the hurricane

Words lunged with fangs and claws! 

Pain turned on its heel and struck back, 

Crashing through fragile tenderness 

Already broken. 

Shards lay sharp and treacherous, 

Scattered across the floor 

Where tender hearts had once embraced, 

Not foreseeing catastrophe. 

The drive home from Visalia revealed no great insights. It went on far too long. He had formed a vision in his mind and heart for how to proceed with his love and his beloved. He just wanted to be home and to wait for her call. The road stood in his way, and he sped along, pushing the car, pushing the miles, pushing the law.

But as he pressed on, the road spoke to him with one small question. What if she did not want to be with him? That was the one possibility that his plan could not answer. He could boil oceans and move continents, but none of that would matter if she did not want him. This nagging question was clear and quiet in the back of his mind, and would not leave him alone. It crept into his hope and made him crazy with frustration and urgency to get home and talk to her. He had to know.

Finally, the drive was done. He checked the phone for messages and left a message for her that he had arrived and would like to talk as soon as she was ready. Then he got in the shower to freshen up in anticipation that he might see her today. After the shower, he checked e-mail on his computer, and there was her note.

It was a long note, and had been difficult for her to write. He knew this before he read the first word. As he began to read, he braced his heart for the worst, and it came. She had learned much about herself in the past year, and had begun to take good care of herself, learning how to be alone and comfortable with it for the first time ever. Then she had met him and he had utterly swept her off her feet. The whirlwind romance had been wonderful and powerful and idealistic beyond her dreams. But as time passed, she had begun to be swallowed up in it. She had begun to be smothered under the onslaught of his affection and nurture and care. She began to feel that her newfound self would be lost in him, and that was not a price she could pay. She had begun to relish the times when he was gone, and to arrange ways and reasons to be apart. Finally, as the opportunity to move to Colorado materialized, she made the choice to leave him to protect the precious self she had found.

As he read her letter, he grew numb. Here was the only attack against which he could not defend their love. He stood up and wandered aimlessly around the house for a few minutes, blank disbelief and horror mingled and tearing at his heart. Then, in a rush like none he had ever experienced in his entire life, grief and sorrow and loneliness and pain and rage rushed up and swept over him. He let it come unhindered, giving his voice and his lungs and every ounce of his being to it. For the rest of the day, the force of it was unabated. He had moments of relative calm, but the intensity of the waves of emotion that he was experiencing was so great that his arms and legs grew numb and cold as his energy was channelled so furiously away from his extremities and into this hurricane.

Whenever it seemed that he must stop to rest, another memory would well up and take him on to the next tidal wave of despair or pain or anger or compassion. Eventually he was able to call a trusted friend who knew his heart well. She came and spent the rest of the day with him, hearing his story, holding space around him for his broken heart to flounder in safely, and reassuring him that his body and heart would not be undone by the wrenching intensity of what he must endure.

He was exhausted from the ravages of finding himself deeply and utterly alone, and for the first time in two nights, he slept deeply. With morning came a relative calm. The storm of emotions was by no means over, but the fury of it was a little less intense. Now he could reflect a little in the moments between the waves. Now he could begin to examine what he was experiencing, and fill in a little with understanding.

He went to the Gavilan Cafe, and told Sandy and Mary Ann about the loss of his sweetheart, whom both had met, and they read his heartache and cared for him as well as they could over his breakfast. It was good to eat, and he was sure it would help to restore some of the weight he had lost since Sunday. Now it was Wednesday and he had only eaten twice. He went from the cafe to look at his bees, but the rain came hard and cold, and he could not open hives.

The day wore on into restlessness and urgency to find relief. Nothing helped. Distractions were only reminders, and activities were powerless to relieve. Loneliness and loss were his companions. They fed on everything he did. They walked in all his shadows. And even in the moments when a distraction seemed promising, he would turn away from it, knowing deeply that nothing must be allowed to interfere with his quest to heal this thing. He must continue on and face every moment as it came.

hope

On Sunday evening he had planned to go to see her. She called instead, and told him that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had opened up for her to move back to Colorado and take the dream job she had always wanted. It would put her close to her kids, and get her out of the hard, dangerous business of horse training. She would take Reggie, her Arabian, with her. He couldn’t bring himself to grasp the impact of her words at first.

