August 2017

I post “where the magic lay” with a bittersweet reverence. I haven’t felt this free, empowered or clear on my boundaries in a long time. I sit in my desk chair, knees curled up comfortingly into my chest, as I feel the lingering tightness in my heart surrender itself over into nothingness. I notice my breath ease up & then curdle as tears of letting go fall down my cheek. I feel a little cold, wet nose on my upper leg. It’s Sadie, the cutest doggie in my world (& many other’s worlds I am certain.) Her worried little groan sends me into deeper surrender & love for the journey. She licks my tears away as they fall. I feel more open than ever to however the story will pan out.

I sit for a little while longer. I feel a warmth wash over me as Matt’s hands reach for my shoulders & give the most loving squeeze. I didn’t know he had drifted up behind me. I turn to face my love, all squishy & open. I smile savouringly as he kisses me gently & our foreheads touch in a peaceful silence. This. This feeling is love.

It’s there most when we are silent to let it expand to fill our bodies. The concept of time dissolves completely. He picks me up & cradles me like a baby. We kiss & our chests rest in sweetness, pressed up together where it feels they belong in this very time. It still feels like we are in a fairytale after a whole trip around the sun. & I trace each one of his beautiful features, falling impossibly more & more in love with all that he is as he slowly drifts off to sleep. The moment feels so good. My breath runs deeper than it has in a long time. I wish it could last forever.

Moments later my mind starts ticking over how much study I still have to get done. I am five weeks into semester & it feels like I haven’t even really started yet. I spring up, anxiety creeping & clawing it’s way back in, & make my way to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

The sound of water bubbling from cold to hot takes over my whole body. I am so tired I could fall asleep standing. I decide study can wait. I switch off all the lights as I savour this big, old, warm house. I take in each room as light turns to darkness. This house is where Matt & I started fresh together. It has been the start - or a continuation - of a magical love. The walls of our previous home held so much history, love, heartbreak from a different part in our lives. & although this new home has had some serious little problems & defects, it has been truly home in all it’s imperfection for this time. & as much as I cling tightly to it & all it holds, deep down I know its permanence is unlikely.

…...

In the morning I awaken at 6am to the sound of Matt humming cheerily as he prepares for another long day at work. I am eerily groggy, a normal thing lately, & I grunt & groan all grumpily as he sings me awake. He giggles hard at the image of the fluffy-headed darkness that is me before his eyes. Once I have finally de-zombified, I roll out of bed to embrace him with a little more normalness. “Good morning Cottontail,” we joke to each other (personal weird thing we call each other more than our own names.)

Noses scrunching, we invite in the new day with some goofing around & deep belly laughs. Sometimes I wonder how we get away with being adults when we are such big kids together. I guess that’s where the anxiety has been creeping in lately, at a point in life where there is so much coming at me all at once I could explode.

I take time to watch him dress & go about his morning routine. I just sit. I watch intently; those beautiful blue eyes fixating intensely, the lines dancing on his forehead in brooding concentration, his long wonderful limbs moving perfectly, that messy morning bed hair. I trace over his features again & my heart feels gooey. He sings funky tunes as he butters his toast & soon I am up bouncing around with him, helping him get ready for the day ahead. The simplicity in this - in moving in savourance of the time we do have together although sometimes it feels very little, whilst stumbling & goofing around in the mornings like tired, crazy idiots - is what makes our love so wonderful to me.

Down at the doggie park, Sadie & I bounce along as I listen to my favourite podcast. It’s been so long since I have lit myself up with a good podcast. Lately I haven’t been making time for it. It’s normally lectures in my ears or projects & assessments drowning in my brain. My energy is shifting as the sun peeks up over the land & I am laughing at Sadie trying to catch the ball & missing the mark three times in a row. This is when Jess texts me. & I am sent into a crazy spin. Just last night I put a post out into the world around truly accepting a life without her fully in it - if she chose for it to be that way. & as if she heard my call, she reaches out. My heart is sent leaping out of my chest at the message from her. She tells me that she’s in my area to cafe hop & study & puts feelers out for a potential coffee or walk. Immediately my ego fires on all cylinders screaming at me lock your doors, run as far as you can!!! I found a tree to sit up against to get silent. I ask myself what truly feels right, what truly comes from a place of love & not out of fear of an unknown outcome.

