Oona:
Our dear friend Guangping often talks about the emotional oscillations that are prescribed in our stimulant-addicted society – swinging between extreme heights of pleasure to really low lows of depression and emptiness. They share that one of the fruits of consistent mindfulness practice is a smoothing out of the sharpness of these turbulent waves into a sustained and balanced peacefulness.
That image has me thinking back to the Bible verses I grew up singing, variations of “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.” (Isaiah 40:4). I remember thinking but aaww I love the mountaintop views, and the mysteries hidden in the crannies of the dark crooked places; what’s wrong with them? And my dad responding with an invitation to empathize with the context of this message: a people who carried the intergenerational exhaustion of exile, and who lived in a time when that cranny could be hiding a band of violent raiders. When I was younger I also used to enjoy being jerked around by roller coasters, which now leave me nauseous and with neck pain.
Now, in the context of relationship, I can connect with the longing to smooth out the emotional roller coaster of love. I’m infinitely grateful to Robin, who I’ve been in fluid relationship with for 6 years, for all the learnings we’ve walked ourselves through in all the transitioning textures of our love. Very much contrary to the telenovela blowout wedding and explosive breakup, we’ve maintained a constant flow of love and support as waves of eros and entanglement have come and gone. Over time, we’ve been refining our skills in gently marking these transitional moments, most recently with the support of some more than human kin.
Last year our relationship passed through the birth canal into its next stage of being; contractions, groans, pushing, and all. They got diagnosed with cancer; we morphed shapes from collaborative intimate play pals into caregiver and receiver. We cringed our way out of our very comfortable attunement into this new form, which had us operating at different frequencies and confronting new/ancient shadows that were cast by the new shape. Sentient wounds resurfaced for each of us, and they/we mirrored the other in retraction and abandon. Projected onto the fabric of our spirits’ interwoven relationship we watched a shadow puppet drama play out, poking and wrestling and collapsing into each other; meanwhile our actual bodies, actions, and daily lives were drifting further and further apart behind the screen.
The closer we move to the light, the larger the shadow we cast. The more insight and illumination I get on my own interior, the more comfort I feel with my own darkness–sometimes comfortable enough to invite another to wrap themselves in darkness with me. Here I write of an emergent ceremonial moment in which Robin and I turned our full attention to the spiritual fabric of our relationship and intentionally choreographed an interplay of shadow and light, leaving room within our willfulness for the emergence of mystery and ecological wisdom to shine through.
On MLK day, I biked to the march, colluded with the comrades, chanted with the crowds, and at a certain point veered off to find a bathroom. When I came back outside I found myself engulfed by a street-wide crew of about 40 teen boys on bikes. I asked them if they were part of the march.
“What march?”
“For MLK”
“ML who?”
“…can I ride with you?”
“bet”
My inner masc teen –who always wanted to belong, who always wanted to be cool enough to roll with the boys, who just wanted to do wreckless and illegal things tucked within the safety of a mob mind–received some deep validation and healing. We took over four lanes of a main street, swiftly wove through the march, curved our way to the lake where there’s a large cement lot for doing tricks. I thanked the crew and bid adieu as they were throwing candy at each other, and made my way to the drum circle section of the lake – another hyper masculine space that I’d struggled to feel belonging to in the past. I arrived so invigorated from the bike experience that I immediately felt free enough to dance, to drum on my helmet, to bang my water bottle on the cement…and for the first time, I won recognition from the men of the circle. They gave me snacks, a bottle of bubbles to blow, a seat at a drum, and more than anything – respect.
By this point I was brimming with energy and life, having felt validated and accepted in two hyper masc spaces. I’d had plans to meet Robin at a distant park, and although my phone had died, I felt filled with confidence and accompanied by the spirit of liberation – so I found my way there independent of my digital crutch. A few blocks from the park, I was halted by a sharp smell, and then the sight of a beautiful striped skunk flattened on the road. Without thinking, perhaps possessed by whatever free spirit that’d been accompanying me, I strapped this relative to the rack of my bike and zoomed off to the park.
Heads turned. I smiled. Robin’s cringing face greeted me, and without much verbal explanation, we both got to work digging a hole under the redwood tree to honor the life and death of this relative.
My childhood nickname was Skunky, so I’d always felt a strong connection to these four-legged friends, to their monastic-sleek aesthetic; to their queerly confusing combination of come-pet-me-cute and don’t-you-dare, to the way their mark stains you for days. At the time of the burial I didn’t have a rational explanation for why this felt so crucially important for the tending of Robin and my’s relationship, but I trusted in the ways our relationship has always webbed out into our ecosystem, both supporting and being supported by other species in our growth and understanding of each other. Some part of me knew that a wounded inner child had woken up wailing amidst the turbulence of the shifts in our relationship, and that seeing that child-self mirrored in this flattened Skunky activated the need for accompaniment in mourning those wounds.
The pain of habitat loss, of the sentient fertile earth being criss-crossed and smothered with asphalt, of needing to risk one’s life to seek food, family, and refuge, of being caught in the crossfire of the unsustainable and unrooted pace of human modernity, of being abandoned at the site of violence to be run over again and again, of one’s only defense mechanism being rendered futile by the closed windows of the isolated pods that zoom about. My inner skunk-child knew these pains; feeling abandoned and overwhelmed by the busy pace of those who I’d sought love and care from, feeling repeatedly flattened by the traffic that intersected my search for safety. In this relationship, I’d felt flattened, abandoned, and my wreaking wounds stained those around me with foul expressions and the urge to run away.
So as we dug and sang and beautified the grave with stones and leaves, I felt my flattened inner child begin to inflate with life again. We hugged the grandmother Redwood, beating her heart’s pulse with her own fallen branches, a gentle rhythm to our dirge. We sang gratitude to her roots for embracing this wounded part of me, and transforming this foul-smelling tragedy into whispering leaves, into sanctuous shade, and into shelter for songbirds. As soon as we covered Skunky’s body and finished our song – I kid you not — fireworks went off in the field 50 feet away from us. The energy of transformation through grief possessed the other beings in the park, choreographing quite an extravagant ceremony.
I needed to tend my own wounds before I could access the full expansive love that we needed to gracefully transition our relationship. When the earth invited me to grieve in connection with other creatures, my whole being was fortified with the strength of interspecies partnership, and the reminder that our wounds and our healing are interconnected.
Robin:
Relationship Ecology 
Leave a comment