the eunuch

For many years, his heart had burned with a seldom spoken and little understood rage. It had manifested itself over and over through the years in a disturbing and powerful image that dogged the idle moments and unguarded interludes in his artistic expression. The image appeared in sketches and drawings and clay and wax. Whenever he started to work without a predetermined goal in mind, which was often, it seemed that he always ended up staring back at a fresh new expression of the image before he was done.

The image of this dark mysterious fury was the face of a man. It was lean and angular, with an intense forward thrusting energy that burned with heat and rage and sheer force. He consciously knew very little about the man raging forth in the image except that he was the man himself. What fueled the rage, he did not know, but he did know that it was deep and massive and well insulated. It rarely surfaced overtly except in the various expressions of the image.

Finally one day, he was sitting quietly with no thought of the image, when its meaning boiled up to the surface and grabbed him with a shudder. The revelation was so rich and dark that it startled him and sent him reeling into a storm of powerful insights and emerging clarity that carried him through the night. The image was an unwilling eunuch.

For years, as his marriage had stagnated, he had come to view his role in it as that of a eunuch in service to the queen. There was no intimacy in it. She had made it clear that her wish was to maintain the hollow marital shell as a safe neutral haven for the kids to grow up within. He had been dubious about the potential of this hollow dead thing to nurture his children and to model wholeness and love in their lives, but had stayed in hope that a miracle would somehow revive the marriage.

His hope was futile and badly designed. Mixed with it, was a deep resentment of this all powerful woman who held him so firmly at arm’s length, neutered and hapless. The rage expressed itself in his art, and in his dreadful passive aggression. While his conscious heart chose to stay for noble reasons, the eunuch seethed and schemed and plotted his escape and the restoration of his life force.

Finally, as he began to move in widening cycles of transformation and healing, he had broken free of the grasp of the neutered marriage. In the process, he had met and fallen headlong in love with the moon’s sister. But she had no place in her heart to carry his romance, and no passion to return it in kind. She had kept him close and had explored his transformation with him as it unfolded, but she too had held him firmly at arm’s length. A eunuch still, his rage simmered just beneath the surface. He had escaped from service to the queen only to find her here once again, holding him off just as before.

Later, he met a powerful but gentle and perceptive earth woman. She was a keeper of horses and wise in the ways of animals, and closely tuned to the heart of the earth from which she came. She touched his heart deeply at their first encounter and healed something in it instantly. She knew him well, and loved him fully and without reservation. He too was clear in his understanding of the ways of her heart, and loved her straight through to the earth beneath her.

But there was a dark shadow that lingered around them and lurked, waiting for opportunities to burden their hearts with uneasiness. It was the eunuch. He had left two queens, and neither of them now held him in their service, but he was not free.

He was still a eunuch. He had not found his life force and in fact, still belonged to the queen, even though now she could not enter into his earth maiden to use her for her dark purposes. The earth woman was too clear in her love, expressing it without reserve, utterly free of the temptation to manipulate or control his heart.

And so, enraptured with his love for the earth woman, he was perplexed, not seeing nor understanding at first that the eunuch was still not free, but yet weighed down with the burden of his dry blank emptiness. But now, the realization had struck him full force, and he saw at last that he and his eunuch still answered to the now faceless queen. The queen must be dethroned. She must step down and take her place among the common citizens of his heart. She must yield her place to the earth maiden with her open heart and love unbounded.

He knew that the queen would not give him up easily. He knew that he would have to expose and depose her willfully. And first, he must find her strongholds within him and rout them out in strong daylight. He must root out the tentacles of her pervasive grasp on his heart. He must find the source of her sustenance in the shadows of his own damaged soul and end the parasitic feeding.

And so, he began a new thing. Now he had discovered unbounded love, and found his heart unprepared to receive and return it fully. This would not do! He would not rest until the eunuch regained what he had lost. And he knew that the earth maiden—the keeper of horses and lover of unbridled heart— would walk the path beside him in the journey.