Spiritual Partners
Many years ago, when I met Peter, I first had sense of recognition. He seemed familiar. Not that he looked like someone I had met or identified as someone I would be attracted to. Just…familiar.
There was also a sense of something bigger…a pull, a draw. What is that strange little tickle of a feeling? I allowed it to pull me in to him. There was a moment that I could have resisted, could have said, “NAW…he’s way too nice….WAY too boring…” I remember that moment of choosing to be with him anyway. It felt like choosing to step into the brightest destiny.
Pete and I had the sense pretty early that there was something bigger going on than just the two of us having the hots for one another. There was LOVE. And BIG LOVE, not a compromised, half crippled, whimpering kind of “love” like we’d experienced in other relationships. Not that pawing, “I need you to fulfill me” sad excuse for getting in and out of another person’s intimate space.
This was full on LOVE, like looking directly into the shining face of Godde. It encompassed us. It warmed us, drew us forth into it, kissed us. It guided and directed us. I suppose I could have walked away if I really tried, but it felt like there was no choice. I was being guided to be with this man.
It showed us our future on our 3rd date, a week at the Outer Banks. We stood on the beach one early morning, and watching the sun rise, Peter whispered in my ear that I would have our child in my belly someday. Can you imagine? On a third date? But I felt the truth of it…there was no arguing. As we watched the sun come up, we were acknowledging the agreement we made to raise another two sons! This was the same week that we discussed marriage plans…and then realizing how crazy it was, ran screaming from each other down the beach…only to come back together laughing, shrugging our hands up to the heavens with the inevitability of it.
Over these last 24 years together, we have been tested in many ways…and I don’t mean just individually tested, like “How many times have I asked you to pick up your socks” tested. I mean, we have been tested as to our commitment to the Godde in our relationship and in each other. Did we really believe that the face of the other that stood before us was the son/daughter of Godde placed before us to love and cherish as our own? Did we believe that we were here to be something bigger, to show the world what love could really be? Could we hold that for people?
These times of initiation have given us the opportunity to see where the pockets of resistance, doubt, wounding and fear lived in us, and each time we have been guided how to go into those fearful places with hands of love and retrieve them, blow on them and transmute them into something beautiful. Each time we have come through yet another exposure of something in us that has not served our greater purpose, we have managed (sometimes by true grit) to come through, loving one another all the more and coming into deeper commitment to our walk and work in this world.
I am told we have completed this work…that the time of our initiation is over. These last seven years of extraordinary journeying with our family (www.berrytrip.us), in our relationship, and within ourselves have tested us to the max, in just about every way that I can think of. There were times when we doubted…had we done something wrong? Did we make a wrong turn somewhere? When we thought our love was special, had we been misguided?
After being in the brilliant light of the BIG LOVE, the years of going inward and looking at how I resist love, block abundance, deny pleasure, and turn from happiness was the most difficult work I’ve ever done. It got so dark and smothering sometimes that I forgot the light that was right in front of me, in my very bed. All I had to do was remember that Spirit had put us together, to remember that special feeling that Peter and I had something bigger to do. But I doubted, and so did he. We each got lost in our own darkness for awhile, unmoored from the vision of the larger purpose of our partnership. While we drifted apart, we made good use of the time.
We each swam deep into the dark waters of our pasts to release old anchors placed around our necks by others, filled gaping wounds with light, retrieved happy children from the wreckage. We brought these inner workings to one another, presenting gifts in the form of awareness, bestowing them with hope that our love could be saved.
And, little by little, we have come back to one another, more healed, more whole, more able to commit to that vision of our love being the Big Love that everyone dreams of.