She had come to California to follow her dream three years ago, and to find year-round good weather to train horses. She had found good weather, and fragments of the dream, but she had unexpectedly found him too. In seven short weeks, they had explored a continent of joys and treasures together. He had opened up a world of love and tenderness and acceptance and passion for her that she had never known, and his attention and care had awakened the strength to choose this move. It was the first thing she had ever done entirely for herself. She had never believed in herself enough before. But he had believed in her with such energy and passion that she had found strength and clarity to choose herself and her life, in fact, her survival, for the first time ever. Ironically, the choice must separate them.

Now she was leaving, and could see no way to keep their relationship moving forward. She had agonized for over a week before she spoke to him, trying to come up with a solution. He could not leave his kids, with three years of high school left between them, and she must not pass this opportunity by. All she could see to do was to carefully pack their tender sweet love in a safe secret place and carry it with her. She must let him go. He must let her go.

As her words began to sink in, he was overwhelmed with grief and rage and deep longing. Now, for the third time, he had loved, and for the third time, his beloved had chosen a path away from him. She seemed utterly resolved to the path she must follow, and she had somehow decided that she could encapsulate the past seven weeks in a memory that would fulfill her need for love forever.

She spoke of this to him now:

“What we have together is perfect. It will always be there in our hearts, wherever we go, whatever we do. Nothing can change that or take it away. I will always love you, and will keep you with me. But I have to seal this off and hide it away to find the strength to go and do what is in my heart.”

He could not bring himself to accept the idea that they must sever their ongoing relationship to preserve their hearts and their love across the miles. They talked for hours that night, and wept into their phones, and argued and questioned and agonized still. Eventually, their hearts were weary and their words were exhausted, and they resolved to take a couple of days apart to let their minds and hearts settle around the implications and possibilities. She had entered the conversation with the resolve that no options were possible—that she must ride Reggie off into the sunset with her remembered love, never to open her heart to new love again. He had bucked hard against that notion and without knowing exactly how, was equally resolved to find a way, yet overwhelmed with a sense of doom and dread, knowing that she too must share his determination if it were to succeed.

He did not sleep that night, and was overwhelmed with waves of grief and anger. He wrote her a long e-mail note expressing his heart and his hope and his frustration. He told her what she meant to him and how he had begun to sense her troubled heart during the previous week. He told her that he could not bring himself to give up on their future. He told her how important hope had always been to him, and how it would not let him settle for a wonderful past, however good it had been.

He sent the note early Monday morning, and called his sister. She had been a trusted and valuable friend to him through all the trials and difficulties and transformations of the past few years, and she would help him clear his mind and heart. She invited him to come to see her in Visalia for a day or two. It was only a couple or three hours drive from Gilroy, and he knew it would help. He made a few phone calls to clear his schedule, threw a few things into a bag, and drove off to seek his path.

As always, driving cleared his head and settled his thoughts. He was a captive to the miles and the destination, and could do nothing but drive and think and feel. Parts of his brain that were dormant at other times seemed to awaken and surge into action whenever he drove. He could find no music in his collection that suited his mood, so he made the drive mostly in silence, trusting the rhyme of the road to settle his heart. It was the stuff that insight was made of. Driving was a treasured secret in the transforming of his life, and he knew that by the time he arrived in Visalia, something would come clear for him, and it did.

For seven years, he had held onto a poorly founded hope that his endurance and persistence could restore his marriage. He had weathered the raging storms, the lonely heartbreak, the hiding and lying to hold onto the pretense of the marriage, for the sake of the kids and for the hope itself. He had hoped without a shred of evidence that his hope could be fulfilled. He had loved and held on in the face of persistent unabated discouragement until finally he had laid the hope down to move on into honesty and wholeness.

For yet another year, he had held on to a passionate hope that his friendship with the moon’s little sister would blossom into romance. It didn’t, and her persistent, consistent determination to stay friends and be present with him had finally settled that hope and let him go.

