soul mates

The Journey of My Soul


I met Susan at the bed and breakfast she runs with her husband while Rob and I were on our recent honeymoon trip to the States. She is hoping to retire to soon to Montana. Her favorite place in the world is the area around Boseman. As I listened to her talking, I wondered what it would be like to be attached to a spot/location as she was. Rob’s spot is a bit less fixed, but he yearns for the mountains and the solitude that lets him recharge his inner reserves. Many of my relatives on my mother’s side seem to have an affinity for Arizona around Mesa. My late husband Will loved the Boy Scout camp in New Mexico where he spent his teenage summers, hiking and camping. My daughter’s favorite spot right now is my parent’s home where she can run in and out freely and play with neighbor children. I haven’t any place where I feel affinity or miss when I am away. My home perhaps but I have lived in many apartments and houses over the course of my life. Wherever I was living was my base, but I didn’t miss the structures terribly when I moved on. I have a fondness for my first real house. The one I bought myself, where eventually Will and I lived for a time, but I don’t long for it. I love our house now, but I could move to another location and be just as happy. My blog friend Tanja wrote a piece about leaving her home in the U.S. for her home country of the Netherlands and how difficult it was seeming, and while I intellectually get what she is talking about, I didn’t feel any great loss for the house or the Des Moines area. A few people there truly matter but house is just wood and cement and probably a whole lot of PVC materials.

 

I wonder if this makes me odd? So many people have places they cannot leave. On Easter Sunday I listened to my sister, aunt and brother-in-law discuss a situation involving a cousin and his wife. His company is pulling up stakes and relocating in Mexico. They offered him a position and practically speaking he can’t really turn it down with only 6 years to full retirement and the economy being what it is. She won’t move. She has lived her whole life in the small Wisconsin area that most of her and my cousin’s family has called home for generations. Even for six years. Even when financial security for their not so far away old age is at stake. She refuses to think about. My brother-in-law saw merit in her choice. Snapped at me for suggesting she should “suck it up” as six years in not much time in the grand scheme. But my brother-in-law is also of the vein of those who cannot leave their roots.

 

I left home at 18 for college and never came back but for visits. I felt the initial homesickness of someone that age, but honestly preferred what I found away from my hometown. When the time came to decide where the relationship Rob and I had was heading, I knew that it was with him and in Canada. Relocating outside the U.S. was disorienting for a bit but ultimately there was never a question of not doing it. And though I feel more at home in Canada than I have anywhere in my life, that is Rob and not the geology.

 

Perhaps I find my place with the people I am most connected to? If so, I have scarcely ever been connected. Will and now Rob. My daughter. My niece Julie who I have seen since a family adopted her at age two and taken far away and out of my life. Which brings me to my journey. I have felt for most of my life that I was in a holding pattern, waiting. And while I waited I was there for someone else. My mother as she struggled with her marriage to an alcoholic. Certain friends along the way where my primary job was to listen. Teaching was certainly about others because as good as I was and as fulfilling that it could be at times, there was always a sense that I had another and more personal calling. My life with Will was about him. Being his happily ever after. Protecting him. Ensuring that he wouldn’t suffer at the end of his life. Katy, I think, was sent to help me – give me purpose and comfort in her own little girl way. She was told me that she chose me to be her mother twice, once before and now.

 

Rob is a reconnection. I feel home in him and a sense of union that seems to have been lacking in my life since before I could name it. What our twining of paths means is yet to be fully discovered and the place that will be most significant in our journey is still to be found. Will that place be THE place? The house I will long for when I am away from it? I don’t know. I think I am a people person, which is ironic given the dearth of people to whom I am close and even interact with beyond the most superficial of levels. Rob and I are the same in that way. We really have no friends. Well, I have a couple but he has no real friends – he tells me this often. In the Journey of Souls, it talks about younger souls needing to be greeted after death by many of the souls they were closest to in their lives – current and past because it helped ease the initial shock. Older and more advanced souls had fewer and eventually no one to great them. Does this carry over into our mortal time? The numbers of fellow travelers is in proportion to where we are on our soul journey? Maybe we lose our sense of location attachment. As we progress we begin to focus mainly on those who are important. People are more important than things be they possession or places.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lost Blog Entries and the Moon at Noon


I had this beautiful piece about Rob written this morning , but for some reason known only to the geeks at Apple Tech, the program “unexpectedly quit” and I hadn’t saved. Let that be a lesson to us all, I suppose. When I told Rob what had happened and that the topic of the day was him, he wondered if I had used the anecdote he told me last evening when we were snuggled up after just getting in bed for the night. He had apparently been 40 minutes late for a site safety meeting he is on the committee to oversee. It’s one of those committees that no one wants to take part in but they do it anyway simply because it’s a good way to rack up brownie points with the powers that be. Anyway, as Rob walked in to the meeting yesterday morning, more than a little late, he observed that nearly everyone in attendance looked as though they were having the mental equivalent of a root canal. Sour and dour and painfully uptight looking. And as he observed the situation and slid into his seat he thought to himself (with not a little bit of Virgo smugness), “Yep, bet none of you got laid this morning.” It’s moments like these – and there are many – that I know my soul is well-mated.

This morning I was so proud of myself for getting the blog entry done early because I wanted to spend the day working on my novel. Yes, I have started the Nonawrimo thing a few days early but I am am justifying this because we are taking a trip to Rob’s mom in the middle of the month and that will be a good five days of getting nothing done as far as writing goes, so I am actually going to end up two days short of the 30 days anyway. In the end all that matters is the novel, and it’s starting to actually take a shape – and not the one I had originally envisioned either.

