STIRRED BY THE RIVER

Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 217, July 27, 2024

• Today’s questions: What are you in a hurry for? What presses you as if it cannot wait? And, What happens when you learn to wait for it come to you?
• Today's suggested practice: to sit with your own resistance to learning what you already know & receive as love... (see my "Short Practice,” below)
• My practice today: 5am, asanas, Lion's Breath, and Ganesha Mantra

TODAY'S MEDITATION

I am in the middle of a river flowing with beauty & love & wonder & mostly enjoying every bit of it.

Sometimes I am a little —sometimes a lot!— overwhelmed. But, proud of myself, I am managing to stay open. To enjoy.

This life is not what I thought it would be. It’s so much more.

What are the things that help me to receive this strangeness? Friendship. I am blessed with a number of good friends, men and women. Mentorship and guidance. I am grateful for men who show me how to live well. I am grateful for being loved. And, most of all, I am grateful for being tested.

I would not be the man I am, the man I love, were it not for the testing.

...

She sat in on a ledge in the middle of the the river and told me many things. Today I'll call her the river maid. There is a poetry in how she was, that moment, and in what she stirred.

This river maid asked me many questions.

I watched her sit. I saw the reflections of the forest all around. Saw the ripples echoing from her stillness in the flow, a labyrinthe of wavelets forming from her centre. Her questions reaching me at the shore. Perhaps, magically (because magic is what we do when we commit to follow the labyrinthine way of love), these questions will reach the man who will love her. The man who will see her and hold her in his awareness.

Because she talked of being seen. Or, rather: She talked of not being seen.

I am reminded of how my beloved told me, how I was the one who sees her, hears her, knows her.

I am reminded of how many younger-than-me women have revealed to me that the one thing they yearn for most of all is to be seen. Held in a man's awareness.

I am reminded of how it felt, to be held in that awareness by my dear and departed and wise friend. As they hymn says, the joy that we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

...

When I learned to feel what a follow should feel, after those lessons with Federico in Berlin, that was when I knew how I wanted to lead in tango. I took that home with me. I make a difference in my tango community.

Similarly, feeling held in awareness, seen for who I am, for the magic and the unfinishedness of who I am, by my wise friend, that was when I knew how I wanted to be the husband to my beloved. Now I make a difference in how I love, how I receive love.

...

This morning I sat in the garden and followed the crooked path of thoughts occasioned by a moment at the river with the maid in the river. Also: wonderings occasioned by her questions as they swam through thoughts of the reoccuring figure & meaning of the Tarot Fool, Kesey's “holy fool,” Proust and remembrance, and closing the circle (or rather: extending the labyrinthine spiral) by wondering about awareness/flow, masculine/feminine, and nostalgia (because that was the last thing the river maid asked about, and I had once wrote a damn good -now forever lost- paper on contra nostalgia), and Benjamin's notion of redemptive criticism. And all of it turning and turning, a turning deeper... And all of it a wondering about love.

...

What did I come to know this morning, in my garden? That...

• the wisdom of my heart defies (certainly confuses) my mind, and that is a good and necessary thing;
• everything is better and truer when I breathe, when I sit & let “it” (whatever "it" may be) come to me when the time is ripe
• the experience of “falling in love” occurs in different ways. Sometimes it’s a quick tumbling. Sometimes it’s a slow, very slow, awakening. However it happens, it is always strange. Disorienting. Love, and certainly the falling into it, is not about comfort. Our nervous systems may seek familiarity & comfort. The older we get, the more resistant we are to tumbling. We are first and foremost in love with the chimera of "balance." So we are more likely we are to find love slowly. To only after our heart has broken open notice that we are losing balance, and, perhaps, grateful for the falling.

She is still you, the river maid. But already her many experiences have trained her nervous system to be wary of falling. It’s a common condition. I feel it with so many women. They give and give and give what they think will secure our masculine hearts. But we are even more afraid of falling than they, so there we stand, all of us, afraid of losing our balance. None of us able to trust ourselves and our desire to be reckless. The cost is a hard cost. And we grow ever more wary.

What to do? For all of the beautiful and love-worthy women and men who are afraid of falling, what to do, when falling is the only way?

Breathe. Do the work of becoming yourself. Trust that you are beautiful, that a man will see you. Trust that you are trustworthy, that a woman will feel you there. Let love find you.

When it does, savour the slow unfolding of it. You will be seen, and heard, and felt, and known. This will undo you and all of your ideas about balance and what is safe and what is reckless and what is true and what is false, and you will only have yourself to hold onto. Trust yourself.

At least, this is what I am working to do. I only have a right to this work, to become trustworthy. Not to any fruits, not to any love that it may occasion.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction. (Bhagavad Gita, 2:47)

🌀There are so many others. But you see me, you hear me, you know me. (My beloved)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED SHORT PRACTICE

Today's practice, to breathe and feel the confusion of life —the tension, pressure, friction, and stress that makes everything possible— and then allowing this confusion to become more beautiful than you can possibly imagine:
Please read through first, then ...

• Set two alarms, for times of the day when you have a five-10 minutes to become conscious of who and how you are in this day.
• When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take a few moments and:
  • Ask yourself: What am I in a hurry for? What cannot wait? And, What happens when I learn to wait for it come to me?
  • Then, follow the short practice here:
    • Stand, or sit, or lay yourself down, and bring your attention to your body.
    • Feel the ground beneath you. Allow the earth to hold you with gravity. Feel how dense and heavy you are. Feel also how lightly you sit or stand or lay on the earth. Feel yourself between the pull of earth's gravity and the subtle but persistent pull of the sun, the stars.
    • Slow your breathing so that it is long and deep into your belly. Slow the inhale to a count of four or six. Slow your exhale to a count of six or eight or ten. Repeat three to five cycles of breathing, going a little slower with each cycle. Continuing to notice yourself held by the earth, raised by the sun and stars and sky above. Feel the subtle tension and pressure and friction and stress that allows you to be and rest and move in this body.
• When you’re done, take another minute or two, breathing gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly. Here, as you breathe into your fullness, ask yourself, Do I feel right? Am I in alignment with the man or woman I am? Do I even have an inkling what that might feel like? Do I even have an inkling of what it feels like to be out of alignment with myself?
• Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.
• Continue with your day until the next alarm sounds, and repeat.