This week two heart messages came. The first quote is attributed to Colette, whose book Break Of Day, written in her fifties as she took up residence on the Cote d'Azur after the break up of her second marriage, came to me in my early fifties, contemplating the end of my second marriage, as a revelation: I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.
I cannot find the origins of the quote, so I don't know if it is truly hers, or whether it was from fiction or one of her autobiographical tales, but it struck me as I read it as exactly the promise of my leap to a watery life with a watery man, which, like every promise, hosts both joy and fear. We know who we are, or at least who we think we are, but are we prepared to learn who we might be? And as I've pondered in previous posts, since we all have baggage, can we truly be born again with a new face and an untried heart? Would we want to? I'm not really sure I don't him to love me as I am right now, with my white hair and my aging body, my scars, visible and invisible, my seriousness, my packing always just a little more than I need. Just as I am, whatever that is, not despite of, but because. I suppose I want it all, an unconditional love that accepts what I am and what I could be. Now the question is, am I capable of the same?
The other quote comes from Thermae, a prose-poem by Matthea Harvey: He shivers, jumps in, starts swimming. When his fingers hit the pool-end he surfaces. His hair, brown and curly before, is sleek. Squint and he might be the figure whom he will describe at the start of his poem--Triton, man from the waist up, fish from the waist down, with a heart that can’t tell the difference.
When there is such a gap between two people - miles, times zones - you tend to live a double life, or at least I do. When he and I talk, I try to host that, and, since I can't always meet him where he is, we tend to blur into virtual realms, the only place we share right now, which is no-place at all. He has been re-acquainting himself with his watery nature, finding his place with Mother Ocean. He is living day and night, every breath, with the imaginal. I'm unraveling myself from the mundane details of my current life to join him. He is steeped in the unconscious; I am steeped in the conscious. And while soon we will be sharing space and time and place at last, for now all I can do is try to open to his journey as well as my own.
It was our joke the week I sailed with Bryan to sea how I would handle a life on the water, that he was becoming Triton. Triton is the son of Poseidon and his wife, Amphitrite. A merman, he raises and calms the seas when he blows his conch. He is also a messenger of the sea gods. Bryan was spending more and more time in the ocean, not just sailing her, but snorkeling and swimming. In true Pisces fashion, it was re-invigorating him all that time in his element. He was growing stronger, is growing stronger, and more and more himself. I am not sure I am doing the same, although it has always been hard for me to see myself truly. As would befit a Libra, a daughter of Venus, I need a mirror, a lover's eyes, to see myself. I need to be in relationship to learn my topography and map my changes.
So when I read this bit of poem I thought about my Triton and what it might mean not just to be half man and half fish, but to possess a heart that did not know the difference between them, accepting both, honoring both, being true to both. Frankly, it seems almost incomprehensible, living as a hybrid, accepting all of you as you. Of course it's what we all are, bits and pieces, welcome guests and frightening strangers, some of whom we accept, some of which we don't. Ego though helps us create and live in the illusion that we are something cohesive, one thing and one thing only. Ego encourages us to pass judgement on those parts we don't want to own, those bits of alien DNA or animal DNA that mixes with what makes us homo sapiens. For years we called it junk DNA, garbage, useless and only now are learning it has its place and is as much a part of us as what we choose to own.
Bryan is finding those fishy places in him, and we can joke about it and create fanciful tales, but he's finding his way to accepting himself unconditionally, living authentically. He's doing the work of therapy living liminally on and in the water, open to what he finds there, the 'good' and the 'bad.' He seems to be practicing active imagination as meditation, as life, working his dream as he's living it. Not everyone can do it; not everyone would want to. I find though, as I would, something wise and wonderful in his journey, and a possible healing of my own dual nature.
When I was young I labeled it father and mother, Puritan and Mediterranean, Massachusetts and Greece, civilized and elemental. One side conformed the other always sat at the edges mucking things up, a sort of guerilla warfare with my soul as the prize. Pacifica began my journey of reunification. The heart attack facilitated the process, a kind-of Camp David boot camp if you will, where live and die forced the two to find a way to get along at long last. I'm not sure I could have come to this love otherwise, which is neither Puritan nor Mediterranean, logical nor ecstatic, but something marvelously in-between, not either/or, but both/and all the points between. So while I cannot quite imagine a heart that understands both fish and man of you, I would like to, and I think I'm coming to a place where I might just be able to love the fish and woman of me unconditionally and completely. For the first time in my life I'm not wondering if I'm on the right path, I'm making my path as I walk it. I'm living the Machado poem, which is right where I need and want to be.
“Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.”
–Antonio Machado
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