A part of me craved time to warm up to him… to receive him fully; but, every other part of me saw the grief.  Felt the transitional state he danced in. So we remained in the liminal.

Parts will seduce you only as far as you’ve integrated them.

And I sat with that.

How I loved his masculine ignition.

His effortless capacity to lead, his non-performative nature…

His communal awareness and capacity to read the room.

And the way he moved:

Decisive. Attuned. Unforced.

That sweetly evolved masculine principle… the one that allows my nervous system to truly exhale.

 

I felt the edges of a depth…

and the parts of me that desired to stay.

I’ve lived this before.

The safety of a nervous system I can relax into vs. the integration of a nervous system I can expand with.

And there it was.

My mirror.

The version of me that chased safety in many versions of this pattern.

 

He reintroduced the final missing layers in my journey home to self. Closing a chapter I had left unfinished, with certain expressions of masculinity that seduced me in this life.

 

Lately, I’ve been jostling with the negotiation of wholeness.

I’ve committed years to unrooting the unconscious and re-integrating into my fullness. Most people never stay long enough to stabilize this kind of union. I have.

I’ve spent years compromising standards in short-term relationships with men who were extremely well-executed in their masculine leadership, yet under-resourced beyond the roles they performed. Depth that couldn’t meet me where I was going.

So, I chased parts:

  • Material success.
  • Emotional maturity.
  • Polarity.
  • Conscious attunement.
  • Stability.
  • Safety.

Not altogether, but in pieces.

And for years, I took a sharp departure from that dance, and stepped into my own masculine. But my journey took me so deep into my masculine, I forgot what it felt like to be held. To let someone else master the moment… and lead.

 

Until he walked in.

 

It all happened swiftly in the matter of fleeting moments and a whirlwind of sleepless nights.

But it awakened me to a remembrance of what it feels like to trust again. And to desire from my feminine.

And it awakened an entirely different quality of aliveness in me.

 

As I write this, I reflect on my grandparents- the first parents to raise me.

My grandma never settled for performative gestures. With her, actions spoke louder than words. She never praised. Never affirmed.

And I learned: true service expects nothing in return.

So I became the one to hold everything.

For three years, I lived in my masculine as I cared for her.

And that’s when it finally clicked for me:

The way culture shapes our embodiment of masculinity.

 

Which is why I can feel, so clearly,
when it’s fully alive in someone…
and when it isn’t.

 

His masculinity enchants me…

And what I saw, clearly, for the first time was

the missing piece I had been circling for years:

Not just the fire…

But the capacity to stay.

 

To hold the intensity of emotion without flinching.

To meet the discomfort of one’s becoming… and lean all the way in.

To return fully to self.

Because that fire?
I know that fire intimately.
I’ve cultivated it, channeled it, let it move through me.

And fire without staying power…
burns fast.

 

For the first time, I witnessed the intensity of fire in someone who allowed himself to express it. And who also demonstrated the capacity to contain it.

And I wasn’t seduced by the heat alone. Nor was I afraid of collapsing into an old story.

I stayed present with him, listening for what could hold it.