Men weave.  They do.
They don’t understand that we weave more than just the sex, and, relatively speaking, they weave rudimentary summer camp crafts, lanyards.  About sex. Because of the sex. We make the pretty frilly bits, that’s where petticoats came from,  delicious fractal swaths of the macrocosm, that’s what women weave. And the jars we dip into, of linens, velvet ribbons,  and moire silk never empty. We are black obsidian, torrents of pearls, turtle shell combs and talon of hawk shamanism. We desire to be taken and made love to in staggering ways. Being met, mesmerized, learning the history and pageantry of the man IS weaving. It exists because women weave.
We are present to witness, to honor, to incentivize the creation, Gaia like. Astounding, the weaving. Astounding, the men.
A memory pushed up dirt, just a little. If I look a doodle bug will crawl out of  the crevice right beside that clump of wild violets. I am suddenly acutely aware that I once made a firm decision  that I later changed. I sure hope I don’t change the way I feel about men. I sure hope. There’s not much I’m attached to, I love mightily, but attachment, I’m pretty willing to get my fingers off the wheel and welcome experience… except I’d be sunk without sex and what women weave.!I’d shake in my boots over accepting a sea change about that.

But I’ve changed before. I recall when I was five, I was eye level with the shiny key entry on the door of a brand new silver Skylark. A ’63 Buick. I was playing in the front yard, underneath the Live Oak, pondering how four o clocks knew to lift their faces at that time, and I heard the stacatto click of heels on pavement, signaling that my mother would soon drive away.
I recited nursery rhymes following around Levinia, our maid. Broom in hand, she’d been sweeping, muttering, humming bluesy Jesus hymns.  A white uniform, always, with stockings rolled down. Now she was pocking in the rose bushes with the handle end of the broom, in case she found a snake to “jugg,”  which happened at least once each Spring.
She informed my world. I learned about haints, saints,  and boys who drew circles in the dirt and played mumbley peg with pocket knives ( I saw them from the Skylark when we took Levenia home.)  Levenia collected money spiders which laid eggs in our Ball jars; she hid them in dark cabinets to increase our wealth.She let me in on it.  We had plenty of money without the hoo doo which ended up decreasing her wealth, costing her… her job when it came time to make mahaw jelly. My mother was livid. She fired Levenia over spider eggs in her canning jars.
My mother was overdressed for the Piggly Wiggly. Judging from the  pill box hat, tightly cinched polka dot dress, gloves and matching purse and shoes in the soft creamy leather, she was on her way to play Duplicate.
Duplicate. A mystery.  Folding tables came out of air conditioning unit storage space. Maids wore doilies pinned standing up, on their heads like diminutive crowns and were extra polite. Ladies’ red lipstick, no shades, all the same thick flat red, smeared  cigarette butts lining  crystal ash trays.
The maids emptied the ash trays into silver bowls with black onyx handles and a silver lid engraved with the family crest. They circulated in and out of the room without a word, delivering refreshments, replacing soggy napkins with fresh linen squares. In the kitchen they spoke in low monotone voices just above a whisper.
“She want a lemon wedge,” said Levinia holding the crystal cocktail in her fingers.
“A what?”
“She say, ‘Take dis back and gimme a lemon wedge.’” Livenia shook her head.
The other maid frowned. “I liked ta give her a wedge.” The women masked a laugh.
Levenia gracefully delivered the cocktail with a slice of lemon on top. “Thank you, Livenia,” pronounced the hostess, making sure the others knew she was polite to her “nigras.”

Yellow  grey-blue smoke hung ominously as if suspended from the ceiling. I’d later  note those colors captured in  Dutch Masters’ painting of an Amsterdam morning sky. Special pads,  sharpened miniature pencils, and napkins were laid out. Half gallons of  bourbon and scotch were delivered to the house. The jiggers were also crystal, but they were just for show. The maids knew exactly how much liquor to pour over  Coke or Fresca in Waterford, tinkling with ice, to best suit, or pace, each guest. The  bridge party was generational, for servers and servees. A ritual among matrons and pillars of southern society.

“Don’t ever go down to the end of the town without consulting me,”  I sang, observing a clump of wild violets in the base of the roots, hidden by calladeums I called Elephant ears.
“James James Morrison’s mother put on a golden gown
James James Morrison’s mother drove to the end of town
King John put up a notice
Lost stolen or strayed
James James Morrison’s mother seems to have been mislaid”  I finished the ditty.

