I was laying in bed drifting off into a soft sleep when I had images of a story id read last year swirl around. This is a story of a fisherman running from what he has caught. A story of a man and a woman. A story of discovering wounds and running from them. A story of healing.
These are lessons and wisdom from that story:
To love, one must not only be strong, but wise. We have been taught that death is always followed by more death. It is simply not so, death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut to the bones. However the miracle we are seeking takes time: time to find it, time to bring it to life. Discovering another person is a kind of spiritual treasure.
He does not realize that he is bringing up the scariest treasure he will ever know, that he is bringing up more than he can yet handle. He does not know he will have to come to terms with it, that he is about to have all his power tested. To love a woman, the mate must also love her untamed nature. The mate for a wildish woman is the one who has soulful tenacity and endurance. You can’t have understanding of woman’s mysterious just for the asking. You must do the work first. You must endure in pursuing this matter. Keep returning.
To lay inert and only dreaming of perfect love is easy. For the naive and wounded, the miracle of the psyche’s way is even if you didn’t mean to, didn’t really hope to, don’t want to, feel unworthy to, aren’t ready for it, you will accidentally stumble upon treasure anyway. Then it is your soul’s work to not overlook what has been brought up, to recognize treasure as treasure no matter how unusual it’s form.
To love means to stay with. It means to emerge from a fantasy world into a world where sustainable love is possible, face to face, bones to bones, a love of devotion. To love is to learn the steps. To make love is to dance the dance. To love means to stay when every cell says “run”!
Even running is apart of the process. It is only human to do so, but not for long and not forever.
People fear that when things become tangled and frightening in love relationships that the end is near. The truth is there is never a “completely ready,” there is never a really “right time.” As with any descent into the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches ones nose and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would have never needed tho create the words heroine, hero, or courage. Without a task that challenges, there can be no transformation. Without a task there is no real sense of satisfaction. To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.
To untangle the skeleton woman is to understand that love does not mean all glimmering candles. It means changing our ways of seeing and being to reflect health rather than death of soul. Fear is a poor excuse for not doing the work. We are all afraid. Nature awaits lovers who go beyond running away, who push beyond the desire to find themselves safe. Sometimes there are no words to help one’s courage. Sometimes you have to jump. There has to be at some point in a man’s life when he will trust where love takes him, where he fears more being trapped in some dry cracked riverbed of the psyche than in being out in lush but uncharted territory. There is usually no sense waiting till we feel strong enough to trust, because that day will never come.
There is probably nothing a woman wants more from a man than for him to dissolve his projections and face his own wound. She transforms herself by the strength of his heart, by his strength to face her. She empowers him as he empowers her. She is just what he must lend his heart to. She begins as ancient bones. She teaches the man to make new life. She shows him that the way of the heart is the new way of creation. She shows him that creation is a series of births and deaths. She teaches him that protectionism creates nothing, selfishness creates nothing, holding on and screaming effects nothing. Only letting go, giving heart, only this creates. That is how love relationship is meant. Each transforming the other. The strength and power of each to untangle and share.
(This is what I have been learning over the last two years. Slowly, painfully slow at times. But I have come to accept the nature of my wild heart and its need for healing. I am now understanding the relationship between trust and fear. Man and woman. Wounds and transformation. The cycles of life and death. Loving and letting go. What a man needs and what a woman needs. I am learning, always learning.)