In both of these cases, the foundation of his hope had been flawed and rooted in a love that was not shared. But now, he found hope springing up from a clear base of love shared. He was sure of her love. He was clear about her desire to have him in her heart, and her resolve to keep him there in spite of their impending separation. If a hope with no solid foundation had given him the strength to endure the hell of isolation and loneliness in his broken marriage for seven years, what could his hope endure now, with love shared and burning bright. Suddenly it was clear to him that he must fight for this love. He had felt that he was helpless to stop its crash against the inevitability of giving his beloved free rein to follow her calling. He had felt helpless to sustain love’s progress because she had seen her move, and her resignation as such an insurmountable and inevitable thing. She had seen the only possibility in treasuring their past and blocking out hope of a future for their love except in memory.

But she had not known him long enough to really know the fierce intensity and dogged determination that fueled hope in his heart. She had not seen the years of hopeless hope he had endured before. She had no way to know in these seven short weeks, how persistent and intense his loyalty and determination and commitment in hope had always been. She had no way to know how much more fuel their love had fed to his hope than his past loves had been able to. But he knew. He was intimately familiar with hope. He knew what force and energy it could propel with such a love at its core. He would not give up. He would fight for a love like this until his dying breath.

Now it became clear to him that this hope was different from the others. Before, he had loved and hoped doggedly for one who had not shared his love. Now, she was fully present in that love, and even though she could see no way to go on, he had reason and passion and clarity to push forward and drive his hope to reality. He would instill that hope in her as well. He would teach her to use her hope to push on and to achieve all of her dreams rather than pruning and trimming them to achieve only the most urgent parts. He would never let her give up this part of her dream any more than he could deny her the dream that was taking her away.

They would find a way to love across the miles. In time, they would find a way to reunite.

This clarity and insight and passion grew and solidified and gained legs to run. By the next morning, he had talked it through with his sister and worked it through in his heart, and there was nothing left to do but go back home and share it with the woman whom he loved. He did not yet know how the details of their ongoing relationship would play out. He did not know how she would respond to his new-found clarity and resolve. But he did know that he would not turn aside from loving her. He would not leave it locked in a box in his heart. He would love her fully and openly and actively to the ends of the earth. He would boil oceans. He would not give up.

And so, he packed his bag into the Honda and headed back home, eager to see what insights this drive would bring, and ready to face the challenges that lay ahead.

the tall people

Since the eighth grade, he had been on the shorter side of average. At five and a half feet, he was taller than some, but shorter than most of his male peers. As he grew older, he found that he was shorter than a growing number of women too. He had married a woman who was two inches taller than him. The moon’s sister was taller than him as well. Being mature and wise and very conscious of the immutable reality of his situation, he had never allowed himself to acknowledge just how much he wished he was taller, until one day the moon’s sister had pointed out to him that he was too short to be a good match for her romantically. It was a devastating blow. He had rallied his maturity and dignity against this simple, unavoidable fact all his life. But now it was out in the open—he was too short.

At some nearly conscious level, his shortness had always bothered him. He had known tall people who seemed to find their own sense of superiority in telling stories in which their tallness proved them better in one way or another than some hapless soul who, of course, was much shorter than them. These tall people seemed pathetic, and yet their stories secretly infuriated him, not just because they were so petty, but because in some dark corner of his heart, he believed them.

But when he met this woman, this earthy friend of horses, something changed. He was no longer short. He was perfect. He was taller than her by nearly six inches, and she never tired of marveling at what a “nice fit” he was for her. As weeks passed, he began to relax into the fit. He began to see himself differently. One day, he walked into a gas station to put money down to activate a pump. Standing in line in front of him was a man who was so tall that he nearly had to duck through the door of the gas station. As he stood beside the giant, he suddenly realized that he was not intimidated by his tallness. Standing next to this big guy, he felt entirely at ease. Tall was simply a novelty. As he became aware of this, he realized how very different it was from the way he had always felt before. Always, he had felt a twinge of inadequacy in the presence of tall people. He had never admitted it to himself, but it was true nonetheless. He had always imposed his standard of maturity on this irrational intimidation, shoving it back into some dark corner where it could not embarrass or harm. It was so unchangeable and childish. What good could come from dwelling on it? But now, the intimidation was gone. He was all right. This man’s tallness was not daunting at all.

