magic is reborn

i know that bitterness has made a nest by the way i celebrate events that might hurt him. secretly, and guiltily. but still, i must admit that there exists a real impulse to hold his head under water.
  I have not really known this feeling before except with George W Bush, whom I dreamt of attacking a few times.
  But for a real person that I know? It's a first.
I have made a special devil of him. He is as dangerous as anyone allows him to be.  And I allowed much.

Once I knew a real healer, whatever someone wants to call him. I can barely remember the feeling of freedom opened in me that once.
  I only remember the descriptions I had for the experience.
So has adulthood eventually robbed me of magic.

So many screens, so many partial videos, so many soundbites, so much dopamine feedback. So much disappointment.
   
    There has been magic, rare, I can see as I watch others consume life void of the richness I have been gifted.
 
A long loud scream of release soaking wet in Devon, surrounded by goddesses.

A bareback ride through a quiet forest of vivid autumn colors no light show can come close to reproducing.
  A pile of women spontaneously humming in unison as a response to something I cannot even remember.
A song I wrote for my mother and cannot remember that I was flown in on mother's day to surprise sing to her in front of an audience of women.
A young man clinging to me after we had witnessed a white creature leap in the dark wilderness.

A sweet and wild blonde goddess driving with me on humid late summer nights to hear Datura speaking to us and capturing her, roots and all.

A birth. Of a boy, after 30 plus hours of some kind of manic hell that changed three of us forever.

Drawing a white wolf and then finding her the next week and letting her become my spirit guide for the next 16 years through colleges and mountain treks and boys who didn't deserve us and boys who did and apartments and share houses and our own houses and love and loss.
     So much more. Half a lifetime of riches, of depth.

 Of finding towering beehives in the darkness in the wilderness after eating magic mushrooms.

Of watching people I grew up with get married. Have babies. Raise a new generation.
 Of roads. Of planes. Of trains. Of bikes. Of horseback.

Of saying goodbye, which is the other part of saying hello. And yet I find the desire to meet new people and places and animals I will have to let go again. And I am amazed at the renewal.

         You may leave my arms and you may leave my memories and you may leave my life, but my heart only gets fuller.

Amen


 
   
 

chapter 2

The first time it happened, I was stunned.
It was around christmas, and it had already been a few months since we had seen each other and I was moved into someone's downstairs office room while they were traveling abroad. My first step to making space for myself as being in this relationship.
    We were on the phone and he casually told me that he had his whole next year scheduled, full of places he was going and people who were hosting him. He was elated. And I was confused. We were supposed to be making plans together, we were supposed to be seeing each other soon, he was going to be coming to Australia. I thought. I thought wrong.
I had gone from feeling like I was the other half of an in love couple to an unimportant accessory. That feeling would eventually become more frequent until it was finally my whole reality.
 
      The months afterward eventually became almost daily fights. I felt helpless to stop them. The discussions nearly always centered around his visa and how our marriage would accomplish it and me explaining over and over that I could not leave Australia in order to marry him and give him a US green card.
    This was around the spring of 2014, the American spring. I had flown to the US in February to meet him and he had taken me to Key West and proposed. Sort of. He told the story of a diver who found a treasure and that he wanted me to have a ring made from the gold of that treasure.
   We were in the shop and looking at rings.
I was happy. I was engaged. And I wanted to tell the world.

    That night we went to the last hotel room we could find after calling all over the Keys and Miami.
In the morning, when I woke, he was already awake and staring off, deep in thought. He told me he had received "messages" that morning that he should tell me some things.
   He told me that he had feelings for other women and there was unfinished business with some women in other cities. I didn't know how to process the information and spent several minutes trying to calmly figure out what that meant to him. We talked for a while and it was completely confusing and unsatisfactory. The only thing that seemed concrete was that he told me nothing had happened and that he hadn't decided yet what he would do.
      I talked about a lot of things about myself on the subject, but there wouldn't be anything more from him about it.

      One of these women he would begin to spend a lot of time with after I'd gone back to Australia a couple weeks later and he indeed would decide to have a love affair with her and he would continue their connection throughout the duration of our relationship.  It devastated me and always made me feel insecure and jealous, but that, I think was all part of the game. It was just one of many fires lit to try and burn my world down.

          I was so ashamed of this, that I kept it from everyone with maybe the exception of one friend.

Telling my story is healing, but also exhausting. And that is all I have to say about that.

         
     
 

my story chapter one

In the movies, people are always not saying the truth, not telling the thing that would illuminate the situation and save relationships or lives or the day. This infuriated me as a child. I think maybe many of us start out so simply and honestly.

   In my case, I have withheld truth, parts of truth for the same reasons we all do; to protect myself from judgements of actions I know were stupid, because the moment to tell my story never seemed right, later, because lies had already been told and my story would contradict them, at first, because I didn't know the lies had been told and I even had a contradictory story to tell.  Because I still loved him, somehow, maddeningly. The same fantasy believing mind that had allowed me to fall in love in the first place also made me believe the truth would out and save the day all on her own. 

