Practically speaking...

Daniel,

It's very, very early in the morning. I've just awakened from sleep with thoughts roiling through my head, and as I lay there I contemplated whether or not I should get up and write them down, or be "practical", considering the mountain of work I have to do later on TODAY, and just wait to fall back asleep.

I'm struck with how easy it is to call this conversation a dialogue between my left and right brains - my practical and impractical sides - and I'm also noticing how each one of the sides claims that IT'S the practical one.

There's the practicality of ignoring the impulse to write at the expense of body reconstruction and cellular repair; the practicality of minimizing the opportunity for *rogue thoughts*, compelling images called up from the depths that might produce the impulse to go *above and beyond*, to cast some thought ahead that will get me into trouble again.

And then there's the practicality of responding to the impulse, and recognizing that there's hard won wisdom in seeing the capacity of my early-morning mind to ponder creatively through places that my practical parts would only slog through, immobilized in stiff boots on alkalai mud flats in a relentless September rain.

Practicality - TRUE practicality - wins, and I rise and turn on my computer.

My strength has always been my honesty and my forthrightness. I pray that I bring forth some of it here...

**********

You say you fear hurting women. My dear, any of us can say that same thing. Of course we all hate the thought of hurting one another. But we can't stop there, and successfully avoid hurt (for then we just have the pain of never having been deeply and meaningfully wounded, in the act of wounding, no less), and yet we certainly can't use any of that "logic" as a justification to then hurt one another, as if a little bit of hurt now is less mortifying or less damaging than a *lot* of hurt later on.

The logic falls off the boat here. We can't know the "later", much as we'd like to pretend we do. We only barely know the "now".

I think it's perfect that you want to hold me, that a part of you already desires me. How nice for us, and how LUCKY for us to have played this far and still be drawn into what we see. I like and cheer on that part of you very much. If I could, I would - I do! - kiss it in the shadows, when the other part of me isn't looking. I would - I do! - send it rose petals, and poems, and pictures. I would invite it into gardens and give it a place to play.

And when it says "Come walk with me," I would.

There's a part of me that thinks that *that* part of you is VERY right, very smart, very much hooked up to the deep flow of life in all its mystery, and I feel very safe with a man who's so hooked up to the ALL. You've touched the woman place in me that wants nothing more to respond - not everyone can do that (in fact, very few of the billions of fellows on the planet manage that one, and that's as it should be...)

You know, I don't want - nor do I think it's possible - to be safe from hurt, nor pain. And yet, I also think there's no greater pain than to feel a man turn away from the wellspring of joy and peace inside. That's a huge part of our story today, on a global scale, and it plays out in the tiny micro-cosmos of one another, too.

I also know that all of us turn away from that spring, at one time or another, if only to learn anew what it is again by having it fade, and then glimmer in memory - wink out - and be rekindled again.

We take the chance, when we walk away, that it won't be rekindled and, in some ways, it is that part of us that walks away that shows the greatest faith of all. It's that part of you that I really honor, Dan - that one that says "All, or nothing at all."

I think there's no greater joy than to be allowed to be part of that spring when it finally comes back into view - damp at first, and just a scent, and then a very slow, very deliberate, completely inevitable return of the green...

********

I understand a lot of what you say when you talk of

> My right brain is screaming at me > in nets of absurd synchronicity > that I LOVE YOU > because my right-brain loves your right-brain > because of all these THINGS > that are just SCREAMING all these THINGS. > Like psychic PENETRATION and cyclical rhythmic harmonization > and God knows whatever other > intuitive wholistic mystical nebulous THINGS > that entice like sirens > and draw onto rocks that smash and crash and grind and destroy > and divert. > But I can't. > I have to stay focused.

I - the right-brain you would call this part of me - am very clever with myself, with my own highly focused Watcher Within, and I'm wily - subtle and sly, you called me. I am.

