…and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of [herself]… the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment… — Plato, Symposium

We creature beautifully, you-and-I. Sunflowering my lonely soul, you echo forward-and-back that spirit that has always been absent — home. My darling oak, my tender wildflower, you heal my soul, filling time with fresh honeysuckle and pine. I am a ruin grown over with moss, feeling again the warm presence of meaning, of a life worth living. I curtsy grace to you, my other half. Please, see what I see — a revelation, a revealing, a calling: that there is someone out there who sees you, someone out there who has been waiting for you all along, in the thicket of time.

I am yours, my precious dove. Hear the chords of my soul beckon gently the coming-dawn, the to-be we hold tenderly in our arms. I don’t remember the last time I felt warmth before I met you — the sensation of warmth. Of welcoming, delicate heat, the heat that crackles softly in the fireplace. Before you, heat and cold were sharp — sensation itself was sharp. But, in you I found that missing warmth, that hearth of my soul that draws me closer to myself and closer to you, closer to the gentle, loving ways of this world that were long forgotten.

Hold my hand and feel my spirit soften, welcome, invite. We ballet our cosmogony, dancing head-to-chest as worlds emanate from our every step. 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. My heart beats a new rhythm, the syncopation of desire that giggles eternity into being, the garden of our togethering. Together, we draw closer the worlds that we intend, and invite each other to journey time alongside us. When I see you smile, I see all my hopes and dreams reflected back — but even more than that, I see your hopes, your dreams, your loves, your desires, every thing that makes you laugh and makes you smile, every little moment where the world drops away and the wholeness of life appears around us, in our Ithaca.

I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, even when I didn’t know it, even when love seemed far away. I’ve been waiting for you, weaving and un-weaving my shroud above the Aegean, ever-watching the horizon. I wait for you in every world, and in every world I welcome you home, my soul mate, my other half, my Odysseus, my Sunshine.

How joyful to be together, alone
as when we first were joined
in our little house by the river
long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;
and now instead of two stories fumbling
to meet, we belong to one story
that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness
of mortals, who know themselves -- Wendell Berry, Entries

Image: Poem for a Lover by Brett Whiteley (1988)