I’ve been thinking how that last post needs a follow-up of some kind. I remember very clearly the moment I took that photo, and everything that led up to it, and the moment when I consulted the Delphic Oracle and got that answer. Part of me wanted to explain it all as soon as I put the two together, because it felt amazing and I wanted to share that with you.

But another part of me denied that motion, saying Don’t You Remember How We Value Our Privacy Around Here? The two parts wrestled, as they often do, and then life was busy and full of small tasks to distract the Oh Come On Let’s Just Say It part of me. Photo sorting, emails about logistics, other people’s problems. Let’s Just Say It me was overwhelmed and exhausted; Value Our Privacy me won once again, and no further explanation was posted.

But I can outwit the shy private part of me sometimes if I wait long enough. Though I am beginning to tire of this strategy.

Anyway: that magic moment of blissful connection between two beetles was captured on a walk next to the ocean during a solitary vacation week, and it was the emotional climax of my trip. Of the entire season of fascinating emotional revelations, of an entire era of thinking.

My vacation week was spent, in accordance with carefully laid plans, pondering past love affairs and putting them all into a narrative. This was not my first time doing this kind of detailed analysis. It’s impressive how much time I’m capable of spending in going over my past relationships and describing them to myself. (An earlier version of me would’ve said “embarrassing” instead of “impressive” but the current version of me is not, in fact, embarrassed, which just goes to show how far cheesy affirmations can take you if you repeat them on a daily basis.)

Ever since my most recent relationship ended a few years ago, I’ve used glorious, spacious singlehood as an opportunity to mine my life’s romantic experiences for every possible nugget of insight. Why? Because I could; because I’d never really had the chance to do it before, having been for so many years one of those people who is always in one relationship after another with little or no break in between. Being single has meant there’s nobody close by who cares all that much about who I was involved with and how they affected me. Nobody’s been in my personal space to be pleased or displeased when I think about past lovers, or tell me I’m giving the matter too much meticulous consideration, or disagree with my conclusions, or imply that I should be ashamed of myself. Alone with my thoughts, I’ve found shame increasingly irrelevant.

When shame fled, I started enjoying the process of dissecting my love life under a microscope. I would take those experiences of love and tease them into their component parts. I’d analyze their weight, their chemical composition. Set them on fire, smear them on glass, view them under various magnifications. This analysis usually took on a written form, but sometimes I’d say it all out loud, re-telling a love story in the forest or some other place where nobody could hear me.

I was completely fascinated by not just my own love history but also the love history of others. Eventually I found that the love history of others was becoming more interesting to me than my own. I found that I was starting to make up fictional variations on my personal history, incorporating what I heard from others and what I’d read in books. When I realized I was doing this, I suddenly understood that my time of analyzing my own past relationships so closely was coming to an end.

This is the conclusion of an important phase of my life (I intoned inwardly in a solemn voice) and it calls for a kind of graduation ceremony. A rite of passage. Thus I decided I would dedicate my vacation trip to reviewing what I’d learned during my extended contemplation. The solitary natural setting and the isolation would, I was sure, make this review of the past into a most memorable and satisfying experience. I even made a schedule for my days- I’d make my way through my relationship history chronologically, and each half day would correspond to a certain number of years. On the final evening, I’d reach the end of my most recent relationship, and peace would reign in my world.

This trip is going to be perfect, I thought. I am going to feel so smart. I will, in fact, know everything about love, and I’ll know it in a beautiful outdoor location with nobody else around to contradict my findings. I’ll have a camera in my hand and an ipod holding all the relevant music from my past and a notebook for recording my smartness. I will exult in my detachment and my wisdom, and when it’s all over, I will be DONE with that project.

I didn’t count on the stomach pain. Some kind of virus invaded my body just as the week began. Its only symptom was terrible abdominal cramps every time I ate anything at all. They’d subside after an hour or so, and I didn’t feel sick otherwise, which meant that I did have some cramp-free time to wander around and take pictures. But then I’d get hungry on the trail, eat a snack, and the cramps would start again.

Pain produced an interesting psychological effect during these hikes. It was a rogue factor in my vacation equation. Instead of feeling comfortable and complacent as I recalled my brilliant philosophical conclusions about love, I was often doubled over clutching my stomach. I found myself tempted to give in to bleak despair. I was flooded with physical memories of being unhappy in love. Also happy in love, and unable to deal with it, which can be almost as hard to take as the unhappiness.

I’ve always felt my most extreme emotions in my stomach, from the time I was a wee sensitive nerdling. You can bet that every time I’ve ever felt extremely sad (or extremely happy) about the way things were going with a lover, I’ve gotten a stomachache, sometimes for weeks on end. I was being reminded, not that I asked for it, of how those events I had so carefully analyzed had happened to a physical body, one whose sensations I couldn’t fully remember anymore.

That’s the missing piece, I thought, sipping hot tea after my first day of hiking, hand on my belly. In my analysis, I have drifted away from how the love I felt made me forget how to breathe, made me feel faint with delight, made me feel pain and pleasure in very specific places, and how I experienced it in my body as much as in my mind.

I kept going with my scheduled reminiscences (I am slavishly devoted to my schedule) but with each story from the past now came a physical memory of the sensations that went with it. I felt confusion creep into my conclusions. In my years of living without the daily demands of a love relationship, I’d forgotten my frustration with the ongoing fight between my mind and my body. I carried that fight into every love affair. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I was having that fight with myself every day. The struggle with each lover had been a mirror of some internal war.

On the last evening of my vacation, I was walking a bluff trail, clutching my stomach and holding my camera and talking to myself about the significance of event X in my life, how it led to Y and then Z. Suddenly, there they were: the beetles pictured in the previous post. I didn’t know what they were doing at first but I recognized them as something that must be photographed. They didn’t appear to be moving. I switched to the macro lens and got down on the ground, every movement making the stomach pain worse. It wasn’t until I looked at them through the lens that I realized what those beetles were up to in that golden sunset light next to the ocean.

They looked so well-armored that I couldn’t imagine how they managed to connect to each other. I thought, what a struggle it must be to get attached and stay that way, when both parties are so hard-shelled and slippery, and in danger of being stepped on at any moment by wandering humans. And yet connect they did, each knowing exactly how to reach the parts of the other that mattered. Did they think about what they were doing? Was it a carefully considered decision, this mating on the path? Who could ever know?

I took pictures of them from every possible angle and then stood up, out of breath, my face wet with tears. There it was: the struggle and danger of love, and its reward. I could not get away from it. They are braver than I am, I thought, and they’re just beetles.

I am a person who likes to feel in control of what’s going on in my life. Just like everyone else, I guess. And I am very, very good at keeping the mind above the body, somehow floating above it, not quite experiencing what’s going on in my physical reality, entranced by ideas, fiction, words, fantasies. But the corporeal follows me, upsets my plans at every turn, asks me to integrate it. I keep trying to escape and it pulls me back. There are many dilemmas, and this is one of mine.

Thoughts of this dilemma were hovering as I looked at that beetle photo, but I couldn’t quite put them into words, though I stared and stared and tried so hard it made me dizzy. I turned to the Delphic Oracle for help, and the answer I got was so perfectly true that I found myself crying again. (Does that ever happen to you? Does the truth ever make you cry?)

I know what forever opposes me, and I know desire is caught up in that opposition. I know it is always changing into something else, and so am I. But I never knew, until that moment, that what forever opposes me could be the source of beauty. The more I think about it, the more I realize it makes perfect sense.