Listen for the sound of your heart…freed and freeing

This, a line from this morning’s opening poem–"What to do in the Belly of a Whale"–comes after drawing a Soul Tarot card, receiving The Devil for consideration today. A beautiful card, actually, with a golden tinted sky, easing into grey; a huge chain with a pair of wire/chain cutters, and a belly-spotted dove in mid-flight, eye on the chain but free. What chains are being cut today? Listen for the sound of your heart… 

Blessedly, I slept soundly last night. A gift, given I did not sleep well the night before. The day’s coffee date with Lisa yesterday morning had not seemed worthy of much internal-angst, but it apparently was. I was antsy from 5 a.m. onward, arising to tend to my sourdough starter, the strawberry shrub I’m making, then…aimless wandering with what to do, how to settle, before the 10 a.m. meeting.

I hesitate to use the word ‘meeting’ when getting together with Lisa, of course. It’s never felt like that before. But it was just that–a meeting. I was not sure what to expect, nor even why she suggested getting together. Our lives are so different now. We have so little contact anymore. I don’t quite know how–or if it’s genuine anymore–to be with her. 

Listen for the sound of your heart…

My heart is easier this morning. Relieved.

Of course it was so very familiar to be with her, to catch up and recognize our rhythms of sharing. My boisterousness begins. I try to draw her out. She refuses. She returns to listening for more from me. Eventually, she shares some minimalist things about herself, but mostly her outer life. Things not too intimate, not too vulnerable, not too risky. Or real, sometimes it seems. I think my heart will always miss the Lisa I got to know in our deepest soul journeys together. Amidst husband’s fragility, children’s lives, grandchildren’s lives, the Lisa I know is no longer nourished nor nourishing for her, I’d guess. I miss the Lisa I knew.

Who is also a Lisa I no longer need for my own soul journey. It felt ‘close’ or a bit wearying, draining, as we spoke with one another. I, too, was invulnerable, sharing only those things I knew would be ‘safe’ or mirroring of things she’d receive well. Little depth for either of us, it would seem. It arose in me a couple times to mirror that both Brian and I would be uncomfortable getting together as a couple, now that Chris had handled his own toxic-staff situation in utter disregard of his family, of her. Both Brian and I are fiercely loyal...to Lisa, it is now...and not very good at pretending to get along with such a perceived betrayal. But way never opened to say any of that, which is probably for the best.

There was an interesting moment when she perceived my ancestral lineage healing work in alignment with her own extensive engagement with her family. I think she needed to find something between us that could arguably be both soul-work oriented and similar. I nodded to her perception, and can even feel the similarity she needed to feel. So be it, whether it is or not.

In sum, I’ve done the chains-cutting work here, nudged into awareness by the tarot card for the day. I do feel myself the belly-spotted dove, newly freed, eye on the chain but arising and away. I like that the chain doesn’t feel cloying or surrounding of the bird. It’s a linear chain that the cutter has nicked in one link. A weakened chain, in other words, not completely severed. That feels genuine.

Let Lisa go into her flows of things.

Stay true to my desire to have little contact with her husband, with her with her husband.

Let her family be as they are–growing and moving.

Smile that she’s finally finding herself bonding with a dog (Roscoe), because she’s rescuing him from a darkened, anxious life. This is the sacred work she does, after all. Dogs. Humans.

I am thankful and released…

I Have More Tools Now...

I awaken this morning, a bit shaken from whatever coursed through me last night, late, as I planned on heading to sleep. I’d not had any alcohol, nor was I aware of being particularly hormonal, i.e. yearning for sexual connection, union. But my body did land me in some unexpected hungers, a drive I’ve not experienced in years, perhaps decades. As I stir slowly with my second cup of coffee, having listened to Pray As You Go’s selection today–Hear the Plea of Your Servant–I realize I have more tools to learn from this rising than I ever did when I was growing into an adult woman. It was reminiscent of dark nights when I was an adolescent, late elementary school into early high school, before I ritually disassociated from the sensations.

