Life on the Edge

Love comes quietly
Finally
Drops around me
on me
in the old way.

What did I know
thinking myself
able
to go alone
all the way.

Robert Creeley

This week I reached 60 years of age. Wow. Who would have thought this would have ever happened? Especially, to “us”, the first of the generation of spoiled, baby boomers (1946 - 1960)? Crossing this threshold is, indeed, a momentuous event.

Lots of water under lots of bridges and plenty of upturned stones.

In Chinese Astrology this is one of the most significant years in anyone’s life in that it marks the end of one 60 year cycle and the beginning of another. I’m a Fire Dog.

In this birthday blog there are many things I could discuss and go into greath depth about as there is much to celebrate. But I would like to focus on just one significant aspect and that aspect is strongly hinted at in the above poem and birthday breakfast photo. Namely, two instead of one.  In the first 60 year cycle I mostly remained unattached and a monkish bachelor. The number of years living with a woman could be counted on one hand (minus a thumb and a finger). This 2nd cycle is to be in the company (and whole, healthy arms) of a partner, Sally, the artist and Chinese medicine practitioner.

Heaven help her. Fire dogs are ever cordial folk whose good manners issue directly from an honest sense of altruism and love of humanity. However.... their enemies are their boiling passion, their inability to control their reactions to what they think of as wrong-doing and their unfortunate tendency to sputter, bluster and grouch. People let them down. Lovers reject their romantic ideals. Dirty politics blind them with rage.

Despite these apparent difficulties, Sally (an Earth Goat) seems willing to push the wheel barrow of love and keep the fires of intimacy fuelled.

Her birthday present to me is this exquisite mandala painting. It is full of symbolism. On a scroll of parchment paper, Sally wrote this about the mandala’s layered meaning.

Ageless endless love

Past, present and future merge to form the entirety of existence. Our existence.

The past sits in the background, hazy, indistinct, lost to immediate recollection but ever-present in essence. The present lies at the centre, between past and future. Our pivot, intertwined with the past, opening to the future. The future encompasses the past and present, influenced and shaped by them yet open; ever open and undefined. Our immense sphere of potential. Expansive and vast.

A golden ring encircles each. A promise of the love between us—a promise that there is love, has been love, will always be love. The energetic web that is us, the mandala of you and me, moves inward and outward through time. The inward outward movement encapsulates our sharing, our giving and taking, our exchange of knowledge, our barter of love, our lovemaking.

An internal fire burns at the core. And eternal light. Intimacy, passion, strength, action and will power.

The mandala is reminiscent of a flower. The light in the centre is the flower’s driving life force; it is spirit, soul, blood and essence. Buoyant, uplifting, outward moving, and opening. Flowers carry the medicine of expansion, lifting energy from the source to the surface. Softly, delicately, at the juncture of self and non-self they dance in life’s breezes. Vulnerable, yet open to the elements.

A bulb sits at the centre of each flower; each moment of our every day is laden with opportunity and new life.

The mandala is our medicine. It is the medicine of sharing. It symbolises that we hold within our depths our own essence, our own truths. We bring our essence, our spirit, our soul to the surface for sharing and exchange. The soft and delicate sharing and exchange of love and self. The flower is formed through the combination of our individual entities, and the entity that is us. The yin and the yang of each of us symbolise the wholeness of self encircled by the entirety of us. Unity within unity.

The mandala thus embodies our united life force, reaching out into the world as one from the depths of self. A marrying of each with other. Transcending time and separation. With endless potential and openness.

...So here’s to the sharing of our ageless, endless, absolute love.