And So My Heart Blazes

My heart has been broken wide open at least seven times in the past six years.

(Death, miscarriage, breakup, breakup, breakup, et cetera and on into infinity.)

I’m finally doing my best to help my heart stay open, to love for the sake of loving, rather than letting it snap shut when life twists.

I’m not quite sure yet what this requires, but I’m throwing everything I have at it.

So far, it feels amazing. Free. Like a huge weight has been lifted. Like I’m doing what I came here to do - and that’s all that’s required of me.

Because I’m afraid I’ll forget this brave new plan the next time my brain convinces me to fret about my ovaries (because that’s so much fun for everyone), I’m writing this down so I can reference it when I get triggered or when my heart tries to slam shut like a rusty bear trap on some unsuspecting person’s foot.

Because I will most definitely forget how good it felt to say, “I am going to love the next person who steps into my life as purely and relentlessly as I can, no matter how the relationship looks.”

I don’t want to forget how it feels to blaze with love through my texts and social media and every encounter like nothing can hurt me, because nothing can. Or, if it does, I am big enough to see it, feel it, and move through it, love still beating through me without getting clogged up somewhere in my spleen.

Dating from a place of joy and fun rather than need. If I’m walking through life radiating pure love, I don’t need anyone to give it to me. Because I’m fucking bathed in it.

That feels really good.

So I can just show up however I choose to show up in each moment and can allow everyone else to show up how they choose without needing anything specific from them.

While reminding myself to hold my vision of what I really want - the white farmhouse on lots of acres with ducks and baby goats and dogs and a couple of kids running through a fairy forest hung with crystals. My husband building me something in the barn while I write on my laptop in the yard.

Trusting that it will show up perfectly and in the right timing.

Every piece of that image is subject to adjustment, except the life partner o’ mutual adoration / oh-what-luck-that-we-found-each-other and the couple of kids running around. Even the baby goat is negotiable.

(Sort of. We don’t have to own a baby goat, but I will require baby goat access.)*

*Related: My friend Stephanie suggested that maybe her mother would let me FaceTime with her goats and I am wildly excited, to say the least.

So how does this feel? How can I relay this to my future self who will forget?

(Because I am relentlessly human and it feels like we humans spend most of our time trying to remember all the lessons we’ve already learned.)

It feels like possibility. Like I can love everyone who crosses my path without fear. It feels like my heart is a wide open field, rather than a rusty, broken plow I have to hide in the bushes so it doesn’t rip anything to shreds. Or protect so that it can still limp through the grass rather than having to be disassembled and put on the scrap heap.

Really, the best I can do is just keep muttering to myself “Let your heart blaze. Let your heart blaze.”

I don’t know how this is going to go. I don’t know how this is going to unfold for me. But it feels like the right way for me to move through life, because I’ve always known that I’m here to love as much and as best I can, and so why wouldn’t I do that every day to the best of my ability?

So here’s to loving relentlessly, self first, with so much overflow for everyone who crosses my path.

Because the my heart is an ocean metaphor? I don’t know.

Why I'm Single

“You’re a fighter. Stop fighting everyone and marry the next guy who tells you he loves you.”

…is a thing I was told on a date recently.

I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m also not prepared to admit he’s right.

But between breaking up with every person I’ve been in a real relationship with since 2008 and a dating strategy I like to call “saving time” and other people term “trying to scare him away”, I’m not sure I can safely write it off.

But it’s not like these guys who told me they loved me were proposing marriage and I was turning them down.

The very genesis of this whole date situation (and said comment I am now overthinking) was me making a joke about fried chicken and him asking me to marry him and me exclaiming, “Hey, that’s my first marriage proposal! Thanks!”

And then we went out and things were said and this remains my first marriage proposal which means I can probably claim the whole premise of his statement was flawed.

SO THERE, RANDOM DUDE I WILL PROBABLY NEVER SEE AGAIN WHO PEERED INTO MY SOUL AND SAW SYDNEY BRISTOW.

