Well, lordy...

Here's another set of words bubbling forth... what a nice surprise.

I've just finished playing with Barbara and Hamilton for the evening. I have nice warm bread, and a glass of red wine, and I'm thinking about you.

That's nice.

I think I could find a small case of the pitiful-me's somewhere inside if I looked hard enough. I really have loved the thought of seeing you again. It was really good to feel that resonance deep inside of me - kind of like that low hum we can sometimes feel when we're out in the larger open places, with long steady swells of mountain ridges riding the eyes' horizon, one after another, singing in a far blue line.

I didn't say I was going to stop writing to you. I think I said I was going to stop hoping you'd write back. I think I also felt/feel that if I stopped hoping, then I would stop feeling it. I figured that if I did this, then I wouldn't feel any words come up any more, and so I'm surprised.

But what am I to do? Not write?

So, here's another set of words.

I don't know who you are, really - at least, not in that way that two people come to know each other when there's reciprocation, when one speaks, and the other listens, and then adjusts. The stillness and the listening, the responding, the attention. Expression, and then a return to the stillness, and the listening. Being with the Other, a Beloved, is that sort of talk and sincere meditation.

I know sometimes it's like waiting for dew to fall, and then for enough to fall to get a drink. I'm less patient than I could be. I'm fearful, I think, of missing It, and I suppose I've often left the station shortly before it's arrived.

It would be good to know you, but I look at your life and I suppose I see what people who see me might see - someone moving so quickly on her own track that no one else can grab onto the train. I remember moments of looking back, and catching the face of the One I needed just as it slips out of view. The One returns, over and over again, I know. Sometimes a brief flash - moments, phrases, a moon or two and then it's over.

What do we see when we get to see that One, too rarely when we're feeling alone, but always and again when we feel that we've lost touch one more time? Is it the face of some Spirit that we know, in that world where we, too, are Spirits? It seems to be a Special one, one that I know and that's meant for me alone. It has seemed, at times, to be a face of God. But always it seems to leave, to chose to move on, to fade. This feels so like a trial that I wish would be over.

Sometimes it seems as though that time has come, and then I see, especially lately, that even when I want to I can't stop. This last decade has sped on and I'm lashed firmly aboard. I couldn't stop for Douglas. I couldn't extricate myself quickly enough from this life's momentum to grab onto what he had to offer - my family, my business, my process here is too thick to let anyone in, and too precious to just drop out of hand. Do you ever feel like this?

sigh.

So I sing this Friday. That's a saving grace. Then I move into my studio and settle down to the work of getting through the winter. I, hopefully, sell the store. Peter's talking about meeting up in Europe, and going someplace together - we both find Varanasi interesting, though India might be getting restless, and he's suggesting Luxor. Looking ahead gets me looking at something besides my feet, so to plan feels good. I was hoping to plan a couple of things with you. Perhaps someday...

I know him just a bit better than I did you, having exchanged a number of e-mails since 1997. I feel more inclined to meet up with him now - after meeting you face-to-face, I think I should keep giving this Networld a chance. It does, at least, ensure that two people can use words to communicate (not that they will, but at least that they *can*)

I think I've despaired of ever finding a strong intimate connection locally - you can see how I am: impatient, bold and assertive, articulate, sensitive, obsessive, self-absorbed, passionate, intuitive, sexual - (in short, lonely) - and perhaps meeting folk like you and Peter is just my way of going to the Big City. I need a bigger pond, because the kind of fish I like are very rare indeed.

I'm easily pulled by love. It's like a magnet for me, and I find it very hard to resist. My astrology compels me toward Another. I've spent my whole life surrounded by people who thought my need to be with Another, deeply, was some form of weakness, some patriarchal social conditioning whose only result is the oppression of the True Female Nature. Yet, in me, it doesn't feel like a weakness at all. It feels like my complete and most powerful place of strength.

For some inexplicable reason, I can easily think of you and write these words. I don't know why.

Have I experienced some odd form of transference, in which I've given over some part of my history to you, such that you represent some aspect of myself that I deeply need to connect with? What other explanation could there be for these intense feelings? How could it be *you*?

Certainly, I've been enraptured by your mind, and what you think, and the life you've managed to put together that enables you to express these things. But that doesn't explain the passion that I feel for you. For it *is* passion - that's the only thing that can push these words out in the form they're taking. And you're in my mind when I feel it, and I see your eyes and I feel your lips.

And yet you've done little more than send me a few sentences - albeit, encouraging ones, but short and unfocused, sent almost in passing - and none for long enough to let me know that you'll ever be within reach.

You can see why this confuses me. It doesn't make any logical sense. But it *is*, none the less.

Winter's just around the corner. We'll have more rain this winter - Sunspot Cycle 23 is starting to turn the corner and subside. Some of the songs I sing are done with you in mind. I'm sure I'll be thinking of you this Friday, and I'll tip a glass your way.

Thank you for still being here. Thank you for this gift of words.

love,

-- Anonymous, October 23, 2001