Now, she returned to the beach to commune some private aliveness. She pulled off into a shrouding of tall grass. Eagerly, she scurried towards the shore. She was still a little tipsy from the wedding she had just left, and this emboldened her… To broach the night, and what unknown may lie just beyond her perception. Upon the beach now, instinctively she started moving northward. The giving sand caused her to move in big, languid movements. The whitewash of the ocean filled her ears. Its power filled her cells. Wind whipped whisps of hair up into itself. She searched the dark.

Between the zero visibility, the uneven ground, and the shifting tide, she felt delightfully disoriented. The absolute freedom of being hidden in plain sight intoxicated her. Where she could scream and the sound would be swallowed by the shifting wind. It was just her in communion with the seismic power of the ocean. The cliffs and their night vision, her only witnesses.

Your voice beckons me,
It is the sound like the howl from the dark wood,
The thing of fairytales, that is supposed to scare children.
But instead, it calls us up out of bed, and draws us towards it.
That which we cannot resist,
That to which we must return…
Sounding primitive origin.
From the space between incarnations,
Like the proverbial fog horn of our center.

She started to feel a body mass in her periphery, where the air pressure changed. She quieted herself to sense into it. It was a distinctly masculine presence. Not altogether unwelcome, or unexpected. In fact, she was tickled by the fulfillment of some hidden desire. Something in her wildest dreams, that had been working itself at her core as she danced on the dance floor earlier that evening. As always happened at weddings, among platonic family and people partnered in love, she coveted to escape with someone who would ravish her… Meet her at her deepest primal instincts, and fuck the shit out of her. Making civilized small talk with acquaintances, she wished someone would rip the silk dress right off of her. Maybe even smear cake all over her face. Something about being stuck in obligatory surface-level conversations always made her want to get railed. Maybe it was the sense of feeling so far away from anything real that made her crave an intimacy hardly known to man. Intrusive sexual thoughts filled her mind as she tried to concentrate on conversations about college acceptance letters and golf.

It had been an immortal wish, and now, here he was… emerging out of the shadows of her deepest desire and onto her body. He wasn’t the kind of guy you introduce to your family anyway. He was the one you keep down in the lair of your alter ego. He’s the one who lurks in the hidden parts of your mind, even. That you only let out when you are lying in bed at night and the levees of your brain fall away and let you go there… to the shameless places. To sinfully indulgent places. He is the kind of guy you don’t tell anyone about, in fact. Because the only way to keep that potency alive is to keep it in suspended reality.

The presence started moving in towards her. And at that, she started running. The momentum graduated towards her. She could feel the warm breath of its hunger, the beat in its chest, and its carnal desire. He gained on her. In delight, she scurried away. All her loins were alight with excitation. She practically flew in swift, deft movements, just evading his grasp. She accelerated to top speed. Her breath ravaged air, and she felt her chest hit maximum capacity… Freedom. Pain. Exquisite.

I am drawn out to you by some counterpoint in my soul,
Some recognition there.
To be cleansed by your salt,
By the white noise of your waves,
And your unchartable territory.

There is something special about the place where no man has tread
Tierra incognita…
Where all navigation systems fail,
And all we are left with is deep space,
and the sound of our own heartbeat.

And then, he got her. Sank his teeth into her muscular buttocks, and brought her down. They fell down upon the sand together. Her chest heaved wild breaths as her body yielded to the sand below. She feigned defeat below his commanding form. Below her, the sand was maternal and holding. And as she rolled over to face him, she could make out only his dark silhouette against a sky full of stars.

Heightened senses in the dark, they were just resonant growls. There was the weight of his body, dominant and sure. There were the oceanic movements of his body mass, rotating against her pelvic bone. Its pulse and heat beating at her expectant spot. There was her still panting breath as it caught up with her, and the subtle feminine voice in it. There was the warmth of his skin, and the permeable flesh below it. His smell… animal and earthen.

He brought her arms up above her head. He pressed his forearms against hers, sinking her into the damp, silty sand below. When she was satisfyingly set in, she felt him move down the length of her body. Then she felt his tongue go down to her bottom mouth. Subtle streams of energy alighted through her body. Sparklers fizzing up through her spine. Up through her forehead and crown. Down, through her fingers and toes. Irresistible streams of ice water in a heat bath. Her body squeezed itself from the inside like an orange, letting sweet juices from her body. Thunderous sounds built and rumbled through her throat. Matched only by the churn of the ocean.

Meanwhile, the salt water reached out its arms to her from the west. Grandmother washed over her arm, offering an undeniably loving presence. Water lapped up upon the edges of her dress, soaking her. She felt the contrast of the visceral cold on one appendage, and the heat of his salacious tongue on her south node.

I broach first contact,
Interface between this and another world.
Already I am deconstituting,
With a huge relief,
A huge unburdening of my person.
I long to swim out to where nothing from the civilized world can find me.
Where I can be sealed in the soundlessness,
Where not even my thoughts can reach me.
To the timelessness before time,
Just incubating in the amniotic fluid of the planet.

When he lifted himself up, she could just make out a smile of utter satisfaction. Tongue hanging loose, salivating like a dog… pellets of saliva and secretion dripping onto her chest. She was pretty sure it was him, but in the pitch dark of course, there was the chance it was something else. She felt through his hair. Long, thick hair falling. She felt his face with her hands. Would she recognize him in the dark? ...By his smell? The sound of his breath? His energy?

He moved up and nuzzled the soft of her neck with his face. She smelled herself on him… like oysters. Oysters of the pearl he was just suckling on. He slid one of his hands down to the soft of her belly to read her. He read the waves of wanting, passing up through her from below: Phum, phum, phum, phum. And he answered their command. She felt the throb of his shaft at her entrance. Tender and hard at the same time. Its impossible softness. Its heat. Flirting, it emanated waves of expanding energy into her. He waited a few paces for her body to register his intention. When it did, he broached first entry. Pausing, letting her body acclimate, til it culled for more.

Waves swell and collapse,
Cycling, over and over again.
Gurgling and frothing,
like backwash through baleen.
Tides evacuate the gaping cavities of seaside caves;
Tracheal openings,
a foreboding invitation…

Thunderous roar,
imminent destruction,
Catastrophic cataclysm
Instantaneous storm heads, re-formed just as quickly.
Rapid change, then innocent retreat…
And the call of the gulls on a placid sea,
The morning after,
And the bright faring sun,
As if nothing had happened…

Impartial destruction, and rebirth.
So immediate, and unafraid.
You are indiscriminating, grandmother.
In fact, I sense that you do not differentiate between good and bad at all…
The most powerful way to live.

She takes fistfulls of particulate grains, slathering them down his back. Massaging his jaw with them. Exfoliating his mug with disintegrated bones and shells. Ocean reaches and pulls her hair, matting it into the sand. Ocean washes mounds of sand into the gaping places. He flips her around like a fish with no legs. Slaps her buttocks with big handfulls of silt. Paints her cracks with broad, purposeful swaths. She sinks unnervingly deeper into the sand. He lays down ontop of her and spoons her backbody with his warmth. Cold sea water sneaks through orifices between them and the land. Salty water creeps into her open mouth.

Vast embryotic sac
Original utero
Holder of the memory-keepers.
Subaquatic creatures, haunting in their prehistoria,
echo in the uncharted depths.
Mamas croon,
Widows mourn,
wailing sorrowfully…

And whilst sounds reach me,
like in space,
I suspect they originate from a source that passed long ago,
and is only just now reaching my ears.
Cetaceans send me encrypted messages,
for which I must reenter my own heart to understand.
Alien species incite existential memory,
With their rhetorical existence.
Bioluminescent cephalopods,
With no eyes,
No spine,
Inside out.

His own cephalopod limb makes its final lustrous ejaculations. Posthumous spasms. A life still pulses gently after death. Deflating, it comes to rest in the canal, impossibly silken in its afterspill, amidst the roughage of the sand. Meanwhile, she is a beached medusa. She has become a gelatinous ancestor. Bioluminescent secretions circulate throughout her elliptical body. The tide drains from her estuary. She is half-returned to the forgiving sand.

Under the sediment of man-made consciousness,
I am remembered to the way before thought.
When I was only body:
Big blubberous body,
Soaring slowly,
Singing the cosmic Om,
Casting the soundscape.
I am remembered to when I was a subaquatic metronome,
synchronizing all sounds into one heartbeat.

Big bodice,
Familiar to me.
Original medicine people,
Singing forth the slow call of primitive life, from the ocean floor
The timeline of eons, assembled vertically

I am remembered backwards:
To crustacean…ammonite…single-celled organism.
I am remembered to when animals were still plants,
And plants were still amoeba,
And we had not yet crawled out of the sea.

Some Definitions:

Limerent person= The one doing the lusting
Limerent object= The one being lusted after

A Quick Primer on Narcissism

Narcissism is important to understand for this post, so allow me to explicate it briefly: Narcissism can be a clinical-level personality disorder, globally affecting every aspect of a person’s being. Alternately, someone can also have a narcissistic organization that isn’t a full-blown personality disorder. They can present more as avoidantly attached, with subtler features of a narcissistic defense structure like projection, unconscious grandiosity, defensiveness, insecurity, and lack of ability to receive the subjectivity of others. Narcissism is a spectrum. Everybody has some degree of narcissism. A narcissistic defense structure protects people from feeling their most primal vestiges of shame, pain, fear, and vulnerability. It is important to understand this defense structure to appreciate how a limerent dynamic activates between two people.

This defense structure is also important regarding the spiritual awakening path of a medicine person. Seeing as how my professional work revolves around midwifing emerging medicine people through the labyrinth of their psychological defenses and into their spiritual gifts, this series focuses on spiritual awakening through limerence as it pertains to medicine people in particular. A medicine person, (someone who is born with extrasensory abilities, and whose mission is to use those spiritual powers to serve the greater good,) is more prone to narcissism or insecure attachment because it is very hard to responsibly manage that much energy. They are especially vulnerable if they have trauma, and this includes systemic trauma. With great power comes great self-responsibility. The more power someone walks with, the bigger the shadow, and the bigger the need for shadow work.

Attachment Wounds, or Something More?

Limerent relationships usually play out between a magical person who has avoidant attachment, and/or narcissistic features (aka the limerent object,) and another magical person who has low self-worth and doesn’t know their full power (we might understand them as anxiously-attached, codependent, or enabling. This person is known as the limerent person.) If you don’t know what I mean by magical person, visit this first post in the series here. We don’t fall in love with people who are boring. We don’t have a strong emotional response to people don’t walk with power. Our attachment systems are hooked by spiritual power.

Although many pop psychologists claim that limerence is nothing more than attachment wounds activating, I contend it is more than that. There is an interplay of the energies and forces between the two people. There are archetypes in the field of the limerent object that hook the attachment system of the limerent person. Another way to say this is that the limerent object is channeling or embodying certain Gods, spirits, or archetypes in the mythological or Jungian sense that the limerent person has a strong reaction to, has business with, or wants to integrate within themselves. Who knows… maybe the respective ancestors or the spirit guides that walk with the two people want to consummate with one another!

What Conditions Set-up for Limerence?

People with eccentric boundaries trigger limerence because they let you in in a way that challenges your notion of what’s appropriate or possible. They give you a taste of something, but lack the secure attachment to follow-through. Rather than being collaborative, they use you in some self-serving or mindless way. Sometimes they only mean to flirt with you for their own pleasure or to discharge some energy, without being considerate of the impact. They may have gone all-in when they were in the anxious stage of their anxious-avoidant attachment style, and then the avoidance kicks in and they disappear. The types that trigger limerence usually aren’t acting from a very conscious place.

I would say that they often do something that is irresponsible in the first place (being seductive for some validation, being overly- intimate, having leaky sexual energy when they’re not actually available, or just generally blinded by very primitive attachment needs. Their prefrontal cortex (the grown-up part that is more responsible and considerate of impact,) is not online. They might be a runaway train of id… unleashing primal energy and heart emotions without impulse control. Even if their pursuit of another is sincere and powerful in their heart, in a practical sense, it is not realistic. This sets the dynamic up for a lot of emotional attachment, without a stable and sustainable container.

Sometimes a spark is ignited when you get the opportunity to see these egoic people at their best. In those first moments of contact, they let on to an impossible standard of rarefied magnetism. They are: charismatic, charming, love bomb-y, highly romantic, magical thinkers, finders of synchronicity, superstitious, powerful, disinhibited, eccentric, or bold. But it is impossible to maintain that level of perfection eternally. It is unsustainable. You are falling in love with an idealized image.

