Love that rearranges us
when we least expect it, love has us confront the endlessness of the heart
They tell me that, we get just a few great loves in our lifetime. That it isn’t the length of love that defines how impactful a love is, but its depth, the way that we get pulled towards something with such a gravity, that it has the power to completely rearrange us from within.
As a relationship ecologist, I don’t often get seen as someone in love. I have been told that I’m so committed to the village that no one would be surprised if I committed to a non-romantic relationship that looked like two kingdoms coming together towards a shared purpose of strategically bridging two communities. Which, to be fair, is an idea I’ve entertained.
Yet neither the arranged marriages of the past that intended to unite two clans and modern conceptions of romantic love, where one is expected to meet all the needs once provided by a village, are options I want to be left with.
My heart knows that something else is possible, a kind of love that returns us to our birthright as beings of devotional stewardship of a relational ecosystem. The kind of relationality that centers on wholeness. Returning our spirit to the acceptance we’ve lost in the ancestral severances that had to cut our ties to land and our kin as a way to assimilate and survive.
Love, the kind that bends time, makes impossible possible, invigorates our senses to leap into the unknown, invites us to rearrange each molecular cell in our bodies. It is a love of such immense power and tension, that we can realize we now have the capacity to confront our woundedness with the courage to stay and be with the process of healing.
This last moon cycle, I was met by a love that rearranges.
One that came out of nowhere. One that settled comfortably into all the crevices and cracks left open by past loves. One that shook the entirety of my being and rearranged me within myself. I had all the pieces ready. What I had been waiting for was an earthquake of cosmic intent to lock each piece into its re-knowing of w-holy matrimony with self.
Prior to this love, I had settled on an agreement with myself that I would never choose to open my body to anyone unless I felt I was wholly accepted, where my sense-abilities would be heard, where my community body1 reflected to me the alignment I needed to trust in the synchronistic call of god playing a hand in the becoming of love.
I felt so steadfast in my intention that I told myself I was prepared to go years safe keeping the delicate flower of my vulnerability and the flickering candle of my tenderness, shielding them with a newfound sense that if I reaffirmed my belonging as a divine being and saw my offerings as sacred, I would be met when I fully understood this as true.
To ready myself for this journey, I packed my bag with the wisdom of my elders and ancestors. I held within me the teachings of partnership from earth-based traditions that speak to the purpose and calling of our lives requiring companionship to be in service to a village’s continuity. In Sobonfu Somé’s book The Spirit of Intimacy she describes the West African, Dagara tribe’s tradition of elders receiving the life purpose of a newly born infant from the spirit realm. Holding this information, the elders would offer to the emerging adult, when ready, a life partner to carry this purpose forward.
In this bag I carried on behalf of my longing for this kind of meeting, the poem Terry shared with me when I asked how to know if someone were right for you, in which he recited to me the last four verses of this poem at the peak of a mountain:
In this iron reign
I sing liberty
Where each receives from each
What each most wants to give
And where each awakes in each
What else would never be.
William Stafford
And what Nao expressed to me while peeling loquats, that only after reaching 74 years of age she sees that though we may always find love for another, there is a different kind of love, a truer kind of love she says. One that looks like meeting one who has received the same whisper of soul-direction from god.
This kind of love is not just about loving this kind of love is about arriving.
When we meet a love that rearranges, we’ve arrived at recognizing our own wholeness. We’ve deepened our trust with divinity’s guidance enough to let ourselves go so we may actually be seen in the true depth of our well for receiving and the untapped exuberance bubbling up as our spring gushing to give.
We cannot be rearranged unless we are willing to let it all go, dissolving all lines we thought we’d never cross, sinking into unknown territories that will reveal the chapters we hoped we’d left behind.
It is in our readiness to embrace the risk of not having it at all, that love comes to rearrange us. The more we cling to a version and vision of what our future is meant to look like, the less we open ourselves up to the possibilities of creation.
When we can touch the pulse of what has been fated by the stars, etched by our ancestral inheritances, constellating as the pain and experiences we’ve had, we will know when we’ve been met by a love that isn’t here to complete or fill us… but to rearrange us.
There’s a massive ocean between me and a love that has rearranged me.
He’s moving back to our homelands to start military conscription, a year of apartness, a future that will be defined by a place so different than my home in northern California. I don’t know what’s next, how we might dance in this space. It’s unclear if we’ll ever merge our lives or build a co-created life together as we wayfind through complexities like his recently ended nine+ year long relationship.
What I continue to trust is that we were meant to meet, to collaborate, to learn and to redefine love through knowing one another. It is the largeness of how unknown our future might be due to the constraints of our lives, where I have faith that if god has whispered the same purpose to us at birth, we will re-find each other again and again, wiser and more committed to the unfolding of discovering the call that brings us closer to the Beloved and our gifts to the village.
Amid my inner world being rearranged, I feel the allure of rearranging my outer life to align with this other, of translating the expansion in my body into a readiness for a constant accompaniment to this new love. What is both the gift and the difficulty of our sea of distance is a tempering that I am being offered, a recognition that this rearrangement within is not for myself but in service to life beyond me.
That this rearrangement is here to reflect to me my capacity for love, as love itself. It is not something that is constrained to this relationship, but rather a reflection of what I know is my potential to loving all of life when I remember how deeply I am loved, as a part of divinity and a wonder belonging to this world.
For a moment we get to be in this transience. A state of mesmerizing syncopation, awe in recognition of being met after all the times we’ve felt left. There is an impermanence to these moments and a timelessness.
Being caught in a love that rearranges, requires courage to surrender to the full rearranging. In the past, I’ve needed the secure markers of future vision alignment to feel I could buoy further into sense-making a relationship. To make sure that we would change alongside the same course and choose each other because of a myth that the present was a map for the future.
Yet all the digging, the researching, the diligent discernment does little when you are simply hit by love that asks us to give up all maps in pursuit of charting one’s own course. To feel the heart pieces scrambling to remain in ways they had once known intactness crying with relief in the stretch of a newer orientation towards trying.
And what I hope for me, for you, for us, in this trying; is to give ourselves to it. Not because at the end there’s a prize, or a relationship that continues until death do us part. But because we need to feel, we need to create, we need to remind ourselves that the purpose of life is not to stay comfortable but to fight for our aliveness.
When so much is trying to numb us, kills us, disembody us, extract from us, we get to melt into the hands of love so tender we are led to the feet of the goddess of the earth, our hearts breaking open with a cry only the ground can hold. When we give ourselves to love, we give ourselves to the rearrangement of everything we had been told to believe in, and we get to feel for ourselves what is worth living for.
The community body is what I refer to as my close web of relations. I receive council, input, and feedback from these beings as a form of self-knowing. I recognize that those I most trust are oftentimes the greatest reflections of my growth, purpose, and shadows.
This is truly an exquisite rendering of this type of love / connection that appears in life and often is not captured well in words.