and honestly the peonies look exhausted. I have a wonderful horseraddish plant and daisies, and lilies... and foxglove and bleeding hearts and delphiniums...... spinach is in the vegetable garden now but not discernible. Chives, the little rascals are running rampant all over the place, like naughty children loose in the supermarket! Out on the beach, there is that fecund smell of rot and slime...of last year surrendering into this one, still waiting for the transformative turn in the dressing room.

What am I cultivating? I am cultivating a life that works, that resonates with the deepest rhythms of the earth, and the deepest Truth about who we are.  I am cultivating a life that honours the flux and flow of all this primordial energy as it courses through Time, winding and holding, releasing and diffusing in and as all of us and all of THIS. I am cultivating a way of seeing, so that from the corner of my eye, I can always view this plunging, plummeting, writhing, rising energy in all of its erotic glory as it dives and frolics in the Ocean of the Real; this is my life...... it is a rough sculpture in many aspects. It has been fueled and distorted by the jarring dance of our times when so much that I am starving for, that I believe we are all starving for, has been slow and hesitant in declaring itself, just as I have been slow and hesitant too. As much as I might want to rant against this lazy agenda, there seems to be an essential quality of patience being wrought from the very frothing at my mouth. "If I want everything to happen immediately, I must be infinitely patient," oh yes, how that koan plays on my heart, breaking it time and again. "Leave those transplants alone!" I tell myself. "Do not pull the plant out of the ground to see if the roots are proper or to my standard!"

We are in Break-Up here. The awesome forces of nature scour and scrape and seep and surge.  There is a rending of energy to a primal state.....Already a young man has gone through the ice and disappeared forever. This is the pattern.

I am immersed in beauty.... all quadrant all level beauty; sometimes it is harsh and unforgiving, and I lose my center witnessing it, caught in the turbulence and tug of staying afloat....and sometimes, most often, it is just outside my door down the path waiting, peeking through in a shameless radiance.  It is in moments like this, beauty so utter and profound, that I wonder that I am perhaps the only one in the universe watching this particular magical dance.....all for me....even Rosie my early morning travelling companion is far too intent on the squirrels and such to have a mind for Beauty.

These days are falling open, empty and clear as the horizon can stretch. I am thinking about all that anchors me and holds me in This place......the geography, the rhythms of habit, my fellow travelers, a whim, a worry, spirit subliming into matter,  percolating deeper than ever the eye can see.

Yesterday, we held our court at the cabin down to Mokami Mountain.....our banquet, we brought roasted vegetables and tofu pie, stopping by at the fishing holes for Take Out, granted only three trouts braving the devastating and liberating crucible out of the ice and into our  fire....still, in celebration, we set up our chairs and table in the snow, in the long afternoon sun.....the fire was being pesky when out of trail emerged Billy with his axe.... some spruce bows....and the wind...the trout becoming us.... what else is there, as we tunnel our way though the molecules of this moment, except perhaps to recognize each other and all of This--- the Divine Carnival in its dancing splendour.

In this court, held in the sun and snow, the leaping greenlies, the blue true, everyone is king and queen....

I love the expression that Stephen and Ondrea Levine used, "triangulating towards God".  We triangulate towards truth....always on an curve of our  best approximation at any given time, either consciously or otherwise.  And I triangulate towards truth with you and you.... measuring, comparing, resonating, jarring, floating, zooming, falling, crashing, soaring.....