I fell in love with a woman who lives with chronic pain.

For so long I wished she felt free from discomfort, free from the weird windings of her inner workings, arcane and unilluminated by the healers here. But she is too porous, too honest for this; her body the Earth embodied. I remember visions from the Amazon—our planet crying out in pain. The elders hung heads shaking at this individualistic biomedical dream. No temples of trees, no rituals in the round—just the cult of the ego-driven persona reigning supreme.  

Doctors behind desks tell her she created it, that she continues to nurse it into existence. But this patriarchy predates her—she didn’t make the men, unsafe with their white coats and clipboards. Those celebrated icons, elevated for their exam results, for their analytical and diagnostic brains relishing the power of rational materialist magic. Who push tough pills to swallow for problems rooted in a mycelium network of the madness of mind-only approaches to matter.   

 It hurts to see a loved one hurting and I want to make it go away. But she needs to be heard, not helped. So I try to listen without fixing or solving her state, while she shows me there is power in pain; that it is a great and ancient teacher. My beautiful warrior, who wakes to work with her body’s processes with courage drawn from the wellsprings of womanhood. A sex sold and side-lined as something less. Less strong, less capable, less expensive. 

My one, my light—you are more than I could ever have imagined or wished for. More magical and more wonderful than the wildest dream of what love could be. I will never forget how you opened your hurting heart to me in those early days. How our love lifted new life where you were told it would reluctantly rise. Where the wisdom of our cells searched for symbiosis and a celebration of us inside of you. Thank you for holding me, for teaching me, for sharing your perfect body with me. A body processing so much more than the singular self; a body that belongs to the soil, to the sky, to the stars.