HOW DO I ATTEND THEE?
I used to think this was a 50/50 thing. I used to think that we were equally responsible for this trusting at the crossing. I believed that it was up to this thing called "us," whether the crossing was made or not. This belief was a fundamental failing my relationships. I know differently now.
Apprenticeship to Love: August 28, 2025
- Today’s questions: Do I recognize my tenderness? My resistance to opening, receiving?
- Today's practice: Take five minutes. Be disciplined about this: set a timer and make this time for yourself. As the five minutes begin, take a breath and touch your cheek, tenderly. Recognizing your tenderness. Recognize also your desire to protect yourself from feeling tender. Over the next few minutes (very few, but perhaps painfully too many minutes) allow yourself to soften into enjoying this tenderness with yourself. Allow something unknown to unfold in you.
Rev. Hans Peter Meyer
TODAY’S MEDITATION
In my experience of marriage there are these threshold moments when I am unwilling to trust, completely, the flow of the situation. For whatever reason, I come to the crossing. To take the next step, I will need to trust her. Trusting her is the precondition for her trusting me, and the precondition for the flourishing that the moment invites.
But too often, in this moment at the threshold, a moment painfully remembered and experienced too often, I am not ready to be the first to trust. And without my trust, there is nothing for her to hang onto. No structure. No direction. So, neither of us will cross into the unimaginable that beckons.
I used to think this was a 50/50 thing. I used to think that we were equally responsible for this trusting at the crossing. I believed that it was up to this thing called "us," whether the crossing was made or not. This belief was a fundamental failing my relationships. I know differently now.
I am blessed to have had a wise friend to help me understand a few things. One of these: We are always solitary, always 100% responsible for what happens in our lives, and especially at the crossings. And especially if I am in the masculine polarity in the relationship, whether it is with a child, woman, or man. But especially so in a marriage. Here, in this effort at a union with feminine-identified woman, it is never for her to be the first to trust; it is always for me to trust myself, and trusting myself, to lead. I must be willing to stake all of myself on the bet of my decision.
...
I can trust her to be the source of love and beauty flowering in my life. I can trust her to be the fountain of endless mystery, endless tests that reveal the man I am, the man I love. She is always looking to trust me. Wanting to trust me to be the resolute and powerful presence that holds safe space and penetrates her with my attention.
Today we are planning a trip. Here's how it works: I propose a direction. I choose destinations. I create the structure. I wait, and allow her to flow into the plan, to change it, to nourish it.
…
We have, in the English-speaking world, give up the formality of the “Thou.” It lives on in other languages and cultures. The German “Sie.” The Spanish “Ustedes.”
Here, in this English-speaking culture it’s all the familiar and informal “you.” We are familiar, often without knowing each other. There is no space for being reverential.
This is not always a bad thing. Still, the informality of “you” misses something important: that you are, as much as you are an aspect of me, sacred to yourself.
What you bring to me might be more deeply experienced if I honoured your separateness, revered your solitude, gave you the dignity of the formal “Thou.”
How much more appropriate with my beloved, to never take anything for granted, to make her always the Thou to whom I bow, trusting her sacred, mysterious, unknownable flow and flowering as her greatest gift to this life?
…
If I have any purpose as a man it is to be a husband to the ceaseless unfolding to tenderness that is the yearning of the feminine.
I spent a large part of this past week becoming intimately familiar with this purpose. I was intimately reminded as I “lost time” (& found myself) with my almost-two-year-old granddaughter. I remember how my own daughters helped me to know who I am as a man. That was many years ago.
It is time to be reminded, and to ask myself, How am I tending to the adult woman I love, the one who teaches me to be a man? A “superior man,” as one teacher puts it? Not superior to her or others, but to the man I have been?
How am I tending to her? I begin by trusting myself to receive Her (the greater, feminine energy of my life) benevolence, Her flow, — and her (the woman in front of me) radiance. She nourishes me, when I let her. My husbandry begins with my surrender to her need for structure and my trustworthyness. It continues as I trust her sacred mystery.
TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS
🌀Moments move instantly to the past; noise becomes harmony; a completely new and unknown moment enters the 'now' from the 'future'...this is all for you to master. Life becomes about walking into the unknown -- mastering it; walking into the next unknown -- mastering this one...on and on. Such is the natural path of evolution. (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)
🌀The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland, Precept 7)
🌀Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction. (Bhagavad Gita, 2:47)
🌀I am always impressed by you. (My beloved, my Oracle and Siren, my Muse)
SIGNAL CHAT
If you have thoughts about this meditation on the crooked path of sacred marriage, please join me on the Signal Apprenticeship to Love chat group here.
