Well, my dream man didn’t work out even after 7 years of trying really hard to “fix” and “improve” myself.
Now what?
Marvin offered to let me have the house in the divorce. I had to think about that for about 3 seconds. No, thank you. I didn’t like the house. It was his before we married. I didn’t like the city. But what did I want?
I was free to do anything I wanted to do.
I stayed another year in the city to finish my undergraduate degree in psychology. I was 36. It was 1996.
A girlfriend of mine had recently had an astrocartography reading. This is the astrology of location. In other words, apparently certain planetary influences are stronger in some locations than others. I enjoy astrology. I consider it a correlation, not a causation. Kind of the “as above, so below” principle.
I didn’t just want a map. I wanted an interpretation and guidance, so I consulted Topaz Weis of Travelling Temple. She was and is fabulous. I still consult her when I want guidance from the stars. You can reach her at topazweis@gmx.net. Tell her I sent you.
Topaz asked me to make a list of things I did and didn’t want in terms of where I would live. I listed mountains and streams. I said I didn’t think I could deal with oceans and beaches. So, when I called for my reading, she said that she was ruling out her first choice because it was on the west coast. We talked about several places, but none of them felt right to me.
Finally, I said, “What was your first choice?”
“California,” she said.
Well, my heart opened, the clouds parted and the angels sang.
I moved 3 months later. For that 3 months, everywhere I looked was a California license plate and other “signs,” that I took as confirmation. I’ve been here ever since. Topaz was right on. I love it here. There are mountains and streams and people who think outside the box like I do. It is home. When people ask why I moved to California I generally tell them “because God guided me here.”
Of course, since then I have learned that our minds do filter for things we are thinking about. Try it. Pick some random thing like elephants. Then notice how much elephants seem to show up around you – in dress prints, statues, on TV, etc. They were there all along. Now you are noticing them.
I’m not saying that there is no such thing as guidance. There is.
Celestine Prophecy remains one of my favorite books because it illustrates a way of living intuitively that I have found fairly reliable. But for a long time, from about 1986 to 2000, I only had the yes/no and my understanding of synchronicity was, well, not quite accurate.
I’ll come back to that. I have written about it elsewhere, too, I think.
Back to marriage.
So. Here I am in the spiritual mecca of the US, California. Surely, I will discover the truth, figure it out, find a wonderful man to marry and spend my life with. Hmm, not so easy as I imagined it would be.
Just before I moved here, I met a man named Keith. We became lovers. I explained that I was moving, but we got involved anyway. There was no way we were marriage material for each other, but we could really talk. Phone sex would do until I found someone local.
I like to say that Keith midwifed me into California. I had only lived in Tennessee my whole life, mostly within a 50 mile radius. I had never gone through the huge adjustment of moving away from friends and family and everything I’d ever known. Thank God for Keith!
I decided to practice polyamory. Keith was okay with that. I was free to date, free to have sex with others, and so was he, as long as we told each other in advance about any new partner. This prevented surprises and one-night stands. It worked okay for about 6 years.
About 1999, I met Mason at a Ds party. Ds stands for Domination and submission. I’ve blogged about that elsewhere. Look at “Doms, Gurus and Multiple Surrenders,” for example.
Mason and I dated for a year. Nearly every weekend we went to Ds parties and played publicly. After a year, he asked me to move in with him. I will never forget that moment. He was entering the highway in the middle of traffic looking over his left shoulder, and I was in the front passenger seat of his blue Camaro. He said, “So do you think you might like to move in with me?”
Not exactly the most clear invitation I’ve ever received, at least from his body language.
But we were doing an open relationship. I still had Keith. I was playing with others. I wasn’t really committing to anything particularly different except we’d live together and take the 45 minute drive out of the weekends and make it my daytime commute. Okay.
I was working on my master’s in counseling psychology. I had student loans to help. After a while, Mason offered to support me while I finished my degree. He said he was paying his mortgage anyway and I didn’t eat that much. I accepted, left my day job and focused on school and trying to find a way to teach and counsel that worked for me. Marvin had kind of done the same thing for my undergraduate degree, with the exception that I had also had to file worker’s comp when I discovered tendonitis preventing me from typing comfortably all day at my job.
My work in my master’s program focused largely on sexual healing and sexual counseling. I did my training in sexual surrogacy. I took the first of the Quodoshka series and several other tantra type workshops. Since this is a post on marriage, rather than on my professional life, I’ll leave it at that.
I refer to my relationship with Mason this way: he lived on the top floor; I lived on the bottom floor and we met on the ground floor for dinner each day. He wrote computer games. I did my schoolwork and tried to work toward a counseling business. We didn’t have a lot in common there. We disagreed on a lot of fundamental things about how to live. His position was that we should accept each others’ differences. I don’t disagree with that, but I was not finding the like-minded comraderie I was looking for.
The story of our break up tells all.
I was traveling to Nevada for a tantra workshop. Mason decided to do part of the trip with me, but he didn’t want to go to the workshop. He wanted to go to Las Vegas. Let me tell you that I had next to no interest at all in going to Las Vegas… ever. He tempted me with Cirque de Soleil tickets, so I went.
I was having a magical trip, seeing all kinds of synchronicities and confirmations of my life work. Well, I was focused on that, so I would. I went into the Belagio and decided to try blackjack a little bit, just so I could say I gambled once. I decided to bet up to $20 and stop. In the end, I had about $40 and I quit. But that is not the interesting part.
The interesting part was the dealer.
She looked Ethiopian or something to me. I thought she was beautiful. She had a pronounced accent. But her name tag claimed she was from Nevada. I asked her about it. She said, the management would not put her birth place on her tag because they felt it would be controversial. I asked if she was allowed to tell me. She said, “Yes, I am from Jerusalem.”
Wow. Here I was on a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts and I met a woman from Jerusalem!
Mason was off gambling. *sigh*
In my heart, I broke up with him then. I didn’t actually do anything about it until I got home. I moved out, into a cabin on the side of a mountain at 9000 feet determined to figure out how to do a sacred sexual business that would support me and bring healing to people who still suffered.
Mason and I are still friends. We still talk, and email sometimes. I admit I had unprotected sex with my partner at the training. I didn’t think. I didn’t intend to cheat, either. Mason knew I was having sex with him well in advance. But to Mason, that was the end of the relationship. He was right, but for the wrong reasons. Still, there was no big fight, no drama or trauma. We just knew it was over.
What went wrong?
I still didn’t know.
I should tell you now. I am beginning to think this is at least a 5 part blog. There is a lot here.
Blessings, Ann
Ann's Tale 