My Relationship Ladder

I want to know what love is.  The song rings through my mind regularly.    I have looked hard both inside and out of myself and voila! From the view of my spiritual journey I have lived quite a relationship ladder.  Maybe I had too many starts and no real marriage, or no permanent bonding of love.  It’s all about me.  The only common factor!  In retrospect I see that I have stepped rung by rung up a kind of spiraling ladder to the incredible expansiveness of love.  “I want to know what love is.”  So crooneth the song.  “And I want you to show me.”  But it doesn’t work that way does it?  I wanted so much to feel love and be wanted and persued.  But I learned that I had to give the love steadily and graciously.  And I was.  But that isn’t enough is it?

I was pretty enough but different, always juggling a deep inner angst about who I was.  Unable to love myself  I couldn’t accept people in ways that would honour their broad variations on the planet and see through their defenses and quirks. Or lay loving foundations. 

My hormonal yearning for love pulled in my first boyfriend when I was 15.  We were in 11^th grade.  His  pomped James Dean hair do boosted his height to 6’1”.  He shone in the glittery vest fashion of 1958.  His Brillcream, later called “greasy kids stuff”  kept his wave high, while sideburns fuzzed up his cheekbones.  My horrified parents stood at the window as he revved his engine and we rolled out of the driveway.     Of course I fell in love with my free floating hero.  In his arms I dreamed wildly – hormones sending out waves of ecstacy and a wildly soothing illusion of completion!  Later my illusion was smashed  into tiny sharp pieces by his betrayal.   “Happily ever after” had to morph into something bigger.   But I had opened to the bottom rung of love.  

Serendipitous events around a miscarriage, a betrayal, and love tilted on its axis of commitment.  I reeled but only for a moment as my foot tenuously stepped on the next rung of my ladder.  A brilliant physicist, driving an ice cream truck for the summer, reached for my hand and pulled my love up to the tune of his wanderlust.  With our back packs filled to the brim with everything we needed or could trade for a good year of travel, we hitchhiked through Europe and Africa, while reality chipped away at our bravado. Together we became humbler and more awake to the moment.  A new kind of love bloomed as we shared our resources, and trusted one another to create solutions to our needs mile after mile.  The owl and the pussycat in the pea green boat.   We were confident in our love when we returned home to marry.

Like a mandolin, our love was tuned and returned.  He followed his dreams to change the world.  I, unclear of my own purpose, in the shadow of his charisma, often retracted my love in self doubt.  Unconditional love is the real meditation.  The love I felt was an infusion, like having a cork popped inside of myself.  But I couldn’t keep it in its effervescent state. The lists of my self doubts grew like weeds among my homemaking duties and resentfully I questioned again, what is love?

He mused that he would die young.  And indeed he did.  I became untethered, found myself scrambling for pieces of myself under our fractured foundations.   My love, I recognized was often attached to the dream that would design who I was and that I was now safe.  The scaffolds we had dreamed up, were sitting on deep hurt that needed to be excavated.  After his passing I took a 6 year turnabout which was often grueling.  I had to figure out who I was and how I work.  My earliest memories as a small person rose.  I had known where I had been before this life. In those memories I felt a strong, bathing, flow.   I looked for it.  I searched.  Who is in there, who is love?  Is it a who?  Is it a Who?  Horton hears a who.  Where is Horton now that we need him?  I didn’t meet a floppy eared pink elephant but I did enjoy some of me – my perspicacity, curiosity, quick humour, and deepening compassion for people and how intricately we all work.

That rich descent into who I am, took me on a wild tour through which foods suit me, past life regressions, energy work of all kinds, massage.  For a few years I was obsessed,  who am I?  who am I?  It was an expedition that often propelled me out of a harmonious friendship or two, as our shared dreams no longer fit.  Always there were a few friends who stood by me, fascinated, but wary.  Slowly I began to understand the love I have for me and how my own defenses, shame and fears had sheltered it from me.   In time self-love peeked through the curtains of my identities.  The next rung was a huge step up!