     

     One day, still trying to steady my ship in another new country after my own little devastating divorce, I heard of a shaman. A healer from Peru. "I have to meet him." 

   And the worlds made room for this after I made the statement. It was if all I had to do was speak those words and the Universe bent itself to my wish. 

     A couple weeks later, I found myself in a swanky harborside apartment filled with wealthy mysterious spiritual seekers. 

    I didn't know anyone, I felt out of place and vulnerable and that predator saw me like that and stalked me like an expert. I used to tell the story differently, how he came and spoke to me and I didn't realize he was the speaker and how I felt so excited that I was going to be able to trade treatments with him. 

  Later that week, we met again and he treated me and then I treated him. At the end of the hour and a half I worked on him, he looked at me and said  "is that it?" 

     I told him yes. And I remember it made me feel weird, but I let it go, because that's what I do : I let things go. 

   I agreed to meet him again in a few months the following year to travel somewhere. I never thought that would happen. I didn't really hold it in my mind as a real possibility.

   But the following June, I was on a plane to Tasmania with this short South American man with a big belly and childlike qualities.

     Our first night together, I tried to make it clear I was not going to be sleeping with him. He disregarded my signals and I can see now it is because he disregards everything that doesn't serve his own needs or agenda and also he has almost no respect whatsoever for women. Infuriatingly, this disrespect somehow fuels his ability to fake another reality for the many women he deals with in his life and career, which of course serves his purpose. And I'm sure that cycle further reinforces his disrespect. 

  On the third night, he was getting more forceful about sleeping with me, although when I pushed him and verbally told him I couldn't, he did back off. He then got out of bed and made a big show of doing some kind of kung fu to "dissipate" his energy. 

   Here's where the story reflects my own stupidity. 

I shouldn't have been in the same room with him. The fact that I couldn't afford my own room at that point in my struggling immigrant story was probably reason enough not to go on the trip. But that's just not my personality to be so prudent and reasonable. I'm an idiot for impulsive adventure and much of my life's pain stems from that tendency. But, so do the adventurous experiences come from it, so, I don't know. It is what it is. 

    He bit me on the shoulder when I responded to him that it was fine that he was tired as it was night and time to sleep. 

   He also said he didn't know why "he was being so shy with me."  That statement confused me for a long time as it was obviously the opposite of the truth. 

   I learned years later in my therapist's office that it was a method of mind control he was employing. I still don't know if this part of him is deliberate or unconscious like a horrid coping mechanism he developed from his bizarre childhood. 

     

    We started a relationship a few weeks after the trip, as he is really fucking amazing at manipulation and I was extraordinarily vulnerable at that moment in my life and I thought I was experiencing a redemption and a new life, which I desperately wanted. 

    I was in love like I have never been before. I was overwhelmed with it. I was an addict with a new drug and I easily glossed over all of the secrecy, the abruptly changing plans, my guts telling me I was being lied to and cheated on because I needed to believe this was the real deal and all the dreams I had ever had were actually coming true. I would study healing plants in the Amazon, I would have a farm and raise kids in a healthy environment away from the evils of the society I grew up in. I would be part of saving the rainforest, I would learn a couple languages and deeply experience cultures I had always wanted to know. I would uncover the secrets linking martial arts and yoga and practice them and heal myself and others profoundly. I would return to innocence, the Garden of Eden. 

   He saw into me and spun my deepest held wishes into a garment he wore. He is indeed a wizard. 

  

Within a few months, around Christmas 2013, the first chaos began and I would never again return to that bliss. 

    He began the gaslighting then. He was enjoying it so much sometimes he would almost laugh when he was breaking my mental certainty and my heart. 

     He made it somewhat obvious that he was having at least one affair, but would also make me feel like I was crazy to think so. 

   My new pass time was mentally torturing myself warring between my own intuitions and his words. He would act in ways that I saw as red flags, but then he would use his words like magic. 

    The break down of my mental heath had begun. I had been hooked and the real games could begin. 

    We would spend hours talking about something and the issue would never get close to resolving. He can spin verbal chaos like no one I have ever seen. In public, his words are humble and clear and apparently make people feel good, but privately, he was showing me a different side completely. There was a moment in the last months we were together when I had been going with him to many of his public appearances and one woman spoke up in order to vouch for him to a group deciding whether or not to take a spiritual trip with him to Peru. She described him as a caring, almost maternal man. She said he was so gentle and so safe and knowledgable, that he could be trusted to do the right thing in any circumstance. 

     She went on, and as she did, I found myself incredulous, thinking that the man she was describing was a completely different person than the one I was in a relationship with, that I wished he was that man and that I had never met that person she described.