Half an hour later I am back home feeling very uneasy, anxious, truly excited all mixed into one. She’s on her way to pick us (Sadie & I) up. It feels surreal. Like I am caught in a time warp. Being picked up by Jess, just casually, on a Tuesday morning before my afternoon at Uni. This last month has brought on the deepest challenges in letting her go & just last night I became gracefully open to new outcomes & now this? I feel truly at a loss to the universe & her timing. But I choose to trust in the parts that make absolutely no logical sense. In the twisting & turning of life there are always little hints of the spiritual, unknown realm at play - especially when it comes to the syncronicities in all of this. It’s all quite incredible & magical when I let it sink in. All pain to me is a gateway to a deeper experience of my everyday. Accepting pain in fully just as it is, is an act of self love / acceptance of the highest.

I get a call that she is here & it’s time to meet again. I grab Sadie’s lead & she springs up. She has won the doggo lottery with walk number two happening within less than an hour of being home.

I open the car door to Jess plus five dogs including her wonderful dog Indie (Sadie’s sister.) It is hilarious. The same old crazy Jess. We giggle. The first hello feels familiar, warm, soul quenching. It’s been awhile since we’ve been able to fully relax with each other, with the tension of the situation & the time & space needed to allow healing to happen. We hug for a while. I squeeze her tight, she squeezes me back & time slows. My heart softens & a few sneaky tears slip through eyelids.

We walk for hours by the river, dogs free to roam happy. Words just flow when they need to & there is a comforting silence between them. I tell her about nannying & how much the kids teach me, & how busy but amazing uni has been for me in grounding my gifts this year. She talks about yoga & finding her place to teach the potent teachings she has learnt from India in the Western World. I love hearing about what she feels open enough to share. She tells me she contacted me simply because she missed her friend,& that it took her putting aside what everyone else would think to reach out. I feel held & I hope she does too. The pain is still very palpable but somehow the bond between us feels stronger than before our worlds were ripped to part. Things have shifted. Worlds, all sense of linear time, lives all blur together as one big universe as it always does when we are in the presence of each other.

This moment - Jess, me, doggies - is full circle magic. Just over a year has passed & I never ever planned for this outcome - an outcome which included a world where we could co-exist together. We have very definitive boundaries now with no real choice over the matter, given that the love of my life is her ex-boyfriend whom she shared a deep love of her own with (try wrap your head around that, sometimes I still can’t!) It’s almost like before we were in a co-dependent friendship as we were sharing so many things & interconnected in so many ways - friends, homes, studies, business. Now that we have these physical boundaries, different friend groups, all this growth that has come with the loss & separation, more diverse & seperate journeys (but still interconnected in crazy ways) - we are able to hold the space so much more strongly for the other. I have grown up in this time, & I have needed to do it without her.

We sit at one of my favourite cafes with the dogs. She tells me Benny - one of the five dogs that’s accompanying her for the day - is the fur-child of a new, wonderful love. & my heart soars. She talks about us a lot to him & she says he cannot wait for the day to come where he can meet us. I feel like I could explode with joy & overwhelming awe. He sounds incredible. Not just anyone would want to meet your previous love. & this moment is where I am fully mesmerised by this crazy human experience we are all having. True love never really goes anywhere, it just changes form - as does everything else in life. We part ways with nothing but words of “I love you” without any clue when the next time will be that we meet. It’s such a wonderful feeling. This deep knowing & not needing to know what will unfold all in the one.