I drew up a list - one of my most famous lists - to follow to improve myself, that I could be more loving in relationships. A wise friend of mine was merciless.   “You and your list” He guffawed. “Just get into a relationship.  That’s where you’ll know yourself.”  Zing!  His words vibrated through me!  And I drafted up a series of affirmations calling forth a new partner and a few other things in my life.  23 affirmations in fact on tape which I ran behind everything I did.   Within 2 days I found myself talking to several different men.   I chose one I thought was most enticing.  Soon, smitten, I was off and running for the travelling romance of Israel.  My  love was even more humbled and yet courageous now. I made that huge step to the next rung.  Definitely I loved him quickly but there were more questions.  What is love?    He and I helped each other out of our rickety boats of defenses as first.  We were so loving as we shared our learning and served each other.   I was in fear of being at home.   My love of self, already scanty but emerging, chilled in an aura of his own limitations on love.  Interesting huh?  I was learning that unless I could radiate love to him unconditionally, we couldn’t share it.  I kept finding limitations.  Some feelings of 'no, it shouldn’t be like this'.  Yet it was.  What should I do?  Wrangling with his negativity and depressions I decided I had to move on.

But then – surprise surprise -   Big surprise – I was pregnant.  I had been affirming “a child if it is appropriate”.  Here she was, this baby,  a true test of love.  I couldn’t bear to be without her.  This new love was a pull, a warm glue of sorts, whose essence lifted my being to believing in much greater than the physical dimensions.  I could love this child unequivocally and without boundaries…as long as I could do my daily chaotic dance meditation, that got me in the rhythms of my far too active brain, and kept me aware of loving.  It was a new rung.

I had to leave her dad.  My empathy sucked in his depression so while I wanted to evolve and set myself free from my childhood traumas, I was numbed, stuck in an etheric sand.  I had to leave.  His personal pain and resistance to change were like a weight in me.  I had to pull myself away and begin a process of unraveling the reactive fabric I had become or absorbed.  It is so hard to know whether it is the chicken or the egg.  I packed up my four year old and off we went to a small town where I could start again and raise this love away from the madding crowds.  We were in Sequim.

There I was set up quickly for another rung at love. This time I became involved with a highly unusual mate for me, a top realtor.  I seemed  hippyish for him.  To me I was proud to be an activist - not a hippie!  But he was so commercial for me.  What we  did share was a deep commitment to our spiritual growth.  More than that we simply couldn’t stay away from one another.  I can still feel our magnetic love.  Yet I was told by my Guides over and over “Do not marry this man.”  And I “knew” it would be wrong though he loved my daughter and me.   

So here is the unbelievable strong message that insured that we wouldn’t stay together!  Right from the first days of the five years of our relationship…visions of another man…a “see through” blonde man, creative, metaphysical, working his way through another relationship, was in our lives.  He sat with us in the car, in the kitchen in the living room…fortunately not in the bedroom.  But it was unnerving.  I thought he was a herald (Oh hark! is that you Herald?) that meant we were to be together and that is why I shouldn’t marry my realtor lover. 

We talked about it honestly.  We saw a counselor about it.    We planned the end of our relationship to be a conscious parting.  We met and meditated daily for a month at 7 AM.  In our meditations his head kept turning into the head of a demon, horns and all.  I thought it meant I was being negative or needed to poop.   That often darkens one’s visions.  He was a good guy.  We were going to be friends forever.  I just “knew” it.  My  “knowing” was totally wrong.

Then the invisible prince charming arrived by phone, the love was palpable.  Too early to know you might say, but I had felt involved with him for five years so that seemed alright.  I loved him already.  Three months later by his physical presence.  The realtor and I worked hard on being friends but in frustration we turned to past life information.   It turns out that the three of us had had past lives in which we had taken turns betraying one another.   So they hated each other and the rage that both of them felt at me, was palpable and never ending.  All our spiritual work seemed to yank  on our invisible chains. 

