“Love is a journey of the soul.”

Gender Duality

When we were young, masculinity and femininity were not in our awareness.  We distinguished a man from a woman, yet we did not place much credence upon the stereotypes we would levee with our selective gender personification.  Whether it is our education, environment, heredity, personality, religion or society, young boys were required to repress their feminine, while young girls were obliged to suppress their masculine.  This broadened the gender schism, conditioning us to avoid, disregard and escape our biological inverses. We became unbalanced human beings, cast into a duality of social relativity.

A Mother for All

A boy’s first love is his mother, and a girl’s her father.  My mom has always been outgoing, outlandish and outspoken, aging as gracefully as the finest wine.  Growing up with her was rarely a dull moment, as she would sing, play the piano, take us on adventures and encourage us to be who my brother and I would become.  She was the center of our world, shifting us through grief when divorce shattered the heart of our family.  She was our hero, bearing the gravity of our upbringing when our lives were falling apart.  When I trace the roots of my charity, creativity, emotionality and humanity, they were all inspired by my mother. 

First Kiss

When I was seven years old, I lived in Marysville, Michigan.  Every day I would walk four blocks back and forth to elementary school.  My mom was friends with a woman who lived on our street, and I would tag along with her on visits to play with the neighbor’s daughter.  One day, we were playacting like we were being married, reciting our vows, holding hands and kissing when the auspicious moment came.  At first, I engaged with curiosity and innocence, not entirely aware of what was happening.  Eventually, we would speed through our vows just to hold hands and kiss.  To this day, these are still essential intimacies for me.

Middle School Steady

A few years after my parents divorced, we moved to Leelanau County.  After a year there, I moved back to Marysville with my father.  As he was the Principal of the Middle School I attended, it caused social alienation and awkwardness in my teenage life.  This is when I began to notice the opposite sex.  During eighth grade, I went steady with a girl in my class, not even knowing what that meant.  I recall going to dances, talking on the phone, writing notes, holding hands and stealing kisses with her in the school hallways.  However, our young fling was as fleeting as a dream, given I would move back to Leelanau County for High School.     

“Onliness empowers relativity.”

High School Badlands

All though High School, I never had a girlfriend.  I did have hormones racing through me as a teenager, yet I was not drawn to anyone in particular.  There were a handful of girls in our class of 22, and half of them were spoken for, so I dove into friendship, music and nature, as we lived in one of the most beautiful places in Michigan.  During this time, there were brief relationships here and there, yet nothing that yielded fond memories.  This would empower my path toward introspection, transformation and understanding, preparing me for the extraordinary relationship I was to experience over the last 24 years.

Passing Ships

At an age when most were gravitating toward college, career, marriage and kids, I was more invested in celebration, friends, music and nature.  After a few brief encounters in my early twenties, I spent a year and a half during the prime of my musical experience in my first real relationship with a kind woman.  However, I was still too immature, intoxicated and insubordinate for it to last.  I ended the relationship, mainly for her benefit.  A year later, I shifted and transformed my life, beginning my journey of discovery, exploration and evolution.  Over the next ten years, I would have relationships, yet none endured longer than a few months.

Intimating the Muse

From my mid-to-late twenties, I spent a lot of time experimenting with spirituality, writing music, poems and short stories and being in nature.  My days were spent in solitary, intimating with myself, or who I thought I was at the time.  Years later, I realized I had been deprogramming from egocentricity, heredity, indoctrination and society, while building a foundation of being with my soul.  As I endeavored to relate with who I was, this experience empowered me to embody who I would become. Once I began discovering and expressing my truth, music was the muse that inspired me to create relativity with community.

Ceremonial Relativity

My spiritual journey began with the Fourth Way School in my mid-twenties, to my Celtic heritage and then Kabbalah when I turned thirty.  My sister invited me to a Pipe Ceremony around this time, and I fully shifted into the Lakota Tradition, marking my exodus from spirituality.  In Ceremony, I learned to listen, live and relate with beings beyond this world.  Soul relativity is omni dimensional; first universal, then intuitive, emotional, intellectual and finally physical.  During the last 24 years of walking this path, kinship evolved with myself and community, and established my ceremonial relativity in prayer. 

The True of all Trues

Around the time I began participating in Ceremony, I was taking courses on personal transformation.  One day I was walking down the hallway at the Center and came upon a beautiful woman speaking with her friends.  She had an aura of enchantment that expressed her inner radiance.  I was drawn to her with excitement, though she was taken aback by my exuberance.  Neither of us had known we had both signed up for the same course that was to begin in a week.  I showed up for the first class, and having been aware of the seating position-sharing partner format in all the courses, I quickly sat down next to her.  The rest is destiny.

From the Heart

For the last 24 years, my wife and I have had a universal relationship, sharing common ideologies, philosophies, revelations, transformations, visions, understandings and roles in Ceremonial Community.  We have learned together to be balanced, unique human beings who empower ourselves and each other to share in the fulfillment of our relativity.  Whether it is the elation when we are together, or the anticipation when we are apart, feeling is becoming.  When I reflect on the encounters I have had, each was an opportunity to evolve into the person I am, and empower and experience soul relativity.    

“Living from the heart is loving with the soul.”