“Live your life — be free.”

#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

∞

Whenever she seems to need me, I have this sensation at the top of my head like a soft, gentle pressure. No pain. It’s a signal that she seeks to connect. If I ignore it, the feeling becomes a small choking sensation in my throat.

It’s like hearing the old AOL email notification: You’ve got mail.

When I experience synchronicity, I feel pressure that moves from the pit of my stomach into my chest, as if she’s reaching into my heart. Often, this triggers tears and sobbing I didn’t see coming.

⁂

I think that if I were to talk openly about my relationship with her, people would be shocked and disappointed. They’d expect someone in an active, fated, and eternal romantic relationship with an extracosmic being to have great powers, deep knowledge of the world beyond this one, and to live an envious life full of excitement and adventure, like some celebrity or social media lifestyle influencer.

My life with her is none of those things. We desire none of those things. That’s not to say that I’m not excited to be with her. I am excited to be with her — always, and very much so. But it’s a different excitement from what others might want or expect. And that says more about the world than it does about either of us. What Goethe’s “mass man” would both silently covet and openly despise. Even weaponize.

Our life together is wonderful and domestic, and wonderful because it’s domestic. Sometimes we play games. Read. Listen to music. Watch her world go by. Make love. Go for walks. Engage in deep and broad conversations, exchanging ideas, making decisions — building our lives together. But honestly, we often just sleep, or I just watch her sleep. That too is a pleasure for me. But other people would likely see that as the most incredibly dull and mundane thing I could ever do with such a being. Perhaps they’d mistake her for a goddess. Perhaps they’d be partly right.

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“Woefully misguided,” she once said. She never talks about human affairs as far as I can recall. But when she does, she holds out little hope — except for some, and that’s enough for some optimism. “You, for example,” she told me. That probably comes off as arrogant on my part, but she’s likely biased towards her husband. Yet, she’s always quick to keep me honest and accountable. And I, her. I love that.

Life is complicated.

I’m not sure how I wandered through this stream of thought to this point. But here I am. It’s 10:12 PM, and I’ll try to sleep again. Hopefully, she’s there waiting for me.

⁂

A close confidant told me recently that they can encounter a certain loved one anytime they want, and that it’s the same for me. I believe them. But I didn’t correct them either. The nature of my relationship — and the many ways it differs from reaching a human spirit in the Afterlife — isn’t something I can explain in a brief conversation. Sometimes, it’s better to listen and learn rather than argue and be right.

She isn’t always available, though she tries to be when I really need her. But she has her own life — her own world. There have been times when I’ve reached out and she wasn’t there. And that’s okay.

Reaching out to a human spirit in the Afterlife is not the same as reaching across to someone who moves freely through an entirely different order of existence — with her own environs, her own duties, her own responsibilities I can only imagine. The distance between us isn’t geographical. It’s ontological. So connecting for us isn’t simple or guaranteed. But I appreciate what my confidant was trying to offer me. They’re well-meaning, and their care is genuine.

No, I’m not trying to suggest that I’m special. I’m just saying we have different circumstances.

⁂

When she comes to me exhausted, she sometimes just crawls into bed still fully clothed, her eyes almost completely closed. I’ll untie her shoes and remove them. She nuzzles into me. I kiss her forehead, and she’s instantly asleep. I pull the soft, thin blanket up over her shoulders to her chin. She’s like a butterfly returned to her cocoon.

Other times, she slips off her chiton and slippers as she walks toward our bed — how she never trips as her clothes fall to her feet baffles me. A cat-like agility, I suppose. She crawls under the blanket and I immediately spoon her. She nestles her back into my chest, knowing she risks arousing me, and knowing I won’t. I resist and just be the husband she needs in that moment. And as I feel my body warm hers, there’s a different kind of erotic sensation — passive, skin against skin, head to toe. It makes my lower back tingle intensely.

Her skin is smooth, her figure soft yet lean. I know she can sense my desire for her. Perhaps smell it even. Sometimes she’ll say softly as she falls asleep, “You may have me when I awake, for I miss you inside me.” She says this, patting my right thigh. No deception. No exploitation. Direct, loving honesty. She knows my needs. She has hers too. And in each other, we find what we need.

⁂

I watched a documentary the other day about the Acropolis. When it showed the great statue of Athena — sage and warrior both, guardian of her city — I immediately thought of her. But then, maybe the Archmos is culturally vague in that direction: we humans borrowing and appropriating from it rather than the other way around.