I do like to joke that I’m a love warrior.

Mainly because I keep throwing myself into the romance ring to get pummeled.

But maybe I get pummeled because I keep fighting.

What if I laid down whatever metaphorical axe I’m carrying and just … stopped?

What does that even look like?

I realize I’m raising a whole lot of metaphorical questions here that probably don’t have answers, but I’m curious.

It’s possible that I’m single because it just hasn’t been the right time. Or I haven’t met the right person. Or paths just kept unexpectedly diverging.

Or maybe I’m single because I push people away, so they run away, so I can claim it’s their fault instead of mine.

This is a dark train of thought and I will most definitely require a viewing of the Great British Bake-Off and people gently mixing cake batter when I’m done writing this so I don’t descend into a mild depression.

If you’re single when you want a life partner, is it your fault?

If it’s not your fault then is it someone else’s fault?

Or do people end up in partnerships purely by the grace of god?

(I get that people stay in partnerships through work and love and choosing the other person every day, but my problem is getting to the point where any of that is even a possibility.)

I am the x factor in my own life. But does that mean there’s something for me to do, to change? Or do I need to just trust that things will unfold in the right time?

Trusting is really goddamn annoying. Being open is really goddamn annoying. I would like certainty and a guarantee and preferably a date of arrival with a UPS tracking number.

If I had married in my early 30s like I thought I would, there are so many amazing people I never would’ve met.

That said, I think I’m done with the revolving door of dating.

So if anyone knows how to lay down the axe, step off the merry-go-round, and move into a new phase of life, I will happily listen. And if anyone has my UPS tracking number, I will bake you a cake.

Me and Sally, the real love of my life. This may be next year’s Christmas card.

Love: A Smug Tale Of Resilient Rib Cages

“Learning — slowly, slowly — to open up and love when I feel scared, rather than curl up like a threatened porcupine.”

That sentence was written in 2012 as my father was dying. I put his last days on Twitter because it helped anchor me as we floated around the hospital waiting for him to cast off into the next great adventure.

I’m thinking about it now because the anniversary of my father’s death is the day after Thanksgiving and I re-posted the tweets as a “Happy Death Day, Dad! You Were A Good One!” gesture.

Now I keep finding my eyes skimming over that one sentence - and worry that I’m back-sliding.

When we have these experiences, the ones that crack our hearts open, the raw vulnerability feels like it will last. Like this feeling of being broken open will last forever. There’s relief and even joy in it, as everything you’d kept bottled up comes flooding out.

But we rebuild. New experiences come in - like the explosion of three relationships in three years, whoops - and we start adding brick and new spackle to those heart walls.

As humans, we want to feel like we’re on a general upward trajectory. Moving forward, learning the lessons, growing. Onward and upward forever more.

But things just keep happening. Which is the definition of life, I guess.

Life: That Time When Things Kept Happening.

(Quick, someone give me a Pulitzer.)

After the implosion of three relationships in three years, I find myself being careful. Hesitant. Unwilling to blaze in the way I did the last three times.

I don’t want to curl up like a frightened hedgehog, but that doesn’t mean I won’t.

How do you continue to open up and love when it feels like the last few times you tried, your rib cage got caved in by a baseball bat?

I know it’s possible. People do it. I’ve done it.

But letting go of the old experiences to allow in the new ones feels scary. Like I’ll forget something important if I do. Like I’ll lose something.

But I don’t want to be that person who lets fear win. Partly because it doesn’t sound like any fun, but mostly because I want to be smug about trampling fear beneath my fuzzy boots.

Love may not win, but smug will.

DEAR LIFE, I WANT TO BE SMUG ABOUT HOW BRAVE AND LOVING I AM. GOT IT? K THANKS.

How do you throw yourself off the cliff again? How do you face down the baseball bat and say TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT! RIB CAGE OF STEEL, BABY!

Since I don’t know the answers, it seems I’ll just have to keep living life, life where things keep happening, and do my best to show up for the life I want rather than quaking at the mercy of things I’m scared of. That’s really all we can do. While taking whatever opportunities to be smug - and happy - that we can wrangle.

