So much intentionality went into every facet of what we became, from before we ever crossed paths, all the way on. He, the one I had sought for so very long, had also been seeking. ISO. That was the acronym in those days. In search of. There is power in the search. The search defines the path, the search finds the path, the search adheres to the path.
There was something he did, and something I did, to bring us to each other. It was deliberate. I have amused myself from time to time wondering if we could have done it another way. I had thought perhaps I could meet someone if I went to a night school class in wine tasting. One evening I walked by one. The classroom door was open, and the room was full of men and women. There must have been fifty people jammed into that small space. I knew right away that half of them were seeking life partners or at minimum a casual date. The others, who knows. Maybe they just wanted to taste wine in an uninteresting room with dozens of other people, rather than drive a half hour to the wine country.
Early on I discovered my choice in men had regularly gone to Barnes and Noble, thinking he might meet an attractive woman among the books. I myself had patronized another bookstore, in another town, and never even thought of meeting someone there.
What was it about him, this one man out of hundreds or even thousands whose path crossed mine in a meaningful enough way that we connected and resonated like a perfect chord?
Let me go back farther, back to the man who fathered my daughters. When I met him, I was lost in the forest of untethered ideas and emotions that sought expression like fireworks. I told myself that the only way I could meet anyone who would matter at that point in my life was if he showed up at my door. Sure enough, he did that. He knocked on my door, sent by my landlord to cause mischief. Truly. I had pushed my landlord away when he tried to kiss me while screwing in a lightbulb. Yes, exactly that.
When later I set about to find someone who would go farther with me than the door of my flat, and the door of my bedroom, there were just a few little wishes. He must recognize me. How would he do that? He would see my spirit was from the mountains, in my love of tall trees, enormous trees of great girth and immense age. I would recognize him, as he would have burnished his soul with musicianship. He would be painted in laughter and wit. He would love the immense outdoors with passion and bring skill to his love. And so it came to be.
The years when we were young were the beginning. We each started from a place in the world defined by having had children with people we could not continue to live with. Having made those choices, both to braid our lives with people with whom we created both ribbons of unhappiness and progeny, we lived in a continuity of distress. The simple act of choosing someone new and a brand new set of circumstances, with intentionality, lifted us both out of that distress. There were still obligations to those prior life partners to maintain a conversation, because we had children to parent, and those obligations were fraught with the tensions that had undone the marriages. The children that bound us to our earlier choices deserved every affirmative act we could each bring forward. The children were in our future an we were in their future, but not in the way we were each other's future.
Things I thought I knew then I did not know at all. One most important thought was that if we could model a successful, loving relationship then our children would be equipped to do the same as adults. They saw both, the stressed bondage of uneven partnering, where like two pieces of different puzzles the adults do not go through everyday life with an emotional bond, and the loving togetherness of adults who recognize each other and respect and honor each other. Which way did they break, our progeny? Not in any way we could have anticipated.
In the years when we were young, we learned we could not change the world but we could design our corner of it to be whatever we wanted it to be. I moved lighter weight things, plants and rocks, and my man moved boulders. He moved entire sections of the earth and transformed them from the chaos of nature or the flattened rubble of human interference into living dioramas. I have seen this only a few times in my life. The Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco is one such place. An immense indoor garden is designed in a series of rooms. You walk from the cool foggy city into a tropical paradise where lotus flowers are constantly in bloom and ferns as tall as houses line the walkways. Butterflies flit through in colors and designs that call to mind parade floats. Butchart Gardens in British Columbia is another form of paradise, or the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Monet's gardens. There is a theme here, the garden. The secret garden. There are many parks, many glorious gardens. And there are the ones, the gardens not designed mainly according to mathematics and proportion, but to convey an idealistic scene of a land where magic is afoot. This is what we did together, eventually. Sometimes he would take up the wand, sometimes I would. Together we sought the places we could begin with, and transform.
Eventually it seemed we would slow down, and as it turned out, we could not, would not. It was as if we were powered by a fierce wind of change. Now here, being here now, I use google earth to wander the gardens we created, and the gardens those who came after us tore apart. There are thousands upon thousands of photographs I made that form a record of places that are behind someone else's gates, now.
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