Love is in the Present

I have been so lucky in this life to have been in love for my entire adult life. This April it was 27 years with my partner, Stephen. Sitting in the yard just now, I was reflecting on a gathering by the river that we were at when we first got together. We were prancing around naked like a couple of hippies, and making amazing love in our tent at night. That was when I was nineteen. I am 46 now, and yet I can recall this event like it was yesterday. All of our adventures out to the mountain rivers in Washington in the summer, were happy times where we were completely in love. In this way they are timeless. They were in the present then, completely, and pulling on these memories, I can access this past present like it is in the now, today.

Love is a difficult thing for many people. We are lost in our egos, we are lost in our pain, we are slaves to our careers or families, and we fail to find or notice true love when its potential happens. I believe part of the reason Steve and I were capable of finding true love in each other, is that we were completely free individuals with nothing to lose. Steve was 36 and had experienced a partner passing away, and shed most all of his earthly possessions except for his dog, comforter, drum, tarot cards and clothes. When we met, he did not have a car or a house, and was totally free. I myself, had just recently finished my first psychotic break and my life was forever changed. I left my first college and came back home to Seattle to live once again with my parents. My psyche was completely wiped, and I was rediscovering who I was as an individual. I sought out my old haunt, a coffee house on Queen Ann Hill in Seattle, and I was reacquainted with Steve who I had seen and met for the first time when I was seventeen. I longed for anything, and Steve was there. We came together in pure love and had truly nothing to lose. Our love has always been in the present, and we have always sought to live life to its fullest. There have been challenges, yes, but we have always successfully returned to this resource of love that we found in each other.

When I was seventeen, I began to search for my soul mate. I didn’t even realize that when I first laid eyes on Steve that he was it. But he was, and we reconnected right as I was turning nineteen, March of 1998. I needed someone, and he was there. Still, it was a choice that I made to follow my heart and be with a man who did not fit the exact blueprint of who I should be choosing. Love is complicated, if one over thinks it. But that is exactly it, you cannot think your way to love. You have to feel it. You have to put aside your mind completely, and in that empty space, you will find the present. I am not sure you can fall in love if you are not willing to embrace the present. If you are lost in your pain in the past, if you are focused on what you want for your life in the future, you may never actually experience the present. If you are locked in these realities, you cannot search for love, and you will not find it. Life is incredibly short and precious. It is not a twenty year career, building a financial retirement, owning land or property, or a five to ten year career in college. All of these are good things. But if you are honest with yourself, do you really want to pass a whole lifetime without a person at your side who will accept you at your best and your worst? We cannot think our way into our best partnership. At least that was true for me. Love is free. Love is good. And love is in the here or now. It is not tomorrow. It is not yesterday. Because I am and was so in love, I am able to reflect fondly on all we have experienced in the moment while being together, and I can fully embrace the present that we have now, while knowing that I have no certainty what tomorrow will bring, outside of our eventual passing from this world. I have been lucky, and I have been blessed. I have absolutely no regrets for any moment over the years, that Steve and I have shared together. I will always have that, in the present, in the here and now, no matter what life brings.