limerance

What's to be done with an unexpected day off? Make the hike up to the student ghetto, to Winning Coffee, of course. Came here to get organized (writing, plans, email, phone calls). But also, as always, in hope of the gift of a serendipitous human connection. And today's already gifted me with one of my favorite serendipitous humans, indeed. We met at Trinity House 2 years ago, and recognized the kindred in each other right away -- despite our very different life paths, and the fact that she's about 4 decades older than me. But that's only a technicality: speaking in soul-terms, she's one of the youngest people I know.

She appears today on the patio out front, wearing a flowered shirt primly buttoned to her chin, and a wide sun hat whose brim, lined in black and turned up at an asymmetric angle above her face, makes her look just like a pirate. A pirate in a flowered shirt. She carries with her, unexplained, a green tin cup, a purple notebook, and a pair of garden gloves. She brings, as always, the sparking and crackling emotions of her long pain-and-wisdom-journey, worn right on her sleeve for anyone to see. Her clear blue eyes are cloudless, sunbright but looming with unseen storms, just like the desert's skies. Her smile is quick, shy, mischevious, conspiratorial. Her small voice, and her careful mannerisms, make me think of the word "birdlike". And although that word has a sort of negative connotation to me, I use it with her because she is so like a bird. Travelling so light through this world, seeming nearly free of possessions or attachments. Alighting on my mind's windowsill with an unimagined song and a flash of luminous beauty that cannot quite be grasped or understood. Only welcomed, in that moment.

And she speaks like a novel being read aloud. Her phrases come out not only complete, but poetically complete. I always have to fight the urge, when she's around, to get out a piece of paper and surreptitiously record everything she says. One time, instead of "see you later" she told me, "I feel certain that excellent things are in store for both of us!" Who else, in talking about an item as prosaic as the plastic/burlap she was using to re-pot her houseplants, would describe it as "the material that large quantities of root vegetables are shipped in". I had to get out a paper, in fact, just to write that phrase down for the joy of it: large quantities of root vegetables. Made me happy just to hear the words spoken together.

But I got out the paper with the pretext, at least, of asking her to write a new word she was offering: limerance. She says it was coined by Leo Buscaglia (who I've heard of but never read) in his books on love. That it describes a season or phase of relationship in which all the portals are open, all the senses receptive, and all is awash in light and hope. She offered the word after I told her, briefly, that some beautiful things were afoot in my life, including a new (ad)venture of relationship. The word, it seems, acknowledges the openness as well as the perhaps naivete in the beginning stages of coming to know another soul: when we say "Anything is possible now!" we are both flying away on our hopeful ideals and speaking a deep truth, at the same time. But I heard her usual grace and acceptance, as she pointed out that being wide-open and wonder-full and "bathed in light" is, if perhaps a necessarily incomplete and mutable condition, laying a foundation for subsequent soul-seasons, then also a season well worthy of celebrating. And I told her, too, that there were earth and water in this present adventure as well as air and fire - foundation as well as high flying. And she replied, delighted, "So, maybe you're not as limerant as I thought!" I take those words, and the company of this kind friend, as my blessing for the day. Catching me off-guard with her unpredictable presence, and re-affirming me even as she invites me to open more windows onto life...