Excalicauldron: Crying is Taking a Shower on the Inside - Issue #12
The superstrength of tears and the healing power of radical vulnerability
Yesterday started like any other (maybe not, cos only on a Wednesday do I start my day by waking up extra early to speak to my integrative medicine doctor - the still-sometimes-unrecognisable hallmark of a wellness-first me😅).
Then came a message from a dear friend whose husband's battle with cancer ended during the night. Grateful for the flexibility my life and calendar afford me, I was able to spend time on the phone with her, bearing witness to tears that had been kept at bay for the sake of staying strong in front of her family and kids.
Being present to her express the shock of her beloved's absence in her life from now on made me reflect on how precious it is, this tender mammalian expression of something as intangible, but simultaneously as real.
Crowned Purple Emperor of Corpses
Love - at least between us humans - is such a terribly complex thing, mired in attachment issues, insecurities, neuroticisms, and very strong (but often with a root in issues not from the Here and Now but long, long ago in kingdoms far, far away). But, as the lovers, poets, and breakup singer-songwriters of the world remind us, it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all (or maybe that was Tennyson).
Sitting next to me as I started writing this yesterday was the man with whom I now share my life. From the balcony of our apartment, overlooking the dying sun's rays illuminating the wooded forest that fills up the bulk of our view, we watched a pair of butterflies perform for each other a courtship mating dance.
I was grateful for the beautiful love between us and the fact that I had found - truly - my best friend. My cup runneth over and I felt moved to reflect on it. Then we had a communication mismatch that ended with me choosing to sleep on the couch, because despite showing up in our love on the page, in the real world I was caught again in a downward spiral of time scarcity, associated panic, and a resulting urge to double-down on everything at all at exactly the same time.
Such has been the eyes-wide-open partnership I’ve found myself in again.
P.S. If you’re wondering, the title of this sub-section refers to the Purple Emperor butterfly.
Love and Other Tragedies
I touched on this relationship in a previous newsletter (Issue 8: Recalibration) but haven't spoken about it openly - or at all, really - thus far. When I was blindsided in a radio interview a while ago by a question about my single status, the relationship (and the seriousness thereof) was in the wink of an eye immortalised on the internet when the interviewer started referring to him as my "soulmate".
I chuckle every time I think about it because it reminds me of all the times throughout my life when I was convinced Person XYZ was The One. The graceful passage of time widens the door where wisdom enters so that the expectations placed on another person no longer demand they fulfill your every wish. No longer do you moor yourself at your partner's pier, detached from the foundational anchors of your own being and innate capacity to fill your own cup and drink from it, too.
The greeting card version of love is, over time, replaced with a realness that gifts you not with glitter and veneer, but the gifts of a coming together to clean up the mud that sticks to your feet in the swamplands of the soul, so that you may ease the road ahead you will share with your travel partner - of the heart and, in our case, passport stamp mates :)
But mud-cleaning is an investment that pays off the further along you are, the initial chaos as you figure out where to start, is messy.
Cracks and How the Light Gets In
Yesterday, as he reminded me that morning, was our monthly anniversary. This day, in itself, is hard to describe. We never formally asked or announced to each other or the world that we'd exchange our solo statutes. Instead, the conversation went from exchanging details about our day, spending it as we were in different countries at the tail-end of the COVID pandemic, to details about when to meet, and where.
And as naturally as we had slipped into a relationship, sight (largely) unseen, so too did we enter into a life together when, a little over a month later, he showed up at my doorstep in a country that was as new to him as it was to me.
But this, dear reader, is where "easy" and "effortless" drew a line. As it befits any story worth its salt, there was daring action, bond-building adventures, and a growing love worth growing up for. But as it befits any story worth its salt, the plot was climaxing all over the place, which is only pleasurable so long as the lows don’t drag you down.
To quote Joseph Campbell, I was stuck in the Belly of the Whale. This is where our Hero/ine waves goodbye to the world as they knew it and loosens their grip around their known selves, an inside-out metamorphosis that turns the chrysalis into a pair of wings, but only if it’s willing to revert to goo.
The days, weeks, and months that followed couldn't decide if the backdrop should be magical moonshine or thunderous tornadoes. And if tornadoes don't usually thunder, meet the latest weather deities: We made it so.
Setting Fire to the Rain
Looking at yourself through the eyes of another is a thing of intoxicating, devastating beauty. You find in each other the spark that returns to you both the oxygen that re-ignites your fires. But there are times - especially as it continues to strip the masks you wear for the world so that you’re left naked and exposed - when excessive oxygen becomes an explosion hazard.
As far back as the Code of Hammurabi have there been trials by ordeal. The idiom “trial by fire” is so ingrained in the imagination that we use it to indicate a thing of positivity. In the Persia of (ancient) old, innocence was dis/proven by any number of tests involving fire, under the belief that the element embodies Asha, a Zoroastrian principle meaning truth-cum-justice. Asha is a complex idea, but think of it as a type of cosmic order that governs both nature and us humans who live in the natural world.
Order is embodied in the daytime sky and nighttime heaven, with the sun the passage through which must travel messages between humanity and the gods.
So to allow yourself to see and be seen by another, behind the veils with which you shield yourself from others and the world, is to step into light so dazzling and fierce it threatens to blind you…if only for a while.
Lowering Walls and Other Mini-Monstrosities
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell describes the Initiation phase of the journey our heroes must pass through if they are to continue to transform in order to become masters of the two worlds:
“Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage.”
Opening up to me the day after her husband’s passing, my friend cried her heart out. She keeps catching herself wanting to tell him about what happened, she grieves, because he’s the one who heard all her stories and listened to all her tales. But crying struggles to find a welcome place when there are arrangements to be made and kids to console. In Africa, the passing of the spirit is met with death wails, I say. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, I say. She, a soul who has dedicated her career to supporting vulnerable youth, swallows a spoon of her own medicine: Crying is taking a shower on the inside, she says.
Returning this afternoon to our balcony, after having been collected from the couch in the early hours of the morning by a loving companion who escorted my sleeping form back to bed - and with a morning of vacuuming, laundry, a jog in the park, brunch at our neighbourhood cafe, and time spent together in between our calendars dancing the foxtrot across our days - we see the same two butterflies (or another flutterby couple wearing the same outfits).
The piercing arrows I shoot to disarm the ever-moving clock hurt when they hit my loved ones, he explains patiently. All is lost, I begin. How many times more will I trip on the sands of time, sending myself to the battlefield to fight against the soldiers of fortune who would deny me the fountain of hours everlasting? You’re only human, he reminds, and lists off a growing pile of challenges the past few days gave room and board. Daring to say yes to love is taking a cold shower on the inside, I note to myself. Might feel uncomfortable at first, but boy is it gratifying to be cool, clean and refreshed once you’re done.
As we continue our shared journey through the early tribulations of what whispers to be a grand ol’ quest of epic (adulting) proportions, continuing to fight the good fight against Overwork as temptress, with me walks a man who goes fearlessly with me straight to the middle of the abyss where, as Campbell explains, the journey inward reaches its zenith:
“Atonement consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god's tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve. It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) they are protected through all the frightening experiences of the father's ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one's faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis—only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same.”
Amor est vitae essentia
The ancient Persians remind us that the courage to love and be loved, raw and uncut, is one of the highest expressions of cosmic order:
“Such are, indeed, the Saviours of the Earth.
They follow Duty's call, the call of Love.”
- Gathas, Yasna 48.12, Taraporewala translation
May we all continue to learn to walk in the footsteps of the few wild and precious loves that call us home 🙏💞 We who love are - all of us - the lucky ones.
xNadjax