I had finished my quick-review-viewings of Season Three of Outlander, finally getting sleepy enough to turn off the light. [I have been occupying my heart-mind while I await Brian’s return and our continued journey through Season Seven, in preparation for Season Eight’s first episode dropping on March 6th]. As I turned off the Outlander episode at the “X” on Prime Video, the screen of viewing options came on. With some curiosity, I clicked through a couple waves of shows. One caught my eye because of an Outlander reference, nickname: Lady Jane. I think the show is called My Lady Jane. Brian had watched the first part of episode one, so I scrolled through the listing of episodes, to see how many there were, in how many seasons. Episode Three listed its contents including a spanking. That was strange. Curious, I clicked onto it, scrolling through the scenes until I found it.

Something in me awoke. A physical response. I could feel my clitoris enlarge and the heat in my womb rise.

This led me into a variety of ‘safe searches’ on Prime Video. Was this a thing? Movies that had spanking as a list item? It wasn’t long before 50 Shades of Gray appeared on the listings. There is even a low-budget documentary on the phenomenon of the show. I clicked on that for a time, feeling the sensations deepen. 

The familiar curiosity about sensation and the self-loathing, the shame, began their dance I remember so well from my earliest physical-maturation years. I took the opportunity to relieve some of the ache. It didn’t take long. But it also didn’t evaporate entirely either. I found a video clip of “the best scenes from 50 Shades” on YouTube.com. I watched some of them, fast forwarding through a lot of it (which didn’t show too much anyway).I then turned off the screen and attempted to go to sleep.

The images danced in my head, simmering with the ache for something. Yes, something, not someone, anyone. Just a drive that coursed through my body, demanding attention, reprieve, action. This is what always terrified me so when I was growing up. It was like something had me, and I was to enact a variety of things onto my body in order to alleviate the drive.

Knowing now what I know about sexual union, the sacred dance of human bodies with one another, I can say this ache or drive doesn’t have to do with that. It only requires action-upon, without any being-seen. Seems to prefer not being seen. A furtive enactment upon my body until the drive lessens enough for me to relax into sleep.

Because it did always arise in the dark, in isolation. When I had a lot of quiet around me such that images could begin to dance within me, my imagination. Today, with more tools at my disposal, I can welcome this shadowy thing with a bit more curiosity, fearlessness.

There is a power-over character to it, for one thing. Makes me wonder from where in my lineage this energy lives in my cells. Like this wave of sensations that comes upon me isn’t very mine, but my body is playing it out, bringing it forth to be healed, tended. The shame, self-loathing, comes from this power-over character. I am playing out an always-need-to-be-strong woman’s fantasy of some sort: needing to feel safe while surrendering to another’s desires, will. I hold so much, digest so many others’ emotional weathers, that I’ve not often been able to acknowledge this secret-yearning to myself. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to feel safe and loved without having to do anything but let go? Surrender? Even submit into the power of another? 

I don’t live in that reality of security, trust, however. Whether it’s my need for control or that the men in my life are regularly seeking the mothering they never received, I do not know that kind of freedom to surrender with men. My body lives mostly in the reality of a defended life, a life defended against sensations that might lead to being-used even here. Which then pushes my body into that as secret fantasy. Feeling desire rise when a woman submits to a man’s desire, regardless of her own. That seems to have a long pedigree in patriarchal dynamics, sadly. This is what makes me think it is lineage-energy, not solely my own.

I finally gave up trying to sleep, experimenting with physical sensation once again, for relief. I found some relief, accompanied by more shame, self-loathing. But release finally came–as I came–and then, past midnight, I finally slept.

So I awoke with a sense of “what was that?” Something so familiar to my earliest years, but so foreign to my present life. I don’t experiment or explore physical sensations anymore, alone or with Brian. He and I rarely find our way into physical intimacy anymore, and I’m not even that sad about it. I experience his desire as draining of my own liveliness, a need for mothering more than a sharing in partnership, physical play and connection. Who wants to sexually play with her own son after all? Not me. His conflicted relationship with his own body--health concerns, some new fears, old overwhelming shames he's had imposed upon him--makes it too hard to feel connected with him without being drained myself. I often feel he wants to escape his own body by entering my own.

