Intimacy

11/10/22 I love it when I feel drawn toward ‘into me see’.  Drawn into you and drawn further into me to allow myself to be seen.  

It is your patience riddled with eagerness, your adoration colored with fear of possible rejection.  All these rawnesses are shared by us both and in this delicate, natural, beautifully impermanent place, we meet.

I love it when I’ve shard just enough for it to serve as an invitation for you to share and open up about something we don’t talk about naturally.  It fills my heart to hear your thoughts, your musings, and your insights about death; that loathed enemy that I’ve begun to see as my friend kind of.

I love it when the self-consciousness of speaking in front of a group is so thick it threatens to choke me, but then my open heart comes to my rescue. Staying humble, and with its love, like a superhero in my world, it saves me from suffocating at the last moment.  Then, when I realize it’s all over, everything else in life feels easy.  We conquered something fearful; some make believe monster, some chip on my shoulder, together, my heart and I.  

I love it when someone surprises themselves at how much they can contribute to an intimate discussion I am leading as I teach a class on grief. Because up to that point they’ve only ever felt isolated and loneliness within it.  And when I can make a safe enough moment, drawing a sacred circle around us, there’s a whole bouquet of truths people have learned through loss. I watch in awe as their disguised greater capacity to love starts to show itself ~ cloaked up to that point as pain, suffering even, like the meanest thorns on the most fragrant, deep red rose growing in the garden just outside the back door.  

I love it when we are playing ukulele and singing as we sit on the grass hunched over your songbook where you’ve written the chords and lyrics.  We must huddle closely to know what to play and sing next and all up in each other’s sweet space I feel cozy.  We aren’t looking in each other’s eyes or having some competitive ping-pong sparring conversation, but rather playing together to create a sound that melds a song, a tune, and poetry into an alchemy of inspiration and joy or sometimes sorrow or sometimes nostalgia. But always when we finish, we smile ~ happy about our little tune and our song-baby we created together.

I love it when I’m massaging you and you are breathing calmly and something prompts me to say I love you silently in my head from my heart to the body part I’m touching or to you or to the divine I sense inside you and somehow you miraculously feel my love by letting out a big sigh right at that moment, sending my love back at me, helping me understand how I feel to you.  

I love it when we are silently writing together, unaware of what is fervently pouring out of one another, but knowing it’s being spun as a result of our sharing this sacred moment and a similarly poignant purpose ~ to write our lives knowing our stories matter and have the power to touch another deeply, inspiring them to sigh when they read our words we spun together in community and in intimate connection.  

(Prompted by Ann Randolph in our “Unmute Yourself” writing group this morning. Inspired by the many different types of intimacies I’ve been experiencing in my life lately.)