The Age of Miracles (10 page)

For a woman to feel free to be strong and wild and creatively rambunctious, she can’t afford to be with a partner who in any way stifles her, invalidates her, or punishes her for being who she is. That being said, a woman is blessed by the presence of someone who can say, in a way that doesn’t withhold his affection or undermine her confidence, “Are you sure you want to go that far?”

For many women, our deepest craving is for a place to relax. We’re like the water in a swimming pool. Of course we appreciate the concrete; all we have to do is just be the water. A woman’s state of being, not doing, is what magnetizes love. And nothing is a more powerful state of being than a deep acceptance of what
is.
Too often we inquire about a situation, “How can I change this?” when we should be asking, “How can I dwell within this circumstance in the highest possible way?”

If you’re single and would like a partner, you’ll only attract one when you’ve mastered the lessons of singleness. Don’t ask how you can “get” a man. Ask how you can be the coolest woman in the world—and when that happens, you’ll enjoy the experience so much it won’t even matter whether men notice you or not. Which means, of course, that they will.

I did a lot of research for you so that I could report back on that.

One of the most insidiously self-sabotaging questions is, “Why can’t I meet the right man [or woman]?” It implies that there is someone out there, maybe in Mongolia or someplace, and if only you knew where he or she was, then you could pop over on the next flight.

But since metaphysically nothing is outside of us—everything we experience is a reflection of what’s going on in our head—there’s no point in flying to Mongolia if we’re not already the perfect fit for our ideal partner. And once we
are
ready, we needn’t go anywhere because he or she will simply appear.

Whenever people have stood up in my lectures—and it has been often—to say their heartbreak is that they haven’t yet found a mate, I usually find myself saying, “Tell me the truth; I know you know it. What do you do that keeps love at bay?”

Often the room gasps, as though I’ve said something confrontational. And perhaps I have: I’ve asked a person to confront him- or herself. I’ve suggested that they take full responsibility for their own experience. And more often than not, after a pause, I’m met with an honest and illuminating answer:

“I act needy.”

“I attract men, but then I start acting like a man myself, so they leave. I’m not very feminine.”

“I get jealous.”

“I get angry.”

“I’m controlling.”

“I’m so desperate to have kids and men can feel it.”

To which I usually respond with something like, “Ah. Well, then isn’t it wonderful that your great love isn’t here yet? You can handle this now, so you don’t ruin another good opportunity!”

In other words, it’s not only explainable why these men and women are single—it’s
good
that they are! This is their time to get ready. Time to do all the work, internally and externally, that goes along with preparing yourself as the gift you really are—not as an assorted set of fragmented emotions, unhealed neuroses, and broken dreams from an unforgiven past.

The most important thing to work on, always, is the nature of our thoughts. Whenever we believe that a situation is lacking, we create more lack. Why? Because lack is our core belief.
Believing
you lack, you
attract
more lack.
I lack love in my life
is not a thought that invites a partner.
What I’ve got is hot
goes further.

And one thing we should never do is believe statistics. Years ago it was speculated in a major news magazine that a woman over a certain age had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than finding love at midlife. But guess what? That magazine ended up taking back its pronouncement! We
do
have a chance!
Oh, thank you!
So we learned something important from that little turnaround: We need to watch what we read. Be aware of any junk you let into your consciousness. And don’t expect the voices of the world to know one damn thing about what’s happening in your universe.

A girlfriend of mine once remarked, “I hate being single because when I walk into a party alone, I feel like everyone thinks I’m pathetic and is feeling sorry for me.” I told her that this was just her thought and nothing else. “For all you know,” I said, “they assume you’re meeting George Clooney after the party.” Midlife is the time to stop giving one moment’s thought to other people’s opinions anyway. Let them think whatever they want to think. It’s
your
thoughts that create your experience.

Love is attracted to the master at love. It does not ask, “What’s your age?” Nor does it ask, “How long did it take you to learn all this?” It only asks whether you’re ready. And when you are, then it will come.

It can take a lot of years before you arrive at love’s door with little or no baggage. There might have been struggles galore making all the shifts, from neediness to self-confidence, controlling to surrendered, anxious to lighthearted, demanding to grateful, overreactive to nonreactive, critical to supportive, blaming to forgiving … not to mention flannel to lace. But once you arrive, you
really
arrive.

Someone once said to me, “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted.” I turned my face and uttered to myself, “Honey, if ya only knew … !”

O
NCE YOU’VE LOVED, YOU DO STAND A CHANCE
of having encountered the demons that surround it: someone’s fear, someone’s lies, someone’s betrayal. But you have two choices after you’ve encountered them. You can go forward in timidity and fear, with an energy that reads, “I’m afraid of the demons. I come with
lots
of baggage.” Or you can go forward with the fabulous energy that only the experience of love in all its vicissitudes can give, an energy that reads, “I have seen the demons, but I stared them down.”

