I AM HERE, STUMBLING INTO MYSELF

Apprenticeship to Love: The crooked path of sacred marriage (September 19, 2026)

TODAY'S QUESTION

What, if anything, are you learning as you go through your days, repeating old habits, reliving old lessons?

TODAY’S MEDITATION

There is no end to Her need. She, the always-changing world, is infinite.

In one of Her familiar forms —a woman quite close to me— she called me this morning. This woman offered her fears and her vulnerability. Fears about health. About death. She offered me the vulnerability of her confusion.

And then there is my beloved, and her trials.

It is, if I could sit still long enough, one of the wonders of the world: the always-moving, always-feeling, the never-enough of the feminine. These women I love, they remind me of how hard it is to sit still. To be silent. To listen and to enjoy the ebb and flow they show me.

These beloved women remind me of all the restlessness in my own body. A restlessness I try to subdue with good and bad habits, and with practice.

Yes, even practice can be a way to not-feel, not-acknowledge the tide within me and without me.

Yesterday, it was my beloved's tide that I was struggling with. Admirably, I’m sure. But still… I could feel myself stretching for resolution. I wanted the fix. The solution. The end.

...

There is no end to this restless tide.

Ebbing and flowing, creating and destroying, birthing and dying. Loving and leaving and always loving, and always leaving.

Breathing into my firm and stable capacity to sit with it all I know it's beautiful. Always changing. Beautiful, but only when I don’t count on it becoming fixed, stationary. Reliable in the way I think of reliable: stable, grounded, eternal.

That is not how she is reliable. That is not how She is reliable.

There is no end to Her need. Just as there is no limit to my depth. But these depths are tested by the instances of Her being in my world. My family. My beloved. The children.

It is their need that tests me. That calls me deeper. To go where I want to avoid. It's just too much effort!

I am called to be even more still, even more silently silent, even more deeply rooted. And only when I surrender to this endless call to undo all that I hold as comfortable and mine, only then is her beauty and her love revealed. Her's is a siren's call. And every woman and child who sings this song is calling me to be take the risk of being more than I imagine myself to be. To be shipwrecked on their tides.

And what is revealed in the shipwreck? Always the same thing: more and more of the love I need, more and more of myself as the man I love. Only in answering these calls with my willingness to go deep, to be wrecked, do I know this.

….

Last night I heard her siren’s call and …

Well, the old habits are “old habits” for good reason: they are part of my bones. Faced with the silence and the depth she calls me into I begin by doing what I do well, comfortably: I talk.

Instead of stilling myself, becoming reverent and attentive, I slather thick layers of my words and…

(I can feel it as I’m doing it, but once caught in that habit it’s a mad wrestling match and the words keep spilling and… so...)

Early this morning: Sending my regrets, my request for forgiveness, and sitting in the silence that follows.

I am learning to trust this silence, not to force it.

I am learning to trust that when she tells me that “You are not like that anymore,” she knows that.

Yes, I am still like that. But I can trust that she sees and hears and knows me to be more than that.

She is my siren. She calls me to ruin myself so that I can be the man I love.

She is my oracle, telling me who I am. One and the same. One calling me deeper, the other giving solace as I fail. Again.

And so my regret teaches me to be the man I am. Loved. Broken. Alive to love!

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS


🌀One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stands full, present, and unreactive in the midst of his woman's emotional storms. When he stays present with her, and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trustability, and she can relax. (David Deida)

🌀The Conscious Warrior is ruthlessly honest with himself while being kind to others. (John Wineland)

🌀You are not like that anymore. (My beloved, she who is my siren, my oracle)

-Rev. Hans
rev.hans@sacredbodies.ca