But these hermitage days have given me extended quiet and opportunity for some of the depth-material I don’t often access to arise, emerge, return. This morning, I can smile at the mysteries of my own body, with less fear. I don’t know what last night’s slippery slope was for, but I can welcome it consciously today, allowing it to be whatever it was. I can trust myself to explore with care, and play safely enough without shame. I have more tools at my psychological-physical disposal than I have ever had, after all.

Something Tectonic Shifted...

Something tectonic in me shifted this past Tuesday afternoon, about which I’m only slowly coming into words. I remind myself the gift is the visceral freedom, the felt-sense of release and receiving both at the same time, neither of which can be grasped by prose. Poetry is un-grasping language, but even poetry may not touch the feeling I yet want to honor, point to, even give witness? Might I be comfortable being a “good news of healing” voice today? An evangelical for healing? (Wry smile, tongue in cheek, reminding myself not to bite down and hurt my tongue or cheek).

When you have friends deeply attuned to body-wisdom(s), you get help in honoring the feelings, even from afar. “...again I feel the electric nature of it” I received via text this morning. Blessedly.

The weekend offered yet another round in what my beloved and I refer to as The Great Matter. We no longer give credence or energy to her by name, even as we recognize each new round is yet the next invitation into healing we both need. 

He came to speech about his inability to believe truly he did nothing wrong, even though everyone has affirmed there was absolutely no misconduct. We have all the paperwork to prove the danger of church-damage comes from her, not him. All the same, he knows not how to forgive himself, to receive that his mentoring and hope for leadership-formation in a young staff-woman in his charge at the church was offered with pure heart and beautiful wisdom. How does he forgive himself when there is nothing to forgive? That is his challenge, his sacred invitation. He needs to resolve and relinquish his regret, learn to refuse the self-condemnations that come so easily in his deeply wounded ancestral lineage(s). Shorthand is that he needs to forgive himself (because he perceives misdeeds). He needs to quit being so proud, avoiding the fallible reality that he missed it. He didn’t see it. He couldn’t see what was happening. He tries to blame himself by blaming some grief he carries, but even there, there was no wrong. He simply didn’t know a lot of which he knows painfully now. As many men do, he feels deep shame when he doesn’t know what he feels he ought to know. He should stop that now, already. Those of us who love him deeply and well are waiting for him to season his pride with sacred fallibility and vulnerability to our love now.

I realized that my work–surprise surprise (eye-roll)–has to do with deepening trust in him, in his capacity to act for his own well-being and mine, for our own well-being alongside that of his church. I spoke forcefully about this a week before this “next round” unfolded over the weekend: “You simply canNOT act for your own well-being, in seemingly any way! You don’t value yourself enough to act on your own behalf, EVER!” Yes, I was frustrated. Yes, it was not an artfully loving way for a wife to say she loves her husband. But I do, and I’m afraid that he cannot advocate or act for his own health, well-being, needs. I don’t trust him to do so, particularly in this situation, which can paralyze him in fear–of accusations, of loss of job, of shame and humiliation as a man facing a scorned and unhealthy young woman whom he had attempted to mentor. So I came to speech about my inability to trust him in this way… Because in his fierceness for me, as he can see it? His devotion and tenacity are rabidly loyal. But if it also benefits him, is for his own well-being, he stalls, unable.

Blessedly, and with deep gratitude for a world that gifts when we risk our gifts: Our mutual incapacities have yet led to this sense of tectonic shift somehow…a feeling of movement, peaceableness, shift open. Perhaps because I did step into trusting him in a new way even as I also offered my own gifts and position on behalf of him, his church, and our marriage. 