Julia and I now laugh about A A Milne making social commentary through the books When we were very young and Now We are Six.
“Mis-laid”?  Julia says. “Mis-laid!  What a crime”
We always say “women never cheat or leave unless they aren’t laid properly.” We drink Dos Equis and laugh, suntanning, on the Cane River,
“I see an English judge, powdered wig, and the defendant, one of our tribe” she giggles, in her new swim suit from La Coleur that she bought to wear to Monte Negro with the Serbian violinist.
“Denied the chance to properly weave, your honor!”
”neither whore nor slut!” I added.
“And she was banished to the stocks.” Julia tidied up the story, smugly, since we both understood the meaning. Women don’t  look elsewhere without due cause. Full stop.
So, the crevice, dirt pushing up near violets, which revealed my five year old frame of mind, was present, ready to be examined.
I made the conscious decision and double checked with the Self I knew, the One I still am, and easily agreed at five, that I would stick to this decision-to never ever consider driving a car.  There was absolutely no reason I  would take driver’s ed or a test or learn the pedals or drive. Never in my whole life. Having settled that, as Levenia thrust the broom in the bushes, I felt much better.
By 12, I drove, without supervision, every day. To the corner store, and secretly, around the A and W and even by some college boys’ trailer, sigma tau gammas, who had  round beds. They did motorcross, had facial hair and took me to Kisatchie. Once.
I don’t remember the transition or giving up the old belief system. I guess necessity spawned the new aspect, that wanted to drive. That, and my father promising me a later model silver Skylark I coveted. It had drink holder indentions in the black interior of the glove box that folded out. And bucket seats. A specially installed Cadillac tape player, 8 track. And I did desire it so.
The only backtracking I ever did, and that was momentary, was at a funeral for my first cousin, David. He’d been killed in Viet Nam.  A Dallas girl, 13, much more developed than me and with big bone structure, was quizzing me about the eighth grade where I lived.  She had a space between her teeth and was so fair I didn’t believe she was from our side of the family. She acted cool and we smoked cigarettes, made clover necklaces and counted fireflies as dusk neared. She suggested we get away.
I didn’t want to go riding in this city in a strange boy’s car.
She’d said, “Do you ball”? and I said I did.  I didn’t even know what it meant. It was part of the deal to get to go in the car, she said, and leave the sad gown ups and dining room table with a feast of meats, and pimento cheese on celery, not on a holiday.
At that moment cars and where they could take you once again seemed threatening.  Once  home in Natchitoches, it was forgotten, the car fear. Getting a license and a car and liking college boys was everything.
For my 15th birthday Sandra skipped school all day with me. We bought vodka and poured it in pink lemonade from the Zesto and drove all around Breda town, and found dead ends with culverts and shanty row houses. Two silly pretty girls, with long silky hair and  lip gloss, drinking out of straws and batting our eyes. Cars were great.
So I hope I never revisit my commitment to never NOT weave. I hope I never stop flowing juices that enliven me as they flow. If I put my entire awareness on it, I am having intercourse with the Universe, always. It is my mantra. It is why I effortlessly connect, how I intuitively know people, their issues. It is vibrating and tingling constantly within all aspects of “me” ; it is freedom to intermingle with invisible ethers and the importance of THAT being essence, all, my Life. Planets and physics and the porosity of everything… being pourous. Totally unflinchingly porous. That is holy.

Aum mani padme f***me  is what my cells say.
The yard is studded with Live Oaks, like the one in the front yard of my childhood home. They don’t stutter like pecans. They don’t drop their limbs at the first hint of strong currents. They are so comfortable and graceful in their strength. Their limbs just  sprawl  once they reach the ground, “not like a tree should act,” those lesser, prissy trees think.
I know the Live Oak. She is  weaving a stronghold embracing lives stretching over centuries.Who else to be trustee for the stories and their resonance.Treasures from France. Calamities. War. Advantage. Falling off the white columns. Decay. Parks Services. Mixed babies up and down Cane River.
History repeats itself.  Slaves. Quadroons. Octoroons. Freed people of color. Sometimes swinging from a rope She held. Pioneers, priests, saints, savages Aum mane padme the deep gothic South.
Christine Maynard

He introduced himself with a heavy accent, as a boilermaker from New York, and sat down.  He’d addressed the same group of building scientists underneath the same dimmed chandeliers at the previous year’s conference. His elocution then, as he lectured on the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, did not intimate his roots in Queens.

I caught up with him later that evening in the hotel lobby.  He was in his element, surrounded by fellow visionaries, iconoclasts and thinkers.  War stories were rekindled about raucous successes, and failures at changing the status quo. His Irish blue eyes were captivating; his laughter, infectious.  Charlie’s presence was electric, irresistible.

He refused an invitation to join the group in the bar, “not a drinker,” and I found myself breaking away as well, in order to follow him.    I said I wanted to reapply my lipstick before going to the bar. He followed me to my room. I outlines my lips and filled in with Clarins “luscious fig” gloss. He watched. 

Charlie spoke of winning 24 hour bike races in Central Park, and I proffered my scars as a plausible excuse for why I was no longer a triathlete.

The exchange lasted less than five minutes, as he had to meet with his business partner,  Kramer.  We made a perfunctory promise to take up our conversation later during the conference.

The head count at the bar dwindled from nine down to three.  As my last two companions prepared to depart, Charlie appeared.  Fresh, big energy. Laptop under his arm.

He sat down beside me.  Without the scrutiny of others’ eyes I was free to drink in more of Charlie; I’d only seen forearms like his on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  His lats and lean strong torso were easy to admire, highlighted rather than covered up by a thin worker blue tee.  He was brimming over with strength, sexuality and…purity. Henry’s essence was decidedly pure, and it was the very source of his strength.  Nothing pretentious, he simply possessed a basic goodness, and aliveness. 

I knew it was coming, there had been signs, reminders of where I was in life’s repetitive cycles, but I had felt too jaded to believe that it could happen again. I had recently re-entered the stage of dissolution and divesting, which is never entirely voluntarily.

It happened before, exactly half a lifetime ago, when I was 22.  I was working two jobs, brokering limited partnerships in oil  and gas, and running a construction company.  I kept noticing that the harder I did strive to create wealth, the less meaningful it felt. I felt ennui, and suffered over the emptiness of life. I was lonely for something real, desiring to be truly met, which seemed impossible to find amidst the Dallas singles’ life.  I was losing my faith, and my hope.  I had given up on love.

