Coming Home This Week + A Poem About Love and Trust
Join us for meditations Tuesday and Thursday & enjoy this poem for the lovers!
Dear Friends,
Please join me this week on Tuesday morning from 9-10am EST and Thursday from 12-1pm EST for Coming Home meditations. All are welcome as we weave a living, alchemical practice together. We share, we sit, we pray, we listen, we receive. It’s deeply nourishing and always unexpected!
This is a pay-what-you-feel, drop-in experience. Suggested donation is $10-20. Whatever you feel called to give is wonderful and appreciated. Contributions can be made at Venmo: @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown. Paid subscribers, you are already covered. Thank you.
As you can see from the foliage in today’s mandala here, fall is upon us in the Hudson Valley. I always love the scarlet eagerness of the Sugar Maples. The Fall Equinox is on Saturday this year (the 23rd), which will make it official. But, the trees already know.
So do the kids—they’re back to school. I know, too. I’ve been thinking about getting a fire pit and have begun wondering where my wool socks are. Coziness is knocking and this week I plan to get in some of the last swims of the season. But, if you live in L.A. like my beloved does, this will all be pretty meaningless to you.
*Sigh*
I miss my beloved Ari (@arikuschnir). I want to name him here because beyond the love of my life, he has increasingly become my inspiration and thought partner. Not much that comes through me into my art and writing these days hasn’t been touched by his love, ideas, and support. He provides the scaffolding upon which my creative efforts are constructed. Our relationship is my place of inspiration. He gives me courage and clarity.
Ari and I have been deep in an alchemical process since we met. Our relationship is a haven and container for transformation. And we’ve managed to build it while living across the country—each of us parenting our daughters, working, making art, finding time to be completely present for each other every day (via technology), and then flying to be together for a few days at least once a month. Like Sade says, This is no ordinary love.
The distance has been getting to me lately. It really stresses my attachment system. To open as deeply into intimacy as we do and then leave each other again, month after month, has tested me to the limits of my endurance. My sensitive nervous system, which makes me so talented at remote sensing and healing, becomes completely dis-regulated when we’re apart. As this has come to a head, I’ve had to really work to heal old wounds of abandonment. I’ve done a lot of work to ground and find safety within myself; comfort in my body and my own home. But, even so there’s been something missing. We’ve finally put our finger on it: TRUST.
Trust—a small word with so much potency. What is it anyway? I’ve spent over a decade learning the art of surrender, the art of emergence, and generally creating a beautiful relationship with the energies we sometimes call the Divine Feminine, Nature, Gaia, the Great Mother. Suddenly, I am remembering a whole realm of spiritual hierarchy that I’ve ignored—partly because it seemed so omnipresent already—the Absolute, the Above, the Cosmos, the Sun…I just haven’t invested the same time and effort into knowing what we might refer to as God, the Father. So now, I am having to find trust in something higher, some guiding light—the truth of which has been largely obscured by patriarchy and organized religion.
I didn’t even know I had trust issues. I never really thought about the difference between trust and surrender until Ari pointed it out. I may be masterful at surrender, but I’m a beginner with trust. The beautiful symmetry is that he’s the other way around: masterful at trust, but learning to surrender. We’re teaching each other and holding each other through the initiations. My inner masculine is leaning into him as it learns and his inner feminine is leaning into me. Both of us trusting and surrendering to “the higher” and “the lower” powers.
Today, I asked him what trust is for him. He answered: “Undeniable clarity, full commitment, a kind of internal, intuitive, real-time confirmation that what I am experiencing is exactly what I need to be experiencing to continue my evolution.” A shadow of trust is control.
For me, surrender is “a deep listening and feeling that allows me to step confidently into the flow of the river of life; not needing to control the situation, trusting my response-ability, believing I am held, an intimacy with reality-as-it-is and knowing life as a process of healing, integration, and evolution.” A shadow of surrender is confusion.
Tonight I offer an excerpt from a poem I wrote the other day as I grappled with trust and longing. I want to share it because it gave me peace and I hope it will soothe you, too. If you are a long-distance lover, you know the pain. If you are a lover who happens to be emotionally distant from your own beloved right now, may it help you both. If you are a lover who has not yet found your beloved, this is also for you.
Here’s to the lovers and the sacred container that is relationship.
Long Distance Love (The Bridge) Written September 2023 By Schuyler Brown I’m traveling by train along the Hudson in New York. While you’re in bed in the City of Angels, before dawn, still dark. Miles and hours separate us; mountains and deserts, too. It hurts sometimes-- let’s be honest, most of the time-- to live a life without you. I'm surrendered to our situation. I don't resist or fight. It's not surrendering that troubles me. My challenge is to rise. To believe in us, to see the way... It scares me so to hope. Not hope--you say--this is weak sauce for what it means to pray. Illuminated like a manuscript; blueprints of a master plan; to trust what’s higher and can see… This is the upper hand. How do I learn to trust please tell me once again? To trust beyond a lifetime? To trust despite the pain? There is no choice if we choose to be together for eternity. What I am trying to avoid is actually the gateway. I must surrender into trust; come to accept some pain is good. Like the kind that cracks your heart in two to make more room, over and over again, for one as vast as you. “I trust. I must." The heart is roused and speaks with urgent ardor. This love, it is a trust exercise of the deepest order. We are ascending into the trust that all life has for living; The trust the earth has for the sun, that the generous have for giving. The trust birds have for air, fish for water, planets for gravity, is a trust so vast it just IS, there's nothing more to say. Nothing to do, nowhere to go… No miles to cross, the time's enough A love that’s always here, and there, and everywhere at once. All around us like the air we breathe-- or light from stars above-- Unchanging, everlasting Even after we are stars ourselves. This is the kind of trust we're building. Architects of the heart. Why? Because we are being asked to play a greater part. We are being obliterated until we are nothing else. There will be no separation. And then we will need no bridge to draw us towards completion. Across time and space, mountains and deserts, between the coasts, our bodies, our hearts, our gaze. Your eyes twinkle like pools of light Mine like a mystery—dark, a maze. Looking now as trust itself Such complementary ways. In a world that needs bigger love We are stretching ourselves right now. Reaching for the infinite, without really knowing how. Not limited by the body, we write a greater fiction. There's something far beyond the truth: the art of pure conviction. The river glows with morning sun: he shines his light upon her. Through time and space I feel you now and pain becomes an honor. ~~~