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| These pictures span our 11 years together. |
Eleven years ago on November 11, 2010 I watched Ron walk into the coffee shop on Belmont in Portland where we'd determined that we would meet. And my first thought was, Wow, he's tall! And yes, Ron's 6'3" dwarfs my shrinking current height of 5'3". And I wondered what else we might differ on and what we would share in common.
This first meeting was a pleasant enough time. And after our initial connection through Match a few weeks earlier, it was good to actually see each other face to face and continue the conversation that we'd begun online and over the phone. And at first, I had no clear intuition of what would follow. So when my co-workers asked me the next day how it went and if we would be seeing each other again, I answered that I did not know.
My not knowing was short-lived.
Ron did call me again. And because I was deeply committed to honesty, and also because of my clarity that I was seeking a long-term committed partnership, I told Ron then that I didn't know how well any relationship between us could progress given the beautiful yard and patio I'd seen in his pictures AND because I was a package deal ― I came with 2 rescued cats, 1 rescued yellow lab, and 1 golden retriever. And here was Ron, a bachelor who had lived alone with his cat and who'd been single since his divorce 15 years earlier.
Yet Ron didn't hesitate in his response. He invited me to come to his home on the following Sunday and to bring my two dogs. He wanted to make breakfast for us. And Ron told me that he lived close to the Columbia River where we could take the dogs afterwards. I accepted.
And that first kiss that happened that day in what is now our kitchen, and combined with a deep intuition, triggered a sense that this man before me may be the partner I'd been looking for and yearning to find for so many years.
* * * * *
I was also clear in my commitment to myself. I was not looking for someone to complete me, fix me, make me whole. The yearning within me was grounded in many years of heart work and truly coming to know myself more and more intimately. I was ready for cultivating a depth of intimacy and connection with a partner unlike anything that I'd ever experienced before.
My little written out list of what I was seeking was on my altar. I was looking for a committed relationship, a deep and enduring partnership with someone who'd been doing his own heart work and who was also ready and wanting to engage in the ongoing efforts and actions that a healthy intimate relationship requires. No more half measures. No more settling for anything less than mutual growth, intimacy, partnership, love.
And I was clear. I knew that I would rather spend the rest of my life as a single woman living alone than try to partner with someone who I would come to feel lonely with. I'd learned that lesson. And it was one I was determined to not repeat.
* * * * *
And so my journey with Ron began 11 years ago, outcome unknown. Yes, there was joy and such incredible sweetness. And, of course, everything is impermanent and ebbs and flows. Messiness was inevitable. Courage was required. And a lot of it.
Anyone who believes that happy-ever-afters are what love stories should be all about has got it wrong. In her amazing classic book Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés wisely describes the greater truths embodied in our most intimate relationships:
"Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings― all in the same relationship."
I first came upon this wise teaching when I read Women Who Run With the Wolves twice, back to back, 30 years ago. And it's taken me many years to truly understand and integrate this wisdom into my deepest heart of hearts.
Today I know that it takes courage, commitment, and growing healing, wisdom, transformation, and resilience for an intimate relationship to truly be intimate and to grow rather than stagnate over time. It takes two people working together. It takes two people who are committed to themselves, to each other, and to persisting with the courageous and amazing work of love.
* * * * *
I am noticing tears welling in my eyes as I write this. And I reflect on my relationship and marriage with our three sons' father, which spanned 31 years. I only feel the deepest compassion and love for us both today. No blame, no shame, no judgment. Just compassion. And love.
Jim and I truly did the best that we could. And too often, even when we sought help, the counselors and therapists we saw off and on over the years and before and during our divorce had their own unaddressed injuries and issues. As a consequence, they were not able to take us any deeper than they had first gone themselves.
Gratefully, there were others in my life who ― combined with my passionate quest for healing, for truth, for opening my heart and embodying love ― helped me to turn all those fingers that had been pointed outward onto Jim back upon myself. Only this time, with a gradually growing capacity for compassion rather than shame. And as I increasingly grew in honesty and self reflection and conscious awareness, I came to recognize that my first husband and I were mirrors for each other. Sure, my look good was much more fine-tuned. But that didn't help me. It had only added to my denial and distractions, my projections and addictions, my avoidance and secrets, my inner isolation and loneliness, my unhealed pain and suffering.
It took me many years into my sobriety and awakening before I came to recognize and understand that it was no accident, no mistake that Jim and I had been drawn to each other in college in the autumn of 1971. We were mirrors in so many ways ― as twins, as two 20 year olds who were injured and addicted, who'd suffered ancestral and cultural wounding, and who really didn't have any role models or ideas about what a healthy relationship and marriage looked like.