My body flagged my state of mind.. I had grown from a size 2 to tight 8 jeans in a matter of months with no change in diet.  There is a  Sanscrit word for this brand of suffering which means “swollen up with sorrow.”

One day, I laid in bed, determined to pray fervently, earnestly, with complete commitment to do whatever God directed me to do, if only I could have a sign. I’d do anything, I offered, to feel that live wire in my chest  again of connectedness, purpose, and belief in something larger than life.

I refused to answer the door or the phone.  I prayed until I fell asleep, and woke up suddenly, expecting to see a tile that had fallen from the ceiling, or some miracle, but nothing happened. How could the Universe not respond? I was irrevocably committed in my heart, to change;  Peace Corps, the I AM religion, if I had had a definitive sign I would have gone anywhere happily, passionately.

Nothing happened. At 3:30 p.m. I pulled on clothes and left my house. I drove aimlessly around what is now deep Ellum (then abandoned downtown of the early 80’s.) There was no God, no caring, no rhythm.  I felt adrift,  I parked my 280 ZX GL which had deep dents on either side, having spent the insurance monies, and I walked two block, lured by a lone neon sign above a news stand.

I marched through the opening into a cramped , badly lit room in the back. I picked up a Honolulu advertiser and read in the classifieds “Holistic, creative quadraplegic desires aide and attendant. Call Norman Hill at 8085535353.”

Live wire jolt.   Done deal. I bought the paper, returned home, and called.  Norman hired me with the understanding that I would start in one week.  I agreed.  He told me that he had just that day hired an Englishman as first mate for his fishing operation, Niall Doherty.

I had a three bedroom home with a recently renewed lease furnished with Henredon furniture and antiques.  My first marriage had yielded innumerable pieces of Lalique, Waterford, and silver, crystal ,and china for 12.  I found a sub-leasor, packed what seemed relevant to my new life and was ready to go.

The day before, the friend who had agreed to take over my house, intact, backed out.  I called Texas Liquidators.  “How much will you give me for everything”? I asked.  This included 12 x 14 chenille rugs, art, appliances, even jewelry. “$300.00 is my best offer.” replied the owner.  I told them they could take everything, after five p.m.

I gave important possessions to friends- stereo, bicycle, mementos, and carried silver, crystal, china and photo albums to a friend’s attic in Addison, in garbage bags.

I looked the part of a nurse when the prop plane landed on Molokai.  A demure white dress and a white powdered Southern belle face were in strong relief to the tanned bare skinned locales, and the other houles whom Norman was populating the island with, running his ad.

Edmund  took my bags and welcomed me.  He drove the van with Norman and the others to a lagoon.  We swam and picnicked and then he pulled me to him in the water and kissed me.  We made love under a full moon eclipse three nights later.

I called him the great unspoiler.  He taught me how to be tough, to go beyond limits, and to be fearless.  He stripped me of my affluent image; we wore Salvation army camo.  I signed up for food stamps.  We lived outdoors. We grew our own food, hauled water, and made hallucinatory love three times a day.

I checked out books from the Molokai library on packed earth flooring, and wove pony walls from the hala leaves (Pandanus) which grew in our valley after first sticking razor blades in wooden squares and pulling the sharp edges off of the dried lengths of leaves.

It was the happiest time of my life.  I learned the feel of the earth under bare feet and marveled at memoires of wearing high heels on marble floors in office buildings, and thinking I was alive.  I laughed at memories of electrical outlets, little plastic rectangles in dry wall, and the concept of a postman who visited one each day.  I became lean and strong. I didn’t drink.  My breath was sweet. I could make myself invisible in the rain forests to tourists, and nature was my teacher.

I was ready for that big of a change once again, or, that big of a change was preparing for me.  This time when the preliminary shift occurred, I first noted the divesting.  My mother’s possessions, which had become mine after she  plunged into final stage Alzheimer’s, were coming up missing.  A brooch given to me by Cahir’s great grandmother when I was in labor, and other items  to which I was attached disappeared as well, at an accelerating rate. I’d list the items, from arrowheads to art, that were gone, on noon runs with the head of criminal investigation. The rate of loss was accelerating, decidedlly.

Having been here before, I knew this cycle’s taste, feel and texture. Diissolution of dying ego identity in preparation for vertical growth.  My relationship with my husband was terminal, everything filed.  Friendships were shifting, and all three of my sons were demanding that we change, shift and grow. My eldest son drove a Mercedes through the garage wall for emphasis. My old methods dead ended every time.

We sold our house unexpectedly; there was not enough time to properly box and pack, nor a place to store everything, so I once again contacted a junkstore to take superfluous items in lieu of pay for moving me, and for cleaning.

I was starting to get the picture.  The gig was up.  And I was grateful. That’s when I realized it was 22 1/2 years later; the cycle was repeating its self, indubitably.

The Terrace Alzheimers’ unit called on my way to Summmer Camp to inform me that my mother’s diamond solitaire had been taken off of her finger.

And I got it.  Her engagement ring was the only material possession I had wanted to hold on to, to pass down to one of my boys, and it, too, was gone. I was indisputably feeling Kali’s dance, creation and destruction, going down into the undertow of change, and there was nothing I could do to hold it back.

In the same fashion that depression provides clarity, an adjustment, knowing where improvement is needed, these times starkly contrast what is truly important, and what my life lacks. It is a time of assessment about where I am spending my monies, energies and attention.