Some people are more vulnerable to limerence. If someone is a period of isolation, depression, or chronic illness for example. Also, your neural wiring can predispose you to limerence. Certain Meyers Briggs types are more prone to infatuation (INFPs and INFJs). These are the magical thinkers. There are certain situations which cause limerence. A perfect storm, if you like. Often it happens when someone shows you affection who shouldn’t (they are an authority figure, they have a partner, or they are older or younger than you to a taboo degree,) thus making you feel like their attraction to you is exceptional. Maybe they are someone of the same sex and awakened a dormant same-sex attraction in you. There is often an interplay of powerful soul-activation and the egoic.

This piece is geared toward limerent people who tend to be more empathic, anxious, codependent, or enabling, because these are the ones in the dynamic who are more likely to harness the initiatory power of limerence to wake up spiritually. The ones who are on the more avoidant, narcissistic, or limerent object side of the dynamic are less likely to do so. However, it can be that there is mutual limerence if both people are anxiously-attached at least some of the time. It could be that one person is anxiously attached while the other is disorganized, for example. The reality is that attachment styles are not fixed. They are on a spectrum, and most people will move along the different axes throughout their lives. Amorance captures the unhealthy limerence and healthy true love that coexist and fluctuate as someone traverses honestly the path of spiritual awakening. This piece will be helpful to those who run more anxious, as well as those who are disorganized.

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Amorance

Limerence implies a projection, a fantasy, something that is unreciprocated, and even pathological. Limerence is often understood to be delusional, pitiful, superficial, creepy, or even stalkerish. But it is possible for two people to be limerent for one another. And most relationships are a brackish water where the two forces of attachment wounding and genuine love intermingle. That is why I like the concept of amorance as an alternative to limerence. “Amorance” is a rare word, meaning the state of being in love, implying deep, perhaps obsessive affection. It takes the stigma out of limerence, which is necessary for taking it seriously (as it should be.) It is more honoring, respectful, natural, and validates it as an often shared and mutual experience. Amorance captures the coexistence of the “in love” state, (based on attachment system activation,) and genuine unconditional love without attachment in the Buddhist sense. Love without attachment is a generosity… a form of creative expression. It is a love that generates energy.

As a hardcore former heroin user friend of mine told me, (who also had to overcome intense codependency,) withdrawal from a limerent object is as physically intense as heroin withdrawal. Addiction is never to a substance or a person, but to the physical feeling that that substance or person creates inside of us. Ultimately, we all seek connection. This is the highest spiritual aspiration. All suffering is a product of feeling separate. Limerence can give us the temporary total absorption feeling of connection. But ultimately, it is as fleeting as a drug high, as it is a projection, and depends on something external. We must learn how to cultivate wholeness within. (As an aside, all drugs are attempts to synthetically recreate the most powerful drug on the planet: love. But love itself is the OG.) The biggest spiritual initiation anyone can go through is addiction recovery. It can take you all the way to the final goal of spiritual awakening, which is why it is so relevant to the path of a medicine person.

Amorance is what I’m really referring to in this article: A state of being in love in which there is an interplay of projection as well as genuine care. This highly charged, beautiful, and turbulent brackish water is an inevitable situation which most people will find themselves in at some point or another, and examining it is fertile ground for teasing out what is real from what is unreal in spiritual awakening.

The Spiritual Phenomenon of Attachment

Relationship coaches on the internet like to dismiss limerence or the state of being in love as just unhealed attachment wounds. But then, what is attachment if it can induce such a powerful experience? I think that attachment is way more of a spiritual phenomenon than we give it credit for.

Secure attachment is direct connection with God. It’s that simple. Someone who is securely attached trusts themselves deeply, and has high self-worth. They have established an embodied knowing of their indivisibility from God by continuing to reference and return to their direct experience as the seat of Truth, and follow this inner guidance. We all have moments when we feel separate, like when we are stressed or triggered. People who are securely attached have reinforced this foundation enough, that they can reliably return there even when triggered, and relatively quickly. It doesn’t hijack them for months or even a whole lifetime! If the relationship ruptures, their connection with God remains unbroken. If someone doesn’t have that embodied and resilient knowing, then they are going to use others to try and access their connection to God through them. They will hold it against you when you veer from what they need you to be to reinforce their sense of connection with God.

Secure attachment enables a depth, presence, and intimacy that is just not possible in insecure attachment. Earned secure attachment is a profound experience of embodied resilience, and it is completely groundbreaking. It is communion with God. It is answering to Truth. It is integrity, agency, and un unshakeable self-worth.

Medicine People in Amorance

Chemistry between two people means there is immense waking-up potential. Literally that the chemistry of each individual is such, that if they come together, it will cause an alchemical reaction. It has something to do with the soul composition or spiritual calibration of each individual. I have been in a relationship before where the charge was so intense, that the spirits would use us like a pair of jumper cables or a flint to jump-start their own processes, ha!

Mutual chemistry indicates there is huge awakening potential for both people by what is activated in each of them. I suspect that the falling in love energy of people who are awakening spiritually is particularly strong because their systems are so open. Their love has more dimensions to it because their perception is so subtle. If they are true medicine people, born to be of service to a greater cause, their love often has planetary implications. Meaning, their relationship, and the sacred work the two people are potentiated to create together can have massive-scale impact. This is what A Course in Miracles calls a “Holy Relationship.” So, if you feel chemistry with someone, it may be because an imperative of the collective is being asked for through your collaboration with your partner. An example might be a partnership that inspires both parties towards sobriety, and propels them to found a recovery program together. A medicine person’s sense of self is more collective, and they experience loving as, “I love you from a whole, inter-connected web of life, and I love the whole inter-connected world in/ through you.”

Now, if you are born a medicine person, there is really only one kind of partnership that is appropriate for you, or one appropriate way to approach relationships. And that is as a collaborative vehicle for awakening and growth for both parties. This is sometimes called a “conscious relationship.” If you are trying to pursue partnership with someone who pointedly does not want to grow, then it is not the right relationship for you as someone prioritizing spiritual awakening. And if you are using relational limerence to stay in your comfort zone, preserve your egoic defenses, or stay static and not grow, then you are betraying your spiritual mission as a medicine person. This codependent dynamic is spiritually stifling and necrotic. You must want to be challenged to evolve by your partner.

The thing with limerence is that it is deceptive. It makes you feel high. It involves a lot of projection that makes you feel spiritually connected. But it does so through using the other person to fill inadequacies of the ego. It is ultimately extractive. It has to do with false power (which is both a taste of, and a far cry, from real power.) It is intoxicating. It involves idealization, and putting others on a pedestal. Real power is completely dismantling of hierarchy and disarming of one’s own egoic defenses. It is self-referential for power. Source is from within. And as any junkie will tell you, a rush of high is never sustained, abiding, or real power.

Limerence is pre-initiatory. Limerence is the kind of relationships people keep getting into when they are on the awakening path, but have not stepped into their power yet. But it is an initiation portal. If you go through it, are egoically devastated by it, learn its lessons, and develop secure attachment, the results are groundbreaking. Limerence is immature. Limerence gives the person who is limerent license to idealize perfection and saviorism in the other, and outsource their power to them. They outsource trust in their own body, and the responsibility to cultivate their direct connection with God to the other. They confer power to this other that they don’t believe they possess themselves. They feel more whole by proximity to this glorified other. Meanwhile, the limerent object benefits by getting showered in glorifying projections, and this gives them a false sense of spiritual power, (rather than genuine spiritual power, which requires responsibility, tolerating pain, facing fears, and doing hard things.) It is incredibly flattering and inflating to the ego to be idealized by another, and it is pretty inevitable to abuse power in this position. They avoid taking responsibility for abuse of power, which would reveal the low self-worth and sense of inadequacy hiding underneath, and cause them shame. Although painful, it would also bring them closer to God because it is real, and genuinely intimate as opposed to the artificial intimacy of limerence. Both individuals are avoiding responsibility in some way. This stifles their growth. They must break out of this codependent dynamic to pursue authentic spiritual growth. The one who is anxious/ limerent usually has more introspective capacity and motivation to break the pattern, while the avoidant/ limerent object is more likely to cling to relationships that preserve their false self and don’t force growth.

Limerence is basically lazy. It is fantasy without the effort of application. It’s fantasy that doesn’t involve confronting your attachment wounding. Limerence is great for inspiration. But it will require your courage to harness it in constructive ways. If you experience the spark of limerence and then apply its guidance practically, this is where limerence and genuine love intersect. Love is active, not passive. It requires investment of time and effort. It involves making yourself vulnerable in order to grow.

This is where the waters intermingle between limerent love and true, generous love. While limerence is dependent on the other person to “complete” us, a Holy Relationship is about co-creation, collaboration, and inter-dependence by mutually-respecting equals. It requires that each person is solidly grounded in themselves as Source. Each person is responsible for themselves, for their communication, and for their boundaries. It is an adult love. It is a mature love. Love of the other then, becomes about appreciation, and conscious letting the other in to be transformed by them, or consensually extending oneself to potentiate spiritual transformation in the other. It is mutually supportive. Unlike limerence, it is not compensating for something the individuals feel they lack.

Moving from Narcissistic & Codependent Limerence into True Intimacy

Limerence thrives on lack of information. That is why it usually plays out between an avoidant (who covets fantasy but is terrified of true intimacy,) and an anxious person, (who lacks self-trust and therefore compromises themselves to maintain the connection.) As long as you are an anxiously-attached person who lacks self-confidence, you will avoid asserting yourself in ways that confront your partner’s insecurities, or threaten their false connection to God. And if you avoid these scary conversations, you will never get the opportunity to see your partner’s true colors… how they respond when their grandiose self-image is challenged. And in the interim, you will fill that space with idealized projections of them. You are avoiding intimacy too! Know that what you assume them to be is you! If you glorify them, it is because you are pulling from your reference point of the garden that is your internal landscape. The problem is that you just don’t trust it as it applies to yourself! While anxiously-attached people tend to make unfair positive assessments of their avoidant partners, people in the dismissive avoidant phase of disorganized attachment, or those who are truly narcissistic, are simultaneously making negative projections about their anxious partners. There is a mutual positivity bias and negativity bias playing out at the same time. And so, we are like ships passing in the night, perpetually missing one another and not actually connecting. Limerence is a missed connection. We are each responding to our creations of projection.

While limerence thrives on lack of information, true love thrives on actual information, communication, practical application, and real connection. As an aside, sex in limerent, codependent, or avoidant/ anxious dynamics will not be very good. You might feel like the other person is making love to some idealized image of you they have in their head rather than to the real you that is before them. You might feel like you are putting out a false self rather than letting yourself be seen in your authenticity. This is not true intimacy, and not very spiritually powerful or satisfying.

What happens for many people awakening from the addiction of limerence into spiritual awareness, is that they will start out being the anxious/ limerent one in one of these intoxicating dynamics. They will gradually grow to the point where they start wanting a collaborative partnership, and start asserting themselves. As the anxious person cultivates a sense of self-worth and agency, they start wanting more substance, humanity, and authentic connection in the relationship. They start speaking up for this and advocating for the self-work, accountability, and support they both need to be true teammates on a more meaningful venture. But for an avoidant or narcissistic limerent object, although they can exchange on a superficial level, they are non-receptive at their core. There is an intractability of the defenses, and an inability to be transformed or impacted by others. They may be happy to receive their anxious partner, but it will be on their terms. As long as the anxious person’s engagement with them reinforces their ego, they are welcome into their fold. But if they challenge their flattering self-image by having conflicting needs of their own, they will be vehemently rejected. So, the bids for authentic relating from the more anxious partner will incur the narcissistic defenses of the limerent object and the relationship will likely implode. The more avoidant or narcissistic one is more fragile. Even though they may have appeared to possess more spiritual vitality at the outset, it is a superficial power that lacks the infrastructure of a resilient, flexible, and integrated psyche to apply their spiritual gifts in a grounded way. Whether the more anxious partner can stop subordinating themselves, trust themselves, realize that they have actually been the more evolved soul all along, and leave the avoidant one, is the pathway to reclaiming their power.

Most relationships have difficulty transforming from one of limerence into a Holy Relationship because limerent relationships are built on playing with power. They likely created the victim-savior dynamic at the outset. Know that if this is the set-up going in, harm will inevitably come of it. This set up is not collaborative nor equilateral. This dynamic can NOT be empowering, and is necessarily codependent. Idealizing others is infantilizing to oneself. The spiritually awakening person must outgrow this adolescent tendency to locate their power and authority in someone else.

