When I met Jason, he was on the road. Literally. He was driving across country from Dallas to Seattle in a crème colored Volvo, and he had parked by the Embarcadero in San Francisco to see what the crowds of sweaty youth and metallic punks were doing on the street. I had just emerged from an all-day festival of punk rock music with heart pumping and ears ringing. We connected through City Lights and Berkeley vegetarian fare, and he crashed my dormitory and spent the night in my roommate’s bed while she was elsewhere.
When we met, I was in living on an all-women’s floor in a university dormitory. I was rooted and disciplined, tethered to a semester schedule, digging into reading assignments and engaged in abstract intellectual exercise. He was nomadic and free, following the winds of nature and the tides of heart-mind, chasing synchronicities like fireflies and forging temporary autonomous zones left and right. Over time, we became passionately intertwined, in the intricate, entangled way that only two Virgos can create.
After we disengaged our life paths, after a long period of silence and distance and geographical separation, I went to visit him in San Diego along my road trip from San Francisco to Houston. I recognized that we had effectively traded places. He was ankle deep in phonebook-thick photocopied graduate school readers and student assignments to grade, every waking hour filled with task and responsibility, projecting himself forward in a scholarly trajectory toward an advanced ethnomusicology degree. I was gliding around with all my worldly possessions piled in the backseat of a hybrid car, with no agenda except traveling the world, converging with liberated beings and taking naps every day. In a moment of alignment, I visited the undergraduate music class he was teaching, and he invited me to play the third movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique on the piano to demonstrate a rendition of musical form for his students.
Over the days and nights and years we made our lives together, we moved in a dance of polarity and exchange, our paths swirling around each other in a tight double helix. I taught him how to make lists, enjoy libraries and solve differential equations. He taught me how to rappel from a tree, embrace polyamory and travel with a backpack on a shoestring budget through Central America. We subtly infused each other with the lessons we had yet to learn and ways of being we had yet to be. With some time and space apart to germinate and grow, the seeds of change we catalyzed in each other have activated dynamically.
