It’s Thursday evening. The windows are open and a warm summer breeze is drifting through my home. Natalie Imbruglia is warbling through my iPhone and I’m licking a bowl of mango-banana-coconut pudding whilst I contemplate my OkCupid matches.
I really love being a flirt. And I love new experiences. Hardly any people on here are grabbing my attention. Why is that?
I’m sending out a few messages, a few replies. It would be good to just go on some dates and meet new people, but I’m not holding my breath.
I realize that I’ve been in a bit of a depression recently. A lot has been on my mind, and as much as I don’t want to be procrasta-dating, maybe it is just what I need to lift my spirits a bit.
Last night I came home from a blissful day spent on the beach. I love the beach. I love nestling in the sand between forest and ocean and letting the sunshine kiss my skin. It was the perfect way to spend a summer’s day. But when I came home, I was hit with a weight of melancholia, and sadness.
I feel this huge wave of letting go happening in me, around me, to me.
I’ve moved into a new phase of physically letting go of things around me. I sold my blender to a friend, I have a colleague interested in my espresso machine. I went through my bookshelves and picked out the books that I absolutely want to keep- and it turns out I have a lot of books I don’t need. There’s a hefty stack of clothes and nick-knacks to bring to a clothing swap or donate. I’m following the inner urge to purge.
The letting go extends to emotional attachments.
I had myself a good cry last night. I’m not even sure where the tears came from. It felt good. I found myself thinking a lot about the emotional relationships I carry with me. The feelings I still have surrounding my marriage and my miscarriages. My frustrations with non-communicative exes. The agitation within when I think I am being left out of the loop on something beautiful and profound.
I broke down with this heavy longing overwhelming me, this longing to be met with unconditional love. To be witnessed in my pain and loved for the strength it gives me. To feel so much love in my life that the pain holding itself like ice around my heart melts away.
It’s interesting that it is in the moments when I am loneliest, when I feel my heart dripping out all around me, desperately calling for someone to pick me up and hold me, that I remember why I am here, why I am doing this.
I’ve forgotten that primary relationship with my Self.
Oh, I have talked about it, intellectualized it, but I have forgotten to actually do it. I thought it could run on auto-pilot, with minimal maintenance work. Apparently, not so simple.
I’m realizing how healthy it has been already to take some space from Orion. I’m seeing that one of the challenges in our relationship is that the closeness and kinship we feel as friends can actually distract us from the primary relationship we each want to have with ourselves. I mean- we get each other, in a way that few other people in either of our lives do. Without the recourse of going to him in search of someone who might understand what I’m experiencing, I’ve been engaging myself in a conversation of sorts. In the last few days, I have meditated more than in the past three months combined, and have been journaling a heck of a lot.
Some of the letting go has had to do with letting go of the attachment I have been feeling to my relationship with Orion. It is kind of scary to let go of holding on to something that has allowed you huge stability in your emotional life, but I know that, at a deeper level, letting go of the attachment to relationships is the healthiest and most liberating thing to do, and there are no healthy relationships for me when that desire to stay attached is greater than the love that wants freedom. Without the buffer of another being to cushion my emotional state, I have to come face to face with all the facets of who I am: the messy as well as the beautiful.
Did I fall into the old habit of looking for love on the outside? Yes, yes I did.
Am I going to spend more time nourishing the love I know exists within me? Yes, yes I am.
In a primary relationship with my Self, and making Love to the Universe.
