WRITINGS & RITES & PASSAGES

Apprenticeship to Love: Meditations on this crooked path 

March 2, 2026

TODAY'S MEDITATION

We are made to hold each other. Somewhere, sometime along the way, we learn to hold ourselves.

I borrowed this from an unknown source. The original but unattributed phrase, "Our nervous systems are built for each other."

...

Our culture prizes independence. We've gone so far on the "fixing ourselves" side of things to say that dependence is co-dependence. 

I know it's more complicated than that. I don't want to diminish the good work that is being done, untangling dependencies and expectations, using "co-dependence" as a useful tool. My own experience confirms this. There is great relationship work that can be done in addressing how dependence can become soul-destroying. I don't want to argue about that. But I do want to argue about how easily we've turned any kind of dependence or surrender into something bad. We may not be limited by binaries; we can be liberated into ourselves by way of our polarities. 

Let me write, again, about tango for a moment to illustrate my point...

...

There is a way of being together in tango that's called "apilado." In Spanish the word means "pile" or "piled up." In tango, the dancers are leaning towards each other, as if they were sticks "piled up," leaning on each other, as in a campfire about to be lighted. 

In apilado the dancers are in a dependent relationship. Like the culture at large, tango emphasizes independence of balance, posture, etc. However, there is a recognition that the art of tango happens in those moments of "tension, pressure, friction" where independence is sacrificed for something larger —the art of the dance. These are the moments between two bodies when they are responding to each other, to the music, to the movements around them, to their dependence on each other. 

When I teach tango I teach from the basis of independence of balance and posture. But this is the starting point only. This is the point we move from and to —and through— as we explore the possibilities of what we two can create. We need dependence. We need to be able to surrender to each other. We need also to be able to surrender to this moment of losing our independence.

In my experience and observation, the same is true of marriage. 

...

Today is devoted to three things. 

• One is writing the ritual of a wedding. 
• Two is writing the rituals of a retreat about the arts of intimacy. 
• Three, is preparing to receive my daughter and my granddaughters for the weekend. 

All are about relinquishing independence for the sake of art. One is the art that is born of the crucible of marriage. The second, the art of teaching that will transform me, my colleague, and all the men and women, whether singles or couples, who are part of the retreat. The third, the art of opening up my comfortable habits to the disruption of my family.... My adult daughter and my very young grandchildren are coming for the weekend. All of these involve some kind of sacrifice, of the comforts of independence and/or the current moment.

Here is what I desire: 

• That the couple to be wed experience an "unbalancing" and a disruption that enables them to take their existing relationship to a deeper and higher level. I call this "crafting a wedding that changes the world." 
• That the workshop participants experience the "breaking open" and discomfort that enables them to create greater intimacy, trust, loving in their relationships.
• That my daughter and her daughters experience warmth and ease and capacity to flow within the structure of my home, my heart.

In every situation there is a ritual element. That ritual will, at the very least, be a moment of acknowledging the sacrifice. To experience the security and comfort of this thing called independence dissolving into the unimaginable moment to be created. Often these thresholds are crossed unconsciously. 

As I write and as I prepare, I am trying to bring the fullness of my consciousness into play. This is my gift to every one of these moments. I am writing the rites of passage, and even in the writing knowing that my words and thoughts must surrender, must be sacrificed, to the art of the moment of crossing the threshold. My sacrifice gives birth to whatever art is born in this crossing.

...

Again: loss of independence is judged as a terrible thing in this culture. There are good reasons for this. We've created an atomized culture. The modernization of economic and political life has rendered almost every non-transactional relationship an anachronism. The village. Extended kinships and families. Marriage itself. All struggle to survive in the modern context.

And yet, we persist in these anachronistic relationships. Our nervous systems are not only built to hold and support and depend on each other, we yearn to hold and support and depend on each other. We have a vestigal need to be together. To seek to create bonds with others that aren't about exchange, that aren't transactional. 