So you can see how narcissistic defenses are alive and well in limerence. This protective/ defense structure is a medicine person’s biggest adversary. Because if it is unconscious, it will completely wreak havoc. It will massively distort their perception of reality and they will misappropriate their power. They will misuse their spiritual gifts toward self-serving ends. Real spiritual power is not just about extrasensory abilities. It is about command over the vessel that we are. It is about mastery over our psycho-emotional being. It is about coherence in the attachment system. Sound, ethical, and constructive medicine people need to be solidly grounded in themselves as Source. This comes from an abiding and indivisible self-love, self-respect, and sense of belonging that flows continuously like a river under the ground of all their doings… metronomic and deeply regulating to the nervous system. When we feel so invariably loved… so indestructibly connected to God… we can discern without attachment. Then we can conduct spiritual energy and apply it in a clean way. This is another dimension of power than just psychic abilities. And honestly, I think the discipline and self-awareness to not be possessed or corrupted by spiritual power is rare. Although many medicine people were initiated in the art of ceremony and doctoring, this dimension of resilient psyche, secure attachment, and clear presence comes more from the fields of depth psychology and insight meditation. To boot, becoming secure will open your spiritual perception!

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How Amorance can Transmute Trauma

What is falling in love but experiencing a taste of the fully spiritually-awakened state? When we get that close to ultimate power as we feel when we fall in love, it surfaces everything that is not that. It surfaces everything in resistance to that full awakening so that we have the opportunity to clear it from our systems. In Buddhism, this resistance is called Mara, and it takes many forms (jealousy, fear, shame, etc.) If someone has PTSD (distorted perception of reality based in traumatic history that makes them contract against life,) this will be unearthed in massive proportions in such a spiritually powerful relationship. It takes a love that deep, or a taste of spiritual enlightenment that earth-rattling, to activate defenses that entrenched. If it is a low-octane relationship, it’s not going to do this. Good news is, this surfacing is a massive opportunity for awakening and healing. Don’t misinterpret it as something wrong.

Relationship influencers talk about seeking a slow simmer in relationships as opposed to powerful highs. I think these “high” relationships are important and necessary to pursue at times, and I don’t advocate for avoiding them entirely. A low-stakes relationship won’t trigger those dormant unhealed wounds. It will keep you more regulated perhaps, but you also won’t get the opportunity to confront what is keeping you from realizing yourself as God. Regulation is good. You don’t want to blow a fuse. Too much dysregulation is destructive. You want to hit a sweet-spot with the right amount of stress. But the question is, can you harness your support system to be able to run a larger voltage of energy?

For anybody with trauma, the response to such intensity is often to contract. But the ascendant way to respond to such intensity is to create a bigger container. If you find yourself in such a moment, can you harness your support system to grow and expand into a bigger embodiment that can run such high voltage of energy? The opportunity is to BECOME something bigger. For example, if you find yourself in such intensity, the lower-level embodiment might misinterpret the intensity for danger, and go into fight, flight, or freeze. But instead, can you: call friends for emotional support, pray, reach out to psychotherapeutic resources, do ceremony, qi gong, etc. to level-up to a higher level of processing to meet that power? The whole point of love itself is to expand and grow into a larger holding capacity than your former limiting beliefs. And this is the role of a medicine person ultimately: to hold such a high perspective and broad, spiritually-integrated embodiment to see through the pain of our world.

Holy Relationships

Relationships of this magnitude require a lot of support: going to therapy, reading books on relationship dynamics, etc. If you are in an amorant relationship with dreams of fulfilling a Holy Relationship vision, you must lean into these resources. These relationships are fed and made resilient by the support of community, mentors, guides, men’s groups, whiteness studies, accountability buddies, addiction sponsors, or whatever you might need. You are a multitude consummating with another multitude. You are a healthy-enough ecosystem consummating with another healthy-enough ecosystem to bring health and abundance to your respective, conjoining, and quantumly expanding ecosystems.

If you are in this situation, know that you are doing big work! You are doing intergenerational work. You are likely healing what is between your people: culturally, racially, in terms of gender, and more. Attachment wounding that shows up in your individual embodiments is the wound site of genocides and persecutions of your respective peoples. You are transformative justice practitioners in intimacy. Your relationship is the vortex. These are alchemical relationships that heal the karma between groups of people at the interface of contact. Your individual relationship has the power to repair holes in the lay-line consciousness grid of humanity. Your relationship is personal and individual. But it is also about healing the collective. This is what many shamanic intimate relationships are like. This is not an easy love: it’s not keeping two people in comfortable, predictable stasis. It is humanitarian work. Medicine people unconsciously seek out these kinds of relationships that can transform them, and that they have the power to transform in healing ways.

Once you have passed through the gates of limerence as a relationship pattern and start moving toward amorance and integrating real love, you are really cooking with gas! Once you are so actively awakening, the will to awaken is so strong. It’s like a fire that cannot be stopped. Then you will be attracted to alchemize anything that is standing in the way. Life wants you to awaken too! So it will put in your path anything left standing in your way, knowing you will gobble up the opportunity. If you are having intense relationships, know it’s a good sign. Spirit must think you are up to the task of transmuting it!

Conclusion

You do not need to wait to be perfectly secure to pursue a relationship. Secure attachment is learned through relationship experience. But if you are someone who is genuinely pursuing psycho-spiritual awakening and starting to outgrow the addiction of limerence, clinging to a relationship with someone who is still deeply unconscious will be horrendously painful. Because you are emerging out of limerence and into the domain of readiness for a Holy Relationship, you will have holy visions for said relationship. If you are an emerging medicine person, you will have visions of the sacred work you wish to co-create with a partner. If you continue to open your attachment system and sacred visions to people who do not have the skills to navigate that depth of intimacy, it will create nothing but chaos and anguish. Deeply insecurely attached people do not know how to responsibly manage that amount of power. It will stir up all of their insecurities and defenses and they will pervert this love of yours, distort it, weaponize it, and use it against you. As your limerent fantasy converts into real life-force energy, be responsible with it. Don’t open your depths to someone who doesn’t know how to swim. It is devastating to walk away from loved ones who you want to come with you on the journey of upgrading your relationship to authentic intimacy and real love and spiritual power. Know that if you find yourself at this point, unbeknownst to you, your soul contract with said person was to be an activator for growth, but not a Holy Relationship. In the meanwhile, be very proud of yourself. Good for you for learning how to deep-sea dive!

If you are an empath, you will probably get into a lot of relationships with narcissists and/or avoidant people in the earlier half of your life. That’s because they are your teachers in these advanced stages of earth school! Empaths have no idea how close they are to self realization. They really don’t know that they are here to create heaven on earth. They are special bright lights in this world, and they are chosen to step into their full power. These limerent relationships will be the ones that reveal the remaining pieces of your shadow that you need to integrate for your wholeness. These relationships are catalysts and activators for eradicating false beliefs about yourself. They involve more taking in the sense that you will likely be pulling from resources to support yourself during this trying and self-absorbed time. As you traverse the shadow realm of everything your toxic relationship brings up: negative beliefs about yourself, latent addictions, confusion, etc., you may call on your friends to “process” the chaos of this shit show. You will likely need therapy services during this time of intense activation and clearing of old patterns. Once you integrate these lessons, you will be ready for a Holy Relationship where you are actually giving back to the world in a generous way. You likely won’t need therapy anymore. You will move with a calm, grounded, and clear nervous system and be generative. You will move into being a Creator, which is part of your mission as a medicine person.

What can you do if you find yourself in the unreciprocated, discarded, agony phase of limerence? Make a list of all of the negative beliefs that are surfacing about yourself. This is gold! These beliefs are telling you all of the false beliefs you have been subconsciously harboring that are keeping you separate from knowing yourself as God. I bet you never knew you had so many until this moment! You are making the unconscious conscious, and eliminating the snagging places in the field of your consciousness.

Until you have walked through the portal of recovery from a limerent relationship or avoidant discard, it is impossible to imagine the soul-reclamation and retrieval of personal power that happens as a result. It was the most BRUTAL thing I have ever gone through and yet, I feel like I transformed from being a girl into a woman. Nothing can rival the level of self-love and self-respect I have coming out of that experience. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I have an unshakeable self-trust, and am becoming unfuckwith-able. Disentangling from codependency feels like it gave me x-ray vision. I can see so clearly. I don’t feel confused about anything anymore. I don’t know... Earning secure attachment seemed to unravel all the knotted-up strings in our fillamental universe.

This is what I hope for those of you codependent empaths who are still in the grips of limerent addiction/ initiation. The healed empath is what the world needs… Empaths who know their worth! If this is you, I offer you my metta. And the sangha of all of us who are awakening to our innate spiritual power.

I am a licensed psychotherapist, psycho-spiritual counselor, and psychedelic integration guide. I specialize in working with people overcoming codependency, healing sexual trauma, and waking up to their spiritual gifts for personal and collective liberation. If you would like to work with me, check out my website at:

https://www.hallieswan.com/

Wolves teach us about right relationship, including between the sexes. I thought this was apt imagery for today’s topic: healing systemic harm between the masculine and feminine in intimate relationships.

The following piece was inspired by a series of sexually abusive experiences I had from male healers. Some of these experiences were overtly abusive, others were more subtle, and all of them involved microaggressions. Some of them involved being gaslit, and even being labeled “histrionic,” a psychological term reserved almost exclusively for women. (In fact, the word “hysteria” means womb!) Although abuse by a male healer may sound like an aberration, in my experience it is the norm. This piece is also about more than just healers. It is about interfacing with the fragile, colonized, male psyche. This piece is about the the complex relational trauma that results from this being an almost total experience of men, and the formativeness of that. This piece is also about the eventual and gradual healing of this impact, when one encounters a secure-enough man. 

Men explained things to her.
Thought they had her answers
Crusaders of mountains and life… 
Like it’s all just the power of positive thinking…
The law of attraction and manifestation…
And if you’re disempowered, it’s cause you’re not doing it right. 

They offered themselves, “so altruistically,” to help her.
They said the right things, like to trust herself and whatnot…
Told her they were happy to hold space for her… to be the butt of her projections 
while she raged and screamed and they weren’t afraid of her…
“I see you, you are safe,” they’d say…
But when the matter of trusting herself came to telling them their baggage, they shriveled up…
Got defensive and argued back. 
The thing was, this whole endeavor was framed as being about her… 
But it wasn’t about her.

“Maybe nothing is wrong with me,” she thought.
For years, she had been sniffing around different healers, 
Trying to heal this brokenness
She appealed to male healers who exacted the same violence on her. 
But what if nothing had been wrong with her this whole time?
What if she had just been barking up the wrong tree?

“I hate men so much,” she confided. 
“I mean, I love you guys… but I hate you so much.”
That was some serious pain. 
The kind that sits deep inside your organs, never said out loud.  
That is a secret, that only escapes when she feels so relaxed, that her muscles don’t hold it back anymore. 

She wanted to feel that glittering exchange
She wanted to feel that freewheeling joy and abandon that other women seemed able to feel,
Even with the kind of men that made her squirm. 

She wanted to open effortlessly, and so she strived to feel it. 
She suspended her distrust to try
To override the protest inside her.
She was so familiar with that shroud of smog that hung between her and most men…
That sourness, that bad smell, 
That uneasiness... 
They would say things like “all of you is welcome here,” that would make it at first seem not as bad, 
even though it didn’t feel all the way good.
And she convinced herself that that was safety. 
That teetering house on a ledge…
That ickiness inside
That creeping feeling,
of the frailty of what was being promised.
That thing she sensed could not stand the test of challenge, 
so she dare not test it. 

She hadn’t known what true safety felt like,
because she had never felt it before.
The closest she had ever gotten was like a sharp note on a piano,
and a hurried nodding of heads in agreement to something utterly unclear.
She had never felt that complete ground inside the body
Like being at the way bottom of an old growth forest,
Where she could finally breathe for once. 
…Where there was space, circulating among the trees,
and between her organs, 
that had finally exhaled a chronically held breath. 

She had never slowed down enough for complete clarity,
where there was no ambiguity between them anymore. 
She had never petitioned to go as slow as she needed, for all of her to catch up
To clear the air, 
No more distortion
Total relief, 
Just Soul-to soul. 
Because there was so MUCH between them, always… 
It would take centuries to unwind. 

And as always, it was her lack of trust that was called into question… that was the culprit…

The smog between them
The uneasiness she felt as they got close,
As they wanted more from her…
She could keep them at a safe distance, 
But an anxiety arose when they tried to get inside. 
Smog hangs at a natural distance… 
Where the atmospheric density is such. 
And that’s how it was with her. She could exchange pleasantries with them, 
But there wasn’t the atmospheric allowance for them to move closer. 

Trust herself…
She rolled it around in her mouth like something she wasn’t sure was edible. 
She felt pressured to trust them.
She tossed and turned between doubting herself and trusting herself… 
She could doubt herself and take consensus reality at face value, 
or trust herself and question everything in the world.

