Brave Intimacy

. . . is hard work and a lot of fun

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. —Rainer Maria Rilke

Image by Jane Ray at janeray.com

Words by leilamadeline at instagram.com/leilamadeline___/

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Dear Readers — Since I messed up my newsletter when I first sent it earlier today, I’m trying again with the new, improved version. Sorry for the duplication. I really like this newsletter and want it so shine clearly.

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Earthbound Intimacy

Intimate relationship is an artful game with shifting rules and surprise plot twists, so we lovers need to stay nimble, experimental, and awake. The alliance we begin is never the relationship we will have three years later, or five, or ten. We change. Our partners change. Life barges in with its unruly interventions—illness, career upheavals, creative awakenings, grief, unexpected joy.

The sexual electricity that once felt volcanic may dissipate, then flare again in new forms. The quirks we adored may become annoying, then somehow circle back into being endearing again through a mysterious emotional alchemy.

If we imagine love as a permanent monument instead of a living collaboration, we miss every cue life offers us to evolve. Lovers who thrive treat intimacy as improvisational theater: willing to depart from the script when reality demands it or fun suggests it.

They understand that constancy doesn’t require rigidity. They’re loyal to the shared project even while reinventing how the project works.

One of their core vows might be this: Tender fidelity to loving each other can coexist with radical flexibility about how love is expressed.

The unexpected twists aren’t interruptions of care and adoration. They are the raw material from which deeper connection is forged.

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Love enmeshes us in our partner’s unique set of karmic complications, so it’s best if we’re interested in their problems.

When we fall in love, we don’t just choose a companion for pleasure and companionship. We’re enlisting in their struggles, inheriting their demons, and signing up for the full blast of their psychological inheritance.

All of this becomes our concern: our beloved’s relationship with their narcissistic mother, their unresolved grief over a sibling’s death, their terror of financial instability, and their shame about past mistakes.

We don’t have to fix or heal everything our beloved struggles with, but we do need to find their inner world genuinely interesting. Relationships rarely survive if one partner becomes bored with the other’s wounds or impatient with their recurring fears. There’s no future in secretly wishing someone would just get over their issues and become easier.

Vibrant intimacy requires an almost anthropological curiosity about another person’s psyche. We really do need to cultivate the willingness to study their contradictions with fascination instead of fatigue. We explore the labyrinth of their being with the same devotion we bring to understanding ourselves.

This doesn’t mean codependent fusion. The sweet spot is a living blend of independence and interdependence: two sovereign beings choosing connection without erasing themselves.

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Love is a laboratory where we can uncover truths about ourselves that have been unavailable or hidden, so I suggest we all be ravenously curious.

Intimate love is one of the most powerful mirrors we can encounter. Many of us imagine self-knowledge happens primarily in solitude, like through therapy sessions, meditation cushions, journals, and vision quests. But relationship exposes aspects of us that remain invisible as long as we are solo.

Our partners trigger reactions that surprise and sometimes alarm us. They reveal contradictions between who we believe we are and how we behave under stress. They expose insecurities and old emotional bruises we thought had healed.

This can feel humiliating. It’s also precious data.

This can be excruciating, but it’s also precious data. Let’s say we approach these revelations with scientific curiosity rather than defensive shame. We say, “How interesting that I reacted this way” instead of “I’m a terrible person.” Then love becomes an ongoing research project into the mystery of our own being. The discomfort becomes material for growth rather than evidence of failure.

Our partner isn’t always right in their perceptions, but they often see truths about us that we can’t easily see ourselves. Two nervous systems interacting over time develop a strange accuracy about each other.

Relationship, at its best, is a collaborative laboratory for self-knowledge.

Love is never a perfect match of totally compatible saints, so I urge us all not to let sterile fantasies seduce us away from flawed but invigorating realities.

One of the most corrosive fantasies is the myth of the perfect partner. This is the delusional fantasy that our soulmate intuitively understands us, shares all our priorities, and fits our personality with geometric precision.

But this perfect partner exists mostly in three places: romantic comedies, projection fantasies, and the first few months of infatuation.

Real love is messier and more interesting. It flourishes in the fertile soil of partial incompatibility, periodic misunderstanding, and mutual imperfection. Our partner will have blind spots, annoying habits, emotional limitations, and baffling enthusiasms. So will we.

This friction isn’t an unfortunate side effect. It’s a generative force.

Total compatibility would produce stagnation, right? Growth requires difference. We’ve got to abide in places where we must stretch, negotiate, adapt, and learn.

The goal isn’t to find someone who never challenges us. It’s to connect with a lively ally whose particular form of imperfection we find intriguing enough to explore for a long time. The friction between us generates energy rather than erosion.

The flawed reality, with all its awkwardness and difficulty, is more fertile than any sterile fantasy.

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Love thrives when neither partner takes things personally, so it’s wise to cultivate a devotion to forgiveness and divest ourselves of the urge to blame.

Another hard-won skill in long-term love is learning not to take everything personally.

