Kaleidoscope Love...

I have spent a great deal of my life looking for love, even though I have an abundance of love in my life.  I love easily and fully.  What I have a harder time with is sticking around, being present and available to those I love.  

I can fall madly in love on a subway train.  But cannot get out of my own way to even make the connection.

I can love someone completely and madly and with all of me but only for a little while.

I can span decades with a person of interest, but find myself completely bereft of being able to make it to the one year mark, or more lately, the one month mark.

I have inventoried my behavior around love and loving so fucking much, I could write a novel that rivals Moby Dick!  (Pun totally intended)

But what I have failed to consider all these many years is how it isn’t my ability to love and be loved that is damaged, it is my ability to stay present.  My ability to remain, my ability to be here and do the work to remain.  I am a leaver.  I leave.  It is what I do...

Move houses

Cities

Friendships

Relationships

Sexual partners and lovers

Jobs

But when I returned to Ojai in 2015, I made some inadvertent pact with the Divine that here I would do the work to learn to remain...

And I am still here, living in the same house for the last 11 years.  Which is a miracle if you know me.  I have never lived anywhere in my life longer than 4 years and that was in 5th grade!

I have wanted to leave a million times since 2015.  I even sold my house in 2020, right before the pandemic.  But then the house I bought fell through and so I decided to remain.  And boy was that a good decision!

And here I am, all these years later, living here in this same place as I shift like a kaleidoscope through the many variations of Erin.  The many levels and abilities to love myself and others.  Which is all inherently tied to remaining.  In order to love and be loved, I must remain.  Which requires a degree of honesty, sacrifice and dedication that I have been unwilling to engage for most of my life.

My love for my mom keeps me rooted here and I see that as such a gift, when a prior version of me would have considered it a tie that bound.

My love for my daughter also keeps me rooted here, since her whole life is here and she has a strong desire to remain.  I, similarly, would have felt inextricably bound in decades prior.

My love for this home, this community, these people, this life I get to live here, right now also keeps me rooted and stable.

I say all of this to claim, perhaps, a little progress in my ability to remain, which in turn, might just help me also improve my ability to love and be loved a little better...

Maybe

Blessedly

Hopefully

Again, still...