Falling Trees, Broken Hearts, Misconceptions and Moving On

A while back I had met a man whom I soon came to think of as my possible Twin Soul. It was out of this world how similar we were and yet how we satisfied both spectrums of the energetic pole. It was truly as if we were two halves joining back together. And please don't think that we're "halves" walking around, or that we're incomplete without another person. Not at all.

And yet in spite of our agreement that our relationship was one out of a billion, he chose someone else. Our light scared him so much that he didn't come through for us. It has taken me weeks now to "recover" and trying to wrap my head around what really happened, how anyone can possibly let such a whole relationship go and settle for mediocrity.

I went to the library for answers. I went there looking for something, but I didn't know what. I just knew I would get answers there. I came across an audio tape presentation from Caroline Myss called "Sacred Contracts." I had been "preaching" sacred agreements for decades, mostly to myself. It's as if we return to this plane with the people we have arrangements with to meet and go through various lessons in this life. It's an act of love really. And yet most of us scuff at the idea that we return with a person so they can hurt us and we in turn have to learn forgiveness. Yet that's exactly how it is.

Caroline Myss and her "Sacred Contracts" reminded me of this bigger picture and it helped me have compassion on the choices this man made. When I first realized that he didn't choose "us" I got angry and hurt and disappointed. I cried all day long, cried myself to sleep, wrote a lot and went on and on asking God for mercy. All day long I said: "Mercy, God, please have mercy on me and take this pain away."

I spent the second week learning from "Sacred Contracts" and slowly my feelings of anger turned into feelings of abandonment and victimhood. "Poor me, he left me, how could he throw such a beautiful thing away." I found wisdom in the woods, hiking and crying to God, hugging trees and getting mercy from the land that takes "abuse" every season out of the year.

I spent the third week practicing compassion and understanding while realizing that he did stick to our agreement, whatever this agreement was. It wasn't meant for him to choose me, or he would have. It was our agreement for him NOT to choose me so I could learn forgiveness and compassion, and so he perhaps could feel loss and learn how to take personal responsibility. Both of us learn the valuable lesson not to be victims but to realize that we're creators.

During my last hike in the woods a few days ago, I continued praying for him and myself, asking God to speak to me with his all-wise and compassionate all-knowing and all-seeing existence. I had taken this hike several times and knew the trails pretty good. This time it was different. It had rained the day before and it was a bit stormy. The trails were covered with fallen branches and dead wood all around me. I had to step over them constantly. I looked at the trees above me and the dead branches on the trails and all around me and suddenly it hit me like a brick wall...

We're like trees, we get planted and we grow and our roots get stronger and deeper as the years go on. Our leafs are like the people or the experiences that come and go in and out of our lives. The slightest wind, or at least Fall, will make them go away. Branches are part of the tree structure. They hold up the tree and make sure the tree's equilibrium remains balanced. The leafs of these trees had fallen way back in Fall, however, it's now March and the trees are getting ready to form new buds and new blossoms. BUT, and this is a big BUT, before this new growth can take place, the tree has to shake off its dead weight. The branches that no longer are able or capable of carrying leafs and thus buds. These branches would only draw nutrients from the tree that are better used by the branches that do hold buds and flowers. So nature has this built-in shedding process by sending rain and winds to get rid of dead material.

We too, as people, get involved in relationships, jobs and affairs of life that may be non-beneficial for our long term growth and well being. It may start out great, strong and lush looking, but as soon as life brings rain and wind, the branch cracks and falls off.

So rather than being sad at the loss, I now continue my lesson in realizing that just because this relationship with this man is not what it seemed, doesn't mean he was bad or the relationship was bad and therefore it is now "rotten" and had to die. Not at all. Because just like branches and leaves fall to the ground provide nourishment for life on earth, this relationship continues to do "its thing" inside of me and inside of him. In other words, just like a dead branch provides food for a termite and other beings, this seeming dead relationship now continues providing me with nourishment of lessons. Just like the branch only seems dead, what really happened is that it just grew too weak to remain connected to the overall tree. Relationships often become too weak, for whatever reason, and they "fall."

While I'm still hurting quite a bit about "what could have been" in this relationship, I'm also accepting that we must have had an amazing contract and we stuck to it. So one day when we're on the other side, we get to hug and give each other high fives for having helped each other with lessons that I could never have learned without him.