It Ain't Me Babe

After a few weeks of really blissful falling-in-love kind of feelings brought on by a fabulous series of email exchanges and many late-night and into-the-morning phone conversations, I got to spend this past weekend with this really stellar human being who also happens to come with all the accoutrements of the opposite sex that I find so appealing. Amidst amazing outdoor adventures set in the mountains in Vermont, we had many long, juicy conversations about love and marriage and divorce, arriving at a number of great insights about who we both are and what we need to really make a go of it the next time around. And as awesome as we are together in a lot of ways, we both arrived at the same bittersweet conclusion that Bob does:

But it ain't me, babe
No, no, no, it ain't me babe
It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe.

At least, it ain't me babe right now, at this juncture of our lives. As sad as I feel about that at this moment, waking up this morning completely psyched to be in each other's arms, I thought how great it is that we got to share these feelings and have this time and never have it turn sour. Somehow it feels like some comfort that sometimes the loves we do choose to hang on to go so wrong and the ones we choose not to engage in over long term can just stay purely GOOD.

We both have a profound sense of gratitude for how much better equipped we'll be the next time around having opened our hearts to each other. As he put it this morning, this thawing has been so good it's painful. Yeah, it has, and yeah, it is. But this is the kind of pain that is all about release and making room for something new, and that's a beautiful thing.

In the wake of all of this, I am comforted, as I so often am, by the treasures I find on youtube. I didn't know that two of my all-time faves sang this song together, Bob and Janis. And if that video doesn't satisfy because it features static pictures of them instead of a live performance, you can also check out Bob live in 1975. Or this treasure: a really sweet video of Johnny Cash and his then wife, June, singing this classic together. Such cuties!