CHAPTER 30
"So, it’s just us."
"Back to two."
They were uncomfortable with the thought, more, the imagined reality.
But it’s not just two as we were two, each thought but didn’t say. She reaches over and tenderly touches his lips. She is his tongue.
They spent the day in a way Communing folks who have been Coupled for a long – very long - time often did – without much conversation. No, lots of conversation, not just talk. ("Ancient Ones!")
They puttered in the garden. A "something to do" which became more between them once the kids had all gone. For him it had become metaphor, but he didn’t intellectualize it: he preferred being moved by the more animated feeling that he was metaphor for the garden: as he picked up the hose or plunged in a spade or plucked out a weed – "What’s a weed?" sometimes fringed with anger, "A rose’s a weed if you don’t like it!" She never gave quarter. – all these actions, the garden flowing into him, the turned earth that is his soul, the weed, part of himself which he just felt the world did not understand: especially her!
Lilith simply liked the comfort of rest which was reward at day’s end. She cleaned up thoroughly. She has come to accept – no, not accept, to tolerate in the most toxic sense of the word – tolerate his lounging in his swatted yet dusty pants; had gotten him to leave his boots on the porch, but she knew she’d never transform him: "Boys like playing in the dirt": she oft recalled this motherly wisdom.
On this day, which was not distinguished in any way from their so many other days, decades now: almost six together: it is night, they are in bed: both share the familiar feeling that they are newly planted bulbs in the flower bed: this image floats in front of them, is a reflection; each turns as slightly as seedlings do to the shifting sun, this moment, moonlight: smile.
How many years now? This preparation for forever-dreaming? This way of Coupling which slips-inside which the other two: now forever-dreaming: had yet to share? It had been a long cooled question: Why? They simply adjusting to the insight that the four-square was more mystically anchored than any could have, would have guessed when they first were aware of their four-ply knot.
For these two, it, again, just happens. One waking moment, one glance, and the step into consciousness which makes them aware that they are waking as they had never woken before. It was not "Blast!" Rather an inaudible except to the soul breath. The coming to a moment of startle wherein they exist as common breathing: holding their breaths at this moment’s edge, aware that the exhale meant that one was not whom one was ever to be again.
As first such, this had been decades ago. Right now, it is that slight, subtle, supple orientation of all points: body, mind, soul, spirit … just a tilt this way, a tug that way, etc., and they begin to dream together.
"Even this is changing." He was deadly serious.
"How do you mean?" Not that she hadn’t given it some thought, just that it had not been as strong a distraction.
"We’re moving – is that the right word? Are there any right words," he says before she can say what she always says, "Ha. Words are the only keys we have, I’m right there. I’ve always been right there!" wanting to sound more triumphal then he does; but he doesn’t want to bore himself, either.
"Keys. Ladders. Catapults. Trap doors. Sink-holes. Call them what you want – containers, better." She halts; halts herself, wants to go elsewhere.
"No more metaphors? No more similes?"
She cheeks an indulging smile.
He shrugs.
"It’s time we’re born again."
Who said that?
You? Me?
Both?
Are we pregnant?
Betcha!
Two old bodies. They had accepted that small adjective. Knew that its monosyllabic sound betrayed the eonic prophecy it carried.
Old as in Ancient.
Flesh which became an archaeological map. He tracing on her not just memory of their shared awakeness, but of the forgetfulness of all "space and time." She fingering the folds, the wrinkles, the loosenings which even the most advanced rejuvenating potions could not refresh. Intimates: it had been this acceptance of their loosening, their mutual loosening, which was their aging, their maturation, their becoming Ancient: ascending, descending, spiraling: as they aged together it is only they who are: mythos-weaving: she who only knew him, and he, her: being the in and out of one another: intimates.
:intimates – it never became a word, neither beheld with an acclamation, "My intimate!" – but it could have been spoken: for the transit into this fresh Spiraling was characterized by the loss of all names for each other; all endearments of the most intimate kind; there was a mating beyond ego; more than a simple transfer of bodily parts, of habitual insights, of sighs and inexpressible yearnings … "It is the Oneness," spoken by that which was now One. No longer The Embrace. Knowing that Ascension was always as it was never. Yet, in the Oneness pulsing into so many individualities: this the insight, the embrace, the throb of Oneness.
here, intimate as only individuals can be. For intimacy is being, an isness, an eternality: it is never not ascending nor descending.
back then: in the Courting – mashing bodies, so it was thought, so as to generate the Ascended Couple, the Cosmic We, what The Embrace believed was the Revelation of the next Ascension …. astral laughing now, a titter of pleasure, a guffaw of amusement, that they had been "Oh, so close!"
"Ancient One!"
"Ancient One!"
"Imagine!" so enchanted are they that just their words and images flow, spiraling into visions and descending into hardness, rising into time and space: into various but distinct times and spaces: creating: "The tones, the hues." "The softness. The hardness." "The living; the dead." Manifesting their Intimacy: flowing in and out: beyond and beyond beyond: coupling beyond coupling beyond communing beyond embracing beyond living beyond dying … beyond: simply here.
Intimates: A Journey Towards Sacred Sexuality Page 41