What is the embodied experience of patriarchy?
It is like a fish that doesn’t know it’s in water. 
Hot, toxic, poisonous water,
Getting acid burns.
She had the distinct sense of touching an open wound,
every time she approached the truth. 
It came back at her explosive, defensive, and venomous.
So instead, she skirted, self-deprecated, and doubted herself…
Walking on eggshells,
Always bracing for impact, 
Don’t wake the monster.   
This is the texture of interfacing with the fragile masculinity, 
that had become a defining scaffolding of her life.

What is the anatomy of self-doubt?
Forcing herself into the “good hands” of men…
Lowering her boundaries to them so that she accidentally inhaled their unconscious, 
like accidentally choking on sea water. 
Sea sick and with salty sinuses.
She swam in the same cesspool of their own confusion, and disembodiment. 
Ingested their distorted reality, once again. 
Dissonance rang through the halls of her insides,
Crashing and clanging and hurting her tissues. 
This is the vibration of patriarchy;
She had gaslit herself again.
Why do we give credence to the most lost among us? 


Bt eventually, she would have healing experiences with them too… 

Experiment…
They inched towards each other
She tested him
She tested herself.  

I make love to you even as we are imperfect
Even as we are in turmoil and struggle, figuring it out.
We heal ourselves in pieces.
You show me glimpses into yourself…
Somewhere beneath the surface of that rocky terrain, 
A soft heart beats…
I can hear it through your words, and that keeps me going…
Through all the edginess, 
And the risks of what is said…
there is just enough opening of our humanity, 
to survive the edgy things we dare to say, and the jagged places we dare to go. 

My pleasure enjoys herself on you…
I can’t explain why it does that, 
Even though, and as, in other ways, 
you rub up against the sandpaper of what hurts me.

I grip the edge of expectations…
conditioning to surrender to you,
just because you are attracted to me. 
But what if what is most healing, is to not go there?
What if what is most intimate, is to just be friends. 
I can heal myself on friends, and them on me. 
I can tell them my secrets, 
when there aren’t the stakes anymore,
and they can tell me theirs.
I can curl up in their arms then, in delight of our kinship
And not worry that I am beholden to anything. 
That doesn’t mean strands of eroticism aren’t there… 
And maybe one day we will consummate them, 
But not because we have to.
And with that permission not to, 
I can exhale a deep sigh of relief and my soul can exclaim, 
“Thank god!” for the freedom to be herself. 
So many possibilities arise when we aren’t confined to that one-dimensional relationship anymore.
We can be multidimensional now. 

There is karma between us
It is bigger than us
We are living the legacies of our kind
The divine masculine lives in you, 
And the divine feminine lives in me.
The masculine shadow lives in you, 
And the feminine shadow lives in me. 
We mustn’t blame ourselves for how hard it is to trust one another,
And for how slow we are to get there. 
We mustn’t feel indignant about all these things between us.
Let us remember that we are not just us,
We are the pinpoints of a whole lineage of each of our peoples
And everything that yours have done to mine, 
And mine to yours.
So when our hands approach one another’s, and they say stop…
When they are shaking and I want to puke, 
I will not hate this block between us. 
Let us remember the sacred thing we are doing here. 
We are not just healing ourselves, 
We are healing generations of trauma in this encounter here. 
As we come down to the moment,
Ancestors are looking over our shoulders,
Endorsing this contact of souls which heals all of them too. 

And something eternal loves each other,
Even through all the betrayal. 
Secret pleasures of boy and girl children
Who haven’t discovered patriarchy yet, 
or to hate one another yet. 
The texture is rocky. 
And like as water gets through the rocks of a river, 
Water still flows, 
love finds a way, 
And “the soft animal of [my] body loves what it loves,” 
And wants what it wants…

Confession:
“The thing is, I miss you guys…” she said, tears streaming down her face in the dark…
“I miss you like the wolf misses the people.”
“I miss you from a time before I was born, when we were friends with each other…
When we were on the same team
Allies, not enemies…


When I tell you how you hurt me, 
Do not mistake, 
That is not easy for me.
That is my truth, and that is my offering. 
mighty vulnerable. 
It comes from the bottom of my broken and undefended heart. 

In that moment I am in the self-love you keep encouraging me to find. 
I did not need you in order to find it
At least, not in the way you thought I did.
I don’t need you to instruct me how to find it. 
But I do need you, to listen.
Because when you listen, 
And feel my pain as yours too,
and feel how our humanity is inextricably linked, 
That heals me. 

Don’t try and fix me.
There is nothing to fix. 
Pain is not a problem. 
I ask only that you feel it with me, 
The pain of what you have done to me, what you have done to yourself, 
What I have done to you too, and what our people have done to each other. 

What is Limerence?

According to Psychology Today, “Limerence is a state of involuntary obsession with another person… The experience of limerence can include an irrationally positive evaluation of that person’s attributes, and a longing for reciprocation. Limerence can make a person feel ecstatic, their mental life focused on a passionate, anxious desire. It can also result in a state of agony if and when the feelings are not reciprocated” (Psychology Today.)

Limerence usually refers to relationships that stay in the realm of fantasy. But they can also entail staying hung-up on a connection with someone, even if that person has pointedly rejected you, set boundaries, is unavailable, or is repeatedly harming you. It can include obsession, rumination, delusion, and a break with reality. This is harmful to self and others and can even violate consent. At some point, it is important to accept the other person’s rejection, boundaries, limitations, or irreconcilable harm for what it is. This acceptance is a profound initiation (an article for another day.) But for the sake of this article, my question is whether we can reframe the romanticism itself away from being purely pathological.

For clarity, allow me to define some terms. “Limerent object” refers the one who is being desired. “Limerent person” refers to the one who is possessed by this longing for the other.

Magical People

When I research about limerence, it is accompanied by theories of insecure attachment. I think there’s more to limerence than insecure attachment… a point many psychologists and relationship influencers focus on. I suspect people who are limerence-prone are actually more magical people. And maybe limerent objects are also more magical people. What I mean when I say “magical people,” is those with non-normative boundaries. They push the boundaries and open up the casket of what we conceive of as possible.

The people that are the easiest to be limerent for are often people with personality disorders like narcissism, borderline, or histrionic features. Or else, they are people with insecure (avoidant or anxious-avoidant) attachment. According to my little hypothesis here, it would follow that people with personality disorders or insecure attachment are innately more magical people. When I say that such people have non-normative or looser boundaries, I mean someone who lives between the material and spiritual worlds. In fact, borderline refers to living on the border between neurosis and psychosis. Such limerent objects may not be full-blown psychotic, schizophrenic, bipolar, or schizoaffective, but there is more fluidness to the boundaries of their psyche than someone who is more on the neurotic end of the spectrum. Some features of these fluid boundaries or magical existence include: attention to synchronicities, meaning-making, idealization, romanticism, and intense feeling states. Yes, some cluster B personality-disordered individuals are more prone to imagination, fantasy, and magical thinking. But that begs the question… what are imagination and fantasy in the first place? Are they just creations of the brain? Or are these people tapping in to real, spiritual phenomena beyond the veil?

In diagnostic terms, these personality-disordered folks may possess more qualities of our personal shadow. Namely: disinhibition, lack of shame, fearlessness, id, boldness, indulgence, grandiosity, selfishness, passion, over-familiarity, and recklessness. These qualities are attractive to neurotic, repressed, or inhibited individuals, as are the super-human confidence, and seeming command over self and others found in many narcissists and antisocial personalities. I can say for myself, that I have experienced a supernatural quality in my dealings with a certain psychopath. It certainly opened up my perception of the possibilities of the universe, which made things very interesting!

Grandiosity is a distortion. But it is also not THAT far from the reality that we are all God. These people may be masters of mind control, master manifesters in the creative arts, or successful business people. They may be magicians, conducting others under their spell. And this is a desirable quality to many who are overly-rigid and inhibited. These less-contained, less rigidly-boundaried individuals are often disruptors of convention. They are often tricksters, embodying exiled but vital parts of the personal and collective unconscious. They may be deviants and subversives. This makes way for vitality, creativity, imagination, and alternative thinking to enter collective consciousness and society.

And what of people who experience limerence? They are often codependents and addicts (also insecurely attached, according to the western pathology paradigm.) But what else of them? They are also likely empaths… another domain of boundary permeability. They sense into the magical and archetypal possibility that the personality-disordered individuals promise or summon. Empaths are deep and receptive and unconditionally loving (often to a fault.) Maybe they don’t know their full power, and maybe they need stronger boundaries to protect it, but they have the sensitivity to travel to mythical dimensions of grandiosity and intimacy with their likewise insecurely-attached limerent objects.

According to theories about limerence, limerent individuals were usually neglected in childhood, and now seek to fulfill unmet needs for closeness, intimacy, appreciation, recognition, and attention. A professor may have praised your ability, and now you fantasize about them saving you from your drab existence. Someone may have merely smiled at you or offered you a moment of warmth, and now you are obsessed with them. That limerents are pining after a missing experience may very well be so, but is there more going on? I have experienced limerence several times, and it is such a singularly powerful experience. I think limerence is about more than just insecure attachment. I think there is an aspect of soul activation and retrieval going on.

Why is it that highly sensitive, less-boundaried (and thereby more magical) people are more susceptible to limerence, insecure attachment, and codependence? For highly-sensitive people, there is a constant large influx of psychic material. That is a lot of energy and content to manage! Being highly sensitive is an innately turbulent existence for that reason. It is much easier for someone to be stable when the volume dial and the color saturation of life is turned way down. Maybe being highly-sensitive to subtle energies or other dimensions makes one predisposed to personality disorders, codependence, addiction, or insecure attachment because it is so hard to responsibly manage that much energy!

I’ve heard a lot of people who are healing from limerence say that recovery is hard because when they think about a relationship with a securely attached person, it sounds boring. Is that because secure attachment itself is boring? Or is it because many securely attached people are innately less deep-thinkers, less transcendent, defying, or visionary? Is it possible to be securely attached and also super deep and magical? (In my opinion, only through hard-earned secure attachment.) I think a lot of unearned securely-attached individuals probably are not as visionary or sensitive. They innately have denser boundaries, and don’t travel as readily between dimensions of perception, and this makes it easier to be regulated and secure. There is not as much limerence when a person has more density, more rigidity of thought, and less imagination. That being said, I do think it is possible to be securely attached while being a profound person with more permeable perception of spiritual realms. This is the goal, and is the accomplishment of many highly-regarded artists, activists, and healers. But this balance is often hard-won.

At times, creating denser personal boundaries is indicated for mental health and wellbeing. Inherently unstable fluid boundaries are a powerful access point to the mystery. But ideally, the boundless mystery is somewhere to visit at will, and not something to highjack our entire lives. We want to develop mastery over choosing to open our boundaries to this, and then knowing how to close them when we need more stability. Personality disorders are global… affecting every aspect of the person’s life at all times. Although we want to be able to travel to less-defined, magical, and powerful, places, living at that level of chaos day-in and day-out (which is the case in addiction and insecure attachment as well,) is not good for anyone’s mental health. It is up to us magical, tortured souls to heal our attachment while retaining our sensitivity.

A Shamanic view of Limerence

Being insecurely attached, limerent, a limerent object, codependent, overly-empathic, or personality-disordered may not just be a result of trauma. It may be indicative of an inborn gift. The life path of the magically born person (the person with innately more fluid dimensional boundaries, more subtle perception, more synesthesia, hyper-sensitivity, extra-sensory perception, or a rich imagination,) is fundamentally different from the life path of others. These magical people came here for soul transformation… to evolve themselves and the world around them and that is an innately turbulent path! If you are such a magical person, don’t measure yourself against the stability of someone who didn’t come here for that. If your life has been highly turbulent, you might investigate whether you are a medicine person. Highly unconscious personality-disordered people may have come here as foils for other people’s awakening, but I still maintain that they are usually more magical in the sense of transgressing normative boundaries.

Insecure attachments get a bad rap. Relationship influencers like Jillian Turecki or Matthew Hussey are adamantly rejecting of the virtues of situationships, limerence, and toxic relationships. Yeah, they can be unhealthy if you are stuck in them for an inordinately long time. But I think there’s big oversight of the importance of these soul initiations. Stability is not the apex of life. Don’t marry the cassanova, the fuckboy, the addict, or the narcissist. But I don’t think it’s good to avoid or reject these experiences as nonvaluable, insignificant, or one-dimensionally harmful. The question to ask ourselves is, “What can we learn from them?” If someone is an empath, and has come to Earth for personal transformation and awakening, a limerent relationship may be just what the doctor ordered to wake them up to whatever lesson they need to learn.