Our beloved’s withdrawal or testiness is often less about us than about old wounds echoing through the present. They are reacting to ghosts we didn’t create and battles that began long before we arrived. Of course we still feel hurt, but we gain freedom when we remember that we, too, bring our own emotional weather systems into the relationship.

Blame is the lazy lover’s refuge. It substitutes accusation for curiosity.

Forgiveness, by contrast, isn’t weakness or martyrdom. It’s an ongoing commitment to seeing beneath temporary defensiveness to the vulnerable being underneath. It allows love to keep breathing instead of calcifying into resentment.

Compassion doesn’t mean tolerating cruelty or chronic disrespect. Accountability still matters. But when blame dominates the emotional climate, intimacy suffocates.

Art by Shelby McQuilkin

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Love isn’t a low-maintenance machine you install once and forget. It’s a living ecosystem. It needs tending: attention, repair, pruning, reinvention, patience. Some seasons overflow with sweetness, while others feel barren or strained. Periodic effort isn’t a sign something is wrong. It’s the price of admission to a shared life that stays vital.

The work may include uncomfortable conversations, apologies, renegotiations, small gestures of care, experiments in new habits, and the willingness to reconnect after drifting apart. Long-term intimacy is less like fireworks and more like gardening, except the plants occasionally argue with you and accuse you of not listening.

The alternative is autopilot: a relationship that slowly withers from neglect or explodes when unattended wounds finally demand attention.

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Love isn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, so I suggest that we not let our romantic story be infected by the entertainment industry’s simplistic, sentimental myths: in which love conquers all obstacles effortlessly, passion remains permanently intense, and conflict signals incompatibility.

These narratives colonize our imagination so deeply that real relationships can feel disappointing by comparison—not because they’re failing, but because we are measuring them against illusions.

Authentic love is stranger, slower, more inconvenient, and ultimately more rewarding than any fantasy. It includes moments when we would rather be anywhere else. It also includes shared history and the subtle miracle of being known over time.

To love well, we have to decolonize our imagination. It’s hard but not at all impossible to shed the sugary myths we inherited and learn to recognize the wilder reality of two imperfect humans choosing each other again and again.

EARTHBOUND LOVE POEM #1

Dear Love Awakener —

I want to be your cackling, dizzy-dazzling, rambling-free groupie. Want to be mine?

We can be in foolishly cool drooling yet elegant solid-gold devotion to each other’s mighty love mojo.

We can play off our mutual primordial respect for each other to help us shed any fearful glitches that might still be tainting our bags of tricks. We can arouse each other to be braver and braver about reinventing the unhealed world with endless uprisings of our liberated imaginations.

We can casually drop hints by the side of the road and in the pit of the abyss and at the hub of the marketplace—hints that yes, our soul flesh is always gung-ho with blasphemous reverence and taboo justice and unauthorized kindness and insurrectionary beauty—and see if anyone wants to join us in waging our orgies of illegal truth.

We can offer to dance those lucky co-conspirators along with us through our blooming subversions until they, too, generate sublime convulsions and sacred transgressions for the good of all sentient and non-sentient beings.

And since you and I transcend the big bad NEVER AND ALWAYS as we ramp up tsunamis of mutual respect and veneration for each other, and since we worshipfully adore each other like cumulus clouds love the dusky sky on the summer solstice, I must add the disclaimer that we can also give each other license to now and then be boring, unspectacular, even nervous or hiding around each other. Amen, and afemme. We can handle the spooky, cornucopian variety.

I never blush, and yet as I disclose this communiqué, I’m feeling the newborn flush of the fresh sun radiating from my amazing maze of a face. My outlaw infatuation with your grinning insurrections riles up the rowdy wisdom of my heavenly body.

Don’t change anything you’re doing! Keep dispersing those tender whomps and wallops that make me so freakily friendly and fertile. What I mean is, keep changing everything you’re doing in the exact way that your ever-rising libido enchantments whisper you should keep changing everything you’re doing.

In other words, to please me, don’t try to please me. Simply be your out-of-this-world, down-to-earth soul-kissing self, flagrantly igniting the raucous flows of fluidic mutant sparks that sanctify you so abundantly with the quickening of the Rebel Divine.

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For more tips and inspirations about earthbound intimacy, go here: tinyurl.com/LoveInspirations

