Chasing Forever
Across the table, a rare lunch pause in the middle of Paris, his beautiful hands holding Osho’s love bible and his eyes searching for clues in mine as they always are; I find myself being schooled.
I saw it in his ocean eyes, the deep sadness poured out and emptied into me one night at our favorite place, and I carried it around silently until I was broken in half by it years later.
I watched as his eyes changed over the decade we spent together, how he looked at me differently, a fading away that felt both familiar and foreign all at once.
I’ve been chasing forever for as long as I can remember. First as a girl with blind ignorance, then as a hopeless romantic, poet and dreamer and more recently as a yogi influenced by Patanjali (and others) who share insight such as:
“It is only when the correct practice is followed for a long time, without interruptions and with a quality of positive attitude and eagerness, that it can succeed.”
Love is a practice, a practice I continue to commit to again and again.
“You are The Fool,” she reminded me on a call recently. “Be in this,” don’t turn away… “you are living the sit of determination.”
During the sixth sit of determination on our day of silence just a month before our call together I remember feeling angry - the anger was a plasma of resistance filling my entire body. I wanted ease, I wanted to “master” this task, I didn’t want to feel any pain or discomfort.
With me in those moments of stained determination I could feel the anger, dishonesty and trauma happening in my family right now, and I let it fill me with the fire that it is - and I breathed it in. At the moment I wasn’t able to surrender to it, the resistance took over, but in sits since I have learned the forever practice of surrender.
My forever is surrender.
I surrender when my heart breaks into a million pieces. I surrender when I don’t know the answer. I surrender when someone is angry with me, or dishonest. I surrender when I witness pain. I surrender when I feel that deep knowing that my lover is slipping away from me. I surrender when I feel lost from myself. I surrender when I’m wrong.
“Reason lost the battle, and all I could do was surrender and accept I was in love.”
In the words of Paulo Coelho, I find a mantra.
My forever is love.
Paris has inspired a longing to understand it better, she shows me every single day what a love that is easy looks and feels like. She simply is - in all of her complex, delicate, and absolute feminine esssence she oozes this quality of love that feels forever to me; it is intoxicating. Osho tells me that “real” love is freedom, Deida tells me that love is polarity and appreciation for this complex nuanced philosophy is possible.
“Nobody can teach you love. Love you have to find yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love.”
In the schooling, and the heartbreak and the years of changed affection I find amor fati. This deep appreciation for the lessons, the exact teachers, and the expanding experiences that are shaping my life, my heart, my growth, and all that I am: in all directions.
My forever is amor fati.
“That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.”
We are not fixed marks, love is not rational, time moves…illusion is real, all of this makes the chasing even more difficult, but Ram Dass reminds us to “be here now.” So in the moment when his eyes were telling me the entire story, when my heart broke into a mission pieces, when my youth was a faded memory, when my family is teaching me a valuable lesson, I find my own forever. I find it in surrender, in being love, and in trusting this fate of mine.