For some of us, it's a hard life. We feel this need acutely. For the rest, we seem to drift along, more or less happy with the way things are disintegrating around us...

...

I am here, with grey in my beard, writing to understand my own seeking and my own difficulties with dependence/independence. (The word "interdependence" is a mental sleight-of-hand that pretends to do away with the tension. It doesn't. The tension, pressure, and friction is real, and also necessary.)

 ...

A man I admire was telling me recently about the impact of Ivan Illich on his life. Illich reminds me of the importance of our anachronistic yearnings. I'll paraphrase my understanding of Illich's critique of modernity: We think we know better than those we judge to be suffering. But all of the thinking and doing based on this thinking only makes the suffering more real and more complicated. The only beneficiary here is a superficial version of ourselves: we've transformed our discomfort with another's suffering into self-righteousness.

We're in the season of Lent. In the Christian calendar we are about to celebrate the sacrifice of Christ. 

Sacrifice and suffering are not popular themes in modern culture. Some wisdom traditions, not only Christian, suggest that *conscious* suffering and *conscious* sacrifice are a price we pay for deeper appreciation and experience of love. 

What I experience in tango, in love, and in life, is that I can choose to stay in the comfort zone of independence. I can choose this (relative) stability and constancy. Or, I can choose to sacrifice it and suffer the tension, pressure, friction of falling out of balance, out of independence. Choosing this sacrifice I make myself vulnerable to the possibilities of others' actions, thoughts, feelings. Sometimes I've known art, beauty, love. Sometimes, not so much. I am beginning to understand, with my grey beard, that what they've said about sacrifice, suffering, and love (and beauty) is true.  

...

One of the hardest things: to feel rejection because of choosing to be vulnerable. Choosing to "lean on." Choosing apilado. And being scorned for choosing dependence, for taking the risk for art, beauty, love.

... 

"She can smell your desperation," my wise friend told me. "She can smell it in your voice. As long as she smells your desperation you are not safe for her."

I can feel this. And, I am desperate. Vulnerable and wanting —expecting!— the response I want.

I invite her own despair into my embrace. This tango continues. Somehow, an unimaginably beautiful dance is created. Haltingly. With pauses (the silences of tango are a true source of beauty). With the moments of stumbling towards grace that mark this as true, as unrehearsed, as coming from a deep and honest place.

I would not be the man I am today without this woman and her vulnerability, and my awkward willingness to stumble into my own vulnerability, my desperation to be leaned on. This relationship continues to have the biggest impact on my spiritual growth of any in my life. It is, now, the most important thing in my life.

...

Today I am writing ritual. To break open the hearts that have become used to things —used to each other, used to the small and now tired gestures of affection that signal rote repetition and not the calling to attention that these gestures once commanded. 

Today I am thinking and writing about how to revere the moments that break us from comfort and into the discomfort that invites vulnerability. Moments that become the intimacy so many of us yearn for in a culture that prides hardness and disinterestedness and independence. 

We are born dependent. We die, dependent. While we live, what part can I play in inviting myself —and you too, dear reader!— to lose yourself in dependence, if only for brief, shining, painfully and terribly and profoundly beautiful moments. 

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice. (Michael Novak)

🌀The Conscious Warrior makes death an ally, using it to sharpen his present actions, future plans, and current state of being. (John Wineland , Precept 11) 

🌀 All we can do is prepare ourselves the best we can, with patience, dedication, and commitment. …do your practice without trying to achieve a goal but rather as a beautiful act of self love in which you offer yourself the opportunity to grow and facilitate a shift in consciousness. (Kundalini Yoga School, Shakti sadhana)

🌀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)

🌀…practice your practice when you experience benefit, and when you do not; …use kindness in the presence of opposition, and gratitude in its absence; …look for the miracles within the midst of each moment, and know that you’re close to the source when you’re feeling the most lost . . . your time is just now coming. (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)

🌀 You are beautiful. (My beloved, she who must be ravished by my powerful and unwavering presence)