No great man gets excited about some bitter woman he met last night. But he might get excited when he meets a woman whose eyes and smile have a knowing look, one that says she knows what men are all about and
still
thinks they’re the best game in town.

You see men differently at midlife than you did when you were younger. They seemed so powerful in the years when you still felt weak. But once you’ve found your own strength, and therefore see yourself more clearly, you see men in a whole new way as well. Their strength, their gorgeousness, their damage, their needs, their souls, their bodies, all make more sense to you now. Yet you’re not attached. In the shining place of pure understanding, you know a man can neither complete you nor hurt you. It’s when need has been burned out of you that desire begins to burn its brightest.

Among other things, experience teaches you how to make better choices. If unworthy opportunities are offered you, you’ll know to give them a pass. Your hard-earned wisdom makes you more likely to say “no” to untrustworthy offers, and a wise but openhearted
“yes” to good ones. No book or school could have taught you that.

Sometimes it’s the pain of love that transforms you into someone who has the courage to take it on. You come to thank God for the lessons you learned, no matter how they came to you or what they felt like at the time. So
what
if you’re not young anymore; you have so much more skill now, and so much less fear.Now you’re ready for love. Bring it on.

I
N THE
M
IDNIGHT
H
OUR

I
remember the moment the doctor told me. I was standing in my kitchen, not having bothered to emotionally prepare myself for the call. I’d had light menstrual periods for years, and I realized the chances were good that, although I was still quite young, the end might have already come.

And it had. The doctor had gotten back my numbers. He put it bluntly: “You’re done.”

The room spun around me; I felt too weak to stand. I sat down slowly and the tears began. After all the years you work so hard to keep from getting pregnant, you suddenly find that you couldn’t get pregnant anymore if you tried. In that moment you regret every goddamned act of birth control you’d ever engaged in your entire life.

I remember a poster that was popular years ago, with a cartoon character of a woman exclaiming, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to have children!” Many of us took so long to grow up that a lot of us were nearing middle age before we realized we even wanted kids!

One day I attended a luncheon where I was sitting next to a man about my age, who was delightedly telling stories about his teenaged stepdaughters. He commented that he had never had children of his own and felt so blessed to be a stepparent now.

Sensing his joy and absolute wonder at what the girls had brought into his life, I looked at him for a moment and simply said,
“We were so damned stupid.” He looked back at me, clearly understanding what I meant, and nodded slowly.

That says it:
We were so damned stupid
.

Someone once asked me what greatness I thought my daughter was destined to achieve, and I responded, “First of all, I think she’ll have a big, happy family.” They thought I was joking. I was not.

It doesn’t matter whether you want children or not. Still, from a psychological perspective, it matters when the day comes and you know you couldn’t have them even if you wanted to. For men, obviously, things are different and they can go on and on. Nature
knows
how long it takes
them
to grow up! (I’m joking here.) But for the other half of the human race, something miraculous occurs to your body every month, and then it’s gone. It is simply gone.

I’ve watched with awe as the baton of voluptuousness has been passed to my 17-year-old daughter. Of course I don’t want to mimic a 17-year-old’s attractiveness, but I do want to hold on to my own as best I can. There’s a certain psychoerotic quality—I always feel it in France—a feeling that any night could be a magic night, and you want to be ready for it if this one is.

I remember the hormones of youth. I remember when every cell of my body screamed, “Get a man! Get
any
man!” Later they were just as apt to say, “Whatever. I don’t care.” My body isn’t a slave to itself the way it used to be, but my soul has taken things to a whole new place.

It’s natural that there are years when the thought of sex is pretty much everyone’s preoccupation; the species can’t propagate unless young people move the process forward. But sometimes it’s when the urge for sex becomes a little less urgent that the urge for love becomes even more pure. The urge for connection itself is ageless; what changes is our understanding of what connection
means.
Sometimes people know a lot about sex but not much at all about love.

In the realm of the body, something starts to cool off as we age. But in the realm of the spirit, things are just heating up. Mature women are pursued not just for their bodies but for their
knowing.
A man recognizes, however unconsciously, that a woman’s love is an initiation into his own manhood. On a physical level, that initiation can mean something as crude as a ride in the backseat of a car. But on a spiritual level, it’s the result of an internal connection that sex itself cannot guarantee. For this, a man needs more than a woman. He needs a priestess.

Every woman has an inner priestess, but she often takes a few decades to emerge. A priestess is fierce—particularly in bed. Once she arrives, she is looking for men and not boys.

