Tuesday, August 30, 2016

The Great Loves of My Life

Damn that last post was over two years ago and sometimes my own writing blows me away it is so good. I am glad I read it as I am still in this cabin considering moving back to Austin, or some other city I may go explore this year. Since I wrote that I have been back to Austin for a few days and that time was magical also. The dog died a few months after that posting and I immediately wrote to the Ice folks letting them know I was available, and lo & behold, I deployed last summer 2015-16 for a doozy of a season. What was so interesting about that season is that I took my loneliness and isolated self with me. People ran from me, and I didn't know why the fuck for. It was alarming and scary and sad...I coped as best I could, had some really good days and incredible work times and a magical trip to the South Pole, felt crushed when I left...and now almost a year later with no contract I am missing it terribly and feel very lost.

I have been single for 4 years....like straight up nun single almost, which is very unusual for me. I have been trying to date since I've lived in Oregon, but no one really interests me that I have met..and finally, through dialoguing with a mature man recently I find that I seem too much a free spirit for most men "our age" he said. Wheeeeee!!! This kind of filled me with bliss! I had been feeling sorry for myself and wondering what the heck I was gonna do with my life and feeling very very stuck and having this little bit of information (that I already knew anyway) seemed to set everything straight for me. I can go on, I can take risks, I can move, try some more cities, and if I don't like them I can keep moving along. Rootedness scares me, and I was lying to myself that I wanted a boyfriend in Oregon and it took a total stranger to remind me of that. Living in this cabin doesn't sit right with me all the time. My neighbors are all much older than me and the stuff they talk about is so not anything I am interested in - and when I talk about stuff I like they look at me like I just landed from another planet. So I was almost in a panic that romance was over for me when I got a real does of reality and some clarity during yoga today. Love and romance and being madly in love are something I am very well acquainted with and the problem I was having with my most recent dating snafu was that I was looking for love in all the wrong places. Yes I was looking for love with a MAN, which has never been the thing source of my joy & happiness and rich feelings in my soul. My Great Loves have been places and times and experiences. My first panting love was New York City...I remember every minute of every day I spent there from 1978 til I moved there in 1983. The courtship period was so heady and intense and I carried that spark in me til I moved there after graduation from college. I felt it again as if for the first time when I spent my birthday there in fall of 2014. I love her as much now as I did then. I had an explosive love with Ireland when I went there in the summer of 1984 and was obsessed with moving there for 20 years. But then I found my greatest love of all, which I'm sure I don't have to tell you what it is. Before I even went to her I was prepared to give up everything: job, boyfriend, home...and I happily did. And a few years into our love there was nothing that was going to take me away from her. A relationship with a man I met there was tested when he wanted to work somewhere else, but I said no, my heart belongs here..she has my heart, for better or worse. He went off to work somewhere else and married someone else, as all my boyfriends did...and that is okay...that is not my path.

Like a friend (who loved her in the same way i did) brilliantly said, her relationship with the continent was like a bad marriage...an experience I agree with completely: I was completely committed to her but she has turned the cold shoulder (nyuk) on me this year. Like the sun she is impartial to my feelings...giving life and joy but also killing when coming on too strong and wanting too much from me. She welcomed me with open arms while her wardens toyed and soothed and rejected us. She had rules one had to play by but some of us free spirits are too free even for her. We speak our minds when even she hasn't evolved enough to handle it. I carry her in my heart, like a granny no longer walking the earth, still close enough in time for me to still pine for her, still carry a torch for her, still romanticize and put on a pedestal. Like other great loves time will ease the searing split from her, and hopefully other enriching things will come in to take my attention off of her. There is no human man that I had a relationship with that can compare with the intensity of the love I felt for these places. They were a part of my life and I cared for them but they were not my north star or what I dreamed about night and day.

Damn it is hard to write when I have been avoiding it for so long...I have been out of my groove - lame, self-pitying, numbing myself with knitting and movies...neglecting this thing that always reveals truths to me and connects me with my deepest self. I have been in this cabin for 3 years...feels like 40. I hope I am not wasting my time. I have done lots of amazing travel in the past 4 years - but that has been easy: research, click purchase, go on trip. I am very fortunate to have gotten to do this, but deep down I wanted my marriage to the Ice to last til I couldn't go anymore. I wanted to go until I was 70. Maybe we will get back together...I hope so because she is still my great love and I am not ready to move on or replace her...I can do other stuff, but my relationship to her is what beats my heart, what gets me out of bed every day, what gives me something to hope for.