I worship the Connection. In my own small way, I'm a Warrior for the Eternal Divine and I champion the purpose of merging, emergence, whenever I can figure out how to do so. I capture territory thorough penetration and cyclical rhythmic harmonization and God knows whatever else comes to hand to shake some sense - the Sense of the Sensoria - into this place that hears sirens instead of the music of the spheres...

Arian and strategic, I deftly wield my little knife with its "points of no return", those sharply defined moments like "send" in the e-mail program or the swinging closed of the mailbox door, to demarcate the end of the territory that my bold and impulsive, hungry-hearted self has to control just long enough to wrest her way from that practical school-marm side of me.

There's an agreement here - Rules of Engagement - for both sides of me know that, accumulated over time, these many points of no return can eventually, with luck and a good compass, become the place that can be called "too far" - and suddenly we've gone too far, past the point of no return, and sometimes - if we're VERY lucky - it's just far enough to actually get us somewhere different.

This other "I", this focused "I" - the left brained, school marm side that saves me from the sirens, too - is also a truly wise side whom I do not begrudge, the one that *does* balance the energetic accounting of the heart and, over this last many decades, has (also, like yourself) found the math of my impulsive wilder nature somewhat wanting in tangible return.

She's not just cold, nor merely "rational". She understands investment, and how to plant and tend and grow. And she's not a tyrant - she's actually swayed (sometimes, and sometimes wrongly, in the sense that the sway leads to pain) by the arguments of her impetuous counterpart because she also sees that her own approach is imperfectly fraught with peril.

There's no guarantee that her trajectory of practical safety will net what *she* desires either, for look at her today: many years invested in a business that sent millions of dollars through her hands, yet nothing really stayed (I'll be lucky to walk away "even", with a belly of experience and a few months' rent) and she's leaving "early", after 13 years, as the upswing for this business begins again - she's leaving early, for these others to pick up the profit as the wind begins to fill these sails again - and why?

Because she's exhausted. Because without the energy of cooperative partnership she is wise enough to realize she doesn't have the strength to keep it up. She knows you can't gut it out on sheer will power forever. She knows that love MUST inform every act - practical or not - in order for it to endure. She knows that this business, like all the best work, is a labor of love, and that just punching the clock of it won't get it to shine.

She knows that she can't do any more any longer besides just punch the clock of it (and she's NEVER been able to just do that), as long as she muddles and slogs and pushes through the swamp alone, because finally - after the years that it took to wipe the road dust of the impractical mystic off her own shoes, and settle into the respectable normalcy of being "involved" and in step with the rest of a "normal community" - she came back around to that place of knowing that without love, without partnership, without the perfected completion of her heart in another, NONE OF IT IS WORTH IT.

So she's walking away for LOVE. There's no one that's specific, and she's scared to death, but she's been down the blind-alley of solitude and it can't get any more lonesome than it has been.

She gets it, Dan. I get it. I understand where you're coming from. I understand where I'm coming from.

And maybe all that this touching between you and I will come to is these few words to one another, here in this place that we've made. So let's make the most of sharing our wisdom, OK?

Sure we're a couple of hungry hearts. Our lovely gentle sides are easy prey for the (too critical - lighten up!) dictators within who are terrified at the trouble our sweeter selves may get us into. And isn't it even gloriously ironic and Oh So Convenient that each of them has company in a part of the other? And in the same persons, no less!

Our Reasonable Selves can plot away with all sorts of mechanisms to keep the untoward at bay (let's keep it mundane; take it outside, kids, into the Garden - the grown-ups have work to do) while our lovely light selves work magic spells with the animals, dream trysts and feed each other on songs and honey, and roam through the forests at will.

We could agree to have a working dichotomy that allows us to get through this next couple of months with our sanity intact. We both have work to do. I've got to finish my escrow and get ready to move. You've got to work on the next draft of the best thesis your professor has ever seen (I'm so tickled for you, and want to lend you clarity of insight and focus, because I know you're brilliant, and I know this is good work...)

Maybe what this cosmic rendezvous is all about is just getting through this next little bit, sort of together, cheering one another on through the slogging days and nights of it. Isn't it nicer to feel not alone?

