A New Day, A New Lease on Life

The funny thing about being organic is that our molecules are always rearranging themselves for a different mix, which often translates into a different mood... when we are not fixed on maintaining the mood we're in, it's amazing how quickly our outlook can shift... instant to instant.  I feel good this morning.  The sun is shining... yes, it's still spring out there.  My boy woke up crying, and my partner and I comforted him. He wouldn't tell us what was wrong, and we suspect he is upset that he wet the bed.  So much shame there.  I hates to admit it.  He prefers to say that he 'sweated'... a lot!  I suspect he feels ashamed because he is not in control of his body.  Because he knows that we don't want him to wet the bed.  We are gracious about it, but it's a mess we have to clean up so we always encourage him to pee before bed to avoid wetting it (our son drinks a lot of water).  "We don't want you to wet the bed" we say.  "I won't" he says.  He thinks he is in control.  And most nights he is.  So when he is not, he doensn't simply shrug his shoulders and say "oh, I guess I lost control of my body; I guess maybe I was really out of control when I though I could manage it."  

The same goes for me.  I don't wet my bed anymore.  But I also don't have control over my body.  It feels what it feels.  I can influence that by how I eat and exersize, and that is a marvelous insight and tool.  But when I'm clipping along feeling everything is under control, then wham!  Out of the blue I feel irritable, agitated or horny.  I can get pissy or cross or quiet.  It would be easy to feel shame about that, but I seek to keep it in perspective, to relax into it, to give myself a break.   Yesterday was a shitty day on one level. But it was also just another day.  

And today is a new day.  As I seek to practice every morning, I recount all the things I am grateful for.  My family, friends, partner.  She is an amazing woman, and if you happen to drop in on my blog and only read a post to two you might wonder why I am with her.  It is because she is such a good person, courageous and wise, tireless and self-sacrificing.  Everything that I am, she is as well - at least when it comes to strength of character.  We are a good match.   When I am frustrated with her, it is often because I want to feel closer to her, want to share about what's going on with me and not have her feel threatened by that.  

Everything in our lives we have manifested together.  We have spent half our lives together, and over the past 20 years we've etched our own patterns, and they can be difficult to break out of.  She is the reason we are in an open relationship.  If I weren't so crazy about her, we wouldn't be in any relationship at all,  But she is worth changing the way we do relationship.  She is why LoveTribe exists... my effort to remake the world in a way that supports our relationship...  to have a community that supports me in my sexuality and my partnership.  

Perhaps that is why we have chosen each other.  If I were with someone who had as much desire or cared to mollify her man (as I have heard some women remark), then these contributions to the world would not exist.  And of couse, I bear equal credit.. for not willing to simply lay down and die when my whole self cried out to be alive.  And so we have what we have created.  Fraught with frustration at times, our tenuous connection remains strong enough to hold us together because we have created patterns and community that support our desires to be alive and vital while also being with each other and continually learning how to make those two goals more mutually supportive.  

We live in different worlds

I feel powerless to help my friend.  I care about her so much, and she is suffering right now, but I live too far away to help.   It's only advice that she needs, and an ear, but we operate in such different context.  I don't know what to say!  I'm a pioneer exploring the new world of relationships, commitment, fidelity.  And while I can't really know for sure, my friend still lives in the old world of monogamy-oriented relationships... what I think of as the 'owner paradigm' of relationships.  She is wondering how my sweetie and I managed to stay together for 20 years with all the struggles she is now experiencing in her own relationship.  The truth is, we didn't.  We felt like one of the constraints that she takes for granted (monogamy) was simply too much of a handicap to put on a relationship we really wanted to survive.  My friends experiences are precisely why.  Yet, my sense of her is that she is fairly conservative (for a bisexual lesbian, anyway!).   Irony of ironies.  Some of the people Ive had the most difficult time sharing with are my gay friends.  Poly really is the 'new gay'.. more queer than queer.  Perhaps because there is no argument about whether monogamy is natural anymore...we all understand on some level that the truth is we are for the most part NOT wired to be monogamous.  Otherwise, it jsut wouldn't be an issue.  There would be no cheating.  No affairs.  No divorce.  It's a lifestyle choice reinforced by historical patterns and social myths about right and wrong.  And those of us who finally come to understand that are like fella in the Matrix who chose the pill that allowed him to see the true essense of things.  How do I talk to my friend who is still in the matrix?

Ah... Beautirul, Dreadful Spring.

Today was a perfectly dreadful day.  

It did not rank anywhere near my harshest of days, but it was harsh enough. It was an example of how at time my relationship seems like the quintessential Gordian Knot of torture and suffering.  

My partner does not want to hear anything about it. She knows I had a tough day. She could tell when I got home.  

What's up she asks.  

Just  a rough day, I say.  

Kids?  

No.  They're fine.  It was a good day for them.

What then?

It's just spring, I say.  

What does that mean, she wonders.  It makes no sense to her, and of course it would not.  For me, spring is the hardest and most wonderful time of year... the time when I feel most alive in my body and most dead because of my partnership... the time when I am most aware of myself as a vibrant sexual animal, frisky and playful and ready to get down, to get it on.  And the time when I am most aware of all the beautiful people around me who are not interested in me because I am already partnered.  