These times were not  bereft of the voice of God, as the Dallas day seemed to be.  The 22 years in between connected me deeply  to Source and  taught me that everything is always in divine order. I had learned some degree of non-attachment, and I knew how to tap into intuitive guidance.  It strengthened me enormously.  So I moved through this undertow without much fear.  I realized that the things we fear most are often the biggest blessings.. And that the emotional and spiritual housecleaning that accompanies divesting and dissolution of ego opens us up for new life.

It was during this period, in my 45th year, that a hologram of Edmund, the great love we had, and the experience of our first year living outdoors manifested.  Memories so life-like, looming in front of made me aware, on the brink of the event, that I would soon be genuflecting again at the altar of Love. That I would be struck by freight train loads of full moon desire.

CHarlie went with me to my room.  The key slid into  the door and we both stepped in, feeling our way with openness and an immediate, comfortable trust.  I massaged his back.  I asked him to stay.  He showered and climbed in bed with me.

The love making never ended.  He held me, rocked me, fucked me with our faces three inches apart, eyes locked into each other’s depths.

Charlie Two

Telephone conversations late into each night.  Then, as our second encounter approached, he said he thought of telling me not to come, or of withdrawing and not having sex with me.  I cry and cry, not to him, but over him and the thought of his rejection of us.  Water pours from my eyes as I lay still and I know it is from my deepest strata.  In case I didn’t get the importance of this relationship, my body and psyche were clarifying the deep significance. This is the next big dance of major growth, major rectification.  Like a tsunami hitting.

I see him.  He looks boyish, vulnerable and sweet, open, present, loving.  He holds me before I can get out of the car, with our motion, his sound.  Like swaddling, this zone of love envelops us.

I am enrapt.  I float through the lobby to our room, 110.  We kiss.  We make love (delicious.)  We hold each other and sleep.  Later, I make him come with my hand; he teaches me. He comes to my touch, the roll of my thumb over his beautiful head.  He says “Oh, oh, oh,” addressing neither a higher power nor me.

I have never been around others with Charlie. I notice his proud chest as his arm and hand guide me strongly.  And I notice how I lose myself in this.  The  conversation was one sided.  Me learning his rythym and cadence.  His stories.  His insight.  How he widens his eyes twice and leans into me to connect, to see that I “get it.” I didn’t always get it.  I postured.  Nervous, adolescent self-awareness limiting what I could process.  But filled with reverence and awe; soaking up Charlie’s life.

He talks of old girlfriends.  Wendy Saunters.   Tall, with tin snips.  African dance was her thing. Rolling Stones emotional rescue.  I wondered how she could endure Charlie nursing her for ten days, through pneumonia, and not make love to him.  How she could wait two months to discuss their relationship.  Comparing my intensity and   my requirements for immediacy of communication.

Was her unattainability the draw?  He refused to give her what she thought she needed-note to self.  Since all is perception, in her mind he refused to give her what she asked for, wanted, and was invested in.  If he doesn’t believe in it, it isn’t happening, from Seminary to sex.

No sex the first night, although I asked.  Lots of massage.  Sex three times the next morning and early afternoon.   I breakfasted alone.  He was awake and waiting when I returned.

Aspen.  Walking.  Charlie’s warmth and communicativeness envelop me.  I don’t see the pulled in side he warms me about, instructively.

We took a bus to Glenwood Springs.  His eyes hurt in sunlight. He leans into my shoulder to shield his eyes. I love him so much each moment, it is a spiritual swelling to bursting point; I’m learning where to go with all of the mounting energy, not dissipating it with frenetic movement, but growing it brighter inside.

The Train

A heavy-set greeter explained protocol at the Glenwood Springs station above the Colorado River.  3 families vacationing envisioned the group photo in their scrapbooks long before the trip began.  Train approaches, girls clown, fathers’ capture memories.

Stragglers saunter in.  A couple with back packs who had reserved a sleeping compartment.  Red clay banks immured adobe brown turbulent waters under azure sky.  Tatooed youths, stumbled stoned down a switchback toward the hot springs.

The shrill whistle hung in the air; its effects, palpable. Expectations loomed above each passenger-to-be’s head.  Train ride. Locomotive.  Steam engine stories, the horse powered excitement of American Imperialism forging manifest destiny on our own turf..  The train rolled into the station.  We formed lines obediently, as per the greeters instructions, moving toward the stairs under the tutelage of porters.

A small room of our own.  We explored switches and niches, form and function.  We gazed at mountains, the river, wildlife and other scenery.

I experienced the first loss of boundaries from coming exquisitely, like a waterfall. No clear delineation of beginning and ending- mist, atmosphere, sunlight, under the penumbra of arching rainbow, with wildflowers punctuating the banks.  I was all of these and more. Charlie’s essence alchemically mixed with mine.

Denver hotel like The Shining.  Until a Ped-a-Cab caught Charlie’s eye, and changed the energy.  He pointed out Roman numerals on buildings and gave an  esoteric lecture from his knowledge base of gas systems.  And love slipped from my lips rolled down my chin and landed in his lap.

Visionary.  Our future.  Me tallking.  Charlie saying “Yikes.”

No sex.  Little holding.  Yet, the next morning just wanting to be with me instead of working out or breakfast.  I felt the first incision of vivesection as I dressed to leave the room. Disconnecting.