As quickly as he recognized the shift in his perception toward his own height and the height of others, he also recognized the remarkable work that she had done in healing his heart of this thing. He was a good size—perfect for her—perfect for himself. For the first time in his life, he felt as though he was the right size. It was a revelation. It broke through distortions he had believed throughout his entire life. He was surprised at what a lightness this brought to him. Little had he understood the perverse weight of his unspoken obsession with height. It seemed silly to him now. Where had it come from? What had fed it? Why had he never seen through it before?

candlelight

In the distant dusky dim 

Of one bright strong candle 

Dancing from across the room, 

He looked into her face. 

Her delicate features varied 

With each blink 

and shift of his soft gaze. 

Now she was one, 

Now another, 

New with each moment, 

always and never changing. 

In the distant dusky dim 

Of one bright strong candle, 

Every woman was there, 

All of woman was there, 

And always, it was her 

—his muse. 

They had been close since they met, and quickly their comfortable, knowing familiarity grew into love. They had spent a month and a half exploring the intricacies and delicacies of the bond that had seemed to bloom full and ripe at their first meeting. That evening, as they sat and talked, it had seemed to both of them as though they had been friends and lovers for many years. It was like no experience either of them had ever had before, and it had launched a whirlwind romance that took them both, as well as all their friends, by surprise.

Now things began to calm a bit, everyone settling into the reality of this wonder of romance that had so unexpectedly sprung up full-blown and magical. It appeared to be much more than the whirlwind fling that some of their friends expected.

Tonight was a quiet night spent at home. He had cooked and rubbed her feet by the fire, and the evening had settled into dim light and soft words and quiet thoughts of pleasure and tenderness. He was very close to her now—a little too close for his middle-aged eyes to focus well, and the light was dim and soft and wavering. One candle flickered gently from across the room, and cast a remarkable mystery across her features. For a fleeting moment, he did not recognize her. Then the soft light shifted almost imperceptibly, and her features danced softly with it.

As he watched, she became and became and became again. For as long as he watched her there in the candlelight, her features seemed to shift and transform her being with the changing. He was in the presence of a most remarkable blessing. His muse was revealed plainly before his eyes. He had seen this vision several times before during the past month with her, but it had been transient and fleeting before—a mere flicker of the changeling panorama of feminine mystery and beauty that unfolded before him now.

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.

trojan horse

he came, a child,

not quite innocent,

and left, no more a man.

monstrous—dark heart.

war dog. hound of hell.

suffering sorrows,

anguished agony, 

scorched death—his own

not allowed

but inflicted.

he would carry it long

and live its agony

in dumpsters and shadowed doorways

stinking with old beer and piss,

and nights of terror 

and hollow black emptiness.

shattered.

lost.

The year he was 18, his draft lottery number was 7. If he had been 19 that year he would have been drafted into the Viet Nam War in January. It was a wakeup call.

He was a gentle soul from a family of gentle souls. No one ever argued in his family. It was not spiritual or mature to fight, and his parents did not tolerate it. He had assimilated the calm and gentleness of his family into his being from an early age, and the very possibility of combat duty in the most horrific and publicly examined war of his time was more terrifying than any possibility he could fathom.   

The next year, his lottery number was 137. Estimates were that the draft would roll around to his number sometime in the early Fall. But a miracle happened. The Nixon administration began to pull troops out of Viet Nam, and within the year, extricated the United States from the conflict entirely. Regardless of whatever stains may have darkened the record of Richard Nixon’s presidency, he always would love the man for this act of sanity that had been so illusive to his predecessors in both parties. The draft never reached his number that year.

But having escaped the draft, he still could not escape the specter of Viet Nam. Many of his friends had gone. The luckiest ones seemed to be the ones who came back in coffins. America spent the rest of his generation wrestling with the horror that little war unleashed on her children. He often wondered why he had been spared. He was truly certain that to go would have utterly destroyed him, and suspected providence. But why had providence smiled on him but not on so many others he knew? He could not feel guilt for being spared, but was uneasy with it anyway. It lurked in his heart unchallenged and unhealed for almost 30 years.

