They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known. And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own.
Now, I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes, and I can only stand apart and sympathize. For we are always what our situations hand us. It's either sadness or euphoria.
-Billy Joel
"Vanda! I taught myself the best Billy Joel song. Do you want to hear?" I did want to hear my next-door neighbor, a music major at Berkeley. I hunkered down in the bay window of his front room, surrounded by the charm of his old Boston house. Eric glanced at me between arpeggios. He would make the perfect boyfriend, I thought.
"Not a pop song!" he said, over his playing. "It's when he lost his love from 'She's got a way about her' -- it's about the yin and yang of relationships."
Eric and I were the same height, 5'9", so when we made out, every bone in his body bumped into every bone in mine. Absent that, he was a perfectly good guy. But like many of my flirtations, it would go nowhere. I was always finding something about men that didn't work. I couldn't have known then that what my situation handed me, would leave me avoiding sadness my whole life. I was a classic example of what coach Alison Armstrong called 'a frog farmer' -- a woman who never turns frogs into princes, but somehow, unconsciously, evokes more frogs.
The last time I drank the plant medicine, Grandmother Aya showed me where I needed to heal my heart.
'All these personality traits that start out protecting you, will hurt you.'
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Vanda’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.