I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women; to enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic - in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself. ~Anais Nin
Being a mystical female in the modern world is never easy. We are perpetually stuck between worlds. False realities overshadow the divine and the plight of a lover hangs on the razor's edge of a dream beyond a dream. It is a dichotomy I've yet to master.
It seems that my highest highs and lowest lows revolve around that dream that never leaves me: perfect union with the divine. That state of ecstasy. That moment that lingers infinitely; without cause.
My idea of hell is domestic mediocrity. I want ecstasy in every moment, just like my beloved Anais, and the only place I find it is within. And while I am well aware we need not a lover to experience oneness with all that is, I crave that lover just the same. Or maybe it is the moments I am after, because the lovers inevitably let me down. They cannot be blamed for being mortal however, any more than I can be blamed for seeking only the divine.
My natural inclination towards enchantment turns into a curse when it comes to love. I project my mysticism onto the man, perceiving and experiencing a sacredness that in the end I find was only within me.
And then my heart breaks. Not because I was in love with the man, but because my dream has been shattered once more. The illusion has been seen for what it is and a sadness takes over, along with self-recrimination for believing, as I always do, that my dream was possible. For having hope in a hopeless situation. Hopeless because it was not a shared dream; it belonged only to me.
And I cry for days and reflect for always. It never leaves me. Moments never leave me. A residue builds that I want both to remove and fall into. I cannot deny the sacred and cannot be content with the mundane.
I don't want what others have. I want the thing I cannot name. The thing I have already tasted but could not hold because it could not be held. This thing that travels and reveals itself between the moments of my own creation.
I have entered the sacred with every man I have been with, inspiring them to be more than they had ever been. Their response to me was always the same. They were real with me. They trusted me. They could be vulnerable with me and because of this, each one shared more than he had with any other woman who came before. But while I may have been an exception for them, they were never an exception for me. When openness and transparency is the standard in my world, reciprocity is what I'm after. It never came. I was forced to seek a larger vessel.
To the man, I am the sweetest flower he has ever tasted, and so he hangs on despite his better judgment and my repeated departures. And I too hang on, softened by his attempts to keep me and moved by his declarations, by his words of love. If only they were enough. They never are.
And when he asks me to paint a picture of what my dream looks like so that he can try to be that for me, I weep. How am I to list all the things that he is not, nor will ever be? I haven't the heart.
Yet I cannot let go. I collect the moments that reflect the dream and try to dismiss the rest. I want him to be it because it want someone to be it and he is the closest I have come. So like a child who never learns her lesson, I keep returning to the symbol of that dream, only to find out for the millionth time that it cannot be found there.
Inevitably and for always, the gap between the dream and the reality becomes impossible to ignore and creates a pain so great that I finally break away with a strength and power that lessens within a week. For the night always comes when my heart taps into the memory, and that glimmer of hope, so that were he (whomever was the last to capture my heart) to say those sweet words that pull me back without question, I would forget the past and rejoin him once again.
My nostalgia turns me into an idiot. My optimism turns me blind. Believing anything is possible, I give it one more try. Just one more...and another.
It was so long ago now that I came to him broken. He loved me through the pain. He kissed away my tears. I gave myself to him. I was vulnerable and soft.
Ours was a quiet love. We created a world together that no one could enter, but this love was not meant to last. For we came together in darkness and it crumbled in the light. Fragile, fleeting and inxoticating, I fell in love with a tenderness that mirrored my my own. I fell in love with his poetic words. I fell in love with a dream.
And now, despite the pain and longing, I sit here draped in ecstasy because there is nowhere else I'd rather be. I am inside a dream within a dream, painting the picture of my beautiful love story that lasts for all eternity.
In and out of love, of life, of thought and feeling, I enter the divine once more, open only to what stirs, enchants, arouses and tempts. This is the world I choose. I desire only to live here.
With love from the space within,
Mandy xo
www.mandylandrocks.com