I think the experiences of limerence, toxic relationships, unrequited love, love bombing, turbulence, delusions of grandiosity, magical thinking, enmeshment, boundary-dissolving union, loss of self, distortion, and even abuse, can be important aspects of any medicine person’s (or magical person’s) journey. So go ahead, don’t be afraid to get dirty. Go in to the underworld, meet your teachers (in the form of other humans and lovers). Find your power. Play with power. Learn how to wield it (in ethical, and right-sized ways of course).

Highly-charged people and situations can be our greatest teachers. People in limerence often talk about soul contracts, soulmate-ship and other such “magical” ideas. These romantic ideals can keep one attached to something unhealthy. But these ideas might not be wrong! I’d venture that these supernatural contracts, twin flame-ships, and the like are actually real. But so are the parameters of our physical dimension. We can’t privilege these romantic ideals if and as they harm ourselves or others on the three-dimensional plane. It is a virtue to be able to go really deep, and also find our way back to stability and wellbeing.

The Virtues of Limerence

Something I can’t stand is the way that western psychology and the pathology paradigm sucks the magic out of things and condemns them as bad. Have a little more mystery in your life! Some amount of fluidity and that enigmatic, magical quality is healthy. Some amount of crazy is healthy. Where do you think good art comes from? Being too far on the extreme of neuroticism is pathological too. It’s possible to be too secure or stable. Maybe being “insecurely attached” means you have a little wiggle room for the mystery.

Okay, so maybe I’m insecurely attached. But maybe that person also was a soul-mate. Maybe that person was abusive, but maybe we also had a soul contract. Maybe I’m projecting, but maybe I’m hyper perceptive and I am assessing something accurately on an energetic level. Maybe dreaming about this person is meaningless. And/ or, maybe we are quantumly entangled. Maybe it was just limerence… or maybe there really was love. We need to take responsibility for our fantasies, especially when they impact other people. But we also have to watch out for over-pathologizing ourselves. What a more interesting world to live in when we grapple with this liminal space between our spiritual and physical nature!

The periods in my life when I was limerent were some of the most magical times, full of spiritual communion, muse-inspired art making, sacred pain, and confrontation with my own soul. They were periods where the sky seemed to crack open and I wasn’t sure if I was about to have a psychotic break or a kundalini awakening. This extreme altered state of consciousness is very fertile ground indeed! Limerence can cause a HUUUGGGEEE surge of vital energy! It provides the opportunity to experience how much vitality is actually possible in one’s being. But we mis-direct credit for the source of this energy to another person who doesn’t necessarily reciprocate our affections. Imagine what you could do with that energy if you directed it in a constructive way… to yourself! It’s a wake-up call to unlock your spiritual gifts.

There is definitely something dysfunctional about borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and other personality-disordered functioning, and I am in no way absolving such individuals, or those with codependence or reckless disorganized attachment from their responsibility to heal their attachment. Nor do I want to underplay the intensity, or intractability of folks who have clinical-level cluster B personality disorders. These folks often cause caustic harm and destruction. I’m just saying, maybe limerence isn’t just a pathology of insecure attachment… maybe it is also pointing to virtues of those who fall under its spell. Maybe it means that you are a person who can walk in both worlds.

Limerence as an initiation

We need to have a balance of stability and these soul ventures that disrupt, push the veil, and are activations of spiritual emergence. And I really wish this path was more respected in our western culture. When someone is on a destructive path, let us not characterize it as a unilaterally bad thing. Even in the trenches of addiction, someone may be searching for something on an existential, soul level that would expand the scope of personal and collective consciousness itself. These journeys to the underworld create unprecedented opportunity for insight and wisdom. May we remember that limerence, turbulent relationships, and even addictions can be a sacred part of life, and not something to be avoided at all costs with the outright distain I’ve seen from some pop psychologists on the internet.

These highly-charged limerent relationships provide unparalleled opportunity for us to explore our shadow. That is, after all, the role of anyone who is born to be a medicine person: “The word shaman, originating from the Tungus people in Siberia, means, one who sees in the dark” (Sandra Ingerman, Soul Retrieval). Shamans and spiritually enlightened people learn how to see in the dark by making the unconscious conscious. Limerent objects are so alluring because they are attracting us to a part of our shadow we have not uncovered yet. Not only are relationships with limerent objects good opportunities, but they may actually be necessary to unearth such deeply buried levels of shadow as displayed by personality-disordered or insecurely attached individuals. These limerent objects can represent a completely irresistible urge to reunite with our wholeness. Another way to conceive of this is that certain love affairs can be a kind of soul-retrieval. Certain people can hold such a strong charge for us because they embody aspects of ourselves that we have split off. A really strong attraction to them can be a desire to reunite with those cast-off parts of the soul. And in communing with them, we can experience a wholeness that we haven’t felt since childhood, or before that soul aspect was lost.

At one point I took an inventory of my romantic history… most of which were highly turbulent. On one level, I could proclaim that I want a secure relationship. But then why do I keep creating these situations? Maybe some part of me likes these. Maybe I should just accept that I am (insert destructive archetype): rebellious, an addict, intense, passionate, like pain, am endlessly fascinated by darkness, etc. If I had an alter ego, it would probably be Dave Navarro …when he was still on heroin, ha! Maybe I should stop denying or fighting this part of myself and just embrace it, and make arrangements. So, I took a class called “From Premature Attachment to Slut Secure,” put on by a sex activist and polyamory educator. I embraced that slur word I was called throughout high school: “slut.” It was an identity I rejected at the time, but on some level, it’s evidently true! Why condemn myself for not succeeding in creating some image of propriety? What wisdom is playing out in those slutty, destructive pursuits? Maybe there’s a lot of creative energy in this night-crawling harlot persona I keep being drawn back to.

Especially for medicine people, a certain level of turbulence is desirable and necessary during certain developmental periods. Let us own this! It doesn’t do anyone any favors to disown wanting this on some level. If you are someone who keeps attracting these kinds of relationships while claiming that you just want stability, you obviously DO want them. Admit it: You want the magic, the chaos, the mystery. Accepting this makes you infinitely more interesting, dimensional, and grounded. Ask yourself what this pattern and unconscious desire is showing you. Maybe it’s showing you that your imagination has been too small. Maybe it’s not your unconscious that has to change, but YOU that has to adapt to embrace a bigger, more powerful, dynamic, enigmatic, and mysterious human nature than you had imagined. Maybe it’s not reality that has to change, but the container of how you live your life that has to expand to fit something that is utterly defying. Maybe this person came into your life to unlock your dormant super powers. The collective shadow is rearing its head through your attractions to dysfunctional people. Don’t turn your back on the mystery. Integrate it man!!!

Getting the Lessons

Ultimately, this is a piece about shadow. Over-pathologizing is boring! No good art has ever come from neuroticism. All the greats were problematic. Perfectionism is a disease of the oppressor. Get free. Be messy. Enjoy it. Don’t bypass. Let it expand your consciousness. Let yourself out to space. Have some tether back, but don’t avoid going. It’s not unilaterally irresponsible. Everyone’s favorite person is an elder who has been initiated by their own darkness. It takes that odyssey to the shadow world to develop the humility, openness, and compassion we all love so much.

If limerence is fantasy, then ideally, one would want to overcome the affliction of limerence because reality is better than fantasy. But fantasy and imagination are the first steps towards manifestation. The move is always to convert fantasy into reality. To become and create that which we long for. Limerence itself is not bad. But it is a stepping stone to manifesting one’s full soul potential. Don’t reject it, but also, don’t get stuck there. The problem with limerence is that it is longing, and longing alone forever and ever is one-dimensional. The storyline needs more dynamism. The master class is when you can take the possibilities glimpsed in those insecure, turbulent, magical relationships, and create them in reality, and in consensual relationships with other conscious people. The other possibility is to accept the disappointment of unrequited love and rejection. That’s another (counter-intuitively) VERY interesting plot twist. When we stop seeking intensity and ecstatic wish-fulfillment, and completely surrender to disappointment and the “mundane,” these things can become deeply fulfilling, effervescent, and pulsing with life. This is very Buddhist/ nondual. It’s the spiritual awakening 2.0 course that comes after the 101 of intense seeking. But more on that later.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. At the end of the day, we’ll shake hands on the other side with the people who hurt us for the sacred role they played in our life in waking us up. Misery loves company. Success is a lonely venture. Come join us in the commons. We’re all just a bunch of fucking losers :) Seriously…limerence and insecurely-attached relationships are a trainwreck in slow motion. Nothing makes you feel more gutted than unrequited love. At least find refuge in how universal this experience is. You may feel completely alone in being rejected, but that’s the experience that connects all of us in common humanity. People who are avoidant are avoiding that completely annihilating shame, pain, or rock-bottom that comes with putting yourself out there. At least you bore your soul. At least you loved. At least you had the guts to completely humiliate yourself. At least you know the extent of your own madness. You’re one step closer to not being ruled by fear of rejection. We can’t say the same of people who choose to avoid these glorious, hideous, messy, obliterating, and defyingly beautiful disasters altogether.

In Closing

I just flat-out refuse to accept a world that denies soul or soul-mates. We are Gods, and we are the architects of reality. To some degree, I think we get to choose what’s real. Soul is an infinitely more beautiful, complex, messy, and interesting existence, so I’m going to choose that reality, thank you very much. And it’s just so much truer to my experience! Even if these inter-personal intensities I have felt have just been my projections, at the end of the day, I still take responsibility for my limerence. But I’m going to allow myself the beauty of a soulful reality in an increasingly materialistic world where beauty is dying.

Limerence itself is not a problem. It’s completely natural. The problem is that people are too afraid of pain in this culture. At the end of the day, the shamanic path is about self-awakening. Claiming that limerence, situationships, or dysfunctional relationships are unilaterally bad is giving too much power to the limerent object. It’s giving away your power, your resilience, your capacity for transformation, your ability to glean wisdom, and your ability to hold complexity. Most situations are not a problem if you are not afraid of pain and are oriented to learning and growth. You are not a victim. Life is full of paradoxes. You are a multitude, and so are other people. Maybe if your limerent object was narcissistic or antisocial they were just using you. But personally, I think life is more nuanced than that. We are here to wake up to our God nature, and we are also relational beings who touch one another’s lives and hearts in profound ways. If someone was deeply impactful to you, you probably were at least somewhat impactful to them too. You came to planet Earth to grapple with the messy experience of being human, and the “mortifying ordeal of being known” (Tim Kreider.) Take responsibility for yourself and take advantage of the opportunity for personal liberation. And love and appreciate others along the way.

The day it thundered and shook the entire dorm,
Students poured into the halls to celebrate. 

We opened the windows in the common halls and stuck our necks out to behold
Eager hands crawl over my bottom for their turn. 
Soon, we are stacked like sardines, one head atop another, 
For a chance to taste the sky who has opened her legs upon us. 

Oh yes!
We have this thing called a powerful sky above all our doings 
Today she has chosen to remind us
of our omniscient oversoul 

Bolts of thunder crack through the city and daylight turns disquieting dark
Now all my neighbors and I, our bodies urgent and youthful against one another. 
Wind blows water into our faces and we laugh hysterically
Makeup washes off and we are undone together

Tempestuous intervention and power outage, 
to remind us that we have always been, 
just paper-thin walls away from loving one another mid-afternoon. 

Our shirts are wet and paper-thin now. 
Unknown hands clamber upon my limbs
This one’s skin is letting subtle garlic.
This one has a warm Indian accent and I want to be inside her. 
I think I am falling in love with the Jewish American princess with mean eyeliner,
who is laughing sparkles into my ear, 
and whose hands make candid contact with my bare calf.
Supple breasts heave excitable breaths in my periphery
A disarmed boy sends an inside joke rippling through our body pile
That one makes playful windmills with her soaking-wet hair upon us all. 

Transcendent friends 
Unmasked by the water
Our collective body, laughing en masse,
Brought together by our common commander in the sky. 

Have you ever had an erotic experience with a thunder storm or power outage? Share below!

They came down to the water’s edge
The place where peace treaties were made, 
before God and the natural world.

Water lapped silently at exposed feet 
Ducklings bobbed towards them, 
Disembarked onto shore, 
And waddled over to their bare legs 
The epitomal nonthreat.
Rhetorical peacemakers,
Daring them to not notice, 
that natural law had always been part of their relationship. 
The little ducklings showed up,
infiltrated their mentalizations and asked,
Are you going to do right by us?
By our vulnerable fluffy bodies, and our tender little hearts?
Are you going to listen to your own nonviolent hearts?

How can you lie, to the water?
How can you lie, in front of the children? 
How can you have hate in your heart, before the epitomes of peace?

