Today, 8 E’ invites us to
- celebrate and give gratitude for the journey
- perform ceremony for our path and all paths
- honor the road that brought us here and the countless roads still ahead
- manifest abundance through recognizing that every step, destination, and detour has been perfectly placed on our spiritual pilgrimage
At 31, I had given up on romance. I perpetually single and blaming it on the lack of compatible hombres in Guatemala. Throughout my twenties, I’d gone on dozens of dates in Austin and the San Francisco Bay area. But once sex was introduced into the equation came the inevitable implosion.
When I was in college, I arbitrarily decided I’d get married at 28. At 29, I moved to Guatemala for a change of pace and culture. And that I got. Guatemala gave me the luxury of solitude and free time. I traded in my stressful public elementary school job for a gig at a prestigious private school. I started to have time for mindfulness and yoga to infiltrate my daily life.
My first year in Guate, I dated no one, kissed no one, and had a crush on no one. My second year in Guate, my thirties started and the drought ended with a trickle of painful, fleeting relationships.
The last was with a man almost twice my age who lived like a bachelor but was technically still married to the mother of his grown children and had a long-term, long-distance, French-Canadian girlfriend his own age. I visited him for weekend trysts once or twice a month. He had been a lifeguard since before I was born and was also a talented guitarist, and he was offering precisely what I wanted, if not what I needed: quality sex.
After three years in the Guatemalan capital city, I was plotting my next move. Maybe Asia?. I was going to be a free-wheeling, world-traveling woman, untethered by marriage or kids. Yet I was secretly hoping something magical and mystical would make me stay in Guatemala.
I was drawn to the idea of living at Lake Atitlan, a gorgeous place I’d visited countless times and had always adored. When I drove to the lake for a short vacation in late December 2011, I did not have wild parties on my mind. I was content to be alone, surrounded by nature and a select few friends.
Upon arrival, I stopped by my friends’ house for a visit. I had not booked a hotel. My friend suggested that I crash at a house nearby. Another friend was also staying there, house-sitting, but she assured me it wouldn’t be a problem as the house was spacious.
The house-sitter turned out to be a Colombian artisan I met for the first time that afternoon, B. As night fell, he and I hiked the five minutes up the road to the house, which had only one sleeping area: a double bed in the loft upstairs.
For the next several days, we had what felt like a fantasy honeymoon without having had to deal with a pesky courtship, engagement, or wedding. I read Taking the Leap by Pema Chodron, wrote giddy journal entries, and basked in the sun. I practiced yoga on the stone porch overlooking the lake and volcanoes. B cooked divine vegetarian meals, and we did the dishes together.
Following the advice of the Buddhist book I was reading, I was striving to avoid my normal traditions of fantasizing, ruminating and otherwise falling in love with the storyline. Meanwhile, I was falling for the love of my life.
I got pregnant about three months after we met and thus decided not to move halfway across the world. Yet, we still weren’t officially together. In fact, B had told me he just wanted to be friends. He headed off to a previously planned trip in the northern jungles of Guatemala.
Would he stay or leave? I braced for the latter and convinced myself that I could be a single mother. I realized anything could happen. He could come back, or not. He could die, or I could, or the baby could. Pregnancy gave me no choice but to stop trying to control the universe.
What did happen was this: B returned from Peten just in time to attend my 32nd birthday party and assure me that we would support each other through this and raise our child together. My 31 years of solitude had finally ended and, through thick and thin, we are still together to this day, 14 years later.
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