This Is Not a Romance.

“Down in the valley, first of May

Gathering flowers, both fresh and gay”

More properly, it was actually January and I wouldn’t dare pick a flower in Costa Rica, for fear of it harboring some wildlife, but I digress before I even begin.

I sat down to write about politics, but as it happens, that was a silly attempt to keep from writing the real story, which was more accurately about a relationship.

My political story has walked hand-in-hand with this relationship. So writing about the end result of that relationship is the same thing as writing about the end result of me, everywhere, including politically. And I don’t even know how interesting it is? In some ways, it’s the same old thing: person meets person and they try to love each other.

But this is not a romance.

I can’t emphasize that enough. A romance makes you sigh and inspires you and leaves you feeling sweetly wistful and glowing and hopeful.

I don’t get the guy in the end, and it wasn’t pretty (though sometimes it was beautiful) and it wasn’t always healthy (maybe it never was), and if we’re really keeping it real, it probably wasn’t even a shared story. In other words, I was indeed deep in love, a bonny light horse(wo)man…but maybe alone in those feelings, to go right into the heart of the wounding.

“How little thought of what love

What love could do”

In January of 2024, I wrote in my journal, in Costa Rica, surrounded by colleagues and mentors and friends, that I wanted to live with an open heart, deeply in love, as love. Everything felt possible. For me, sure, but also for the world.

And in February 2024, three things (it’s ALWAYS threes with me) came into my life and kicked the crap out of me and left me reeling in a bad way

“Don’t you break my heart”

I used to relate to that line pleadingly.

It’s December 2024 now. And I sing it with a small smile, the kind of smile that says “I know you will break my heart and that’s just fine.”

So what happened between then and now was…sort of nothing??? Which is why this may not even be interesting. The writer in me wishes I was telling a redemption story, one where I met someone kinder and gentler who thought I was just grand, someone who loved me too, and where the end lesson was something like “Well, just let it all go, and everything will turn out better than you ever even dared to dream! Defy gravity, witches!!!”

Maybe that happens eventually. That would be great, mind you. I’m for it.

But this year wasn’t that story. I didn’t get a romance, and it’s a crying shame (says me).

“Saw a ship sailin’ on the big blue sea

She sailed as deep, as deep as she could be.”

Instead, it was a lot of me being alone and trying to fix myself so that I wouldn’t get my heart broken again.

I had it that I was a mess. At fault. Full of regrets and recriminations. At best, I was a naive fool, and at worst, addicted to pain.

And I was making further messes anytime anyone tried to have a relationship with me, with a heart I was trying to force to open, and failing pretty hard.

And I could sit here and write it all out, but that really WOULD be boring. I’ll just give you the Cliff’s Notes, okay? LOTS of coaching (naturally), therapy, embodiment work, lots of yoga, cord cuttings, sound baths, more crystals than any one human actually needed, ditto oracle cards and tarot decks, meditations, praying, and an ayahuasca retreat. A SILENT ayahuasca retreat, even.

So ultimately what happened was that I tried everything under the sun. And… I failed at that too.

In the sense that I threw everything I had at this love and I could not actually fix it. By which I meant “stop it”. I would know it was fixed when I no longer felt it.

So there I was, sitting there in full awareness that I’d walked through betrayal and deceit and manipulation and abandonment and rejection…every wound planted in me so young getting prodded at and exacerbated and deepened. Surely such a person did not deserve my love, you know? And that was really THE single biggest wound of them all.

I was really really really (repeating like a decimal) tired of loving all of these motherfuckers that simply do. not. deserve. it.

Ah. And there it is.

Okay, god. I see you. Finally finally finally, I see you.

“I put my hand in,

In to the bush,

Finding the sweetest, sweetest rose,

I pricked my finger to the line

And left the sweetest sweetest rose behind.”

My coach Marita reminded me last week that nothing we take on from a context of fixing will ever actually work.

To which I said “oh thank god” and finally meant it.

Tara Ewald, if you are going to live with an open heart, you are going to love a LOT of people that simply “do not deserve it”.

And why are you so sure that you deserve it anyway?

Somehow…through nothing but Grace, pure loving divine Grace, unmerited and unearned…I stumbled into this way of loving that withstood the WORST this man could throw at me and the BEST that I could throw at me too.

“Saw a ship sailing on the big blue sea

She sailed as deep as, as deep as she could be

But not so deep in, in love as I am

I cannot tell whether I,

I sink or swim”

Because the truth, the actual truth, is that we all deserve love. Period. That’s why we’re here. To learn how to create love beyond our circumstances and our wounding. To make love that goes deeper than perception, and merit, and obligation, and reciprocity.

Now mind you, this is not an argument for why you should run back to that relationship, or drop your boundaries, or otherwise recreate a pattern that doesn’t serve you. A relationship and love are two VERY different things sometimes.

But sometimes they aren’t different at all.

And you can see why it pertains to politics. I happen to believe that the ones walking the path of the Boddhisattvas are here right now.

“Thousands and thousands, all on this Earth.”

I have seen it in so many of my loved ones, as they walk into the hearts of their wounds and alchemize them, not only for themselves, but for their lineage, their communities, for humanity.

This is not a romance. It is, however, a love story.

Maybe the biggest love story of them all. Thich Nhat Hanh said “It is possible that the next Buddha will not be a human, but instead will be a loving community.”

Frankly, that never made sense to me until now. There are just so many warriors for love, warriors of the spirit, that I am watching face their worst fears with immense hearts and an implacable stand for what is best and highest in us. They are living problems you wouldn’t wish on anyone: dead mothers, sick children, children that struggle with the will to keep going, partners with mental illnesses that are hard to treat, traumatic loss of livelihood and property, bodies inexplicably ill and requiring intense treatments, minds that are suddenly not functional, betrayals that are nearly impossible to understand…the list is nearly endless and nearly unbearable.

And yet! There is something within these people that is simply unbreakable. And it’s not their hearts: those break, and how, and often.

I think it is their capacity to love. I think it’s their calling…our calling…to write this chapter of the greatest love story that’s ever been.

I am so grateful.