[somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond]
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
– e e cummings
It is somewhat of a trope isn’t it - the heartsick person battered by the slings and arrows of outrageous relationship fortune, who comes to believe that there is no use in trying anymore, and who resolves to end her quest for love for now or for always, but just then, as the door is slamming shut, an intriguing foot appears, blocking the doorframe, which foot is attached to a remarkable human who just happens to be offering the perfect romance?
It has been done to death, this cliché, but always to someone else. Except not this time. This time it happened to me.
It was Friday, February 11th, and the week had already held not one but two bad dates. The first, on Wednesday, was epically, impressively bad - it lasted all of fifteen minutes, and had already ended by the time my friend/rescuer Dréa had responded to my SOS text with a contrived emergency to give me cover for fleeing. The second date, on Thursday evening, was actually fun, but he turned weird by evening’s end, then disconnected on Friday morning with a one line text. Feeling about a thousand miles past hope, I half-heartedly opened OK Cupid and swiped through some profiles, more out of habit than optimism.
When I got to Ben’s profile, I felt a strong spark of intrigue, but the spark was quickly stamped out by the conviction that he would never respond to me, or would respond but would turn out to be just another in a long line of weird or terrible men I had matched with. (Just wait - my dating memoir is going to be a romp, although, to be fair, I have also encountered some remarkable humans, a couple of whom have become dear friends.) Yet Ben’s profile was too interesting to ignore, and his good looks only furthered my curiosity. Most importantly, his profile was suffused with a sense of wonder, one of my favorite qualities in a person, and it contained this quotation, from Brother David Steindl-Fast: “Look at the sky. We so rarely look at the sky…Open your eyes. Look at that…”
How could I swipe left on that kind of profile? Despair or no despair, I swiped right, sent him a short message, and then went back to gloomily telling myself that it was all useless and I was going to spend the rest of my life lovelorn and alone.
A short time later, as my despondency kept rising and threatened to overwhelm me, I resolved to close down my dating profile and walk away from romance for a while. It was just too damned disappointing. And nothing good ever came out of it.
But then…improbably, shockingly, intriguingly…Ben, having clearly swiped right on my profile, responded to my opening salvo with this:
But all my life–so far–
I have loved best
how the flowers rise
and open, how
the pink lungs of their bodies
enter the fore of the world
and stand there shining
and willing–the one
thing they can do before
they shuffle forward
into the floor of darkness, they
become the trees.
Friends - he responded with Mary Oliver.
Mary Freaking Oliver.
Mary Freaking Oliver writing about flowers. (All those who know me well know that I am a proud and committed anthophile, so this was a real double whammy.)
I immediately embarrassed myself by responding that the quote sounded like Mary Oliver and that I LOVED Mary Oliver, forgetting that I had mentioned her not once, but twice, in my own profile.
He was sweet about that.
And then we started exchanging messages and then we quickly hopped over to text and then suddenly it was late afternoon and then he proposed that we have a video call that evening and then we were video chatting and then we were planning a date for the next evening and then we kept on texting all day on Saturday and then we met for our date and then our first date lasted sixteen hours and now it is August 8th and I’m sitting in an Airbnb cottage by the Chesapeake Bay and he is sitting near me, writing too, and we keep sneaking glances at each other and grinning because neither of us ever expected the wild felicity that has laid down this beautiful path for us to walk together.
I am happy. So beautifully, improbably happy.
Consider:
Two weeks after we met, my beloved dog Ginger was diagnosed with cancer and died four days after her diagnosis. Ben cared for me through my grief, walked in the woods with me and listened, and held me when I cried, all without the slightest hesitation.
A month after we met, Annie (now called Ash) reached a new low in her struggle with mental illness, and ultimately was hospitalized for a week, which I will write about another time (maybe), but which was a gutting nightmare beyond my current powers of description. Again, Ben held me through it, reassured me, listened, and just showed up with mercy and empathy and kindness.
A month after Ash’s crisis, my former brother-in-law, Michael’s only sibling, died suddenly, and Michael flew out to California for two weeks, leaving the girls to my solo care. Three days after he left, Elise woke up with strong symptoms of appendicitis, and so she and I spent nine hours that afternoon/night in the hospital, while the doctors ran tons of tests and finally sent us home without an answer. Of course my amazing friends rescued me by taking Ash and Vee, but Ben showed up too, as a kind presence reassuring and comforting me by text and phone through the worst of it.
A few weeks after Michael’s brother died, we learned through Vee’s wise pediatrician that Vee was also in a mental health crisis - one we had missed in the swirl of louder catastrophes. And Ben listened and empathized and held me as Michael and I raced to get Vee the help she desperately needed.
Throughout, my dad’s health kept declining and there were little emergencies that felt like foreshadowing. Again, Ben stayed with me.
Throughout, the stressors of my job grew, and began to implicate my sense of competence and skill, making me doubt myself even as I juggled multiple high-urgency projects and crises. And Ben reminded me, over and over, that I was so much better than I believed, and that I didn’t deserve to be diminished and demeaned.
So, that is what the past six months have held in my own world, emergency after emergency, almost without respite, and yet, here I am, sitting next to this amazing man, and he never fled, nor even flinched. How many of us can say we have the courage and kindness to be there unconditionally for someone, especially someone who is brand new to our lives, especially when we are wrestling our own demons? It knocks me flat, every day. And I will never run out of gratitude.
So who is this mystery man?
He is a brilliant attorney. (Don’t hold that against him…).
