BEING ALONE, TOGETHER
Without this distance, it I would be in constant commotion.
Apprenticeship to Love: April 4, 2026 (original April 4, 2022)
TODAY'S MEDITATION
There is always more. More silence. More tenderness.
How still do I have to be to register your heart and its tender yearning?
...
Alone, my yearning is to be together.
Together, I am tremulous with vulnerability.
Together, I stumble forward, remembering to breathe, to soften my heart, my belly, my throat to receive what this moment brings. What my beloved brings.
...
I am dancing. Again. Finally. Tango, a beautiful and terrifying opening to the other. For the few minutes of our three-song *tanda*, making art from our broken and trembling hearts.
It is very common, in tango, for me to feel the follow's hesitancy as she comes into my embrace. Few of us are ready to surrender. My gift to the moment: to listen and feel into this vulnerability, and give this body the moment she needs to know herself safe. Listening, I know her beautiful desires to be safely held. It's an honour I take seriously. A privilege I am humbled to accept.
There is nothing so powerful or so beautiful.
Holding this woman in my arms, I am feeling her fear and her excitement. I am remembering: become slower. So slow and so deep and so trustworthy that she discovers her own beauty. It may be a beauty she never knew she held within her.
To share this moment of vulnerability with me, for the moments of our dance together, this is her greatest gift to me. It's why I dance tango. It's why I walk this path of apprenticeship: I yearn to feel her trusting me so profoundly that she blossoms, without thought or care, into her radiance.
...
I shared the Rilke passage about marriage and solitude with my distant beloved. I told her, after feeling my own fear in the face of her frustration with the noise of my life, that I am grateful for the distance between us. Without this distance, it I would be in constant commotion.
Instead, alone, I sit with my discomfort. I allow myself to feel the necessary compassion — for her tenderness, and for my tenderness. All of us, tender. As Ram Dass says, "walking each other home."
That is tango. That is marriage. We meet in mutual vulnerability, mutual solitude. We hold each other, yearning. We feel a brief experience of being held, known, safe. Walking each other home, we make a brief moment of art with our love, our dance.
TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS
🌀Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. (Erich Fromm)
🌀The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust....
But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. ( Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)
🌀You're not like that now. (My beloved, she who must be held, tightly)
