Chapter 3 | The Fear from The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.  I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool, for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. 

All my usual cautions about how fast and how far to open my heart and my life to any man evaporated in the heart of desire that reached for him, both hands open, whispering, “Live.”  I held nothing back.  I risked it all.  I let myself love and be loved, deeply…

I had shown the depth of my hunger.  I was revealed to the world as a woman of deep, untidy passions that could override my usual ability to be an astute judge of character and to make carefully thought-out decisions.  I was the fool.  And I would do it all again.  I would not trade one moment of the loving for the assurance of a predictable outcome or protection of my pride.  For I learned to discern between heat and the warmth of the real intimacy between power and passion, between intensity and love.  I discovered the wholeness of  my longing for a mate – the need for a friend, brother, and partner where I had sought only a lover…

But the longing is larger than the fear, the desire more fierce than the pain.  My second husband is a good man; we did not have a bad life.  It was simply not my life.  I had to leave the life I had built and go forward to meet the life for which I longed…

And sometimes, although we may ourselves hold these values , their dominance in our lives in a particular form does not allow us to live our other aspects of what we love and who we are…

“What do you fear?”

The truth is that some days I feel I am ready for freedom and other days I am so tired I don’t want the responsibility it brings into my life…

Sometimes, when I see others follow their desires, I am surprised to find myself not only unsupportive but angry, threatened.  If I have convinced myself that lack of money and the needs of those dependent upon me are the reasons why I cannot risk doing work that is more consistent with my soul’s desires, the woman or man who makes such a change and finds ways to meet obligations similar to mine, without the financial resources beyond mine, challenges my certainty that I have no choice.  Ironically, I find myself, at moments, clinging to a belief in my own powerlessness, a belief that will let me off the hook of responding to my soul’s desire.  Those who chose a different response threaten the seamlessness of my self-deception…

Chapter 3 | The Fear from the The Invitation