For Elationship Love Spells, go here: tinyurl.com/ElationshipLoveSpells

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of February 19

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Big bright transitions are at hand: from thrashing around in the educational mire to celebrating your sweet escape; from wrangling with shadows and ghosts to greeting new allies; from messing around with interesting but confounding chaos to seizing fresh opportunities to shine and thrive. Hallelujah! What explains this exhilarating shift? The Season of Dazzling Self-Adoration is dawning for you Pisceans. In the weeks ahead, you will be inspired to embark on bold experiments in loving yourself with extra fervor and ingenuity.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Saturn has entered Aries. I see this landmark shift as being potentially very good news for you. Between now and April 2028, you will have enhanced powers to channel your restless heart in constructive directions. I predict you will narrow down your multiple interests and devote yourself to a few resonant paths rather than scattering your intense energy. More than ever before, you can summon the determination to follow through on what you initiate. My Saturn-in-Aries prayer: May you be bold, even brazen, in identifying where you truly belong, and never settle for a half‑certain fit.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I am issuing a Wow Advisory. Consider this your high-voltage wonder alert. Your future may offer you thrilling quests and epic exploits that could be unnerving to people who want you to remain the same as you have been. You will have a knack for stirring up liberating encounters with lavish pleasures and rich feelings that transform your brain chemistry. The rousing mysteries you attract into your sphere may send provocative ripples through your own imagination as well as your web of allies. Expect juicy plot twists. Be alert for portals opening in the middle of nowhere.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, you find anatomical drawings next to flying machine designs, mathematical calculations alongside water flow observations, and philosophical musings interrupted by grocery lists. He moved from painting to engineering to scientific observation as curiosity led him. Let’s make him your inspirational role model for now, Gemini. Disobey categories! Merge categories! Mix and match categories! Let’s assume that your eager mind will create expanded knowledge networks that prove valuable in unexpected ways. Let’s hypothesize that your cheerful rebellion against conventional ways of organizing reality will spawn energizing innovations in your beautiful, mysterious life.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In falconry, there’s a practice called “weathering.” It involves regularly exposing trained birds to the wild elements so they don’t become too domesticated and lose their wildness. The falconer needs a partner, not a pet. Does that theme resonate, Cancerian? Is it possible that you have been too sheltered lately? Either by your own caution or by well-meaning people who think they’re protecting you? Let’s make sure you stay in touch with the fervent, untamed sides of your nature. How? You could expose yourself to an experience that scares you a little. Take a fun risk you’ve been rationalizing away. Invite touches of rowdiness into your life.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The loudest noise in history? It was the 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, heard thousands of miles away. The pressure wave circled the Earth multiple times. I am predicting a benevolent version of a Krakatoa event for you in the coming months. Not literal loudness, but a shiny bright expression of such magnitude that it redefines your world and what people thought was possible from you. Can you be prepared for it? A little. You’ll be wise to cultivate visionary equanimity: a calm willingness to stay focused on the big picture. I predict your big boom will be challenging but ultimately magnificent and empowering.

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VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Buddhism teaches about “near enemies”: qualities that may appear to be virtues but aren’t. For example, pity masquerades as compassion. Clingy attachment pretends to be love. Apathy and indifference pose as equanimity. In the coming weeks, Virgo, I hope you won’t get distracted by near enemies. Your assignment: Investigate whether any of your supposed virtues are actually near enemies. After you’ve done that, find out if any of your so-called negative emotions might harbor interesting powers you could tap into.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Many intelligent people think astrology is dangerous nonsense perpetrated by quacks. For any horoscope writer with an ego, this affront tends to be deflating. Like everyone else, we want to be appreciated. On the other hand, I have found that practicing an art that gets so much disdain has been mostly liberating. It’s impossible for me to get bloated with excess pride. I practice astrology for the joy it affords me, not to garner recognition. So in a backhanded way, a seemingly disheartening drawback serves as an energizing boon. My prediction is that you, Libra, will soon harvest an analogous turnabout. You will draw strength, even inspiration, from what may ostensibly appear to be a liability.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Mycologist Paul Stamets claims mushrooms taught him to think in networks rather than hierarchies. He sees how everything feeds everything else through vast webs of underground filaments. This is Scorpio wisdom at its most scintillating: homing in on the hidden circuitry working below the surface; gauging the way nourishment is distributed incrementally through many collaborative interconnections; seeing the synergy between seemingly separate sources. I hope you will accentuate this mode of understanding in the coming weeks. The key to your soulful success and happiness will be in how well you map the mycelial-like networks, both in the world around you and in your inner depths. PS: For extra credit, study the invisible threads that link your obsessions to each other, your wounds to your gifts, and your rage to your tenderness.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The peregrine falcon dives at speeds exceeding 240 miles per hour, making it the fastest animal on Earth. But before the dive, there’s often a period of circling, scanning, and waiting. The spectacular descent is set up by the patient reconnaissance that precedes it. I believe you’re now in a phase similar to the falcon’s preparatory reconnaissance, Sagittarius. The quality of your eventual plunge will depend on how well you’re tracking your target now. Use this time to gather intelligence, not to second-guess your readiness. You’ll know when your aim is true.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): There’s a certain miracle you could really use right now, Capricorn. But to attract it into your life would require a subtle and simple shift. In a related development, the revelation you need most is concealed in plain sight. To get these two goodies into your life, you shouldn’t make the error of seeking them in exotic locales. Ordinary events in the daily routine will bring you what you need: the miracle and the revelation that will change everything for the better.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Over the last 4,000 years, a host of things have been used as money in addition to precious metals and paper currency. Among them have been cows, seashells, cheese, tobacco, velvet, tulips, elephant tusks, and huge stone wheels. I hope this poetic fact will inspire your imagination about financial matters. In the coming weeks, I expect you’ll be extra creative in drumming up new approaches to getting the cash you need. Here are questions to guide you. Which of your underused talents might be ready to boost your income? What undervalued gifts could you be more aggressive about giving? What neglected treasures or underutilized assets could you use to generate money?

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