ENJOY THIS DISTANCE

Apprenticeship to Love: Meditations for the sacred masculine on this crooked path
March 24, 2026

TODAY'S MEDITATION

I teach tango. It's a beautiful thing, to dance this constant improvisation. But the beauty comes from work and from surrender to what is irreconcilable: the distance between us. We dance to improvise a bridge, a merging. This is the art of it all, to persist in this always-failing improvisation.

When I teach tango, I emphasize one thing, above all: the heart connection between the lead and follow. This is a dance of polarities. The art of tango is very much like the art of my life and my love. They are both born of the tension, pressure, friction between our hearts. I would also include the tensions of proximity/distance, the strange/familiar.

...

Rilke, writing about marriage, suggests that distance is something we can learn to love. It is necessary to our own deepening, and to our appreciation of each other. This has been on my mind for days now. Years even.

The relationships that most nourish me feature the quality of an impossible distance. In simplest terms, it is the distance between the poles of strange/familiar, masculine/feminine, proximate/distant. Recently, I'm feeling the tension of distance: the more distance, the greater my desire to become one. I'm experienced enough to know this: there is no real merging. But there is still the yearning. (I'm also experienced enough to know that what passes for merging too often comes at the cost of neutralizing the polarity. I slip into comfortable neutrality viz. the one I desire, and that desire is dulled.)

...

I seek something that has, so far, been impossible in my life. It is a coming together that brings our hearts together, while keeping alive the strangeness and the distance. How is this possible? Magic? Art.

...

The witch I trust reminded me that in this slow, muddy season, there is more than waiting. There is also, always, the beginning of something beautiful. Even as I attend to the mud and my need to practice the skill of patient husbandry I need to also practice the art of enjoying these beginnings. These new shoots pushing up into the light are beautiful, as is their yearning to become more.

...

Every step I take on this path in this season is pregnant with beauty and pleasure. Every step is both a movement against the mud and its limits, and an expression of love for what this mud and its slow resistance gives birth to. Every step my heart is tested. Tested, my heart becomes stronger —not just because I will it be stronger, but because I begin to feel the newness that is being born. And this fresh newness nourishes me. It reminds me of my duty to hold this distance between our hearts, between the muck of what was and the radiance of what is to come, as a precious wilderness, both terrifying and inspiring. It is a sacred duty, in service to a holy space.

...

She, the one I love, will not be what I want —not for more than a moment. Enjoy this moment!

And, also: enjoy how her never-ending demand for silent and distant attention teaches me to be more than I believe myself to be.

Be this stillness. Hold this holy space. Guide her with my unreasonable knowing. Be fed by her silent, distant, and wild needs.

This time, this space, this dancing together across the impossible distance —enjoy it! Enjoy it all!

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living. (Albert Einstein)

🌀... 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, my oracle)