Life is giving you a teaching.  Hang on its every word.  Every story that finally puts the pieces together, showing everything in retrospect, reveals the natural perfection inherent in each moment.  You need them.  You need them until you trust that the pieces will always come together eventually, until you have seen this happen so many times that you can see the perfection right now without a story.  Then, drop the stories and know that absolutely everything and everyone is perfect just as they are.  Not sappy perfect.  Not almost perfect, or excusably imperfect.  Not on their way to becoming perfect.  Perfect in the sense that even the mistakes are exactly what the moment calls for.  Your alleged failings are your gifts to the world.  And the losses and injuries you experience are the world’s gifts to you.

Last night I dreamed that I was looking out across the frozen lake near my house.  I saw an enormous full moon sitting on the horizon, bright white and ten times its normal size.  Allured, I went outside to watch it rise.  Initially, the moon was covered in doodles.  I had seen them before, scribbled on a paper tablecloth during dinner when I last saw my “crazy wisdom” beloved, before he told me about his new partner.

I put distance between us finally, because I had always been so empathically privy to his involvements.  Over the years, witnessing them and incessantly hearing about them evoked intense pain and drove me out of my mind.  Equally intense was his guilt, his conflict with his own nature, and his battle against factors that seemed to fate him to a life of infidelity.  How dearly I wanted him to lose his guilt and accept himself!  Determined to avoid causing harm while remaining true to himself, he was excruciatingly honest, compelled to share his experiences with everyone to whom he was bonded.  To come clean, I suppose.  I was far from excluded, a fact I found intoxicating.

He would not break a bond without a really good reason.  “I don’t want to lose any connection,” he once told me.  Complementary to his determination to cut no one off, maintain every bond, and exclude no one was my absolute primal terror at the prospect of being cut off, losing close bonds, and being excluded.  A match made in heaven!  I mean that sarcastically but there is some truth to it.

I thought one of the worst torments I could suffer was to be excluded from a lover’s passion, which felt something like watching the divine essence slip away, turning cold and dark, and leaving me in a universe bereft of presence.  After my dream, I realize that all the torment I experienced during the past year or so occurred when I was not excluded.

At the same time I am realizing the peace of exclusion, my former beloved is discovering, I hope, that while guilt or selfishness may motivate people to hide their passionate encounters, hiding can also be an act of love.  Ironically, he was quite privy to the encounters of his own former love in the apartment above him for months.  The scene was comically horrifying and blatantly karmic.  Lesson: Sometimes, we need to adjust the “privacy settings” on our love life not because we are doing anything wrong, but because those who still yearn for our intimacy cannot bear to overhear it.

Whatever you do, I always said, do it with love.  Fail with love.  Sin with love.  That is wholeheartedness.  Think about it.  If you found your ultimate soulmate, what would you do?  How would you love them?  What would you give them?  Your body?  What about profound healing?  Liberation from suffering?  What if their suffering stemmed from a fear of exclusion, and you could show them they had nothing to fear?  What if their suffering stemmed from guilt and inner conflict, and you could help heal it?  What would you do to make that happen?  What would you give up?

Love like that.  Don’t love like a boyfriend or a girlfriend.  Love like a bodhisattva surrendering to the golden threads of causality that lead us, at times circuitously, to release and luminosity.  Or you could just offer your little ole self for twenty, maybe thirty years.  (Well, I’m ready to have my cake and eat it too.)

The girl upstairs finally moved out, to his relief.  And, at the same time, he is finally moving out of my field of vision, to my relief.

In my dream, the moon rose in an arc, ventured far into the distance, and settled behind a curtain of trees on a hill, hidden from sight.  A giant, glowing sphere, something akin to a nuclear snowball, rose from the earth and rejoined the moon.  What was it?  His core of light?

There are times when I can feel his light leaving me, pieces of me I thought were me.  I had forgotten they only arrived when I met him.  Now the space inside me feels dimmer, but it is easier to find my own light, now that I know what such light tastes like.  Actually, we all share the same core.  The trick is to realize it, to know that when we walk away, it is still there.  The light of everyone is inside you; you are never alone.

After the core of light joined the moon, a glowing red orb rose from the earth.  At the center of the orb was a plus sign, another tablecloth doodle.  A sun cross.  One or two more glowing red lights rose up and joined the moon.  This is the second time I dreamed of an enormous moon with two or three satellites.  A time frame?  Two to three months?  Okay, now I am just having fun with it.  It really does not matter.

Though it was occluded, I knew the moon was still there.  I did not feel a sense of loss.  I just watched the light show and knew that eventually I would see the moon again.  The night air was warm despite the snowy landscape.  I twirled under the stars and inhaled the fresh breeze.  I felt very peaceful and happy.

Being excluded is not so bad.  Being cut off only happens on the surface.  There are bonds between us that could never be broken, something else I learned because of him.  My most tormenting personal demon, one that has chased after me for as long as I can remember, is shrinking before my eyes.

Good night moon.  See you in the morning.