I'm soaking in it

My friend J once gave me a ring that says "follow your bliss." Back then, when she gave it to me, my deepest investigation of bliss was located at a beauty-bar of the same name getting a facial. When I tried to locate bliss as a state of being in my life, it usually landed outside of myself, through the eyes of someone else, a boy or a job. Usually a boy. Are you my bliss? What about you? Maybe you? It became a kind of endless loop that reminds me of the children's book Are You My Mother (a newly hatched bird falls out of the nest its mother has temporarily left, falls to the ground and asks every creature in sight "Are you my mother?" When it becomes convinced that the steam shovel is its mother and climbs aboard, the contraption begins to move, lifts the little bird up and drops it back in its nest where, voila, it's real mother has returned. I find this story comforting on all kinds of levels, but mainly because I think it suggests we all end up exactly where we need to be, when we need to be there.)


Oh, boys. It was so unfair of me to expect them to deliver me my bliss, but there it is and I did. My first investigation into "are you?" was V, he of the guitar and long hair and sexy ways, I see it in my eyes how much I handed over this empty vessel to be filled. I really wanted to suspend myself in the fantasy of complete submersion, but I was a little seasick with the feeling that this SS Bliss was sailing on a mirage. Yet when he slept with my best friend, instead of getting up and off the island, I instigated a three-some. Yeah, that turned out really well. Really? ouch. I had a way of doing that, extending my pain by staying in it as long as possible because. I. May. Be. Wrong. And it will all turn out OK. Rather than letting go, I decided I could handle it because I was different, and dove in deeper. I discovered over and over again that I am not different when it comes to my heart. But I remained terrified of setting sail to gentler waters until I was tumbled by every wave. I'm also really stubborn. I did it again in my marriage when D told me I wasn't really his type. I had suspected that for awhile, but hadn't wanted to look at it. Because we'd always been friends above everything else, I got all European and suggested we still live together but take lovers. Um, no, that did not work. He now lives in LA.

Today, right this minute, I have these crazy moments of absolute body-rattling elation that I know truly to be my experience with bliss. Sometimes, as like tonight, the feeling comes on the edge of me filling with, followed by shedding, a lot of tears, and then an opening and I swim through to a place where I just can't believe how happy I am to be in my skin. No one else's. No one taking me there but myself. Just me. No one else can take me there. They can join me, roll along beside me, no doubt even inspire some bliss to rise to the surface, but the dance is within me and I'm on my feet (or sometimes on my knees) letting it move me where I need to be.