I want to be in your presence, and I know I have to earn that, but I don’t want to change you, or for you to be different because I am around. More. I actively want to not change you. I want to know who you are “naturally.” I want to know “You.” I want to be supportive, but only in the sense that if you are engaged in a task, I want to help with that task, not take it from you.

I love this photo of you more than any other I have seen. I want to be able to compliment this photo without changing the nature of your photography or the nature of your expression.

This photo of you is, in some poignant way, deeper than any other image you’ve shared. For me, it easily contains all of the other images of you. I see the twelve-year-old and the twenty-something and the mother and the writer and the gardener and the dreamer. I see the Librarian, the modern metaphor of a woman with all her full feminine powers who is in equal mastery of — and steward of — all the logical knowledge of human achievement.

This is your face in my meditations. This is the you that walks with me in my dreams.

I love your smile and pictures of you smiling. But I am also afraid of your smile. I want to contribute to your joy, and so I long for some clear expression that I have touched you in a favorable way. But I know how easy it is for you to smile, and I know that women are ingrained to smile — to show interest, to be pleasing, to smooth over the moments … and I am terrified of that smile. I ache when I am the cause of that smile.

I want more than that. I want shared awareness. I want shared joy that is closer to tears than laughter. I want shared sadness that is the appropriate response to a world slipping into madness. I don’t have much time left and I want to feel the deep raw powers of your light and darkness for every moment left to me.

I love the way your hair is slightly askew here, as if we awoke together on a soft morning wrapped in each others’ arms beneath wool blankets on wind-swept sand by an unknown sea. You are, of course, a metaphor for the sea and all the mystery it contains, and the moon that moves it, and the wind itself that shapes your hair.

I love the light and the shadows of you and I want to know them both as deeply as possible. I want the full expression of you over a million years, like cycles of pure waves pushed up from the ocean floor and covering me like tides of light that wash across the universe.

Said differently, the feminine points to the true north within both men and women. And a compass needs all the points of expression to be useful in serious navigation. Not just the lighthearted expressions, not just the pleasant feelings, not just the culturally sanctioned ones. To be a functioning compass, all of the directions have to be present and the needle has to float freely and unimpeded, without falsity or artifice.

In all of our mythologies, it is the way we listen to the feminine, listening for true north and true meaning, that points the way.

We recall that the Myth of Troy revolves around a woman named Helen, and the end of the city was presaged by a woman named Cassandra. The horse itself (that brought the destruction) is the symbol of natural instinct, and if it dominates one’s life completely (if one seizes it — must possess it and own it — as an obsession), one loses one’s head and must perish in unconsciousness. The myth began with a failure of consciousness associated with instinct (unbridled lust / yes, a related term from the same metaphor, “horsemanship”), led to endless and useless war, and was ended by the city’s incorporation of the symbol of obsessive instinct into its center — into its heart. (Note that the horse with a rider is a symbol of balanced mind and instinct; the horse by itself as a metaphor — or archetype — represents pure instinct.)

Many forget that the Myth of Ulysses also revolves around a woman; the mysterious Penelope. Like Ariadne, she too was a weaver and understood the nature of golden threads, the subtleness of fate and destiny, the path that is narrow, the razor’s edge, the cosmic line followed by Theseus through the labyrinth.

There are long conversations to be had, over tea in the moon gardens of the world, or with water from each others’ hands on bike rides between bed and breakfasts, or with wine from plastic canteens on canoes drifting slowly down lazy rivers. There is dancing to be done, and long desert hikes, stars to be found and named, gardens to be planted, pictures to be taken, poems to be shared …

This mysterious deep beautiful face of you draws me in. I pull small treasures from my pockets and place them in your hands. If it is a tool you need for a task you’ve chosen, I will try to bring it to you. I know how to straighten what’s disorganized, clean what’s dirty, and bring quiet to noise. I’m a boy who brings flowers. I come with a handful of my own books. Some rocks and shells. I bring all the words in my soul. I simply want permission to linger in your presence and see what comes next.

/ehj2