For me, when the realtor stormed away never to speak to me again…until he passed that is and our visits across the veil resolved the  unspoken…..and when I sent away the etheric suitor in his flurries of rage and strange misunderstandings,  I was reeling at my illusions, deeply lost and hurt.  What is love?   My beautiful daughter was heartbroken longing for home and family and a steady supportive love.  Inside I knew a gap between the love I thought I felt and the attachments that seemed to vitalize it or their distortions.  Remember chutes and ladders?  I had slid down the 99^th chute, stumbling round the bottom of the game board. 

I wanted to know what love is.

The tiny town with so many reminders and people who knew us and made decisions about us and the external realities of my relationship break ups prickled in their karmic nest.   My search for love had deceived me, the intuitive.  I needed to grow or clear out my old programs unhook attachments and yearnings for a real love…self and others.   Like a Geiger counter I drove til I found an electrical frequency in the land that would boost the transformations of old reactions in my vibrational body.

It was Tucson, AZ where we re established ourselves.  I capped my search for love “out there” stung deeply by my own illusions and the trickery of seeing visions through the lense of desire.   It can often skew our readings. 

Tucson was a learning curve.  No lovers.  No men.  Lots of new friends and fellow healers but no romance.  I couldn’t trust my own love to be clear headed.  Nor could I trust that I wouldn’t hurt my daughter further.  I was learning the dance between attachment and desire.  A lot of us in the healing fields have to wander through the weeds of our soul’s history, choosing and releasing choosing and releasing from the magnetic attraction for intimacy. 

My daughter became as a teenager, enraged at me, at our life together, and I had to send her to her dad.  I couldn’t bear it, but I couldn’t bear to lose her entirely to drugs.  I love her so much but didn’t like her during that time and my emerging love capacity  was daunted.  I did know by then that I loved a lot and deeply, but it just didn’t seem to work for me.  Back to the drawing board.  I moved myself to the Bay Area to be near my step daughter. 

At a workshop for sacred geometrics, I met a wizard.  Sacred Geometrics and Metaphysics we had a soul and spirit in common.  My Guides said we were soul allies.  Not soul mates.  We were meant to push each other out of our personality forming subconscious programs. To help one another develop more wholeness.  Our relationship unfolded and together we pulled apart limitations on our selves, drank fresh veggie juices, explored universes with my Guides and his long term studies with Lazarus and the levels of blocks on our love whether from past lives or this life.  I worked hard to be home and family with him, and to evolve my own service into the world.  Our love grew through our sharing, step by step support of one another as gingerly we pointed proverbial toes where he could finish creating original sound replications, and me, my business of readings, and radio.  The Guides implied that this was all temporary, which we didn’t quite believe.  It just seemed such a deep and safe knowing.

Then devastating financial circumstances melted down our home, and we were tipped into the basement to unhook our lifestyle and rebalance our lives.  The love that I always feel in my work and meditations grew. The love he and I shared pulled itself into safety, wrapped in a kind of tourniquet. I couldn’t hold our lives together.  I had to do my dharma, my work in the world.    Chilled to the bone in fear and loss, I had to work hard to focus on my own work and radiate at a higher level.  I headed out from the damp gentle northwest to the rich bubbling droughted LA to be near my step daughter and start again, all over again, at 71.   She and I have often shared a rung of love as we go through changes.

I chuckle.  I often say “I am always at the beginning.”  It keeps my ego at bay while truly opening me to listening to wisdom from people and guidance.   And the love I seek still grows.  My wizard and I have accepted our physical distances along with our huge losses in a shared stream of love that always expands.   The attachment part of our love has moved on.  Now it is a flowing glue of support, we have each other’s’ back,  that each of us uses separately and as soul allies, together. 

Love is growing in me, at times staggering under the revelations of deception in which we live politically and economically, but finding a deepening connection with all that is, the gifts of the many illusions that guide me and others into  our soul’s work. 

Now I pray for another mating opportunity to activate new levels of true love.  I surrender as I feel the updrafts of the etheric ladder to LOVE.