These are all things my partner has a hard time relating too.  She doesn't understand what its like to be in a man's body.  She hardly understands sexual desire from any perspective, but especially not from my point of view.  And she doesn't want to hear it.  To her, my desire is over the top, out of proportion to what is normal or healthy.  Which is crazy if you spend any amount of time exploring this issue at all, you'd find there is quite a range of natural desire.  We just happen to be at opposite ends of it.  And so we cannot understand each other at all.  As a scientist she get's me... about as well as she gets our little boy so enamoured of guns and fighting.  She understand that to reject his fascination with violence to to reject him on some level.  The same applies to me, and so she seeks to be accepting, but it feels like an extreem act of generosity.  As if her understanding is really more pitty.  Well excuse me for being alive.  It's not MY fault the Goddess made me this way.

And so I suffer quietly, but it is painful to me nonetheless.  I physically feel the tension in my body.  I feel agitated, anxious, penned in, pent up, trapped, wanting to run, like I MUST get out, and yet I go nowhere.... My heart pounds harder, my children wonder why I seem agitated and I think how I must be crazy to have stayed in my partnership so long.    I marvelled at how powerful my intellect and will must be that I have done so.  Once again, just like last spring, I wonder if I can make it another year.  No wonder Beltane and Carnival were invented!  I feel all coiled up like a snake ready to explode.  And I keep it to myself.  

For my partner has her own suffering to deal with.  And here is where our Gordian knot comes in.  I know that she does but sometimes I understand her about as well as she understands me.  And when I seek to give her space to be whole, I tend to give her that which I need most for my own happiness... space apart, time to connect with others, freedom.  While she often wants just the opposite... time together, to connect with me.  This afternoon, all I wanted to do was run as far away as I could.  Truth is I'd love to share these feelings with her, but she hates to hear it because for her it feels like I don't want to be with her... and understandably so.  She gets that I'm turned on by other people.  What doesn't sink in so good is that I've been this way for 20 years and am still with her.  If that doesn't demonstate a desire on some level to be with her, I don't know what does!  

Anyway, here's to Spring... that most wonderful and dreaded of seasons.

Tonglin is Tough

I'm feeling sad right now.  My heart aches and I pine for a friend whom I would love to be more intimate with. But that is not where she is at.  I so want to reach out to my friend, yet I also understand that grasping in any form only pushes her away.  She has pulled back so much already for reasons I can only guess at, and the loss of her friendly banter feels like an open wound in my heart.   I  am tempted to run away from these feelings, to distract myself with work or sex.  I tell myself I am seeking to honor her, but I wonder if perhaps she simply wants someone who will pursue her more strongly.  What a difficult dance is love as engagement and detachment!   I do not know how to do it, other than through transparency, revealing who I am as authentically as I can.  I have sought to continue to be open to engaging playfully with life, to seeing other people, mostly to assure her I respect her choices, but I so want to grab her and shake her and tell her how awesome she is and how much I adore her and want to spend time with her.  

Rather than run away from my feelings, I seek to stay present with them.  I sit with them and feel them more deeply.  And then I imagine my friend and how she must sometimes feel this way too.  And my partner. And other friends.  And even people I do not know.  This is a budhist practice called Tonglin, meant to develop compassion and grace.  And it is tough.  I feel like crying.  I feel like running away.  I feel like running to her and saying "will you play with me."  I feel like a child that wants to be friends but doesn't know how to engage the other children and doesn't want to be rejected.  As adults, we say "children are cruel," but I don't believe that.I suppose as they get older than can be, but young children are mostly simply authentic... they'll say whatever is true for them, and I greatly admire that.  Even when it hurts.  

Here I am a grown man, successful in so many ways, chief of my fiefdom and supremely confident in my abilities and place in the world, yet feeling like a child around this woman.  How can that be!  And what is worse, I think to myself, how could that ever be attractive to her! That I do not engage her with machismo and sweep her off her feet.  To show her my uncertainty feels vulnerable.  The truth is I am not uncertain about her at all.  In caring about her, I am uncertain how best to be her friend...  My mind just flashed to Peter Parker, the alter-ego of Spiderman.  My son loves Spiderman, or I might not have thought of him. He is in love with his friend Mary Jane.  At first she is oblivious to it, and later he hides his love to protect her.  I feel like that is what I am doing.  Hiding my love to protect my friend from it, from the passion I feel for her that she seemingly does not want.  Yet I cannot help but feel how I feel.  

I have sought to put myself in her shoes, to imagine how she may be feeling so that it is easier to give her space.   I know what it is like to have women want me who I am not drawn to,  often dispite how beautiful they are!  If I'm not feeling it, I'm not feeling it.  And the same goes for her about me.  If she's not feeling it, she's not feeling it.  (Dispite how beautiful I am!)  While I have not truly felt like it, I have even gone out with other people as a practice of staying open to the abundant vitality of life, and as a way to assure my friend (and myself) that I am honoring her desire to simply be friends.  Yet even my body rebels in the end, won't cooperate in being fully intimate and engaged with others, stays true to its desire to engage only her.   Just last night I wrote her a note assuring her that I want to and can quell and redirect my energy around her, and I DO want to; at least I want to want to... because I absolutely do want to be her friend first and foremost.  But this morning, I felt my longing so strongly.  Perhaps because it is morning and so I am closest to my dreams!  By tonight I shall be toughened... stoic... non-threatening... gelded... mute... safe.  

And so here I sit, connecting with my heart, engaging Tonglin, creating compassion for myself, for her and for the world.  And my heart hurts.... it just wants to jump up and down like a puppy! To push her over out of her shell and say WAKE UP you goof and look at this amazing creature before you that wants to PLAY with you!!!  What better things have you to do than engage your playful spirit with me!  Breathe... Relax into my breath.  Breathe into my heart.  Relax into my heart.  Breathe.  Return to Tonglin.  Relax into compassion.  Relax into my deepest love.