Love always wins, Daniel. It may not be with *you* and *I*, this time around. Perhaps we'll wait for another roll of the Life Dice. Perhaps it's not quite our time, and perhaps there's nothing at all "meant to be", here, beyond what so plainly (and really, your practical side HAS to give into some of the realities here, at least to keep them active in the anomaly file, the big one that stays out on the desk...it's a crime to throw away good data - and good dates :-)) is a couple of very like minded people who could have a very nice time, for some unspecified period, if they'd just go with it for a while.

> But my left-brain is saying, > "hey". > It's saying I MUST BE INSANE and that I NEED TO GET A GRIP. > And this isn't for MY sake even, > but for YOURS > because I have never done anything I didn't WANT to do IN MY LIFE. > And I never will. > Somebody could get hurt.

Perhaps you're right. Perhaps this is exactly NOT meant to be. Perhaps that's why we're so far apart, locked behind bars of our own design, and so vulnerable to the wardens of rationality that can keep us in check with phrases like "you can't be seriously thinking this way about someone you met over the Internet", and "this is all in your mind". What easy prisons to shape from words.

> I am "weird" in the ANGLO-SAXON sense, not the vernacular sense: > a walking black hole that people cross the street to avoid.

Well, don't think you're not talking to a wyrrding woman, my friend. But THIS belongs face to face...

> love (right-brain) > disbelief (left-brain)

I can't say "love" yet, either. You're right. That will have to wait. It's ok for that to be a sacred word. It's ok for that to stand for ALL of you and ALL of I. I'd prefer it, really.

We're light beings here, and I suppose it's a given that we loved each other from the moment that we connected and fused into conversation.

I remember the first time I read one of your essays. It stood out for me hugely, in the archives of the EG list. I carefully copied each one out and put them in a file called "Daniel". Even then, in that moment, I felt an affinity for your eyes, and the heart that lived in them. I told myself I wanted to talk to you someday. I didn't begin to HOPE that I'd share words, much less words like this.

We are wise beyond our wildest dreams.

So, I'll look for signature closures that honor BOTH sides of me - the one that looks at your picture and reads your words and is transported to other places (the side of me that I PROMISE I will revere as the keeper of my lighter joyful heart, the side that I PROMISE I will not discount in my need to control the volume of pain that feels inevitably commensurate with the level of song that I hear inside) - as well as the side of me that is circumspect, cautious, skepitcal and cynical (oh, cruel words! there are better: patient, all-encompassing, caring, complete, broadly and deeply REAL, the one that I PROMISE I will not discount in my need to explore every canyon and abyss that opens in front of me...).

I'll find words like:

sincerely,

practically,

truly,

deeply,

lightly,

joyously,

miraculously (yes, I think both of us can say that - one more libation of acknowledgement for the Divine)

yours,

Cynthia

PS

> But if ripe fruit will fall at a touch, > then WHAT OF OVER-RIPE FRUIT?

Over-ripe fruit is a seed.

-- Anonymous, June 16, 2002

Answers

See I knew you were thinking the same things I was thinking. I just wanted to give them voice but then you returned more eloquently as usual. There is so much here I would respond to, point by point. But there is no time. The best poetry is made in the moment and never even written down. It's an offering to time and eternity. You had to be there. Like Burning the Man. Like a Grateful Dead concert.

Again we find ourselves atuned. Sly and subtle you are indeed as you find I desire you. We are like headlong balls of light rushing like locomotives to merge. But let it be with a whoosh not a crash. I've seen too many train-wrecks.

But DAMNED miraculous, I'd say.

You describe your brains well. One day in the midst of a reptilian ritual we may speak of the triune brain on its vertical axis instead of the bipolar brain on its horizontal axis.

Lets resolve to lie down on the playa crown to crown and see what flows between. (As if any more COULD). But that would be fun. The physical manifestation of (::) or 0::0 or |::| or \::/ or /::\ or ? Shave your head and bring the vaseline. ;>

-- Anonymous, June 16, 2002