After a few years, movies about Viet Nam began to surface. He never went to see any of them. The chaotic senselessness of the war still disturbed him too much. There was something in it that he could not identify—something that tore him apart inside even though he had not personally experienced the war first hand.

As the years passed, he never examined this overpowering aversion and terror. It seemed to crop up whenever he heard explicit accounts of violent, horrible abuse of groups or individuals at the hands of others. Holocaust stories and genocide and serial killings all seemed to stir the same dark brooding aversion. He avoided movies that depicted such events, and consciously practiced diversion from thinking about such things. He had always taken a measure of comfort in how repulsive such things were to him. It seemed to anchor his goodness and moral strength.

One day he made an emphatic comment to the Moon’s little sister about never watching Viet Nam movies. Her eyes lit up—his aversion was too strong. There must be some dark thing beneath it that she could explore.  

She prodded him to explain it and for weeks they discussed it. Then one day, it came clear to them both. The problem of Viet Nam was not that violence had been done. There were accounts of violence every day in the news. There were instances of violence everywhere in the entertainment media. These were deplorable to him, but most of them didn’t evoke anything of the revulsion that they were examining now. 

The problem of Viet Nam was that it forced America’s sons to confront their darkest, most horrifying potential for inhumanity, and then it abandoned them to the hell that boiled up from their hearts. Viet Nam moved and tore him so deeply because he knew that the monsters forced to the surface so violently and out of time for the veterans who had gone there were no less present in his own heart and in the hearts of human beings everywhere. Viet Nam had been a window into the dark shadows that lurk deep and unmolested in all of us. He had read essays to this effect over the years, and had intellectually assented to their theses. But this was different. Those essays had not touched the shadow in his own heart. They had been ideas to him. This was his own shadow. 

Now he saw that his aversion to deeds of inhumane evil was not so much an indication of his own moral strength but rather a deep dread of his own capacity to move in such dark places himself. What would it take to push a gentle, peaceful man like him into an unthinkable act? He knew that the world he lived in was capable of such a push. The things that were so repulsive to him were examples of just such a push—examples of people much like him who found themselves in circumstances that left no moral high ground; no clean way out. Or people who had been pushed over the edge into pain that deadened their hearts to their own humanity.  

The fact that his life had not pushed him so far was little comfort. He was clearly aware for the first time in his life that the darkest, most diabolical evil he could imagine was within his capacity. He had after all, been the one who imagined it. And he began to see how his upbringing had loaded the shadow with moral urgency. It had not just been good to be calm and peaceful and full of gentleness in his family—it had been mandatory. The struggle to overcome evil had depended on it. He had carried the banner. He had fought the good fight. And yet he had always been beset with this nagging undefined horror within. He was a Trojan Horse, and so, could never risk a moment to rest.

 He began to grow a deepening sense that he must come face to face with this black potential and learn from it. This would be the only hope to overcome its terror. Only by knowing it well, measuring its reach, testing its energy, could he trust his ability to live with it in balance and peace. This was perhaps, the greatest challenge he had encountered thus far in his life. It entailed walking into utter darkness to encounter monsters made of shadow. He must feel his way along, and trust his heart in darkness as well as he had learned to trust it in light.

the center point of love

For over a month he did not write. A tiny wisp of white cloud had been drifting quietly, far off on the horizon of his heart for many months, and now suddenly it began to grow and spread and darken across the expanse of his sky. There was fear and danger and foreboding in it. The cloud spread rapidly and grew black with a reddish churning intensity and fury. It blotted out the late summer Sun. It hung low and heavy with pain and torment welling up in its breast. It was the raging storm of lost love, and he knew it had come for him now. He knew it would not be denied. He knew he could not hide, or run, or argue or trick it out of the prize it had come to claim.

For as long as he had known her, he had loved her. For nearly as long, he had known that she loved him too. But with all this knowing, there had always been a distinct difference in the nature of their feelings toward each other. They had danced around the awkwardness of it. They both cherished the connection they had, and were not willing to harm it. But always, the little cloud lingered on the horizon. Occasionally it drifted across the Sun, dropping the temperature perceptibly.

