Anima Reflections in a Warm Pool
After I turned 30 I wanted to have a partner going my way
Mary, one of the women in my first massage school, in an Ashram, would go to elaborate lengths to hide the fact that she was smoking cigarettes. She knew I was the same way, smoking but going to great lengths to hold it down. I would climb a tree at the end of the block and put the cigarettes up there, so that if I wanted one badly enough at three in the morning, I paid the price. Everybody I knew from that group was beautiful, in the sense of being heart centered. I was with a woman I met in journalism school, who went to work for the IRS, which was a good job but I wanted a partner who liked to research and edit and travel. I had broken the cardinal rule:
Know where you want to go before choosing someone to go with you.
The hardest thing I ever did was leave a woman who was self-sacrificing. How can you leave somebody like that? Later on I came across a quote of interest: Self sacrifice enables one to sacrifice others without blinking. I had not been able to put it into words but learned it by experience. When I moved into bodywork I wanted a partner in my field to go with me as a collaborator. I got passionately attracted to a woman I laughed at when she said she I would fall in love with her. I told her I had a list of women and she was the last name on the list. She said, in her crisp Northern Italian accent, “I will turn your list upside down.” And she did. We were dreaming the same dream together sometimes. We were attuned. I’d never had that before.
She was a high testosterone woman, and at the same time she was delicately beautiful. I had no idea that she was beautiful until she came naked, bathed in moonlight, into the warm pool at Harbin Hot Springs, and I saw her without the white Reeboks, red t-shirt and blue jeans we both wore because we had the same style from when we met. Her body was perfect, as I should have expected of somebody whose sport was long distance ocean swimming. For the first time I had a lover who was an athletic partner. We took taekwondo together and sparred if we were bored and wanted exercise. Her legs were always hot to the touch. She was Aida, and I was Radames, with a similar fate in store.