The whole natural world is a rhetorical question, 
in each moment, 
Begging your character.
The question is, 
When God grants you the opportunity to be honest with yourself,
How will you respond?

We are the last ones left. Late afternoon turned to evening. And twilight became increasingly dark. The warm colors and sounds of the lake… children laughing on the distant shore and murmurings of peaceful friends, faded. Crickets emerged. And in the perpetual now that is existing with you, before we knew it, everyone else had gone. Had picked up their picnic blankets, had gotten hungry, or cold, and run back home to enter the phase of evening. And then, it is just us and blue moonlight upon milky skin.

 You recite me a poem while I pee in the bushes and you proclaim, “The sun does not say to the moon, ‘you owe me…’ The sun does not say to the moon, ‘you owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that… LOOK WHAT HAPPENS WITH A LOVE LIKE THAT: It lights up the whole sky!!!” Meanwhile, I look out upon the face of that moon beaming down upon us. In your nearness, an otherworldly calm comes over me. I am so calm and aroused at the same time, that I can’t even pee properly! My genitals are seized up in anticipatory excitement. 

After I’m done trying, I strut back over to you and say, “Not to be pretentious, but I think that was actually Hafiz.” For one of my favorite things about you is your intellect, and our intellectual sparring. “Awwwwe,” you respond, smiling enthusiastically and plunge your tongue into my mouth.  

I come to sit beside you. I pause to let my body entrain to the otherworldly stillness of all that is around us, sharing this with us. At rapt attention: The redwood bodies. The ferns, winking at us. The spider silk, iridescent, and billowing in soft breeze. Their sentience hiding in plain sight.

How is it possible that everything is still and moving at the same time? I adjust to put my vagina to the earth, like putting one’s ear to the ground… one ear against another, listening…  My vagina listens. And without trying, an axis assimilates. A deep hydrophone into the ground. A through-line that runs up through my body and into the stars. I am merely rotating around this preeminent pillar. I am as big as the stars overhead. I am both calm and acutely awake. The plants bear lucid witness. The trunk of this redwood tree beside us. Its sound-absorbing fibers. The ducklings bobbing now in the shadows. The listening cicadas. The birds grown silent with the soft felt night. Our mammoth creature movements in the dark.

I crawl over to you. “Lay down” I say, in commanding gentleness. In delighted surprise, you recline. Your body looks small below me. Vulnerable. Bare chest and saucers for nipples rising and falling in uncertain anticipation. Looking slightly cold. I mount you. My groin and all of its soft loins press in to yours. Cephalopod limbs come to life. My vagina, now awakened, stirs your internal organs. I direct you as I imagine someone riding bareback would… steering with their groin. I ask yours a question with mine. Neurons fire back on live wires. Glitterings and twinklings swim between our laps.

I subject you to slowness. Before your eagerness can hijack it. I am the conductor. Let me take you into my world. I am the metronome. I can control the tempo, by expanding space in to the note. I can even bend time. Time itself bends to me. Let me show you! I transmit this time-defiance to you. Come be in this expansion of each molecule with me. Too much power than I know what to do with. I am the ringmaster. Master of ceremonies. Let me put things in to you. Send clusters of atomic orbitals in to you. Sparklers fire within you. Let me show you how superhuman we can be. I feel you breathe in to these cells, expanding space too... my teammate in doing so. I feel you trust me. I can feel your trust in me, guiding us. Taking you somewhere. I feel you trust yourself. I feel you ride your own waves. You are your own conductor of time-space. You ride the horse of your own eroticism, rather than it riding you. You have broken a wild horse. 

I pin you there with my pelvis. Nailing you to the forest floor. And I feel your own back entrain to the floor. Between gasps for air and squirms of delight, you titrate by surrendering to the ground below you. Breathing her in and all of her oxygen, awake in each blinking cell. Oxygen that is spacious in each cell of the forest floor, in varicose roots, and co-conspiring plants, lending themselves to us. Pouring themselves in to this nexus of concentrating energy. This place where a new universe is being born from the focal point of love.
 
I watch your face as we make first contact of wetness. Wetness finds wetness. Wetness, already dripping out of your cock nudges my wetness. With my lower mouth I can taste you… Thin, salty, milky, wanting, eager, building power, prone to shape-shift. “Come here” you say to me, and I bend forward to be close in face. Now we are exchanging roles and you are taking command and showing me. You show me all the love you have to give me through my portal. Your love wants to show me all the pleasure I am capable of. Wants to remind me the sublime substance I am made of. We are two boats knocking against one other until our systems synch up, and then we are one. Let us ride together!

You subject me to pleasure. And when you hit places within me that scare me with intensity of pleasure, you help me breathe and look back at you. In an echo chamber of I love yous. Nonverbal I love yous. In each thrust my body says, “I love you, I love you.” How do we know so well what we’re doing? How does it come so naturally? Organismic memory. 

It is only in these fleeting, blinking moments… a sentience emerges out from the ether and winks at me. God comes out of me and winks at you. God comes out of you and winks back at me. Knowing, knowing knowing. And then fades again. A secret in plain sight. God’s disguise dissolving but for a brief, fleeting instant. God peeks out of hide and go seek. God caught crouching behind a bush, smiles back at me…knowingly… lovingly… and then dissolves back into the bush again. God has come out from all of the bushes of the forest all around us. I know you know. I know you know that I know. But what words are there for such an understanding? None suffice. So instead, we smile untamedly. Electrons circulate rapidly along the circuit between our hearts. We stop trying to explain or be understood or put awe to words. And just as soon as we discover the big secret, we forget it, and fall back in to being the bush again. 

Another day. Back again, at this here lake. We came here because you had something you needed to tell me. Because you needed to unburden your tortured self. You tie yourself in knots. I am just here on the picknick blanket, watching you incinerate like a piece of newspaper in your own flame. One second, you’re paper thin. The next, you’re flaking apart. I can still read the words. What are you trying to say? What are you even doing? 

Eventually you get done confessing to me, that after you have opened up all of my insides, you would rather just be friends. Your words and your body speak different languages. All these stupid words while your body churns with longing. I turn my attention to the ducklings. Who crawl over my bare legs with wabbly, wet, webbed feet. Silky lake water drips from them down in-between my thighs. I look toward mom. She looks back at me with dark, unworried eyes. 

“Hmm,” I reply. For what words is that nonsense worth? 
“That boy wouldn’t know a sacred thing if it fell out of the clear blue sky and hit ‘im on the head,” says an auntie who has always been crouching on the ground inside me. A cigarette is burning. 
Who is she? Is she me? 
I light a cigarette.
“What are you doing?”
“Throwing off appearances,” I say. A veil lifts. I become something else. I guess it’s the woman I have always been underneath everything. The woman with nothing to lose.  
“Have you always smoked?” 
“Yes,” I say. Because it’s true. Somewhere inside me, I always have…
“Come to Jesus Hallie. Come home to Jesus,” she says.

Just friends… how absurd… 
How can you insult the water like that?

So we undress, she and I
She-I, under blue moonlight
“What are you doing?” he asks again
“Entertaining myself apparently.” And I wade off into the silver water. 

He does not follow us, the boy we left on the shore. That man and his inner conflict do not follow us.

The water is cool upon my skin. It penetrates through my flesh and contacts my bones. I surrender mine self. We break the surface. And then we become something else altogether. 

Below the water, we glide among the flora. Mossy green and emerald green and chartreuse. Bits of particulate matter float by my face. Why does this feel so familiar? Like coming home. Like a duck to water. My eyes change. I can see in the dark. I bear gills. I can breathe under here. 

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The sex on the shore didn’t actually happen like that. That’s the possibility the runaway train of my heart was already careening towards at the time. This is what really happened:

You push the milking wet bulb of your dick in to me. Into that ambiguous area we haven’t totally agreed to yet. But you won’t look me in the eye. I pretend not to notice that you won’t look at me. That you hardly remember my name. You writhe like a snake underneath me, made ecstatic by something, but you won’t look at me. Am I alone in this room with God? Is this just my God, and not yours too? This is a car crash in slow motion.

Falling in love is humiliating. Especially when you’re the only one. When you are the universe expanding infinitely with no brakes in sight. When you’re young again and hopeless in optimism and don’t understand why the world can’t just be like the garden. When you see only possibility before you. And the need for stopping is senseless. Untethered flights and heights and an unfettered heart. When you are a naked baby. A toddler asking “Why? Why not? Why can’t it be this way?” Boundaries don’t even occur to you. Until they hit you like a 16-wheeler head-on.

Constriction is a guillotine upon the head of awe and wonder. To let you know you were all alone in that room with God afterall. Now all that awe seems childish and dispossessed. Foolish and bereft. Deplorable and stupid. And your unbound driping wet idealism is filled with shame. Flights of fancy and idiocy. The expanding universe is doing the opposite now. Sonic booms in reverse. Everything contracting and swallowing itself. Pain in my abdomen. All five stages of grief rapid cycling. Humiliating denial. Humiliating bargaining. Humiliating nonacceptance and anger towards someone who disavows the existence of the expanding universe altogether. I’m curling up and dying inside. I really was all alone with God this entire time. That really was only my God, I guess.

I leave before sunrise so you won’t regret waking up next to me. I don’t say anything that will prove how fragile this “love” is. I do not challenge you. I do not reveal my inner dialogue. I do not let the auntie speak. Instead, I am obsequious. Sickeningly sweet in my absolutions. All the beauty I stuff back inside me and make small. All this awe putrefies into self-hatred. It was nothing. You were just having fun. “I’m sorry you felt hurt,” you say. I question my own sanity.

The sex was bad. To be honest with myself, it was bad. It was bad because he wasn’t there. I don’t know where he was within himself, but he was elsewhere.

And all these dreams of co-creation... All of this potentiated energy, I have to put back in the bag. Its contents spilled all over. It’s the kind of thing I can’t put back in the bag. But I’m the only one doing damage control. So I pick up trash on the beach with a trash pick. I try and sweep the ocean. Water pours out of my broom. It’s impossible. The spill is everywhere and omniscient.

And then one day, I am reclaimed by the water. By the lake that preceded everything. By the lake to which I always belonged. Maybe this whole thing was just a ploy to get me to remember my power.

In the months after, lying in bed despondent, “I’m sorry we have to do this to you,” the voices say, “but you have to get this lesson…”

For that I will live. In service to the refining of the sculpture of myself that is emerging out of the block of clay, I will get out of bed. For the auntie that has always been at the base of the kiln, fed up with me keeping her down. For the one in the water, I turn mine eyes, and my heart. In sacrifice to you, my deepest self, and something I can’t quite see yet.

I am alone in this deep blue world, with God all around.

A note on this paywall: Because the nature of this publication is so personal, I have chosen to paywall some of the more vulnerable content. I am navigating several other professional identities and this paywall functions like some protection for me. This blog shares at a level of vulnerability you will not find in many other places. Although I value sharing this depth of experience, and want the insights to be accessible to all, I also want to honor the level of personal exposure it puts me in, risking unsolicited commentary on things that are very intimate to me. I will always only put out high-value content that I feel can benefit others.

Also, I am looking for others who might like to participate in collaborative projects or group processes around sexual healing, sexual storytelling, or transformative justice around healing systemic sexual harm. I feel a paywall may create an opt-in for others who are as interested and invested in this subject matter, and weed out those who may misuse or misunderstand this content.

This is a project that I am very committed to and show up for fully. Self-care and boundaries protects the integrity of the work itself and my ability to regularly produce high-quality material. If you are not already a paid subscriber, I hope there are enough free samples here to help you decide if you want to invest more deeply.

In Gratitude,

Hallie

Disclaimer: This piece includes descriptions of sexual assault. Although this story is based on real events, names and details have been changed for privacy.

On a gray November day in Boston, my friend Rose and I cozied up at a table in Caffe Vittoria. We snagged the corner table… the one tucked into the singular bay window, overlooking a busy intersection in the historic North End, which is like Boston’s little Italy. Through the mosaic of stained glass, pedestrians shuffled by bundled up in fur and trench winter coats. We sloughed off ours, letting the precipitation melt off our wet boots onto the floor.

It was a Thursday afternoon. I had come in to town to visit said long-time friend. And we were finding each other at the unique intersection of her childhood neighborhood. This poetic place with immigrant history. I was meeting her in the world that had raised her. That I had felt through her, while we grew up together ourselves like entwining vines in college. In dorm rooms, we were becoming women while still the tender pulp… innocent, ripe fruit. Inevitably, we witnessed one another through the shapings of boy-men, loss, joy, stress, and carefree abandon. And in all of her conveyings, of her family and her home and the things that grew her, here we were at that place. I felt a nearness to her, knowing more of the inner world of this beloved friend. The fourth wall broken of her years of stories of her family… meeting them, being taken in by them, and feeling the essence of Boston, which I had loved in her, without understanding what it was until now. What I am trying to convey is the intimacy of knowing someone through the formative years of young adulthood, which we did. And then discovering an even deeper layer of such a person. And therefore, of appreciating how the events that follow live in our bodies, minds, and hearts.

