Letter to a future lover

Nature looking out through eyes and into each other — including all our relations

I don’t need you to understand me, I need you to understand your relationship with God. Whether that God is called Tao, Allah, Love or Awareness, what is your relationship with Divinity? I used to think that I needed someone to completely understand me — my desires, my passions, my aspirations my complexities and idiosyncrasies — but I don’t feel that’s all I need anymore.

The more I become who I am, the more simple my life becomes and clearer my motivation and dreams are. As I shed the stories I’ve been told and walk through the land of my own shadows, I can see the light more clearly. No matter how big your dream, the graceful way to realize it is to live in the present moment with authenticity — taking the next step in front of you while remaining clear to your intent, principles and core direction. I find this through keeping my relationship with Divinity not only alive, but as my first priority.

As I live my life, I want to share it with someone who is also evolving in their hearts and minds through deepening their own relationship with the Divine. There is a joy in sharing closeness/intimacy, such a privilege of this human life — but I don’t want a relationship that is only about me and you. The only way for me to realize this is to change my relationship with life, with God — asking questions like: how can I serve life and understand it better? how can I really listen to the voice of my heart and follow it? How do I learn to trust the process and surrender my need for control?

I want a relationship that is rooted in the dharma — not in the limited sense of duty to ones family and society, but in the greater sense of ones harmonious participation with the the whole circle of life.

I need you to understand that I’m growing through my attachments and that I experience the tension between the mundane and the transcendent. My little-self emotions and expectations sometimes get the better of me and I can’t live up to my ideal — and that I’m okay with it so long as I can remain honest about it. Also, to know that my ideal may change and that what’s more important is who I am becoming by living according to my inner truth rather than preconceived ideas for myself or my most intimate partnership.

I want you to be accepting of your own messiness so that you can embrace mine, without falling into a complacency that permits us to rationalize our pathologies and enables us to project them onto each other.

I might not want a family, I might change my mind later on. I don’t want us to pretend that the future doesn’t matter — it does, and I want us to talk about it without the fear of commitment, which is at the heart of anything that endures. At the same time I don’t want the shadow of a possible future to distract us from the the gift of the present…recognizing that how we live and relate now sows the seed of what will come to pass.

I need both us to be able to open to the mystery of life… Not as a problem to be solved, but as a unfolding that we’re willing to experience and participate in. This existential relationship echoes and reflects in all other areas of our life — and if we can be wholehearted in this then we’ll be wholehearted everywhere else.

So I don’t need you to understand me, I need you to understand your relationship with the Divine, and a big part of that means getting clear on who you are. Let that take first place in your life and myself a joyous second. I know that when you put God first, you put everything else first too; when you understand your relationship with God, you will understand my relationship with the universe, including you.