Observations blotting out intimacy. I sleep walked through the airport, leaving passport.  Blinded by love and boy concerns at home.

Charlie III

The time I became comfortable, totally comfortable, flowing, myself, with my new lover, my love, Charlie.  He is so beautiful.  I am so settled, deeply connected and female principle in his presence. I love him, with no part of me reserving judgment.  I trust him totally. He is simply beautiful; pure, clear, sweet from strength and righteousness and no wavering. It frees up tremendous energy.  It makes him so rare and I breathe rarified ethers and see little electrons sparkling around his head and face through moonlit windows.  I love him and I want to always love him, and my love is from my strength. His sex, guidance, sweet nature and masculine principle whip up my desire to unparalleled heights. I love him.  And Charlie loves me back.

Can we NOT screw up this beauty?  Have we progressed on our respective paths enough to stay open and hold ourselves, each other and the life of relationship in reverence?

I promised not to push him, just to love him and accept the time we have together.  Ultimately, I want to walk with this man as my partner, lover, best friend, though life. He works so hard to do everything right, and I want to honor him and care for him and be there enriching his life, creating a vibrant, safe, sensual, inspiring home.. Being present for Charlie for whatever he needs best fulfills me. It doesn’t seem like a supporting or secondary role; I really believe in co-creating through love and vision and magic a better world, a better everything.

We stayed at the Fairmont Hotel, M and 24th in D.C.  He arrived wet, orange cotton button down, shorts and hiking boots. I ran to him and kissed him.  I stand on tip toes and then nestle into him, placing my feet fully on the ground between his and I relax into his embrace. Quick introductions, upstairs to dry off.  Intense sex- so hard, with Charlie standing behind me leaning me over the bed.

Hand in hand we walk to La Perla with the group.   Geoffrey not eating much, having had two martinis on jet lag.   Manning attentive and nice.  Charlie seeming so confident and comfortable with these new acquaintances.

I rubbed him; his head, face, calves, thighs.  Fucking and sleeping.  Morning sex.  Very moving.  I told him, kneeling on the bed, holding him that I loved him.  “I love you, too.”  he said, before he exited.

I presented at the Pentagon with utter confidence, as I was loved by Charlie,..  And Charlie returned to D.C. on the 9:37 p.m. train.

We ate at Victor’s once again. Good bread waiting.  He doesn’t care for risotto.  I rubbed him to sleep.  He slept so deeply.  Thunder and lightening.  Morning loving that was the best yet. Absolutely beautiful finale. The intercourse is so fulfilling, like hiking in mountains with music of the spheres and all nature in harmony.  One one one.

I left with him in a taxi to Union Station.  He gave me a “foamer” magazine to help me better understand those who love trains.

16 days later

Christine pulling away and examining it deeply.

Last night my heart energy became impotent mid-air between Louisiana and New York. I felt atmospheric shifts causing my love to condense and fall out of the sky.  And it wasn’t your tiredness.  I felt this polarized view from my unfucked, unrecptive, cynical vantage point hit with an audible thud.  Suddenly, I saw a lopsided relationship.  The view from here is as follows:

It’s all about you, Charlie.  And if you threw me crumbs I’d probably keep giving to you happily, wide open. But you don’t, and you don’t see it. On the phone, every time, after a lengthy recap of your day, I speak.  You say “I’m going to sleep now.” If I tell you a story, maybe you ask one question to show interest. There’s so much I’ve needed to share with you and turn to you about.  Perhaps part of it is not understanding graciousness, which is a better spin than you just being a taker, even though I can understand stunted giving skills,, clearly attributable to a lack of mothering.

I would have liked in the past two weeks for you to have said something encouraging, something showing me you care, without my prompting. A nice good bye.  Kindness. Things you like about me besides the fucking.

Giving me time.  Caring. I would have liked for you to have planned a visit or called me during the day to talk or to have written or E-mailed me that you care about me or addressing what you want,  talking about us, or sending me your writing.

What’s sad is that once again,  you are probably baffled by someone in your realm suddenly being unhappy with you. And distancing themselves. I hope this letter is illuminating.  And you are probably hurt because you’ve tried harder (calling me every night and being sexually exclusive with me) than you might have tried in ages to, show that you care, to stay open and check out the  possibilities.  And I appreciate that, although it sounds as if I don’t.

But I fell hard off of that place of love and trust and I want to regain it with more depth and honesty, and the only way to move ahead is for me to tell you how I feel.  As soon as I see you in Virginia I’ll cry and I’ll come and I’ll love you with the tantric capacity of every woman’s love ever. I’ll see everything as wondrous in your capable arms and in your charismatic company, and I’ll be on my feminine power perfectly balanced by you.  I do love you, Charlie. And I do think part of you wants the experience and richness of being woven into my lush tapestry.  And I want you, and only you.  And I have fire and passion for you.  And I want to be the One for you. And I am.

Hearing the story about Kramer and her not knowing about me does feel a little unclean, and based on situational ethics.  It does warn me about your willingness to give enough to keep a situation in effect that has positive rewards for you.  But I believed you when you told me you loved me (too.)  You haven’t said it again or given me any words of endearment or indicated your feelings. And all we have over the phone are words.

I want more than I’m getting emotionally. I don’t want to be in a giver taker imbalance.  And I do want more equitable communication and more investment in time and energy and you may not be able to do it. I know you are busy.  I am extraordinarily busy, but I’d make time to speak to you during the day and more. I’ve taken off all morning to write this because it’s that important.

