The very best of my life has been the unplanned
In a few days I will celebrate 60 revolutions around the sun. A part of me is in shock. How did that happen? When did that happen?
The true part of me feels more alive, more coherent, more whole, true and beautiful than I have ever felt. And yes, way more sexy than I have ever felt.
I determined somewhere in my twenties to not live with regret. I also vowed to not prostitute my soul, my integrity, for a life that was not aligned with my core values. This was a bone-deep commitment, which cost much in NO’s, including a glamorous life on the arm of someone as the trophy wife, a no to the easy path to money through work that bothered me deeply as a violation of what I felt right…
We humans are a complex bundle of all sorts. All of us have been heartbroken. All of us have struggled with much. Our bank account is no reflection of happiness or health of our mind body being.
The big three… love, money and sex test us all. Too much, too little, not good enough.
The very best of my life has been the unplanned. Even dare I say, that which I have not coveted.
In my youth, yearning for money, I found the work of my lifelong mentor, Bucky Fuller. Only now, three-plus decades later, do I understand.
In my thirties, while married, I became an accidental mother. The greatest role of my life.
In my later thirties and forties, I tried again for love. I learned about depression, suicide, and a choice to live and die through a relationship with a man who struggled every day to stay on Earth. He lost that battle. I tried internet dating, and decided that I would rather be single, happy and celibate than settle for average, and the bumpy ride of navigating romance.
In that decision, voluntary celibacy and singlehood, which lasted thirteen years, I went through my own dark night. At one point my longing was to fall asleep and never wake up. Many of you have tasted this place.
Every belief I had, everything that had held me upright, disintegrated. A good friend, recognising the signs, reached out.
In choosing to put my feet on the ground and say yes again to ALL life, I made powerful decisions about how this life I was now committed to was going to be lived.
Many of the threads the same, but amplified. Super high volume integrity. Super high volume application of the work of Bucky. And no longer seeking, searching for a relationship. Loving me, life and the whole mishmash.
And so, in my 58th year, I accidentally and oh-so-surprisingly found love. Not the love of my youth, bumpy, fractured, tentative, or the love of my mid-years, grasping and mildly desperate, but the love of a woman so completely comfortable in her own skin…happy with her singleness.
In my 58th year, I also found the clarity of the work my life path had been directing me to, often with so much confusion, frustration, and existential anxiety.
It is no surprise to me that my love and my work arrived simultaneously. Indeed it is no surprise that the fruits of my life path have taken so very long to ripen.
But ripen they have. Oh, so very ripe. It was worth every single step.
In my 58th year, having love of such natural and beautiful ease, where we truly feel like we have found ourselves after a very long separation, arrive, has humbled me and filled me with wonder. Wonder at the crazy, tangled but inevitable path that is integrity lived.
It has only become better. Work, love, life….words that I longed to speak for so many years in my youth…’I am so lucky.’ So grateful. So filled with awe.
Photo taken August 26th 2020
