Love’s Boot Camp

This blog is in reply to this one.

You are in solitude for 11 years, drinking and redrinking the poison that nourished you when you were male – the poison of putting sex before love, mind before body, thought before feeling, numbness before pain. In solitude, you become a woman who patterns herself after the divine feminine; after the matter that holds that which never dies. As such, you need pure polyamorous love to become yourself, yet, when you were male this love was so alien that your femaleness has no structures for receiving it.

When you were male, society taught you to date, fuck and marry – replacing your mother with your partner, so that you and she may take your parents’ place; forfeiting your right to your own life to your parental and spousal responsibilities, to someday join your ancestors in the grave. Now, that you are female, polyamorous and alone, you are in limbo. Dating, fucking and marriage are nothing more than a coffin to you.

Thank goodness for the Internet. A woman reads your blog and contacts you because she likes it. Over the next months you & she fall in love. It is a dream-love that carries a perfection that boldly announces itself as beyond understanding. It tells you that you are to Heaven as your dream-lover is to Earth.

You leave solitude to stay with her – for how long you don’t know. You share a lot and work hard. You call this time together “boot camp.” Military images reflect this in your dreams.

During the first weeks, patterns of the male-identified person you were in previous relationships fall away. You rest in the darkness between you instead of resisting the demons the darkness may produce.

You each learn to be parent & child to the other – quite consciously navigating roles most people are unaware they are re-enacting. Your lover says that there is a realer way of being than this; a way of being in which the instinct of the child & the wisdom of the adult are integrated into a more complete form of being.
You learn to be quiet and peaceful in your lover’s presence; nurturing a kind of solitude within your companionship. Your lover says this is, “really really really really really really really really really really really important.”

Your lover says that it is not good to melt too much into the comfort of being lovers; that there need to be boundaries.

You draw closer and closer. Your male resistance to the feminine dissolves into intimacy. You never thought you would ever again feel so close to a partner. It is a closeness that was sacred to your male self. He did not understand that this closeness loses its sacredness when lovers sacrifice spiritual self-interest to it – when they are committed to each other more than to their own selves.

One night you go to sleep beside her ensconced in amorous bliss and the next morning she awakes from a dream in tears – in the solitude of her grief; grief she has been processing heroically since her mom’s passing 9 months prior; grief elemental to her being, that creates a path through which the Earth herself mourns through her. Through her, the Earth mourns the life her people have not learned to live – the life that finds no fertile soil, that is squandered, wasted and raped; that is traded for romance and children. Your lover will not trade this life for your love, nor anything else.

Animated with this life - the life of the Earth - she burns with a passion no one who is less self-aware than the Earth is of herself may touch, or even glimpse.
For days, you have been overhearing mention of “fire,” and now your lover is burning with life no commitment ring may contain. She is glaring at you with eyes that say, “Stay the fuck away.” Mercifully, she takes leave of you, driving into Nature, which receives her as a lover more true and ultimate than any human being.

You honor your lover’s process like you honor the Earth, and God – but you do not know how to stay clear of her fire when it is time to. Her fire burns you even when you are trying to give it the space it needs – and she acts like she cannot trust whether you are up to this task.

Her fire brings light to your deepest codependency issues; “Only if you are OK, am I OK…If you are OK and I am not, and your love cannot ease my pain, you will take it personally, as if I have done something wrong to you. And then you are not OK. When you are not OK, it is always because of me. When you are not OK, you are going to take it out on me by being short with me and giving me a cold shoulder - acting like I am cancer, genocide, rape, schizophrenia, heroin, the 20th centruy, and your sexually abusive parent wrapped into one - and you will do this until I am so miserable that I will submit to whatever you want. I will act and say whatever you want because you mother me, and I have no other mother.”

Only, everything is new now, because you are own mother, for whom there is no substitute. In honor of this awareness, you let your lover leave you for as long as she needs to; to serve the life within herself that she shares with the Great Mother. Without sharing the depths of the Great Mother’s sorrow, the heights of her joy are unreachable – and the river of eternal love must be dammed by the tick-tock of marriage and/or divorce or death.

Your lover gradually cools to a more relational place. Once the fallout has settled, you more clearly see the boundaries you need so that relationship does not to devolve into a disease that only drama may remedy.

Some lovers pretend the vows they make will conquer drama. No vow is up to this task. Your lover & yourself have a vow that serves drama well. It reads:

I trust myself.
I trust you.
I trust our love.
I trust our process.
And that is my Source.

You trust that neither you nor your lover will exchange the life you each share with the Earth for the comfort of the other’s bed – because you trust that Heaven & Earth will not allow it, since you serve them purely, and with awareness; and since you & she are not less than vessels of Heaven & Earth, amidst a process you trust, that is part of the eternal river neither of you may lose.