I pursued an opening that was offered me over dinner with friends on Friday night, doing so from my presbyter-role which did not require full disclosure with my husband…yet. When it became timely, I shared with my husband, as his wife, what I had begun, unknowing whether it was truly an opening or not. His near panic attack scared me and if anger or fury were his way, he would have been furious with me. He probably was. So this was my trusting that he would eventually realize it was the right call, even if it was not his idea, choice, or instigation. Within the hour, I learned that it was an opening, that I would be speaking to my colleague about The Great Matter, if only professionally, with boundaries and caution for confidentiality. As much confidentiality as could be mustered to protect while also speaking truth gently and with lament. My calling as presbyter who is charged with the honoring and protection of congregational members required it, even were it to bring ire and legal accusations motivated by projection and hatred. This “ruined” the days-away with my beloved, in one sense, even as they were apparently just as they were supposed to be, for our deepening connection and growth personally and as a couple. He did thank me for stepping out in faith, 24 hours after his near-panic attack about it.

So what leads here, into freedom?

Part of the tectonic shift for me was being welcomed by the church, in a particular branch of the Church, “because there was something on my heart that I needed to share.” Those words from the associate pastor softened something in me. The opening prayer brought open a gentle exclamation–or maybe invocation–Oh, I love the church, I said. I love the church. [This effusive exclamation will surprise many who have known me best these last years, given my work of digesting bewilderment and a sensate awareness of abandonment :) I wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t felt it so deeply–then, and now]. This day, I felt the energetics of Spirit and spirit listening about to open with two other folks in this Body of Humanity (that denominationally can often be so inhumane). I spoke as a presbyter first, then as a preacher’s wife. I tried to speak as sparely as possible while yet naming the potential damages I could see, have experienced myself. I closed us in prayer. As I walked out, there was something electric in me, changed, charged.

I had been deeply heard.

What I felt nudged to name was awkward, but deeply appreciated by those receiving it.

It was costly to name, but useful.

It opened the way for a confidential, established discernment process to deepen, then conclude.

This round finished.

I called a friend on the way home, left a voice message. I then called another who I rarely call unscheduled but who is close-in most days anyway. We spoke for the 5 minutes each of us had. They felt the change, the charge.

The gift is the visceral freedom, the felt-sense of release and receiving both at the same time, neither of which can be grasped by prose. I spent some time in a darkened, solitary and silent sanctuary, gratitude overflowing into song. 

Vindicated? Is that it? Finally found to be right or justified from without, and completely honored from within (myself & my marriage) when previously ignored or refused to be so? To be honest, the tender part of me probably does like that word, but it doesn’t really name the mysterious forgiving force that found us this weekend too. It was a sense of Intimacy or Spirit that drew me to the sanctuary. Not being right or justified.

A visceral freedom and felt-sense of release, relief, gratitude.

One Flesh Wonderings

[Written early June 2025]

“We never became one flesh,” he said, almost nonchalantly. I keep hearing him say it, these many days later.

I was walking with a spirit-friend who was kind enough to read my book in manuscript form, who wanted to talk with me about it before I left town on holiday. It had dawned on me several months ago that he was a perfect beta-reader, given he knows my paternal family ethos intimately yet is also beyond it, outside it, even as he is now part of it too. The tensions had been large in me about spirit-writing while ensconced in family-of-origin norms quite averse to spirit-writing. His receiving of the book was gift in itself, but hearing its impact upon him, his life, was that and more. Now that I have had a couple days of travel, driving up into the Scottish Highlands, I find myself curious about the impact of this observation on me.

He was speaking of his own life, but I was gifted with something for my own. I know of what he spoke, even as my own covenant of marriage blesses me so. The ancestral lineage in which I walk has a long-wounded history regarding the body, so naturally my soul hitched with a man who has a similar wounded history, if with origins distinct to his story. My newest book traces the path of abandonment and awakening to this wounded-embodied reality. Sensate but numb. Embodied but cognitively-imprisoned. Then awakened to divine desire, even as it blurts and hides in cognitive hamlets most familiar. My book apparently named something this spirit-friend lives with, into, even as it is not usual in largely Westernized cultural environments to speak openly of such things. We did, in covenantal form…he in his covenant, me in mine, me partly holding a covenantal container of having married the two of them well over a decade ago.

What does it mean that my embodied form felt a wave of relief, normalcy, wonder at his confession of celibacy? His wondering of moving toward a vow, for holy purpose? What does it mean to live within the covenant of marriage and feel led toward a vow of celibacy in companionship, embodied Prayer yet irreconcilable difference? 