You have tremendous power over me and can make me continue to be accessible and giving and engaging for a long while simply through our sex. But this shift will solidify more each time I visit this place. And its unnecessary if you are willing to give more and grow closer to me.

IF I stay in this more distant place, I can be your advisor, your teacher, but not your mate or partner.  So I try out in my head taking what is good, the sex, and interaction with your mind, and I try to move beyond the love overlay/projection of family and permanence and growing together and being best friends and being The best couple…who got it right.  My vision- We’re both huge lights and could have a richness, happiness, health, mental stimulation, great sex into old age, tenderness and compassion and a lifetime of love. It really hurts so much, because it is so achievable, yet I feel unmet in it and I’m really really feeling hurt in giving it up, in illusion bursting. But maybe it’s just been me, and I’m the only one responsible; I’ve hurt myself.

And I’ve needed you in the past two weeks. There’s so much.  You haven’t given me an opportunity or inquired or created that space in your life for me. And it’s always facts and wins on your tally sheet while the issues I need to turn to you about, there’s just no window.  And my feminine side is languishing, and feels homeless.  I don’t think you really love me or really care about my life, and it’s very sad.  You’ve never mentioned the book I painstakingly marked and wrote notes in for you that I felt was so important for our relationship.

After our conversation last night is when the clear shift occurred. I didn’t feel sad then, I felt powerful.  I had to take a long bath to let what I knew come up.  To listen to what this part of me already knows.

I watched an  invisible flowchart of what I discerned, drawing on literature about relationships, from Anna Karenina to Anais Nin, develop in front of me, emotional terrain labels flipping like train schedules in European stations.  I augmented with personal experience and other women’s stories, and followed the outcomes.

It probably hinges on the “maybe I love her”  refence to Kramer,when you later claim you don’t.  It sounds like Kramer’s belief that she is the one, has grown a life of its own, and there is dependence (hers) for well being, inspiration and survival, on that belief being intact. I know I don’t want to create a situation where you get positive reinforcement and rewards for setting me up to believe something in a Machivellian way that may not be fully true.

You may be capable of doing just enough to make me believe, to keep the rubbing and fucking and other things you like and need in place. I don’t think you’d be insincere, but I’m scrutinizing everything. I put in writing all I happily proffer with “ no responsibilities no downside.” You say “Goodie goodie.”  You say “Lucky me.”  These are the only two responses I get from my giving; there’s no dialogue or feedback.  I feel alone.

You respond in a voice mail I save that the letter makes you feel warm and happy.  I want you to feel that way.. What do you say or write to me to make me feel that way?  Sometimes good things.  Even last night with no energy you said we would work out and hold hands and kiss and fuck and eat good food and fuck some more.  Tha’t’s really sweet. But they are activities and I want to have meaningful talks about how we feel.  Do you care about me? Do you want more than the above from and with me?  Can you create a space for me and give to me and find it rewarding?  Can you envision living with me?

I actually do believe in your heart energy in lovemaking, and that you do love me and want me and want us. But we’re not making love now and I need something beyond your shirt. It’s going to take some fortitude on both of our parts to get through this so my needs can be met, too.

Do you want to learn what it’s like to be in a relationship with equitable giving and taking?

It bears examining.

You do give magnanimously to groups, to school children,  to kids at the movies and in lovemaking. But there is an aloofness otherwise. You seem to let people in your world only when you are the director/producer/ scriptwriter. I can’t interact like that. I am your equal. I am your teacher, as you are mine.  I’d like to teach you to have what your heart really wants and needs…real connection. The deepest rewards come not because one is good, or bright, hard working, or disciplined, or successful but because  one is open and receptive to what others need, and willing to give it.  The less one is proving and perfoming, the more energy is available to be receptive, to learn others needs.

This is the current dynamic:.  You have a huge gift.  Others are drawn to you.  People adore (ad means move toward, or is the root of oration) you. They adore your heart, your passion, your person, and they want to show you, and to give to you. They invite you to join their groups, to share their company.  They acknowledge you.  All the things you missed out on growing up you have in abundance at this read.

You shine your big light outward, a projection, non-receptive, and think that’s relating.  People are still happy just to be around you. But sooner or later, they move from an unsettled feeling to puzzlement to resentment because it’s all about you, which is amazing and wonderful, but they don’t feel that they are cared about or that the warm feelings you engender in them are reciprocated. And then they cut you off, or get mad, and you are left bewildered.  The woman upstairs, the couple in Paris, the West Coast AA woman with the singing Chihuahua, and me in this writing, all repeat this theme.

People pull away because they begin to see you as a taker.  But you are not, at your core. You just don’t have a lot of experience with giving; perhaps having avoiding it as a perceived bad habit!

You do attract givers.  And you do make decisions to not give what those in your realm ask you for.  Because you didn’t have what you asked for given to you. From way before the aquarium.

But you can change that.

Here’s my request:

Would you script it a little more romantically, and come see me before I come see you even if for a weekend, and write to me encouragingly and surprise me and tell me you love me on the phone if you meant it in D.C. and really feel me and let be be fullly woman with you being my man?

I want that kind of relationship with you.  I want to fully enjoy being in love and being loved by you, and I want to be best friends.

What do you want, Charlie?