It was snuggled in under amber lamp light of that vintage café that day, that gradually, something magical started to emerge. Somehow, we got on the topic of sexual assaults we had experienced. Of course, we didn’t frame it like that, for many of them happened when we were 20-something year olds in spontaneous abandon. We were in a developmental age where things weren’t defined… When there weren’t answers, only experiences that we swam through like a kaleidoscope. When there was still mystery, and our experiences murmurated rich and dynamic rather than black and white. The stories started innocuously enough. Probably something about the audacity… the outrageousness. That normalized male entitlement that now that we thought about it, was insane.

The stories started like the time she was at a restaurant in actual Italy: “We were drinking expensive wine and I’ll admit, I got pretty tipsy. So I get up to use the bathroom and I ask our waiter where it is. He tells me to follow him. I must have blacked out, because when I came to, I was in the KITCHEN, and all the cooks were putting their hands all over me and rubbing themselves on me and whipping my ass with dish towels! I freaked out and ran back into the dining room. I was so shaken up that I just kind of slunk back into my seat and avoided eye contact with our waiter the rest of the night.” I instinctively put my hand on my chest. “My sister asked me where I had been. I have no idea how long I was back there.”
“Did you tell your family?”
“No, I didn’t want to ruin dinner.”
“Ruin dinner.” I roll my eyes. “I know that one. Man, Italy is bad. The cat calling there is out of control. I think it’s the machismo thing. Every day it was like, ‘Shakira, show us your cunt!’ walking to class.”

“I remember! know. They’re the worst. I had the judgiest male gynecologist there when I had to go in for emergency UTI treatment. Like, don’t be a gyno if you’re going to be Roman Catholic.”
“Oh my god. Wait. I remember this. Didn’t you pee your pants on the way to the appointment?!?”

“Yes!! The infection escalated because the night before I went out drinking (which is like, the LAST thing you’re supposed to do.) But I got stuck talking to this guy who would NOT SHUT UP! I knew once I had the urge to pee I had about 30 seconds to make it to the bathroom before I would lose control of my bladder. And, I’m drinking pints of beer. So this guy’s not letting me get a word in edgewise. And I estimate with the line to the bathroom, it’s already a lost cause. And then I think to myself, “Well, I’m wearing black pants. If I can manage to let it out real slow, maybe he’ll never know the difference.”
“So THAT’S what you did!?!”
“Haha, yes!!! It just kind of seeped in to my pants. In fact, I was STILL stuck in the same conversation with this guy about an hour later and I figured, ‘well, I’m already wet,’ so just did it again!” We are both in tears of laughter at this point.
“Honey, I think they call that a bladder infection.”
“I think you’re right. Okay, so I neglected it until it became a bladder infection. And you’re right, yes. I was doing the pee pee dance all the way to the doctor’s office the next morning and no I did not make it. And he would not stop giving me shit about how his schedule was full of dozens of American study abroad girls coming in for UTI treatment after spring break.”

That led to my own story, about the gynecologist who told me to not look down,

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Hello beautiful readers of this publication for whom I am so grateful,

I have launched another blog called Decolonizing Hearts. This publication reflects my other main passion: an exploration of how to decolonize our consciousness. This blog will explore different aspects of how to decolonize our bodies, minds, and hearts. Themes include: interspecies communication, nonduality, feminism, anti-racism, transformative justice, ecopsychology, and more.

It will explore how systems of oppression live in us somatically, energetically, and spiritually, and the profound process of shifting our relationship to these dynamics. Decolonizing Hearts is a transmission of liberatory consciousness, in the ways I have discovered it so far.

If you enjoy My Estuary, I invite you to check out Decolonizing Hearts as well! It is very different from this publication. I really appreciate your readership and your interest. I consider you community members and allies in my vision of supporting one another’s awakening.

At some point soon, I may paywall some posts on here. Anyone who is a paid subscriber here will get free access to paywalled articles on the other blog as well.

I just published a video today on Interspecies Communication and Inter-dimensionality. I hope you will check it out and enjoy!

In service to our collective psycho-spiritual awakening,

Hallie

My name is Hallie Swan and I am so grateful you are here. I am a licensed psychotherapist and psychedelic guide specializing in sexual healing. This blog conveys my own journey from sexual trauma to sexual-spiritual awakening through eco-erotica. Some themes you will encounter in this blog include:

feminism, queerness, sacred rage, self-actualization, finding one’s voice, healing from codependence, alchemizing shame, radical embodiment, and shadow work.

May it be an inspiration and activator for your healing as well! Sexual healing is a a big part of decolonization and collective liberation.

(A disclaimer: These writings are rooted in my experience as a cis, femme woman who experienced a lot of sexual objectification. Although I’m not straight, many of these writings are based on heteronormative relationships I have had. As someone who is white and was able-bodied for many years, these writings certainly don’t cover the vast range of intersectional perspectives on the impact of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and capitalism on sexuality. But now you have a sense of the angle these writings are coming from.)

I have many visions for this blog… that it may become an interactive space and a hive for collaboration (Because this topic of healing sexual trauma and moving into sexual liberation is about more than just me!) Sexual trauma is pervasive and systemic. And sexual liberation has systemic implications as well. I have big inspirations for how we can support one another's healing through investing in this conversation together on this forum. We are bound together in karma and we have the potential to be one another’s allies.

This blog is a teaser for a book I’m working on on the same theme: a memoir, with stories in the form of poetic prose woven throughout. I have visions of doing live readings with performance artists doing interpretive dance alongside me. I have visions of commissioning women visual artists to feature their art alongside pieces in the book. If you feel inspired to collaborate on these ideas or otherwise, please message me! If you are interested in counseling services around your own sexual healing or related, please visit my counseling website.

We live in a culture of toxic masculinity and sexual violence that hurts everybody. I am VERY interested in how this affects men in particular in their coming of age and sexual development (because these are the stories I don’t hear.) I don’t say this to center men, but because we need your healing! This is to say that I am very grateful for the male subscribers to this blog taking an interest in one woman’s journey of healing from the impact of toxic masculinity and sexual violence. I’m also grateful you are taking an interest in understanding what feminine liberation actually looks like. Maybe even in being here you are taking some responsibility for your own healing too. There may even be people tuning in here who I had past painful, dysfunctional, toxic, or even traumatic experiences with. And I hope this blog awakens something in you too. Ultimately, I long to heal what is between us women and men, and the many lifetimes of colonial rift between us.

And of course, sexual healing for women is about so much more than just men! It is about ourselves, and disentangling from all of the patriarchal and colonial programming we have embodied that is so insidious we don’t even detect it… until we do!

A note on the name of this blog: An estuary is where an individual river opens up to the sea. This blog is where my individual consciousness opens up to the ocean of our shared consciousness. I have always had a deep connection with water. Water is so feminine… You think it’s gentle but it has the power to whittle grand canyons and take down entire coastlines. It is reflective and rhetorical. Cleansing and purifying. Crystalline, mysterious in its depth, shape-shifting, permeating, universal, etc. May we have deep respect for the surprising and subversive power of water and the feminine.

Why subscribe?

For now, my posts are free of charge. Although I feel so much generosity for this project and would love for it to be indefinitely free, we live in capitalism (meh.) There may come a point when I have to paywall some things for financial reciprocity for the massive labor of love, time, and effort I’m putting in to this. I’ll try to figure out how to create a sliding scale on here to make it accessible to all. Until then, if you want to participate in the spirit of abundance and support for my enthusiastic artistic and healing career, sign up for a paid subscription! I can say that voluntary paid subscriptions from men feels like a form of reparations and feels very nourishing, so thank you.

I promise that quality is of upmost importance to me and I will only publish pieces of high literary and psycho-spiritual value.

This blog is dedicated to my maternal line, and to all the women and queer folks whose stories of sexual violence I hear day in and day out (often when you are investing precious time, effort, and money in my therapy office.) I am so grateful for all of my women friends who I have shared with in pain and humor and rage and beauty around this subject. Our solidarity sustains me. I am so grateful for all the feminine mentors I continue to have who have helped me disentangle from internalized sexual oppression and objectification, and supported my empowerment.

Your inspiration borders on madness. And sometimes I leave you be to let the spirits work themselves out in your auric field. To let the wound-up dreidel unwind itself. The colors of your aura are so vivid. The spirits so thick. And at times, they usurp you… taking you to delusions of grandiosity and heights and notions where you completely lose your ground. You are manic at times, annoying in your incoherent ramblings. But it’s only because you have so much vitality that you can’t even contain it! And it comes spilling out in glorious disasters that must be put to canvas, to film, to dance. Or else, they end in catastrophic, terminal messes. You are an activator for others. That is your role in our collective drama... a vital role, no less. Like a turbine in the universe… whipping up anyone who enters your gravitational field into inconsolable and crazed firestorms and spitting them back out so they land on their butt with their hair all wild thinking, “What the fuck was that!?!?!” Making everyone undone, confused, insecure, inspired, and wide-open. So that they stumble back to their lives with a whole bunch of raw material uncovered they never knew they had. Unwitting jester. Maverick. Trickster. Coyote.

A flamboyant dragon, impossible to ground. Never quite landing. Creative genius, and impossible to live with. Loveable. Indecent. Uncontained. The most unself-conscious person I have ever met. Exasperating. A muse. An ignitor. Perfect to play with… not to home with. Let him be himself. Don’t try to make him in to something he’s not. Don’t put any stock in that. No constancy. No home-base. No safe haven. But a brilliant flying dragon, whimsical and iridescent. Innocent and tragic…all at the same time.

And so, you can’t be my sanctuary. I can’t entrust you with my deep, undefended heart. Instead, you can be the thing that almost kills me… that makes me terribly alive! You can be my activator. You can be the precipice before I topple over into insanity. That is the borderland, la frontera. That is liminality. The place between dreaming and waking when the astral flirts with form. The place that visionaries covet.

I don’t even know what time period you’re from. You shift in and out between generations seamlessly, like the spectrum of linear time folding in upon itself. Sometimes with you we are in Europe’s belle epoch, and in the next moment, you are in depression era trousers and cap asking me, “Mam? …More coffee?” The time traveling makes our playtime quantum. You shift between the alter egos of the spirits that surround you. And I am a witting recipient of the mystery. Your possession activates my own interdimensional madness. And soon, I am channeling, shuffling over to you in a silk robe, a headscarf, and pink furry sandals, talking in a hoarse cigarette accent like it’s any other day.

And being around you, something else mysterious starts to happen. Which is that I unintentionally start singing old western songs, as if my great-granny is tapping on my cranium and wanting to convey the land that she came from: the desert southwest with its mournful lone cowboy love, and a tempo like hooves upon the dusty ground. And then slave spirituals start coming. And then the whole fam-damily of spirit guides become activated, and are elbowing their way to the front for a chance to make their mark upon the material world. And in those moments, I become an interdimensional multitude too.

So thank you, technicolor dragon, for the wild cacophony of aliveness you ignited in me. Being so close to madness is a sacred gift, I don’t take for granted.

We are twins… counterpoints of each other’s sacred masculine and feminine. Sometimes you are small, and I see your feminine peak out from behind shy eye lashes. You watch me transfixed as I apply makeup at my vanity and I see a flicker in your eye and say, “come here…sit down.” Your planet shifts into a slip in the fabric. You come sit on my ottoman and with delight I start painting the lines of your eyes. Our secret pleasure. I pull my silk robe from its hook and drape it around you. Long neon flowers and wings fall against midnight black from your shoulders. You cross your legs, and I feel a protectiveness over this holy moment… Over your vulnerability that is laid out like the innermost pedals of a flower before me.

I take joy in letting you in on this secret usually reserved for the feminine… this secret of the otherworldly peace of applying makeup with diffuse dusk light pouring in through the window. Of seeing your beauty reflected back to you in the three-piece mirror. Of the light itself playing a harp’s chord. Of feeling delicate and divine. Of feeling a feline power, or whatever flavor it is for you now… maiden, queen, fairy, diva…

And as you tentatively at first let me paint you, you are so unassuming and new. So fresh, nubile, virgin, and unexpectant. Vulnerable. Hopeful. And you look at me with a new look in your eye… Will I accept you? Will I answer your covert joy with love? With desire back? And I witness you come out in each consecutive moment. Lifting your lips to my lip gloss. Letting yourself be seen.