He is a great dad, committed to building and keeping strong relationships with his children. (We are basically the Brady Bunch, except he has two sons and one daughter.)
He is a geography/history savant who can draw the entire world map - down to the islands! - from memory; can identify, within a few years, when any globe or map was printed; and knows basic facts about every country on Earth.
He is an agnostic amateur theologian, who learned Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew just to read core texts in the original. His daily meditation practice inspires me, as does the fact that he came to his spiritual practice the hard way - through years of questioning and studying and dialogue and reading and reading and re-reading.
He is an incredible fiction writer, who can weave whole worlds out of pure imagination, and a spoken word poet who can spin poetry slam-winning wonder from quick thinking and thin air.
He is a daredevil, who is going to give me a heart attack one day the way he climbs trees like a monkey. (He’s also eight years younger than me, giving him the advantage of youth, but to be clear, I was never that athletic or fearless.)
He is as outdoorsy as I am, and always up for a hiking or camping or nature-oriented adventure, or even just a long walk through my neighborhood or his. We are always noticing the beauty around us, and calling to each other to notice as well.
He is a social justice warrior, who has given himself to the care of others in need in many ways, even going so far as to sign up for vaccine trials to help the cause of combatting diseases that plague the developing world. (He thankfully recovered from malaria, which he was infected with purposefully during one trial.)
He is a work in progress, always wrestling with how to be a better dad, a better activist, a better partner, a better son, a better human. He doesn’t shy away from living a life of self-examination and self-improvement.
He is as sexy as the day is long, and he rings all my bells and keeps them ringing. Our chemistry is thermonuclear and, well...you can use your vivid imagination for the rest.
He plays the drums and has a beautiful singing voice.
He is affectionate and effusive, emotionally and actually available, sweet and spicy, funny, thoughtful, empathetic, and, in a stroke of felicity that I will never fully fathom until the day I die, he loves me. And I love him too.
Lest you think that we inhabit some impossible Wonderland, of course all has not been perfect. In his Duino Elegies, Rilke (as translated by David Young) writes:
Aren’t lovers always
coming to sheer drop-offs
inside each other
they who promised themselves
open spaces, good hunting
and a homeland?
Ben and I have had our share of sheer drop-offs, and there have been occasional difficulties and sadnesses in our months together, but the sheer amazement of it all is that these drop-offs have never been fights, have never been ugly, and have never led to the slightest loss of empathy or care between us. We listen to each other fully, each of us strives to show that we value the other’s feelings as highly as our own, and we guide each other kindly from the cliff’s edge, until we find our way back together to the sunny path we’ve been traveling. And so there is beauty in the hard times as well.
In May of 2021 I wrote, on this site, in an essay called The Happily Ever After Manifesto:
I want to be with someone I’m excited to spend a Saturday with, or many Saturdays, but who has his own things to do on Sunday. I want a partner who I can enjoy time with and feel connected to and passionate about, someone who lights me up and makes me laugh, who finds beauty in unexpected places and is excited to show me, who is curious about the world and full of wonder, who lives his (progressive!) values, and who is truly kind and compassionate. I want a man who prioritizes and commits to our relationship without being overly possessive; someone who doesn’t (wrongly!) think that our life commitments - to children or work or a romantic relationship - are a zero sum game in which only one commitment can be primary; and someone who won’t coldly cast me aside like some disposable Other Thing when he is done with me. I want someone who understands what he needs to do to live an emotionally healthy life, and is working every day to reach that goal. And I want to offer a shoulder to cry on, and cry on his shoulder when I need to, without those tears translating into the expectation that he must mend my life, or vice versa.
And wouldn’t you know, I must have manifested Ben (as my kids would say), as he is the very essence and being of this paragraph. More amazement!
I do not know, of course, what the future holds between us. Neither of us wants to spend a lot of time peering too far down the road, especially not when the present is such a lovely place to be. (Sometimes I like to turn to him and say, “This is great! Want to keep doing it tomorrow?” And so far, he has always answered with an enthusiastic, “Yes!”) I am trying to hold this relationship gently, and be present for its present wonders, which are more than enough. Having walked away from someone I thought was the love of my life, I know I will survive and recover if our relationship ends. But that’s not a storm cloud that troubles my present sky.
No. In this moment it is all unfathomable blue and fantastical shapes in wispy, fluffy white, and tomorrow in the wee hours between moonset and sunrise, we will walk down to the dock of this cottage together and lay down and watch the Perseid meteor shower light up the sky, and I will think of the monk’s quote from Ben’s profile, and of the words of my own poem, published before I had experienced the transcendent joy of sharing the sky with this amazing man I love:
Every day the sky is a wonder. Cast your mood aside and look up! Did you wake from a troubled sleep? The sky is on fire! Is your thudding heart shuddering your ribs with an agonizing rhythm? Grey has never been so luminous. What slumps you, slows you, lead-fills your veins? Don’t miss a minute of the speed-of-wind changing beauty! It is not for you, but neither is it not for you. This blue is your child’s favorite color. This reminiscent crimson is a smile. Whatever your landscape: splendor! It does not hurt to be small underneath this bowl of glorious infinite. You are not far from me with the sky as the measure. Everything can be said, and nothing needs to, under this stretching, generous sky. Look up!
We look up, we keep looking up, and we are happy.
Jane: this is incredible.
Jane
Your openness and honesty and courage mean that only a very special person will complete you. Happy beyond words that you have found Ben who truly seems to be that person.
Seamus