Christine’s sister and her brother, her classmates at St. Mary’s and most of the families she knew from the backward and insular plantation town of French origin, Natchitoches, Louisiana, prioritized  neatly laying down floorboards to give their feet a safe place to land. Christine intuited, early on, that there was no safe place. There was only being. And she delighted in it, delighted in all of the pieces, pain and pleasure, good and bad,  confetti commingling in the air, gracing one with possibilities.  She made a lot of people nervous, including her mother. She ignited passions and beliefs, for and against everything. For and against herself.

“You like to shock people” was something she commonly heard from those seeking to understand, but generally speaking from a vantage point of limited intellectual capacity, or limited willingness to use one’s intellectual capacity, an impairment common in the crippling South.

The shocking’s not the thing. It was her job. Her spiritual practice.  Nervous system mandates. Her tribe’s way. She reminded others, through her aliveness, of their own.  Some, who knew her well, stately flatly, people either love you or they hate you.

She didn’t hear it so much after having the three boys. Her desire for their acceptance toned her down a bit. That, and the enormous energy required to raise them completely on her own.

She thought she would be with Niall, their father, forever. Even in the furthest recesses of her mind, she was certain that if their marriage didn’t make it, he’d still be a very involved, supportive father. She, (who changed majors from pre-med, with a 3.8 at the end of her junior year, because of the deeply engrained concept that she wasn’t supposed to work,) found herself having to raise and support her children, without a father, in the home town where she was the first Little Miss Natchitoches. Where she endured 11 showers, 13 teas and 7 brunches during the year of engagement to her first husband, the landed gentry attorney whose grandfather was on the cover of Oil and gas journal.

If some one, a guide, had pointed out that Christine would never stay with one man, that her palm indicated a lifetime ordained to learning through men, about their jobs, interest, passions, beliefs, and that it would be futile to attempt commitment,  would she have been better off? Instead of job fairs or career counseling should there be a test, like skin galvanic response for sociopaths that tells one whether or not they are capable of staying, of accepting that yoke?

Christine asked for it, not the yoke, rather the growth that accompanied tossing the yoke, yes, she even asked for suffering or agreed to be willing to suffer in order to grow, in her Senior year at LSU in an Honors English Lit class. The cultural dissonance between all those wedding showers sipping pink fuzzies while amassing silver, crystal and china, and the role models and choices she was discovering in literature, was glaring. The fact that the 60’s and 70’s had transpired and had been experienced by most of the inhabitants of the civilized world, but the Old South continued waiting for Mr. Williamson in a Blanche Duboisesque fashion was too jarring to ignore.

“Just give me that ring” sorority girls, daughters of their time, told her every day, as she let them lift her hand, ogling the stone. She opened up an armoire filled with 12 of each stem Waterford made in her pattern for friends to admire, pre-nuptial prizes.  But at the same time a professor of 20th century lit was proffering a way out, through invaluable truths. They were lessons that shaped her as well as her understanding of the world. She crashed hard, perceptions shattering on the altar of dualistic ontology, thoughts and discourse birthed and developed through opposites.

Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café launched the professor into a diatribe that reduced every relationship and everything to which one ascribes value  to the common denominator of “There is an inverse relationship between attainability and desireability.” . Ford Maddox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Wolfe, Thomas Mann, instructed her.  She studied Chogyam Trungpa’s Five Heaps of Ignorance, moving backwards through ego development to find the hard, bright kernel of Being. Vajrayana Buddhism and crazy wisdom was the first approach to religion/psychology/philosophy in which she found delight. Later in her Lecture Series, “Moving through Fear into a Jucier Life, she would connect the dots between  astute observations of physical markers of ego development in infants, with the five heaps of Ignorance. Trungpa says beings are born at one, knowing no separation from Source. An I-thou dualism develops and spaciousness becomes limited, concrete.

One can no longer dance and delight with the elements, on bumps into hard cold walls of a self constructed prison. More ego constructs develop along with a greater belief in a separateness that we spend the rest of our lives trying to break through.

One psychiatrist  sees ego solidification of reality in eight month neurosis. He theorizes that as a baby becomes mobile, crawling, he or she thinks “Aha! I can crawl away from my Mother.” And the next thing the baby realizes is that the mother can leave him or her. This monumental realization replaces the belief in an invisible umbilicus. Before eight month neurosis, the baby believes that even if the mother is not present that they are connected. Afterwards, fear enters, and an intense need to be informed by the senses that the mother, indeed, is near.

Here was an answer, she realized, to the question that drove mankind like lemmings. She took the bait deep and dove,  like a tuna or sword fish, surfacing to sail in sparling sunshine and struggle fiercely with the hook that served the bait, the knowledge.  It desires to be desired, recognized as the pure desire of nothing. No-thing.

Kojove taught phenomenology of Spirit. Self-consciousness is equal to desire. Desiring itself through other it negates the other, eats the other, like the bones licked clean by the masseuse in Tennessee William’s Desire and the Black Masseuse.”  OR like women emasculating men in their insistence on intimacy. Or, conversely, what men fear will happen if they do submit to total immersion in intimacy.

A Life develops from itself, of itself, free from other. But it is profoundly unconscious of itself. Doesn’t know itself to be free, to be alive. Negating everything that is not itself it must oppose itself to itself and reflect itself in order to know itself. It must confront death in order to become conscious of itself as freedom.

She became frightened to death of being  sucked into and stuck in  that which was illusory, rather than frightened to death of not having expensive face lotions. If she’d been prescient perhaps she could have fast forwarded the cotton batting covered Christine, door number one, showing the highest good  as one day being  like Laura Bush. If she didn’t make a change.