Now suddenly the cloud had a life of its own. He was aware that he must answer to the dark thing, and now was the appointed time. He knew that the love he had envisioned and nurtured toward the Moon’s little sister was not to be fulfilled. At first, his heart caved in under the stifling force of this bleak oppression. How could he live without the hope of their love? What substitute could he ever hope to find that could rival the power and beauty and joy and sweetness they shared? He was utterly undone, and spent days lost in despair.

But as usual, she remained clear since it was not her heart that was breaking. She knew the strength and nature of her love for him, and was steadfast, though not certain that he would be able to continue their sweet friendship in the face of his horrid, heart wrenching loss. He had hoped for romance to flower between them. She had never been moved clearly in this direction, and to his bitter comfort, had not pretended for his benefit.

Now, after nine months of deep, close intimacy, he came face to face with reality. What they had shared had not stirred romantic passion in her heart, and it was not reasonable to expect that anything further that could happen between them would do so. She was the trusted friend of his deepest heart, but would never be his lover.

The thick smothering sorrow and heart wrenching loss of this fact settled over his world on Friday afternoon. It was more than he could bear. He agonized and thrashed his way through a long sleepless night and into the empty lifeless light of a crisp clear Saturday morning. They talked that Saturday. It was torture for him, but in spite of his agony, he could not turn his back and sulk away. He must engage his sorrow. He must not allow it to swallow up their friendship. As always, she seemed strong and clear and able to weather his storm.

As Saturday wore on into Sunday, he began to embrace the feelings of sadness and longing and fear and anger that washed over him in wave after wave after wave of unrelenting anguish. He found that as he opened himself fully to the feelings—as he devoted his entire force of being to them—they were transformed from oppression and constriction into open expansive energy. There was a miracle in the works. There was a transformation taking over his heart that he could never have dreamed possible out of such bitter, crushing sorrow.

As Sunday wore on into afternoon, he began to realize that he had never embraced his grief for any relationship loss he had ever experienced. He had always doggedly pushed back against the feelings for weeks and months and even years, until the pain eventually gave up the bruising battle against time. But this time was different, and he was discovering a new sweetness and power in these wrenching hard miseries. First, he turned his attention to his divorce, and then to the loves he had known and lost long ago in his youth. He let waves of heartache swell up out of each of these broken dreams. And as they flooded up from forgotten places, he embraced each of their sorrows with tender enthusiasm.

Anguish was transformed. Now he began to wash and drift in a rising flood of joy and peace and acceptance. The hurt and sorrow and brokenness of four lost loves welled up and flooded his heart before sunset. Feelings of sorrow and grief from each of them had risen to the surface, and all were still present with intense depth and richness in his heart. He had embraced them one by one. He had received them passionately and with tenderness. Now, they could not harm him. Now, these horrible monster feelings that he had run so desperately away from throughout his whole life were becoming his most cherished prizes.

He spoke to her again. Now, his sense of loss and longing were tempered and sweet. There was a strength in him that he had not known before. He still loved her just as he always had. But he had found the center point of his love. It did not rest in her, as he had always assumed that it did. It was somewhere deep down inside his own heart. He had discovered his own joy. He had discovered his own capacity to live and love and embrace even the darkest experiences of loss and rejection and loneliness. Now he could love her without concern for her response—regardless of whether or not romance ever bloomed. Now he could hold the full body of that love in his heart and move on, strong and sure in his own balance and rest. Now, for the first time in his life, He drew love from deep within himself rather than tapping into the heart of another. The transformation could not be expressed in words. The field of energy and peace and comfort emanating from within him was new and uncharted. Sorrow and longing were still present. In fact, they were magnified in this new life bubbling up within him, but they were strangely comfortable and welcome. Love had found its core.

He did not know what tomorrow would bring. He knew that his friendship with the little sister of the Moon would endure and thrive outside the quest for romance. He knew that she had been the catalyst for the most powerful experience of his life thus far. He had found that all his past loves still lived within him waiting for this transformation. And so, he knew that she too would always hold her sacred place in his heart He also knew that he was still eager to reach out to share his love. He would enter into love with a clear, strong, open heart, as he had never done before in his life. Now he would focus for a time on nurturing and cultivating that strength and clarity and openness as he ventured out into his big wide new world.