To love or not to love?
I met someone. After spending years nursing my heart back from heartbreak - I opened my heart again. I met this person, around the time I felt fully in my power. - I was creating, doing, making happen, aggressively, and exclusively dating myself. And on meeting this human, it felt like I was experiencing an upgraded masculine - grounded, caring, supportive. I was enjoying the showing up of love in my life. I was surprised, pleasantly.
And slowly over the course of months, my energy dwindled. The spending weekends together, that before were all mine. The making space in my life for a new someone. The worrying of is this the one? With making space - physical, mental, and emotional - the debate of if I should invest more or less in this has consumed my mind, fatigued my body. I hear myself whisper last week - Am I lost. Where am I? My body as always decides to break down to get my full attention. If only, I would listen sooner. I promise it, next time I will.
And, thank goddess for the breakdown - for in nursing my body, I listen, tune into the silence, and promptly the medicine for my heart comes from the teachings of Pinkola Estés, “we can lose ourselves through a devastating and wrong love, but also in the right and deepest love. It is not exactly the rightness of a person or thing or its wrongness that causes us to lose ourselves, it is the cost of these things to us.”
Yes, devotion, love costs the feminine. Like cash debits on a personal savings account. It costs her, her own life force, her own soul-stuff. We feel into the field of another and make our field available to them fully. Like giving them a card to our own savings account. We do this by making them a part of us in our heart-mind. We care, we concern. We desire for them. We dream for them. We extend the boundaries of our being to now include another whole person, their life, their reality. And this incurs costs on our own reservoir of vitality. This makes for quite the catch 22. Because the goddess wants love. But also wants freedom. Wants the truest deepest connection, but not with the withdrawals to her vitality and life force.
Estés comes to my rescue. She explains love costs us only if we do not learn to retreat. To ‘go home’ she explains. Make a habit of retreating, getting away whenever the call is heard. The call comes to each of us in our own unique ways. For me, it was feeling spent. Feeling lost. Feeling unsure. And then of course my body breaking down. Estes further shows “There are many ways to go home; many are mundane, some are divine - rereading passages of books and poems that touched you. Spending time near a river, stream, or creek. Lying on the ground. Being with a loved one without kids around. Sitting on the porch shelling something, peeling something. Boarding a bus, destination unknown. Greeting sunrise. A special friend. Holding an infant. Writing.” Ah yes, writing. I stopped writing. The coming of love in my life cost me writing. So I decided today, to say no to everything, to say no to love silently in my own heart, closing my field and going home. I wrote. I read. I lay on the ground. I went to the waters. I fueled myself. I doted on my primordial mate, my first love - me. Like a drop of water on parched lips, my energy surges within me. The words leaving my fingers gulp energy into me. I am feeding myself, I realize. I was hungry, famished- for my own attention, my own concern, my own reality to be at the center of my world. Estés so beautifully shares an ode to her own solitude, “For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need. I sit at the feet of the great old trees of my childhood. From that vantage point, I ask my questions, receive my answers, then coalesce my woodland back down to the size of a love note till next time.”
As I fold up my new-old forest of a love note till next time, a wondering arises within me. Is this merging and retreating in the love of other and self, the point of it all? The great dance of brave hearts? The exhalation and inhalation of my love a sign of healthy relational lungs? Estés explains the tending of our own drives of devotion and solitude IS THE INNATE FEMININE ECOLOGY. To love my own cycles, and get lost in my own forest from time to time, I become a shady woodland for those who love me. In being alone, I learn to love another more deeply.
___
Excerpts from Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
