Of Cracking Eggs and Evolutionary Relationships

This Is A Diamond

It is clear that This
is a Diamond.
Multifaceted. Faces of God.

Each time I see you now
I have only two choices:
break open
or
openly break.

How can I explain This?
It might be easier
if we
leave the castle
climb the walls
enter the city
and let Our Love be made
in

All of God's streets.

‘This Is A Diamond’ – Em Claire ©2007 – All Rights Reserved

People usually think I'm this ultra wise person because of my spiritual practices and contemplative creative life-work. The truth is, I'm also this simple girl who has real issues to deal with. Like, I don't know, say maybe, Love? 

Particularly a romantic relationship between man and woman.

As a mandala artist, being in a romantic relationship with someone has been a great process of union, separation, and integration.

First, because the mandala helped heal my PTSD from a former partner who had his own wounding issues. 

Second, the mandala helped revive in me a deep relationship I have always had with the dream world and my own birth vision manifested through this sacred art form in relationship with someone two years ago. 

I am not expecting you to figure these two out as its something I'm not confident to share about in public. I can't really explain the details of these awakening affinities but the deep process of letting go of deep patterns of co-dependence and attracting men who clearly wanted something else (or most of the time someone else) these last two years is turning out to be one of the healthiest things I have done in my entire life. 

Joseph Campbell said, "Destruction before creation."

It's the egg's breaking before the yolk is brought out that brings about creation (but yes, it is also a hearty breakfast my love). After all, the entire universe required that friction and the chaos brought about by the collision of energy that formed matter. This human being, 80% galactic dust, is a product of the dance of form and flow of opposing forces.

But that doesn't mean creation's dance to give birth to itself and these wonderful creatures we call ourselves is not painful. 

It's Osho meets Buddha. Tantra meets Yoga kind of thing. Until it spirals out of the marriage and separation of flow and form, its what humans call a "break-up."

A big BANG.

The other night, I was in one of those late night taxi rides with old love songs are on full blast and I just  wanted to break into a musical to laugh at myself because its painful to realize how much I do still miss someone. 

Packing my stuff in boxes again. It's officially a regular ritual for me every two years ever since I was probably born. 

But in the spirit of growing up and turning 30 in a few months, something just needs to be unfurled, unwired, unfolded, untangled.

To dance like the spiraling of a galaxy.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I was afraid of commitment myself that's why I was attracting partners who were just the same. Despite the opposing forces of yin and yang, there is that magnetic factor of sameness. 

…I had just come back from my walk yesterday and I was glancing through one of your books when out fluttered a picture of you. You looked maybe 15-gaunt and haunted. Realizing how much I loved you, I burst into tears. I have not told you a hundredth of what I hold in my heart for you. I know that your journey has reached a turning point and I want to give you strength. I have loved you since I was 13, when I first saw your hand move across that sheet of paper. I have loved you in every manner my imagination could contrive. I have wanted you so deeply that my body sang with pain and pleasure. You have become my obsession, my passion, my philosopher’s stone of fantasy. You are my desire, my longing, my spirit. I love you unconditionally. Do you hear me, Griffin? Do you see that I cherish you beyond question, that you have nothing to prove to me? You are making your journey to secure yourself. I am already tethered to your side. If you can love yourself as I love you there will be no dislocation- you will be whole. Bring yourself home to me and I will immerse you in every ounce of tenderness I possess. 

Sabine. 

When I was 14, I had a dream of someone whom I cannot describe here. And he remains to be a mystery up until now. God I hope he's not an alien. This person's mysterious presence appears over and over again in my dreams and in the love stories I'm drawn to. Like this cult classic story of Griffin and Sabine which I read as a 21 year old. 

When I was 21, I met this wonderful artist and so the story goes.

Today he's married and he has a kid.

Suddenly it came rushing one by one: I loved movies of revival after long separations, affairs, and even a supposed happy ending yet the lover has terminal illness. All these years I have been idealizing Sartre and de Beauvoir; Gibran and Haskell; and yeah, Griffin and Sabine. All these years, I would turn down friendships by men who seemed to have no issues or problems and were likely to be committed and loyal.

Is it really a star-crossed pattern for all creative relationships? Is creation an eternal process of union and separation?

Was I dooming myself with all this drama?

Warning: this musing might sound like a postmodern American comedy in a TV series but it's not. Come to think of it, we Filipinos talk like this in our heads (If you got that, you shouldn't be surprised why I used "eggs" instead of "balls" for this blog's title)

I'm not writing this because most of friends my age are already married and with children. When my mom was my age now, I was 4 and she just gave birth to her 3rd child. Things are perfect the way it was as it brought me to life this way. But I can't imagine myself as a parent right now. Not primarily because of the uncertainty of nuclear warheads ready to strike or the peak oil doom but because I want to be ready and clear. I want to be this wonderful mother who had her true adventure and self discovery  on her own eventually to meet someone who has also done his inner work himself.

Which brings me to this: I am writing this because all this packing up is asking me to no longer carry what is not helping grow and evolve.

And because its part of my creative process.

This used to be a romantic memory but sometimes, I'd like to pretend this is me stomping on his feet with force. 

My co-creative journey with my former partner was a beautiful and profound one. When that went away because I chose to leave the relationship: I wasn't ready and he was still working on his own commitment issues - I was afraid to co-create again. 

Not even with just a man but even with everybody. 

I was afraid to teach mandalas again. Afraid that people will use my ideas. Just like a former partner is using my ideas through an art project with this new girl.

But what does it mean when I say MY ideas?

That's an ongoing existential process for me... for my work with the sacred arts involves my surrender to be a channel of the Source of true creativity. 

Isn't this the eternal question of every artist who lives his/her entire life in the service of Creation?