So, with my best intentions thwarted, I was going to camp at the Starbucks and write for a bit after dropping my little girl at kindergarten. But, it’s lunch hour and the tiny Starbucks resides in the local Safeway where many people visit the store’s deli and then feel free to eat in the Starbucks sitting area. Yeah, I don’t get that either. So, there were no tables, and though I could have taken my chai latte over to the Fort library, I decided to come home and write in the office Rob set up for us a few weeks ago. Yesterday, the cat sat in my lap as I wrote but today she is angry with me for leaving her outdoors while Katy and I went to the gym. As I explained to her when we returned to find her curled up on the welcome mat at the door, this is what happens to little cats who don’t come when they are called (she’s learning but slowly).

On the way into the Fort I noticed the moon was still up. It often is. Not something I ever saw back in Iowa. I still can’t get over the sky here. Rob says it is the same sky but it just looks so different. Perhaps it is the wide openness or the latitude, but the clouds and the moon and the stars even never fail to catch and hold my attention like they were paintings in the Louvre.

What I had wanted to say today was how I love to watch my husband. In the mornings he is so deliberate in his actions as he dresses for the day. He is a powerful looking man and it fascinates me, the way his muscles move under his skin and how the light shades and shadows him. Of course, my first version was far more poetic. Rob wondered if being so often my topic he would lose his Canadian sensibilities. I am not sure that Canadians are anymore sensible than the Iowan’s I lived around all my life, but he is certainly the least affected man I have ever known. Sensible is certainly among his many middle names.

I am sorry I lost that earlier entry but I guess I was supposed to write this piece you are reading instead. Sometimes things work out better than originally planned.

Soul Mates


Kindred Spirits

Image via Wikipedia

A soul mate is a once in a lifetime thing and when this lifetime is through the departing soul crosses to the other side where it waits patiently to be reunited with its mate because it is incomplete without its match. Like a pair of socks.

The patient part alone is more than enough proof that this theory is not true. I can’t remember a time when Will waited patiently for anything. Much as he loved me, he never let me forget that I kept him waiting in the beginning.

Our match was, in some respects, purely an emotional and physical one; we had very little in common in terms of interests in the very beginning, but I knew the moment I  saw him that we would be together at some point. It began as a friendship, and when he decided this was no longer enough, he waited me out an entire summer while I dated other people and got over my fear of the emotional intimacy he represented. It’s impossible to say how we would have held up over time, but had I not met him, I would be never married today.

The topic of soul mates comes up from time to time on the YWBB. One of the first times I put forth an opinion about it in my early posting days, I came down on the negative side. At least this is according to Rob, who is currently cleaning out his collection of favorite posts. He ran across my original reply over the weekend and brought it up when we were on messenger the other night night waiting for my daughter to fall asleep.

I have thought more about the soul mates issue since as I have run across other posts that mention or discuss it. I am still not inclined to believe in it myself. I think that what is meant, when someone refers to their significant other as a soul mate, is more in line with the idea behind kindred spirits. In fact Rob made reference to this term once in our early correspondence. According to the dictionary it means “of similar nature or character”. I do think that sometimes you just connect with some people in a way that defies logic, and that some people are destined to be a part of your life. I don’t think it is a once in a lifetime thing though, and I think that this can apply to non-romantic relationships as well.  For  example, I knew my daughter before she was born, and she has actually told me that she chose me to be her mommy, not once but twice.

Rob and I are kindred spirits. I sensed it a bit in the beginning when I would read his posts. It was a feeling that compelled me to reply to a post of his in the General Forum one night. I offered to be his “evil twin”. I needed to meet him. Learn about him. Know him. I have experienced this before, with Will of course, but also with friends I have made over the years.

I have no great guru-like theory myself about this type of connecting, but I’ve read, or maybe heard, the following one somewhere, and it makes sense to me. This theory is based on the assumption that reincarnation is a fact and that we will live our way through multiple lives on this plane before moving on to the next. It proposes that we go through eternity with a set group of kindred spirits, or soul mates if you prefer, with whom we are always connected. Our relationships change from one lifetime to the next. Husband/wife. Parent/child. Siblings. Friends. There is the inevitable ebb and flow which naturally takes on different dimensions when the vast breadth of time is considered, but the connections are always evident to us.

What’s funny to me is that the people most likely to be spouting the soul mates line are those least likely to be introspective enough about relationships to require likeness of mind in a prospective mate to justify the label in the first place. It is purely a physical thing with them. It is love at first sight with a heavy emphasis on sight. The sharing of ideas and values is less important than the establishment of mutual chemistry. In my opinion that is not what is meant by soul mates, as they explain it, and is certainly not kindred spirits as I know it. A poster on the board wrote something to the effect that she didn’t believe that two people could, or would, reveal their innermost thoughts via email or on the phone. I suppose that is true for some. For me it would be impossible to keep myself to myself and from someone with whom I felt I already knew. I trusted Rob with my first blog entries before we even began to correspond in earnest. My blog was raw and rambling and much of what I wrote could have been easily misinterpreted, but I knew I could trust him and he has more than shown that my trust is well-placed.

When I read about looking for another soul mate, I am puzzled. Kindred spirits seek each other out and with the help of destiny, cross time and space to be reunited. There are 1500 miles and an international border between Rob and I. There was a 10 year age gap between myself and Will. Rob and his late wife, Shelley, were born 2300 miles apart, but in each case it was meant to be; we all found each other. It is not a matter of finding however so much as being found which for the most part means simply being open to the possibility.