I’m learning as I go.

Robert Johnson’s book We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love explores the story of Tristan and Iseult as a framework for the modern notion of romantic love.  In the story, Tristan and Iseult form a desperate, secret, dramatic, tryst-filled, sexually-charged connection that ultimately destroys the lives of everyone involved – the two lovers, and their two spouses.  There is betrayal and intrigue and promises and grasping.  It makes for great opera and theatre.

Iseult is Tristan’s unattainable ideal, a beautiful queen, a perfect fantasy.  She is a Divine creature in an earthly body.

There is another Iseult in the story: Iseult of the White Hands.  She is also beautiful, and she also loves Tristan, but she is an attainable reality.  She mends dresses and cooks meals and feeds the children.  She is an Earthly woman in an earthly body.  Tristan appreciates her, even marries her, but his addiction to the strum und drang of romantic love leads him away from his earthly love again and again.  His betrayal drives his wife into helpless rage and pain, and she ultimately betrays him with a fatal lie.  All are lost.

There’s a lot for us to grasp in this telling of the story, about how we mistake earthly love with a person for divine connection with the soul, making impossible demands on our other and placing our soul’s needs outside ourselves.  But right now my attention is on the dichotomy of the two Iseults.

I am an Earthly creature with a Divine soul.  I am both, and I must honor both.  I recently spent some time in a relationship where I had wanted to grow my Sacred Feminine and so I focused on being Her in the relationship.  But I found myself increasingly lopsided, my earthly needs unmet – because I did not ensure that they were tended.  I spent too much time in the forest of Queen Iseult and not enough time in the household of Iseult of the White Hands.  And Robert Johnson writes that while the divinity in women inspires the modern man to great romantic heights, it’s the earthly qualities that draw the man into relatedness, into responsibility, into connection and reality.  So I finally drew energy into my White Hands and spoke the whole of my earthly truth, and while it may have come too late for that particular relationship, it is never too late for me to integrate the two and learn how to animate the Everything of Who I Am.  Divine and Earthly.  Inspiring to possibility, and also rooted in reality.  With my soul firmly in my own keeping, which allows me to love wide open.

Making a body of work about reclaiming the Feminine means living and learning, and growing the work as I grow myself.  I’m learning as I go.

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