As I traded in more and more of my projections for coming to actually know myself and heal my shaming inner critic, the veils of my illusions and harmful beliefs and perceptions were lifting one by one by one. I came to see what I'd been missing and what had been blurred and buried by my fears and losses, judgments and projections, addictions and distractions, and unaddressed triggers and trauma. Indeed, as more of the surface layers were peeled back, I came to realize that both Jim and I came together exactly because we were mirrors, even down to being twins who were born less then two months apart.
Most of all, what tragically impacted our relationship for so long were all the ways ― subtle and passive aggressive and also more blatant ― that we abandoned ourselves and each other, that we weren't honest, that we beat up emotionally on each other, that we held secrets and withdrew and controlled and projected and blamed and shamed one another. All of it, the depths of all of it, was rooted in the abandonment of ourselves and the wholeness of who we truly are.
Jim and I are not unique. All around us we are witness to the harsh and fear-laden inner critics that avoid and distract from beating up on ourselves emotionally by instead doing it to others. And there are countless ways in which the inner pain we carry shows up in our outer lives. So often these fears and shame and broken-heartedness has its roots in very old and many times intergenerational wounds. And these patterns have gone unseen, misunderstood, neglected and perpetuated because we have not known how, or had the support we needed, to face and embrace and heal the pain that we carried in our hearts. Hurt people hurt other people.
There is no blame. It is what it is.
* * * * *
It is also true that once we are supported and brave enough to begin to see these patterns and addictions and triggers and unskillful reactions in ourselves and the relationships in our lives, the responsibility is then ours to begin the journeys of seeking to embrace whatever it is that has long been buried deep within us. This is the path of accountability, of honesty and truth, of healing and transformation. And this is the journey of breaking the cycle of being drawn to others who mirror our own hurting hearts because they, too, have unknowingly abandoned their own.
This suffering, these broken relationships, these old painful patterns which are so often unconsciously passed down to us by our ancestors and our culture, are rooted in belief systems that lead us away from the truth ― the truth that we are lovable and worthy of love, the truth of the beauty of our true nature, and the truth of our sacred being and how we are interconnected with all of life.
And we cannot come to face, embrace, heal, and transform the deep wounds to our hearts and souls in isolation. We need safe people and safe spaces. We need those who've been on their own paths of heart, who understand the journey because they, too, have been living it. We need to connect with those who have moved beyond pathology into claiming the gifts of the alchemist ― transforming trauma and injury into strength and tenderness, empathy and compassion, wholeness and truth, wisdom and love.
Following the empowering threads of truth, compassion, grace and love is not easy at all for most of us. The initial journey is painful and scary and can shake us and our reality as we've known it deeply. Many let go of the thread. We hit a wall and go back rather than looking for that next doorway and that next wise resource of support. Because it hurts to thaw out and open our hearts in ways that we haven't before. Trading in illusions, addictions, unhealthy relationships and actions, and harmful beliefs and coping mechanisms for greater and growing consciousness is a truly courageous journey. For so many of us, there are many veils to lift before our vision and our hearts can see more clearly and truly grow deeply tender-strong.
The larger picture that I have come to learn and be aware of is also that it is hard to build trust and to be truly and consistently intimate with anyone if we first haven't embodied an intimate relationship with ourselves. It is difficult to truly and deeply connect with others if we are disassociated and disconnected rather than in our bodies and experiencing more and more of the fullness of who we are. It is difficult to be honest with others if we're not knowing how to be honest with ourselves. And it is hard to find and sustain loving friendships and partnerships if we aren't first in one with ourselves.
* * * * *
It was decades ago that I first heard Bad Company sing, "Oh, baby, I'm ready for love!" So cool! I loved that song! It also took me a long time to recognize the difference between being ready for lust and ready for love.
Truly, how many of us are actually ready for love? I certainly wasn't when I met and married my first husband. It has only been gradually, one step at a time over a long time, that I sought and stayed with the hard work of love.
And, oh my!, it hasn't been easy. When an early counselor looked at me nearly 40 years ago and said, "Molly, well people don't marry sick people," I wanted to yell fuck you! I didn't, of course. But I wanted to. And her words stuck with me. I couldn't shake them.
Today I am grateful.
Another early counselor gave me a homework assignment that I put off as long as I could. I was told to write down all the things that I felt guilty for. I sensed that this would take me into some deep untouched pain. But because I wanted to be a good little client, I finally moved through that wall of resistance and began writing. And, damn!, my list went on and on and on and ended with that I was guilty for breathing air. I had not known this consciously. And I cried and wept and grieved. Deeply.