This picture doesn’t have much to do with this post, aside from the fact that I adore these women and also my face is a fairly accurate depiction of my feelings on love at the moment.

Death to Happily Ever After

Happily Ever After has finally been beaten out of me.

It only took forty years and multiple loves, entanglements, mistakes, and Oh-Shit-I’m-Being-Weird-Again situations, but I made it.

It’s not as dire as it may sound to those of us who’ve been raised on Disney movies and romance novels.

The death of Happily Ever After means being able to appreciate each day with someone for what it is, rather than constantly grasping for Is This It? Is this The One? Are there babies and an engagement ring in my future? Will I finally get to update my relationship status on Facebook?

It means enjoying the person for who they are rather than what your relationship might be in the future. It means getting to know someone without mentally redecorating their apartment in case you move in one day.

I don’t think life meant to drag my Happily Ever After into a back alley and shoot it, I think life meant to show me how to surrender. How to take things as they come. How to be present in the moment-to-moment of each experience without regretting the past or grasping for a particular future.

When we love someone, it’s natural to want that love to last forever.

And, really, it does.

If I love you once, I will love you for the duration. A corner of my heart is annexed to you and you get to live there forever, like it or not.

I was joking the other day that I need to expand the physical mass of my heart because it’s running out of corners.

He replied, “Good thing your heart is infinite.”

Our hearts are infinite. There is no limit to the possibilities, up to and including Happily Ever After. Some of us do meet that person and choose to keep showing up and loving them until this mortal coil is shuffled, however imperfect and wounded it feels. Some of us have even mastered enough of this human existence to love with ease and pure joy.

Since I want Happily Right The Eff Now, I’m pulling the plug on Happily Ever After.

Because there is no past, there is no future, and my heart has more corners than I could hope to fill in this lifetime.

If Your Love Life Is More "WTF?" Than You'd Like to Admit: Hi, Soul Friend!

Honestly, all I can really say about my romantic life at this point is: WTF?

After being single for six years and then cycling through three breakups in three years, with a bonus miscarriage just for fun, I got no clue.

(On a date once, someone said, "It seems like you were born to be a wife and mother. So why aren't you?" My head almost exploded all over the bagel shop.) 

That said, I do feel like I’m preparing for something.

I do know that this divine partnership wouldn't be calling me so vehemently and relentlessly if it wasn't part of my path. 

I do feel something big on the horizon, even if I don’t know what - precisely - it is.

If you're feeling this too - fist bump, soul-friend.

While all my guidance is around surrender and prepare and don't-worry-about-the-details-little-miss-wants-to-know-all-the-things, I have gotten that October is going to be a BIG month for those of us on this divine partnership path.

Who knows what that actually means, but it sounds fun, so I’m game.

This morning, it popped in that I should do some group healing and guidance sessions with Mary Magdalene and Jesus on this, because they have that divine partnership thing down. They love this stuff. They live for it. (However multi-dimensional ascended masters can be considered to live for things.) 

So here’s a here’s a healing session Mary Mags and Jesus, to get some clarity, some heart clearing, and hear what they have to say about stepping into divine partnership:

We teach what we need to learn and, oh-my-flying-unicorn-cakes, romantic love and partnership is a big lesson for me.

(So is money! And work! And self-love! I GUESS I'M JUST SUPPOSED TO TEACH EVERYTHING. Haha, sigh.)

We are all balancing between our human selves and our divine selves - this merry ascension process is about merging them into one. Just as the divine partnership path is about balancing our shadow and our light and peering over the precipice and into the sun.

(Or something. I honestly have no idea what I’m talking about.)

(At least my human doesn’t, which is why I’m doing channeled sessions on partnership over the next month, so hopefully my divine self can get my Amber self up to speed and help us all find some light and clarity and peace and excitement around our love lives. If you want to join me, message me here and I’ll give you the details.)