Zig and Zag

By Anna Von Reitz

My Twin Flame is a man of sorrows.  He is always the first guy through the door of the burning building, who carries out the unconscious Mom, the baby half-dead from smoke inhalation, and then goes back and rescues the family dog. He's the guy toddling down the road right behind your car wreck who pulls you out seconds before the gas tank blows.  He's the one who finds the abandoned kitten, blows breath back into the drowning victim, puts the tourniquet on the femoral artery, and disarms the bank robber.  It's always him. Always.

It's so predictable, so wildly beyond any kind of statistical probability, that it is a family joke.  He is also the one who gets stuck with all the really, truly awful s^*&t jobs of life that absolutely nobody wants to do or has the strength to do. It always falls on him ---- and its not that I and others don't try to help --- it's because we don't have the strength or we don't have the knowledge.  And there he is.

He's a hero, like in the days of old, but in real life heroism is not glorious or fun. It's painful, dangerous, exhausting and at the end of the day it comes down to two uncomfortable results--- either people know that he was the one who saved their bacon and he is red-faced and embarrassed and slinks away, or they never know at all --- and then he is relieved, but still battered by the experience himself.  My Twin Flame has seen some truly awful things and done some truly awful things and always he picks up his cross and soldiers on, though once in a great while, he just sits on the edge of the bed in the middle of the night and sobs like a child.

Just as predictably, I am never the first one on the scene of any accident or disaster, even when probability would say that I should have been.  I never am.  Not only will I not be present during the crucial action, I might not even make the funeral.  You might think I don't know about what happened.  You might even think that I don't care.  I am out getting a hair cut or buying apples for a pie when the dirt goes down and you can set your watch by that, too. It's not like I plan it out that way, but just like his presence, my absence is part of the pattern of life and existence: his is the darkness and mine is the light.

My part comes later, after all the frantic activity is over and done, when all the other well-wishers have gone home to their own lives and you are left alone staring at the empty chair or facing the next ten years nursing a comatose paraplegic.  I sneak into the back of the room after the fourth week of chemotherapy when you need a ride to the hospital and everyone else is busy. I remember your birthday when everyone else forgot or there is nobody left to remember.  Mine is the long, slow, enduring help and care that just goes on forever day by day like an intravenous slow-drip. 

I am the cup of tea and the cookie when you are plain worn out.  I am the sudden arm under your elbow as you are losing your balance on the stairway. I am the voice that reminds you of dumb stuff and makes you laugh in spite of everything.  I'm the one who gets you a plane ticket when you absolutely have to be there and its going to take a miracle from God.  I am the one always plodding along at a dog-trot doing one errand or another, catching and fetching, and binding up all the other kinds of wounds that people suffer from carelessness and neglect and the selfishness of the world.

We make quite a pair, my Twin Flame and I.  We understand our respective callings and situations.  We respect all the pressures and demands we are each heir to, and for the most part we bear it all in mutual silence and don't complain and don't blame each other at all.  I go through the terror of not knowing what danger or scrape he may have stumbled into when he is late getting home, and he bears the loneliness of waiting for me to "do my rounds".  We support each other in all of it and after all the years we've been together, that's just the way it is.  No eyebrows raised.  No discussions.  Just go and do and keep on doing.

The plain fact is that there aren't many women who could stand at his shoulder and there aren't many men who could or would stand by me, either.  We were watching a movie in which fighters were bound by one arm to each other and forced to fight as a team.  We just smiled grimly.  That's the way it is: back to back, so utterly different, yet tied together, zig and zag. 

You would think upon meeting us that we had nothing in common.  You would wonder that we could talk to each other or share anything at all.  He is visual and I am verbal.  He is wise and I am observant.  He is forever serious and philosophical.  I am always teasing and looking for the joke.  He's the strategist. I'm the nut in the balloon flying over the battlefield sending back the raw data to his High Command.  I've never met a word I didn't like.  He can't stand many words at all and can go whole days without uttering more than a handful. I speak in sonnets and he grumbles haikus.  I am maddeningly perky.  He is just as stubbornly brooding and often morose.

Except for mutually understood burdens and sufferings there is no reason we should get along, why we should love each other, or stick together. We are like day and night, pre-dawn and twilight, April and November. 

There are mysteries too deep to gainsay, certainly things I will never understand or be able to explain.  What I can tell you is that it is a great honor and blessing to meet your Twin Flame, to overcome the illusions of all your differences, and be at peace with them.  

There is a painting I cherish called "October Rose" that says it all, a wild rose blossoming long after the killing frosts have come---as sometimes actually happens in Alaska. It's a celebration of all the miracles that don't make sense and come to us anyway, the life that springs forth from our dying and the love that underlies all our differences.

As we all move forward in 2018 we will all need to see past our differences to the heart and the core of why we are alive and why we are together and what our mission is on Earth.  We need to accept the beauty and meaning and great good fortune that all our differences actually represent.

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See this article and over 800 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com