This is his question more than my own, though it touches on the realities of my own companionship. I am soul-hitched to a man long-wounded in his own physical realities–being unmothered, dissociated in mind/body, knowing relationship only through protection/duty/ obligation–without conscious attention to or intention for healing any of these lineage wounds. He comes to me to ease his sadness, to escape more than connect (my experience, not his words for his awareness or intention). In my own vernacular, he is seeking being-mothered more than the soul-partnership and embodied play that I yearn for. And I unconsciously mothered him for years, which is part of the reason I never wanted children. I mothered my mother, my father, so to be secure as I was growing up. Nothing left in me for that kind of loving. I rarely feel him in intimate spaces, and am often sad and lonely afterward. So I do not pursue physical time with him. We live more celibate than not, making our peace with it in the ways each needs to. “We have never become one flesh” could describe what I experience with this man I yet love wholly, fully.

What if we were never supposed to become one flesh? What if such a thing were never possible, given the ancestral wounds so prevalent? What does one flesh even mean?

My complication here is that I have felt completely vulnerable, wholly seen, deeply received in my body-soul-mind-spirit, by another. A woman with whom I still feel intimately connected even if we rarely see one another today. Companionship with her healed this ancestral-wound part in me, at least as much as can be healed. Chaste, I yet knew energetic union felt deeply in my body somehow. I remember once wondering if I saw Jesus looking back at me, through her eyes, as my body responded fully. I felt Presence, anyway, more than I ever had known in another human being. One flesh, maybe. 

So I have this felt-sense, and I yearn for that sense of interconnectedness with my soul-hitched partner, I have also accepted that such union is unlikely with him. Nor is it perhaps even loving to expect or want from him what he is unable or unwilling to explore in himself. One flesh here becomes the never-ending mountain he needs to climb perceivedly for my sake, not his own. And he sees no need or benefit in climbing the deepening-mountain for his own sake. One flesh becomes this unattainable thing, an ever-present perceived failure he doesn’t know how to know how to want. How is it loving, then, for me to press him where he does not choose for himself to go?

Sadly, I think this is a much more common reality of marriage today than not. Intimacy is not for the faint of heart, says David Schnarch. No one is ready for marriage; marriage makes you ready for marriage. All of which means the soul-work required for passion shared, for the deepest intimacy a human being can know in divine desire, is too risky, too ego-less, cognitively surrendering…for either my soul-partner or me, most days today. 

My challenge is that I’ve known it in my flesh now, even if my soul-hitched partner seemingly has not, nor knows how to know how to want it. Except as Spirit nudges, invites…which is enough for me, for as long as I’m in this embodied form anyway. My own Spirit-invitation is into subtle energy work, Reiki for a day this month. I feel connection with those who are drawn to subtle-energy body learning, and that connection is enough for me, for now.

Empathy into Change Undeterred? Not yet...

I feel like I just got dumped on, first thing in the morning, with no recourse to either withstand or refuse it. How do I be supportive of the man I love even as I am close enough to see precisely how his own leadership style creates precisely what he bemoans? I mean, we all do it–create the conditions for our own spiritual challenging into growth–but my marriage is a particular dumping ground for him to refuse to see such patterning in himself. Which, of course, as he’s emoting is not the time to point such things out. And for the most part, I did well enough biting my tongue and allowing his venting. But I still begin the day, feeling dumped on without any recourse. Ugh.

So what is my pattern to change here? What is my invitation? Is there any meta-reflecting that could both relieve me of the energies that are not my own here and suggest alternatives, for us both? Considering I haven’t been driven to the page for such reflections, it’s clearly load enough to bring me here. That’s noteworthy, actually appreciated. I’ve missed writing, even as I’ve also not felt particularly drawn to more words until now.