So, she made a solid pact  with the Universe  to suffer in order to grow, as opposed to protecting herself from full immersion with sentries- a husband, money, security of her society, and maid servants. Stupid things struck horror in her heart as she made the wager that greater happiness existed on the other side. She envisioned wearing white shoes before Easter and after Labor day because she might not own any other color.

She still walked down the aisle. It lasted a year. He wanted to move from D.C. back to north Louisiana; she panicked and split, heading for Dallas, divorced, at 22

THE NEXT ONE     She Stole His Seed

The father of my three boys, Nihil,  was a most excellent sociopath. Good sex was a vital component of the respect and love I had to feel for a man in order for me to get my fingers off of the steering wheel. Niall once remarked that getting laid properly lasted me four days. After that I began to get unwieldy, testy, cranky, he said.  And belief system being everything, when I was getting laid, when I was happy from that drug and pictured my man as capable, good, caring, thoughtful, my hero…he was.  And when I looked down from that high wire, whether it was due to too little sex or too much real life disappointment encroaching, the view was often terrifying.

Nihil had trouble in England, growing up.  He was sent to boarding school at 6 years of age, and later attended St. Cuthbert’s, the same school Sting attended in northern England.

Nihil had his share of caneings but he had it coming. He put cherry bombs down toilets.  And was ADHD before the diagnosis was available. He would be called down for daydreaming and thinking the rows of sixes looked like the pretty signets in the dikes between fields on the Romney Marsh.

He was sensitive. And his mother’s favorite. She protected him for a long time.  Evidently, Nihil reminded Jenette his mother, of her first cousin, a willful girl, most fun to spend the night with, creative, living in fables and fantasies which she invited others into. For Jennette, it was no more than playing Narnia, yet when the cousin was prevented from seeing her first beau, and she tore her clothes off as her father struggled, and ran down the street naked, she was hospitalized. A lobotomy was suggested. Her name was Ann. She lived institutionalized. Nihil’s godmother was a schizophrenic who sent christening gowns with three arms. Another cousin. Should be a warning label.
“These offspring will be boys who do bars.”

His father’s peat bog ancestry made relations with his coddled son strained, and while waiting for Nihil, who dawdled, and resentment mounting as Nihilwas the only one of the four children who failed his 11 plus and monies which had to be spent to send him to St. Cuthbert’s, Patrick was not enamoured with interminable waiting.  He had a temper, and he hurled his coffee cup at Nihil’s head across the room.

Nihil’s father worked for the conservative party.  Later, he would have the honor bestowed upon him, by the Queen, of Royal Ambassador of the British Empire, for years of service to the party.

At sixteen, No longer being forced to join his siblings and parents in the tiny caravan that trailed behind their car to France and all over Europe, Nihil opted to stay at home while they sat and slept in terribly cramped quarters of a caravan. He’d had enough salt sandwiches ,cucumber tomato and cheese in white bread.  And dog hair. Bell, his mother’s hearing aid dog shed terribly. The family was much too tight to stop at Little Chef on the A1.  As small children, Brenda made them share one, four ounce can of orange juice, as a  special treat. She’d been through rationing in WWII.

Nihil spent his weekends doing hallucinogens and smoking hash. He brought  squatters into the house on the Jesmond Dene, who looted and violated their home. On one occassion his mother’s prized silver concha belt was nicked. They could no longer  trust him and his father had had enough.  The compromise his father accepted, as they quarreled over Nihil’s fate, was to give Nihil the bomb shelter and a tiny plug in heating element for a cuppa. That lasted a week. Then he hit the strets.

Nihil’s mother would sign all around downtown, and speak in her slow, unheard by herself voice, “Have you seen my son, Nihil.” She drove around NewCAstle for months, thinking, at first, that every cold, scrawny dark headed boy with shoulderblades angling out of a worn coat was Nihil.  Nihil had fled the city and gone on a mission to bust his buddy out of a Greek jail. The whole thing was a blur, really, because he was on acid and stoned not to mention cold and suffering from  malnutrition and, evidently, mental illness.  Whether he did assist the jail bust or whether he just carried around the newspaper article of his friends return to the UK, I don’t know.  In the days when I believed him and believed in him, I did so with certainty.

He told me about living in a squat in Utrecht with one loaf of black bread to last him a week.  He worked for a day on a construction site.  And then made plans to go to America and travel with his cousin Sallie.

I don’t know how he secured airfare. Maybe his uncle Godfrey, a professor of medical economics with a schooner on Block Island, paid his way. Would he now, if he’d known Nihil would be fucking his daughter, Nihil’s first cousin, and that they’d break into camps and steal artichoke hearts from grocery stores along the AL-Can. And  what would Godfreys  take have been on their claim to be husband and wife while living in Valdez, sharing a 9 mm for bear and a terrible case of non specific urethritis  Sallie contracted from  a customer at a lounge she waitressed in, to support them.

The mayor of Anchorage hung out with his gay friends at Sallie’s bar’. The memory of Johnny’s death, a suicide, struck Nihil as he swam in the bracing Aegean off the island of Corfu, years later. It was his first true psychotic break which I,  having been made love to in the past four days, mistook, in a hopeful fashion, for spiritual empowerment.  Before that episode I never really reflected on the significance of Nihil, setting fires at family campsites. Fires that penultimately caused the family to leave, ashamed and afraid, in the night.