But yes, I am human too. (I say that with a non - E.T. crop-circle fanatic tone)

I'd love to be with someone I can truly co-create with. Someone I am healthy with. Someone I am wise with. Someone I can journey the world with to explore mandalas further. Sure, someone who would love to send me letters too (but just to me not like someone I dated who writes all the girls he has the hots with); and yes, someone who would understand and love my run-on sentences.

I'm just kidding.

Well, yeah it's true. 

Nowadays, its ok to be jaded. It's ok to sing goofy love songs out loud to release some unresolved sarcasm. It's ok to wish that any guy I meet will not be attracted to me for now (or the other way around). It's ok not to look good for a man and have break outs while my body releases all the toxins because of raw food. If he doesn't get that, then he's not the one.

But who is THE ONE?

A Jungian would interpret Griffin and Sabine as the union of the Anima and the Animus... the integration of polarities, archetypes : East - West; Light - Dark; and yes, Man-Woman.

One is a pretty big number if you think of it in the language of Oneness.

I used to be in a Oneness campaign with this guy. But when this died out, I started doubting about Oneness. Referring to it like a greenwashing campaign. It's as if it was easy to be one with everybody. Sometimes you have no money, sometimes you can't express yourself, sometimes nobody understands you, sometimes the man you think you still love is just with someone great right now.

Yet here I am packing up to move into an intentional community that has Oneness as its vision.

Between that point of disillusionment about Oneness to the point of readily letting go of prestigious opportunities (even to announce that I am truly single and available), to go to a Oneness community was this:

the mandorla experiment

This liminal almond space between two circles: a Vesica Piscis, or popularly known as a Mandorla. This point between two circles, the point between humanity and divinity, the point between what is inner and outer. The transcendent space between happiness and sadness. This is the point of meditating what is true or not.

Which brings me to this question: What is True love?

Perhaps my thousands of years - old soul is still learning that. Which is why I'm still here, right?

But you know, one thing I am learning about the quest for true love:

It is the story of God and humanity. 

Eve must be the entire earth this Man is sitting on. Ah yes she's everywhere around God the Father :-)

It's the story of separation from what originally was, and the evolution towards what it is becoming... which is the pure essence of what it was in the first place.

My teachers have taught this over and over again: When you realize that God is within you, you will no longer need to find that outside of you.

I'd like to believe that my journey to Oneness, hell, perhaps my journey to meet the One, requires this Oneness with my Self.

I'm just honoring my space of self love and self forgiveness. I'd love to do this first before I can truly be happy for him and start telling him why it went wrong even if I scream at him so he can no longer do this mistake with this person he's with if this person is really truly making him happy. Because that's what love is right? And that also means, I deserve that kind of love too from someone who really wants to be with me.

But yes, I'd love to believe he was a beautiful and wonderful person on the inside out. He taught me ultimate courage and adventure, qualities my fear - oriented self who grew up with a wounded childhood has been trying to learn all these years.  He taught me to be my authentic self as he has always been deeply honest with his weaknesses and foolishness. I didn't realize there was great wisdom with that until now when I am revealing myself naked this way. Because of my constant fear of him always flirting with someone else, I came to realize how much I didn't love myself to be confident enough to be secure with my own beauty. Most importantly, to love myself enough to feel deserving of someone who didn't need to desire someone else. This at the same time respecting the kind of journey to love he finds self actualization from no matter how different it is from mine. For we are all, yes that includes you, just needing to experience love the way we want to.

This is probably going to take time. Much longer than it took you to reach this part of my public monologue. Maybe I am not that evolved yet as much as I wish I could be like how he can manage being subscribed to my facebook updates because I deleted him. Maybe 10 years from now, my children will find this facebook reference as old school as Khalil Gibran's and Mary Haskell's letters. What's next could be something as complicated as rocket science or my growing obsession on how one can be a hippie yet a hipster at the same time. If you don't get that, that's basically the point if I speak from the state of projection and sarcasm.

The truth is, if I speak from clarity and wisdom, the point is this:

A mandala is born from a point that danced to become a circle. From that point on, that mighty dot that started it all became the heart of things and the core of integration. And the heart, is where all things boil down to.

He was my complete opposite and that broke us apart but led us to a deepening of what really truly makes us whole (at least I hope it has led him to that). We are mandala artists after all.

Maybe this point of clarity in authentic happiness for my freedom with equal regard for his newfound joy with someone else will reveal itself soon or not. But this is the point wherein miracles happen, when I learn to let go of expectations (including that obsession with that dream years ago or even the idea of being with someone again) and just truly work from the yolk within - one sunny side up at a time (or in my case once I settle at  Maia where I am abstaining from this amazing comfort food and maybe any romantic relationship: magical healing from buko juice from one hacked coconut at a time).

This will be my true love story : My Dearest Sarah... Love, Sarah

So for now... just as it has been before and will always and forever be...
THIS IS LOVE: 

" to fly toward a secret sky,  

to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. 

First to let go of life.                                                                                                        

Finally, to take a step without feet." 

This "my Beloved," Rumi reminds me, is to really be TRUE LOVE. 

It's time to let go and fly.

Sagada

In loving gratitude to R, with whom I've shared love, shadow work, crazy dreams, heartaches, deep seated anger, mandalas, and important evolutionary wisdom with:

May we never forget the relational and co-transformative nature of human expansion. Although the ultimate romance is with your own soul, it is our experiences together that give birth to the essential lessons. We are each here to participate in this dance of sacred imagination, stepping on each other’s toes and turning each other toward God one clumsy step after another. We trip, and then we get back up with greater awareness. With this in heart, I am hopeful that we can learn to accept one another in our humanness. We are going to continue to make mistakes, but there is grace in that if we see our errors through to the lessons they contain. - Jeff Brown (from Apologies to the Sacred Masculine)