Wednesday, October 14, 2015

lightning bolt

I have spent a long, long time whinging about my "idyllic life in Laurel Canyon"(that's an actual quote, by the way). So what happens when you want to write about a lightning bolt, about the day when everything changes? How do you shift your narrative in such a way that doesn't make you seem like an asshole?

This is how it goes: You're one thing, in one mind-set, lamenting the things you don't have, stuck in the mode of trying to look your most beautiful and spending anxious moments trying to be adorable and winning and then in one momentous night, you're not the same. Every single thing changes.

This is new territory. I don't know where to start or how, I don't even know that I should be writing about this. It's taken a few days (punctuated with travel to London and a full-on press schedule for a winning, kind client, and my bold move of taking the splint off of my finger, and finding the time in the crazy work schedule to sit down outside, listening to crickets, under the fairy lights in the garden, with a glass of Merlot, hoping above hope that the rain might come) to even sit down to write about it. I'm wondering if I can or if I should or whether I might jinx it, or whether it's appropriate. (My daughter asked me the other day why I don't write about her, and I tried to explain that things that important and close to me, don't get written about, but then, what is the point of a personal blog, such as this one?).

This is how it goes. There is man I have know for a while, a tall, kind, elegant man, someone who works hard and is gentle and has helped me for years with both my personal demons and the work ones, someone who is receptive and attentive and a rock, someone who I've written about her before because he reminds me of tea and cricket and chalk and oak trees, an Englishman, who has managed to make a little home for himself inside my head, a tiny little safe place, that I can retreat to when things aren't good. And the man became real. The things in my head, both imagined and not dared for, became real.

My friend Laura, who I fully believe to be a witch, because she is so very intuitive, calls it emotional intimacy, and I think this is what happens when you allow yourself to be vulnerable (thank you Devin, and Brene Brown).

One day you are nervous and shy and wondering if you've chosen the right shade of lipstick, and the very next, you are open and un-awkward and yourself, and lying with your head on the lovely, kind, smooth, warm chest of someone you want to spend hours whispering to when the lights are out. It's not the kissing or the way he puts his arm around your shoulders when you cross the street, or the way he smells, or how he's the tallest person in the room and he's introducing you to everyone and taking your coat and bringing you glasses of wine with a secret code that only you know, nor the way he says "I don't care who knows," it's the conversations you have in the early hours of the morning when the revellers have gone home, and it's just you and the hum of distant traffic. It's the revealing of one's truth to another, to someone who wants to hear it and seems to understand it. It's the walking around a dark flat with bare feet and seeing the light outside, but feeling safe inside. It's the unusual sensation of not being alone, even when you're driving down Santa Monica Boulevard after a three o'clock meeting and he's about to go to bed, but he tells you that he's there for you and you know, you know that he means it, that it's true. After such a long time of trying to be a dater, a lover, a happy-go-lucky cool party girl, that somehow you're home. It's about getting used to home and remembering that there is no need any longer to sparkle, that your sparkling is, in fact, absorbed, happily, by someone else.

I don't know how to relax. I don't know how to wake up in the night and not find poetry which illuminates my longing. I don't know how or have forgotten how to be still in it.

I do know that he won't panic when he reads this. And I know that he won't ask me to take it down, because like me, he came out of his cocoon, and, in a rather wonderful way, we're on an adventure together, and I don't think either of us care where it leads; we're just trusting it.

Thank you, o great and loving energy of the universe, or whatever you would like to be called. I am a very happy girl.

7 comments:

LPC said...

Well this makes me ever, ever, so happy. May all the golden light of love illuminate your days endlessly.

Katherine C. James said...

This is so lovely, Bumble. I am happy for your happiness, and I think what you wrote is just as it should be: "and, in a rather wonderful way, we're on an adventure together, and I don't think either of us care where it leads; we're just trusting it."

Today on Facebook I posted today's picture from the series of photographs I took of myself last year with lines from e. e. cummings, because today is cummings' birth date. The lines I chose are my favorite in all of cummings' work. I think they apply to your life, to all of our lives really, when we are living them well in the moment. Here is what he said:

trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)

(From dive for dreams.)

Here's to trusting in the present moment. I think that is where the joy resides.

xoxoxo.

materfamilias said...

Oh, this is just so good. Bless. Bliss. Soak it up and Shine!

Rowan said...

Hoorah! That's wonderful! Just enjoy it as it moves along, trusting and not pushing.
Wishing you contentment.
Deborah C - Melbourne, Australia

Janelle said...

oh utterly marvelous, darling Miss W! thrilled for you. truly. x

carla_fern said...

what was it your dear brother said?? xoxo,,,fingers crossed

Marcheline said...

JUST... FABULOUS!!!