It’s not enough, at a certain point, for a man to just know how to handle a woman’s body. He has to learn how to handle a woman’s
being,
and often it’s a priestess who teaches him. One of the greatest gifts a mature woman gives a man is that what makes his younger girlfriends swoon, “Give it to me! I’ll do anything!” makes the older woman go, “Yeah, so what else have you got?” For her, he’s going to have to work a whole lot harder. And that pun is intended.

If what you’re up to is producing babies, then obviously the younger woman has the goods. With a younger woman, a man can conceive a child. But with a priestess, he is often more likely to conceive the man he wants to be. Physically, a man spreads his seed; spiritually, a woman spreads hers. Ultimately, we impregnate each other and then we are both reborn. When a man has spent magic time with a woman mature enough and wise enough to have entered her priestess years, he’s the one who’s likely to call later and say, “Honey, I think I’m pregnant.” The new breed of hot new mama has miraculous powers, calling forth a new breed of man.

O
NE DAY MY DAUGHTER CAME HOME AND TOLD ME
I
JUST HAD
to hear this great new song. It was a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay.” I explained to her that in my day, we listened to the
real
“Lay, Lady, Lay.” And in my case, as I’m sure is true for thousands of others as well, we did a whole lot more than just listen. I’ve asked myself often in the last few years, “What did my mother think we were
doing
on those afternoons?”

I read a quote once that no matter how old we are, the music we most relate to is the music of our youth. In my case, that’s definitely true. And the songs I remember most are the songs I fell in love to. From Joan Armatrading to Jefferson Airplane to Van Morrison, there are phrases of songs that remind me of things, beautiful things, that were some of the sweetest moments of my life.

And why were they so sweet? Because, along with the birth of my daughter, they took me to a place where there was no separation between myself and someone else. And that was real. The love affairs we had in our youth were not unreal, so much as the personality structures we went on to develop afterward were not containers for that much reality. Some of what we call “mature” in our society is spiritually regressive.

I’ve officiated at scores of marriages, perhaps even more. I believe in the institution. But far too often, it’s devastatingly obvious that a vortex that can be the greatest liberator is turned by the ego into the bleakest prison, not only for the body but for the soul. The words
husband
and
wife
should not be synonymous with
roommate.
Love should not be mundane. It should not be banal. When it becomes that, it loses its magic. While the comforts of shared coffee cups, someone to sort through the bills with, conversations about the children, and admissions of fear to one who has become your best friend are all a part of what make long-term nesting wonderful, emotionally it is to our peril when we allow considerations of the world to form a veil across the face of love.

I was sitting next to a man on an airplane once, who told me that he and his wife were excited about a new business venture. For the first time in their marriage, they were going to be working together. They had refurbished a carriage house in back of their home and had turned it into an office. All of this seemed to them like a fabulous setup for a great next phase in both their careers and their relationship.

As he told me of their plans, I think he saw me choke on my red wine.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I responded, aware that I didn’t even know this man, and had no business giving him unsolicited advice. But he persisted. He asked. And once you do that with me, expect opinions.

“Well, what I’ve learned,” I told him, “is that when a woman is working, she’s in a masculine mode. But that same mode that works so well at work needs to transition to a feminine mode if she wants to be as successful at love as she is at work.” Again, I’ve researched this.

“Go on … ,” he said.

“So it probably seems great to you now, that you and your wife will be able to just walk the little path from your office to your kitchen and keep the same conversation going while you’re preparing dinner that you were having at the office.”

“Is that bad?” he asked.

“No, it’s not bad,” I said, “except possibly for your marriage. You’ve taken the psychic gestalt of a business partnership and literally given it the run of your house. And in time, that will include your bedroom.”

“Whoa,” he said. Men get very alert when the subject turns to sex. “So I shouldn’t work with my wife?”

“I didn’t say that!” I responded. “But I do know this: If this kind of thinking makes sense to you—if you feel that you and your wife want to protect the erotic quality of your marriage from encroachment by a business mentality—then I would suggest you take 30 minutes apart from each other between office hours and evening hours. She needs at least that much time to switch psychically into another mode. Meditation, walking, soft music, candles, bubble baths, whatever her soul craves as a balm to her nervous system—such time should be ritualistically built into your lifestyle, or you’re going to start finding that a businesswoman has shown up in your bed where an erotic goddess used to be.”

Weeks later I received a thank-you note from him. And after that, one from his wife… .
*

Romantic love is a force of nature. Like an ancient goddess, it likes to receive gifts. It must be honored, respected, protected, and cherished. Otherwise, it simply leaves.

Dear God,

Please make me

a master at love.

Reveal to me its mysteries,

and give to me its magic.

And may I never use its power

for any purposes

but the ones You intend.

Amen

___________________________________________