I was far removed from being ready for love.
Unknown to me, and buried in my deepest heart, what I was uncovering were layers of self-loathing and shame and unworthiness.
I don't know anyone who is an addict ― addicted to substances, eating or starving, gambling or sex, caretaking or anger or shopping or religion or work or exercise, etc., etc. ― who doesn't have a broken heart. There are so many ways that we can abandon ourselves and remain disassociated, fragmented, and unknowingly stuck in very old and often generational painful patterns.
AND what I have learned and experienced in my own life and witnessed in others is that it is also possible to transform all of this into gradually and increasingly learning how to live wholeheartedly. We can learn how to allow love in and over time embody love.
This is truly the most amazing journey... this journey of the heart, this journey of love. And as we set that intention to heal our hurting hearts, there is set in motion Grace, Mystery, Synchronicity, and people and experiences which end up profoundly altering the path we had been on. Doorways begin to appear that had always been there, but which we had been blind to. And there are those who see our beauty, who don't buy into our shame but understand it deeply, and who love us right where we're at.
Love is always the greatest medicine.
* * * * *
By the time that I walked into that coffee shop 11 years ago on 11/11/2010, I was ready for love.
I was ready to walk through and heal and transform my fears of intimacy and finally embrace what I'd always yearned for in a loving partnership. Yes, I had been clean and sober for 26 years. And, that said, walking through the doorway into sobriety was also only the tip of the iceberg of what would follow. An early counselor told me that I was going to need to make the long journey from my head to my heart. So true. So true. And this is exactly what I had been doing for the past nearly three decades.
It's not that my old trauma was gone. It never just goes away. But now I had tools. I had conscious awareness. I was ready to recognize and own and work with my triggers. I had healthy sources of support. I had been transforming my injured instincts and harmful boundaries into healthy ones. I knew more and more how to be accountable and own my stuff. And I increasingly knew how to not take on the issues and old places that weren't mine, that belonged with someone other than me. Significantly, the old patterns of my inner critic, shame, fear, and judgments were now in an ongoing process of being transformed into empathy, compassion, and conscious awareness. I had been learning how to hold myself and others with tenderness, kindness, and love.
What a vastly different experience than the violence that I had unknowingly been living with for so many years. My whole life was in process of transformation. I no longer needed to seek someone to make me whole because I was growing into my own wholeness. Yes, I was seeking an intimate and enduring partnership. And it is also true that my joy and gratitude and peace and happiness within myself and my life were not dependent upon whether or not I found this person. I'd been engaged in the hard and wondrous work of waking up, of breaking open my heart and letting love in.
It's so amazing ― this long journey of clearing the obstacles that I'd unknowingly built within myself to loving and giving and being love. And Stephen Levine is so spot on when he wisely says, "The more we love, the more real we become." So true. So true.
* * * * *
When I first met Ron, there had been a poem that I had been holding in my heart for some time...
The Invitation
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
* * * * *
So much has come to pass and to grow, to heal, to blossom since this tall man who is now my beloved husband walked through that coffee shop doorway 11 years ago. Ron and I have weathered many ups and downs, many challenges and digressions and growth opportunities, and a deepening that I could not have imagined.
Today the mirrors that I experience in my life are vastly different from what they once were. Today I soak in a depth of shared honesty and vulnerability, trust and tenderness, understanding and support, playfulness and laughter and joy, resilience and commitment, and so much more. And I am beyond words grateful that Ron and I have accepted together the invitation ― the invitation to love.
It's been hard work to get here, hard work to be ready for love. And so incredibly worth it. So very worth it. I never knew before, not truly in my heart-of-hearts, that such joy was possible. Such gazing deeply into the eyes of the beloved with boundless smiling and knowing. Such profound and unshakable trust. Such a depth of gratitude and grace and love. Love fed is love that multiples. Again and again and again.
And, as is true of any love story, ours is much greater than being about just Ron and me. These ripples are part of a much larger whole, one which connects us all to the thread of love ― and whether we know it or not ― and which is boundless. This has been an interesting journey beyond my wildest dreams. May this wild ride into the heart of love also be yours.
With love and blessings,
Molly
* * * * *
Things Are About To Get Real Interesting
― Chelan Harkin
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Simply wonderful -- the amber years ahead will have the sweetness of honey, and the familiar warmth of aging, treasured books --
ReplyDeleteThank you, Rande. Yes. 💘
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