************

September 2017

The onset of Spring brings crazy turbulent ground-shaking conversations of change, with Matt starting to question deeply whether what he is doing now - Real Estate in Melbourne - is really what he wants long term. At the beginning of the conversations arising, I am completely open & excited at the idea of a quieter existence by the beach & at the doorstep of the forest. My entire being leaps out of my body, envisioning what life would look like a little slower. I have been living in a sort-of busy bubble. It’s really hard sometimes to live an inner-city life & have a slow, peaceful existence at the same time. I think about the paradoxical ironies involved in this coming up now. This year I started building some pretty solid foundations in different areas of my life & cultivating the courage to pursue my passions more deeply. I have met some new amazing creative networks this year, my life-long friend from Perth is about to move to Melbourne at the end of this month, my relationship is incredible & full of the highest love, my university degree is going good & I am creating a whole mental picture of the future - in Melbourne. I dig deep within & ask what I really want, even if it makes no logistical or logical sense, & straight away i hear the word “go.”

Amongst it all I meet some wonderful new friends. One morning before Uni I was grabbing a coffee at my favourite local & I completely fell in love with this lady's border collie dog (dogs are the best networking tool these days, cute little icebreakers.) I went up to her & asked her all about her doggo & of course we struck up a wonderful conversation & later a friendship. She is quite a lot older than I am but she is such a fascinating, chilled out & wonderful human. She tells me she has just finished her PhD & her thesis was exploring the relationship between poetry & philosophy. She tells me she has a beautiful one-year-old daughter & that she's dedicating most of her time to raising her. I cant wait to meet her. One afternoon Sadie & I go over & visit them at their cute little house. I interview her for an article I am writing & I think it's the best choice I ever made as she just has so much to say. We talk about the deeper mysteries of life; the polarity in everything, politics, love, the magical way of things & it's so refreshing. To be able to meet someone & go beneath the surface without the small talk is pure magic to me. Henrietta, her daughter, runs around the backyard with the dogs & they are so precious.

But I go back to being busy - normally in the way I would be deeply grateful for - working four days a week nannying & full time studying. But there are so many full circle lessons & decisions curdling & dancing on their own accord in my heart that the anxiety I suffered from as a 12 year old girl resurfaces. I go to bed dreading what lies under my eyelids & deep within my stomach as the waves start thrashing against my insides causing shaking & fear. It brings me back & makes me think of my wonderful, kind, calm Dad. I jump out of bed most nights & make myself a peppermint tea, just as he would when I would be recovering from an anxious vomiting stint at 2am.

I realise soon that I have been way too comfortable in certain ways. I have grown so much this year creatively & it’s like I have just been too busy between all the different areas of my life that there has been too much noise & traffic for me to get a little bit of perspective, to question in a deeper way just what my soul has been trying to whisper to me. The whispers of the soul are so incredibly subtle, so the only way to hear them as I have always intuitively known is to get silent. I realise just how far out the window my yoga practice has gone in exchange for uni, work, study, creative work, pressure, coffee, when really my life should fall around my yoga practice - where I learn over again that nothing in life is really in my control & that is okay. I have forgotten that deeply. But I still don’t get up to practice, it’s really hard to break a re-formed habit. & I am too hard on myself for it, so much so that it completely squelches my innate inner muse & her divine creativity. I am in a bit of a downward spiral as Matt is starting to ask the bigger questions & it gets a bit chaotic.

An old karmic pattern of not trusting myself re-surfaces & I start the good old habits of whiplashing in my choices & struggling with boundaries in my relationships - because I have no boundaries with myself, I just keep going & going. I feel a burnout coming but I still don’t stop. Matt is struggling between the callings of his soul & the way he has always lived - within comfortable means, just plodding along & letting life decide. We struggle to identify what the right choice would be & there are heart-wrenching fears around perhaps being led in different directions. I cannot bear the thought of him not being in my life, but I do know deep down these are all things that are not mine to worry about - they are out of my grasp & in the hands of something much bigger. Still, it doesn’t stop me from feeling everything fully. The choice is still lingering like an elephant in the room & we have some heart-shattering miscommunications. I become a punching bag as he is pulled in so many different directions & struggles to consult the most important person for clarity - himself. I am strong & loving with him anyway & eventually - not too long after the storm - the beautiful moment comes where he reminds me why I love him so irrevocably. He switches off the defences & says sorry with such sincerity I could melt. & I just don’t want him to hurt anymore.

& I remember that love really is kind as we come out a little stronger.