Realizations

I'm at a very strange point in my life. I don't know if this is some end-state that I'll simply see further refinements of for the rest of my life, or if it's a serene pond along the rapids-ride of life; either way, I intend to appreciate it right now.

Love is strange thing for me right now. I have no pressing urge to love anyone new, but I'm entirely open to it. I think the nature of love has changed for me. It has lost not only much of its needfulness, but much of its neediness. It is not a quantum figure for me anymore; I do not feel a need to categorize and quantify my love for anyone, nor demand reciprocity.

Maybe this is a consequence of my discovering the end of my marriage was not the end of my love, and freedom from the structure of that marriage actually allowed my love to flourish in its new form. It's like a tree whose roots have finally broken through the barrier containing them, and can now spread out wherever they can find purchase, and not where they don't grow well.

I now love my ex in a much healthier way than I did when she was my wife; as my best friend, as the mother of my children, as a fellow misfit who fits well with me. I see her developing sexuality as something of hers, a private thing that she lets me in on as she shares her discoveries about herself -- a gift of insight into herself (and a request for my insights) rather than something she's bound to share with me.

My children are growing into this newly-opened space of our lives, running from one home to the other, one parent to the other, like children released into the outside for the first time in a long winter. They're creating their own rules and names in this space -- half the time, the little one calls me Mommy-Daddy, and her mom Daddy-Mommy, whatever that's about. And they're both happier than they've ever been.

Love is not a commodity to me, anymore. There is no shortage of it; the more I love, the more I feel I can love; the fewer constraints that love exerts, the fewer there are upon it. Attachment, I now understand, need not be possessive; divorced from possessiveness, attachment becomes connection, and the connection becomes incredibly less fragile than it otherwise was.