First, I do empathize with the man. He’s the central cog of a declining machine, an increasingly low-level commitment ‘community’ doing what it knows, which is often not very communal. His sense of duty is astronomical, keeping him in place to bear up under obligations and isolating-caretaking leadership, amidst deep valleys of anxiety, grief and sometimes concretized fear (i.e. Israel discernment, of late). His soul is unmothered, not to mention his body, which is observable in his own wounded ancestral lineages. Everyone really did the best they ever could have…yet leaving him (like most men) without the emotional toolkit to allow, metabolize, and be constructive with his own emotional weather. He’d rather vent onto others than do his own work in the opportunity for changing himself in the system. No one has required him to do so, really, though I’m sure he’d refute that statement. I’ve required more of him than he would like. :) But I don’t think I actually know many men who do or even allow themselves to perceive such work. Irwin Kula may be the only one I know, come to think of it. Most look to their women or subordinates in professional environments. Or in my paternal family, the written word. Which is what I’m doing, to be clear.

Because my own family lineages and woundedness don’t really help him here, though my own fierce attention to these things for decades might-could, in a universe I imagine (as a Two). I’m more frustrated with his emotional ventings today because I know if you set your mind/heart/body to the work, you can learn how to allow, metabolize and be constructive with emotional signals, cues. They can become nonreactive signals that something in me yearns to be different. I’m better at this than I have ever been, but I’m still slow and learning. Generations (and my own decades) of habits are hard to alter, after all.

So I find myself playing out my mother’s version of marriage, being the energy dumping ground for whatever the man we love knows not what to do with… I grew up with this pattern. I took on this pattern to stay close to my father. And now, naturally, it’s a significant part of my marriage to a pastor.

Let’s imagine things I’d never have done but could have…

As soon as I felt it overload, I could have said aloud, “I’m overloaded with things that are not mine to receive, solve, or address. STOP.” Had I attempted it, it probably would have come out poorly, being received as a “I don’t care about your pain,” which is not true. I do. I just feel it intensely and do not have boundaries enough to be convicted in “this is not mine to receive or metabolize.” When I don’t set the boundary, when I don’t perceive soon enough that “it’s too much,” I get suffocated and need to physically leave the space to protect myself. (i.e. escape to Pettibone, and fantasize now about spending the evening in an artist date of some kind, by myself).

Setting the necessary boundary requires me to perceive the overwhelm much sooner than I am currently capable (apparently). I remember Paula Jeanne Teague having me do an exercise with another student in the circle, a guy I really enjoyed named Jeff. She told him to walk toward me. My instructions were to tell him to stop when he was too close. Simple enough, right? His pace of walking and my capacity to discern safe-distance, however, were not a match. I couldn’t say it in time, he drew too close to me (even though I enjoyed him, was not aware of any threat at all), and a belly-sob erupted from me. Poignant to me today, but still instructive. The same dynamic goes on all the time in my marriage. I don’t perceive my own emotional responses in time, often taking up to a day or two. Not helpful. How do I speed it up? Can I? Is this a time when faster would actually be better? I think so… I wonder if the energy work will assist me here…?

Come to think of it, I have been experimenting with such a line, emotionally, this week. I shared some things with Brian I would not normally–about my own spiritual learning path, about things I’m exploring which he does not respect nor consider of much value. I shared the most significant moment of my day yesterday–singing a song at my aunt’s grave–and the emotion was too much for him. He began to mock-sing the song, with a roll of his eyes and a teasing or making-fun-of tone. I think it was mostly unconscious for him, so he could deny it when I called him on it. Neither of us trusts the other with this kind of emotional depth, beyond his/my capacity to receive it. I receive emotional depth elsewhere in my life, where it feels easier, more welcome.

Which is not to say I’m not happily married or content to remain in this conundrum that is my covenantal life. It is what ‘invites’ me to grow, be uncomfortable, reclaim myself again and again. Of course I wish there were more romance or ease between us, but that would require more emotional risk than either of us seems willing to engage. Or speaking for myself, more than I have stamina for at the moment. It’s easy to blame the church or his leadership style that makes his experience of church what it is in the cultural decline of it all. Those things are relevant. But if Brian and I were truly willing to risk more than either of us is right now, these things would be held differently. Intimacy is not for the faint of heart, after all. Brian and I are both too faint of heart for sharing the emotional work each of us has to do on his/her own.