That night qualifies as a Top Five in almost nineteen years of making love to the same woman. Hell, it might even be the best-ever—hard to calibrate these things exactly, you know?

We were on the balcony with nothing and no one but dark mountains spreading out in the distance. She stood and shook her hair out, let it fall down her bare back and reached her fingers to touch the shining web of stars in the night sky. Goddess energy shone from her breasts as she turned to draw me close. I could scarcely breathe as we sank in an ecstatic tangle of limbs and lips onto the blanket she had arranged on the deck. We seemed to explode then and sail off among other meteors which blazed across the black cosmos above.

Later, we lay quiet in our private afterglow thoughts and she suddenly buried her face in my chest and cried a little. “What is it?” I asked, but she shook her head. Finally, she leaned in to kiss me and whispered, “I just love you.”

Were ever words more hard-won than those after nineteen years of being together?

Were ever words more unlikely to be heard between two such different, incompatible people after so many years? How does a couple—with all the statistics and personal baggage charting a course toward inevitable divorce—find such a space of intimacy?

A spiritual seeker my whole life, when the shell truly cracked for me, everything changed. It was as if an invisible ophthalmologist gave me a corneal transplant and I no longer saw anything the same way. For awhile, the new light hurt my eyes, so to speak. I was starstruck and drunk on the Divine.

Over time, the world came into focus. With this clarity came some painful revelations. No longer could I ignore my bullshit. my codependence, my control-freakery and a long-buried resentment of my partner.

As Gloria Steinem once said, “The truth shall set you free. But first, it will piss you off.”

Yes. I had spent years reading all sorts of self-help and personal development books. I could reel off great sermons of positivity to anyone who would listen. I was a perennial seeker, though. There remained in me a deep wound, a gaping need, a buried arrowhead. I was sure that my partner was the problem. If she would just accept me.  If she would just surrender to real intimacy. If she would just let go and love me, then I could enjoy a life of bliss.

But my new clarity wouldn’t allow me to lie anymore. I began to see my partner as a mirror of myself.  A mirror so close, in fact, that I could no longer blame a single thing on her without seeing in that judgment an exact reflection of myself.

Oh, lover, my guru. You show me my deepest wound and brightest light. Your face appears wherever I look. If I should leave you and seek another, you will only change form but bring me always back again to the same unlearned lesson.

Oh, lover, my guru. Thank you for teaching me to love myself. Thank you for being a reflection of all that remains unresolved and asks for healing. I need not journey to far-off sacred places or beg for rice in saffron robes. Before me you stand with all the lessons I so dearly wish to avoid.

Oh, lover, my guru. I  bless our moments of high bliss under star-woven skies. They remind me of a contract—made perhaps in some nonmaterial place—for us to meet and come together like this. Like this and also like all the other ways we rub and scratch and polish each other until the reflection is clear beyond words.

Jacob Nordby is an author and speaker. He recently released his first spiritual novel, The Divine Arsonist: A Tale of Awakening, and was published alongside Jack Canfield and others in Pearls of Wisdom: 30 Inspirational Ideas to Live Your Best Life Now. You may connect with Jacob and download a free ebook titled “Re-Mapping Your Life” by visiting his website:http://www.yourawakenedself.com

 

~ Editor: Lori Lothian

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