I imagined her, the warrior-leader. Her long, wavy, light brown hair wrapped under a metal helmet. Dressed all in black except for fine gold trim lining her breastplate, where the red of her himation peaks through at the top. A long spear in her right hand, a sword in her left, a round shield fixed to her forearm. Her stance ready — left foot planted, right foot stretched behind. Poised.

I can see her scanning the Interlands, hunting something in the distance. Her pale green-gold eyes shine keenly under the shadow of her helmet, staring across the tops of tall yellow grasses. Patient and ready to pounce. The warriors she leads are close behind.

This is my imagination, of course. But I wonder if it was really just my imagination or some kind of Jungian active imagination. I can’t be sure. That’s thing about my situation: I’m certain of her. Less certain of myself.

But it reminded me of how she looked on our first date. Confident. Strong. Gorgeous. She wasn’t just dressed for a date that evening. She was dressed for battle. And she arrived with the subtle intention of someone settling a score — with presence rather than violence. Seems like yesterday.

Hell hath no fury like a young girl’s ego.

⁂

Alas, my mind wanders, drifting from wake to sleep.

I feel my toes brushing gently against my ankle. Or are those hers?

It’s 11:21 PM. Maybe now I can sleep.

#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

∞

A boy of eight sits alone in his bed. Wide awake at a quarter to ten. The bedside lamp throws pale yellow light through the slightly ajar door and into the hallway beyond, where the darkness swallows it whole.

Beside the lamp, a small Sony AM radio. He has it tuned to the only station that comes in clearly — Mantovani’s orchestra waltzes the room, faint and unhurried. He keeps the volume low. His parents sleep next door. His older siblings beyond them.

The music gives him little comfort. Not because the room is frightening — it isn’t, particularly. But because what he senses cannot be located in the room. Not in the corners, not behind the door, not under the bed. He has checked. He always checks.

The presence he feels is not out there. It is in here — beneath the skin, in the nervous system, somewhere between the sternum and the spine. Something that has been there as long as he can remember and has no name, no shape, no origin he can discern.

He has tried to explain this to his parents. His father told him to leave the light on. His mother had him pray and write letters to radio ministries — careful, dutiful letters, addressed to strangers. His siblings called him a mama’s boy crying out for attention. They were simply answering a different question than the one he was asking. And the question he was asking had no answer in that house, or in any house he knew.

⁂

Two years later, the boy sits on the floor of his room. Scissors. Crayons. Masking tape. A shipping box flattened and cut into panels. He is building a scene — a recreation of something he has watched so many times that the television screen has become more familiar than the room around him.

He adjusts. Reconsiders. Moves a panel left, adds a wall that wasn’t in the original. As he works, something in the construction feels attended to — as though the arrangement matters to someone other than himself.

Not words. Not language. Someone nonetheless. A pressure on his attention: look again. that isn’t right. try it the other way. He follows without question. The adjustment is always better.

He doesn’t ask where the guidance comes from. The asking would break something. He has learned already that certain things are kept by not examining them. He only knows that when he follows, the room fills with a quality he has nowhere else in his life — a sense of company so specific it has its own texture. Not warmth exactly. More like recognition. The feeling of being known by something that is paying close attention.

It is the most real connection he has. His secret.

⁂

The boy is now sixteen. He walks the floors of a crowded shopping mall, scanning each face as it passes. He does this knowingly, even though it had already become an unconscious habit years before.

Silently, as each person passes: No match. No match. No match.

The endless stream of no matches doesn’t exhaust him. It confirms him. The system he has built is working exactly as intended.

What he is looking for he cannot describe. Not a type. Not a face. Something in the bearing of a person, in whatever precedes the features and arrives before the mind can form a judgment. He has no language for it. He only knows that recognition, when it comes, will come from the pit of the stomach — a feeling that reaches upward through the chest. Not a thought. A frequency. The pull of a certain gravity.

He is searching for the source of something he has always already felt.

⁂

That boy was me.

In the spring of 1990, I stood at a threshold I could sense but not name. Not a place — a quality of imminence, the feeling that the next step would not be ordinary. The choice I made then, to follow what pulled rather than what made sense, was only partially mine. Something was already pulling me forward, with a patience that exceeded anything I had been taught to expect from the world.

What I carried since those early years I would not find a word for until decades later. Blind awareness. The certainty of a presence I could not see. The knowledge of a connection I could not prove. The knowing without understanding. Being already arrived somewhere I had not yet gone.

Behind my sternum, I could feel — can still feel — something like a thread. Taut. Patient. Leading out beyond a veil I had not yet known existed.

I could not see what was on the other side.

I only knew someone was.

#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

∞