I show you your reflection so you can behold yourself. You don’t resist it. Instead, you take it in with long drinking eyes. And your doing so touches something very deep in me. Because you let it contact something very deep in you. It opens the moment more and more. You are reverent. It is not lost on you, the sacredness of this moment. Then only, once you have drunk it in like nectar, do we get very playful. You tease me, tossing your robe sash around dramatically and flamboyantly, gossiping… testing out new hand gestures and ways of speaking. Even being coquettish and coy. And so even as I am showing you the most delicate of sins with the mascara, something has opened in you, and you move from a new place. A new center of gravity. From a place of gratitude. From being seen for something you didn’t even know was there. So that the moment between us is scintillating with a million newborn cilia.

The moment calls for some necessary invocation of our feminine foremothers. So I stroll over to the stereo and finger through Ms. Lennox, Edith Pilaf, Aretha. I press play and a warm powerful sanction spills into the room, “The moment I wake up… “

Unmistakable pleasure suffuses your face and further uplifts the moment. You can’t take your eyes off your reflection… as it should be. Pursing your lips and tilting your head you wonder aloud, “What do you think?”

“Exquisiiite!” I answer enthusiastically in a French accent.
Some paces pass…
“Did you see that man Henry from the party by the way?” You venture, raising your eyebrows at me.
“… And?” I humor you… “What did you think of him?”
“…His hands!! Honey, his hands!!” You gesture, as arm hair and genitals make endearing peeks out from silk robe. “I wonder if he’d think I’m pretty….”

I let you discover the eroticism that is inevitable between femmes… putting on makeup together and sharing clothes… stripping into panties before one another and being seen. Subtle exhibitionism… ever so subtle. Nonviolent voyeurism. Permissions. It’s like an invitation that hangs in the air. Like leaving our sensuality ajar. Almost suggestive. Not aggressively coveting. And not doing anything to make the other close up. We all know the preciousness of what is exposed in the locker room… and there’s an unspoken covenant to protect it. Eroticism mixed with safety. An unspoken cellular pact to protect one another’s bodily integrity. But side-glances of awe. Of thinly veiled desire as you tell her, “No, you don’t look fat,” as you gawk at the beautiful cellulite of her rotund buttocks, or “No, you don’t have a camel toe ” And we are one smile… one drag of a shared cigarette, or one gesture of kindness away from falling in love altogether.

So I pass you a cigarette in its Cruella De Vil holder so you can be one of the girls as I confide through showing:

It is something we bestow upon one another… the gift of that safety, like a blessing. Like a prayer. Like a spirit. Like a sanctuary, soft and gentle. That grace that comingles with naked children running around, maternity, and eros. The impossibly beautiful smells that mix with human odor, and the mysterious ways we apply it to the back of our knees, our hair lines, and our inner thighs so the men won’t know what hit em when they are overcome with bread and honey… by lilac and breastmilk and pheromones and the sea.

I am so eager to gift you that profound inner safety. To show you the beauty we women know is possible in this world… that we make together, amongst one other. Peaceful coexistence and cooperation. Singing together while washing. That peace you must know too, somewhere inside you. That you perhaps even remember, bouncing on your mother’s knee. And I know you long for it. You all long for it. We know so because men come to us in puddles seeking sanctuary from subliminal violence. From the distressed messes of their own making. I want you to see you can make it too. You have it in you too. I want to grant you that liberation.

So I share these treasures with you passively, the way all women learned them. In tender moments such as these and in passing, from aunties and honorary fairy godmothers and elders of the feminine.

“You know what you need?” I say, and wander over to my drawer to fetch my fishnets. I let you discover them in the same way I discovered my mothers in her dresser… in awe and wonder and genuine bewilderment… finding out through dress-up and playing. Through being possessed by an alter-ego. And by doing so in secret during naptime, and shuffling around in oversized heels and pearls and applying way too much lotion that it gooped up in-between my fingers and got in mama’s silks. I discovered such feminine in silence… In the moments God graces us with like this where time stops, and nothing intrudes on the sacred. In that divine suspension from reality. In the moments of necessary solitude and boredom, where in the quiet, my spirit came up out of its body and snooped around… searching to consummate something. It snooped around with a nosey curiosity to discover itself.

And so, I let you discover the fishnets without my intervention. Leaning back on my armoire and pulling from said cigarette, I witness you:

You explore them earnestly, then poke your foot in. A slight amount of insecurity always heightens attraction, because of the sincerity. It makes you intensely present. You move your legs around in the fabric and I know you feel the glorious sensation of silkiness from within. You are jubilant… radiant beneath your skin. And as you rub your legs against one another, you ecstatically make static and revel in the newfound texture… in the now smoothness of your hairy legs. And I wonder whether you will even entrust me with shaving them.

And now your playfulness comes out. You want to bump my booty with yours. You want to feel mine in my own fishnets from your now femme hand. You want to lay next to each other on the bed and risk touching one another, as if we are best friends at a sleepover. You want to squeal and play tag. You want to do my hair… pinning a butterfly barrette in it. You want to see the inside of my jewelry box. “What is this?” you ask endearingly, as you hold up a purple lip pencil. You peruse the eye shadow and move on your seat fluidly, stretching yourself sinuously… taking your time and making a long drawl as you select the color you want, and wonder where on your face I will apply it.

And as I do so, this new energy emerges out of me too. An agency. A confidence. An authority. And it is me that drags my finger along your jaw line and tells you, “How pretty.” And I mean it. It is me that tips your face upward to kiss you.

And as I do so, you are something unlike anything I have ever seen before. Not the you I’m over-familiar with, that my brain has condensed into a known. Now you are something brand new. And I am flooded with the overwhelming power and responsibility it is to be in the masculine: to hold something so vulnerable in my hands. And with my feminine knowing of being penetrated, I intentionally slow down to absorb you. But somehow, I am still penetrated. This time, by the revelation before me. By this technicolor force of nature… a brilliant peacock, a pin up doll perched on my ottoman in all her glory. A magnum opus. So many things course through me at once: awe, a torrent of love, desire for something that scares the shit out of me, insecurity, and the daunting unknown. Now I am the one that is new. And just as I start to get afraid, you grab my butt playfully and wiggle its cheeks forcefully and say, “it’s still me,” smiling electrically and beaming those eyes full of love. Now it is you granting me safety.

A note on this paywall: Because the nature of this publication is so personal, I have chosen to paywall some of the more vulnerable content. I am navigating several other professional identities and this paywall functions like some protection for me. This blog shares at a level of vulnerability you will not find in many other places. I will always only …

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Because you are a preeminent star in my sky, I couldn’t help but love you.

Your planetary body followed its course into my constellation. With it, your love entered… completely autonomous, and despite either of us. Your presence, in a preverbal language said, “I am unconditional love. You didn’t create me. You can’t destroy me. I am here, because it is my time. I am here because God has willed it so. I am here because that’s the movement of the stars. I am here regardless of your plans, or mine. You can’t help it, and neither can I. My planet is still entering your constellation regardless, and so my love is entering, regardless.

Our pre-destiny said: I am bigger than you. This flow of cosmic order requires only that you reorder all conceptions of what love actually is. That you let all that is unreal fall away. That you quiet yourself and surrender to that silent star that is growing inside you… the counterpoint of which is all around you, waiting for you to pick up the phone. Did you know that I don’t necessitate your adherence to exist? I don’t require your belief, or even your understanding. This flow of cosmic forces grants you an opportunity to be changed. Your only job is to let your will follow suit to the Grace that is showing itself to you.

And you said: I’m just as surprised as you. Overcome. Bewildered. Disarmed. Small before the confounding power of what has found me too. I am discovered. I become quiet, as to not disrupt something. But how can I disrupt that which can’t be destroyed? Which is so much more commanding than me? Which I couldn’t break or defile, even if i tried? Which is scintillating in omnipresence, and unmistakably strong? This love of mine, all on its own, is humbling me too.

You don’t have to fight for me to love you. You don’t have to prove yourself to me. I love you, in spite of myself

And as you assumed this love of yours, you said to me: Evidently, I love you no matter what. I am not precarious. Mess up all you want, say the wrong thing… be your best self, or your worst self… It doesn’t matter. I will still be here, loving you, so long as my planet moves through your constellation… however many eons that may be.

I come to in the back of an old abandoned school bus, 
Broken down, with flat tires, in an overgrown field, 
In the midwest, 
in the summertime. 

Everything is still around us. 
The late afternoon is balmy
And the only thing moving, 
Are our lips, against one another’s. 
Waking up in the middle of a dream, 
I am swoony. 

You are youthful in the back of that school bus,
With those familiar brown pleather seats,
With pock-marked yellow foam peeking out from tears. 
You wear your boyhood in the way your legs have fallen open, 
Suggesting an eager pleasure rising beneath those oversized pants. 

And I can’t resist, but to reach down, 
to stroke the flesh dwelling beneath the fabric
Your inner thighs,
And tease your tender wanting.
So unselfconscious, and free, 
I almost feel like I’m stealing something. 
Your delight is uninhibited 
Pure, like magic emanating unfettered from your chest. 

You are ageless in this dream, 
Transcendent,
You flow between the manhood of the contemporary now, 
And some vernal time
Before we technically knew each other, 
when we were souls preeminent to each other’s lives, 
Already comingling and suckling soft genitals. 

 As I pull back I see, your boyish grin,
Shining out from beneath thick black hair, 
Fallen carelessly across your face
Satisfied, eager, enthralled…
Indulgent
So easy to please…
Adoring, and enraptured.
I feel like a thousand fireworks going off before your eyes. 

 Smells of youthhood fill my senses.
New, warm skin, 
New saliva, with a hint of your lunch.
Lovingly clumsy,
And precious. 

 Tectonic plates shift in the dream and you are grown now, 
And your groin is, 
distinctively less innocent. 
It growls and moans and wants more of me. 
You are unhurried,
Savoring the moments before I consummate your hunger, 
Confident in its immanent fulfillment
Confident in your effect on me. 
Now you simply attract, 
Emanating an assured magnetism.
You wait for my sure descent upon your lap, 
And to grab hold of my hips, to grind me against you.

 I go down on you in the back of that bus, 
tucked away in those last seats, hiding.
Your hips undulate and ride my mouth
Guilty pleasures meet in this suspended reality.  
Innocent touches meet shadow, 
young meets grown, 
simple meets savory. 

 Masses of liquid pour out my mouth for you
Drool soaks the fabric around your crotch. 
Pools upon the seats. 
Excitable skin jumps at the mouth
And butt cheeks slip and slide on pleather seats.  

I am the ringmaster of this here dream
And in my lucidity, 
I do things to you, my dream object.
So I smell your chest. 
Like a dog sniffs another
Uncannily, you ask, “Que estás haciendo?”
With a mischievous, knowing smile
Which makes me unsure about whether you are really my object
Or have you incepted my dream?
“Go ahead, you can smell me,” you challenge
You challenge me to be as carnal as my uninhibition would be 
When I thought you were unawake. 

I survey your chest hair, 
Its unique distribution,
and the universe of a land and a peoples it harkens back to. 
There is an intimacy to almost knowing you
My psyche reaches now to know you when you were young, 
The sounds in your house, your mother tongue, 
your mom’s foods that made you,
And the roots from whence you sprung up from the earth.

I smell your genitals
Your now flaccid cock
Its loose skin
The way it lays, unthreateningly and innocent, 
and its dark brown folds. 
I reach to know it from when you were young and getting to know it yourself
Always wanting to touch it and hold it in your sleep, 
And its flapping about as you ran in gym class.

In the quantum dimensionality of the dreamtime,
I search for you when you were as ripe as a puckered fruit too
Before we hurt each other,
Before you were hardened and already distant upon meeting
And the only way to know you was from the outside, 
and by trying to worm my way in like a caterpillar. 

If I had known you when you were still the stalk of your fruit, 
Would we have been benevolent in love?
If I had known you from the inside when you were just pulp and still growing, 
When your sex was green…
pubescent wet dreams in the morning, 
and involuntary erections when I brush your face with a clover… 
If we had innocently been discovering how the world worked together, 
watching cloud formations in long, fecund grass, 
while our sex grew up through us like uncontrollable sprouts in the spring
…might things have been different? 

 Now, in the mystery of the dreamtime, 
You are chrysalis goo…
Shifting between ages and I wonder, 
whether we are time-traveling together, 
and changing history,
Or whether it’s just my imagination. 

Beyond the bus, 
Low light backlights dandelion seed heads
Illuminates auras of spider webs
Gnats dance upon thin air, 
And the fireflies will be out soon. 

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