I spin this ring at the base of my finger. The thin, delicate, hand-carved lines etched deep in the surface of smooth silver ripple in the reflection of light. I am in love. I wear it on the middle digit of my right hand because that is where it feels it should belong and where it seems to have always belonged. Its placement, its position in my life did not originate as a question. It was handed to me as an answer.

Now my finger, ringless for many years, is wrapped in a band covered with the traditional designs of the people native to this area. This is how wolf came to sit at the crown of my palm. Even now the slow curves, the careful shading reveal the readying haunches, the long, toothy snout extended, a single eye sparkling half in ferocity, half in gentleness. It reminds me of loyalty, of the steeled intent that shifts worlds and transforms the borderless nation of a single soul. And although I know that a week ago, I stood in a jeweler's shop in Sooke, British Columbia spinning it against my flesh for the first time, it's now hard for me to remember my finger without it.

I'm not sure exactly where to start this story. How do you explain the idea of things that are new but feel as if they've always been, things which have rewritten in a short time the memory of the world before? Yet that's what this story is about.

I've been rightly accused of declaring epochs. I've also been known as someone who loves drama sometimes more than facts, who tends towards the poetic over the simple. In addition, I know myself as somebody who can't seem to stop writing when the tale has been told and the embers are cooling.

But this is a story about love. Love calls down epochs and demands calf-eyed mooning and the poetry of hearts. Love is a thing about which no amount of words is ever enough. Love comes without warning. No loud feet on the stoop. No sandalwood scent in the shift of wind. No distant glimmer on the backs of sparrows.

This story is tremendously large and gets larger with each day's passing. As I stand within it, I am overwhelmed. I don't understand what it is or where it's going. I can't make sense of it to myself because I'm riding it from the inside and am surrounded by it and it fills my vision. And yet, I do have to begin to tell the beginning, because I think it'll influence my life for a long time to come. And it's only by telling this story that all the others will be unlocked to share.

On January 18th of 2006, at 11:11pm, I received an email from writeanya pointing me to a blog written by her new friend and contact. The email had the subject "marry this woman" and included a nice bit of gushiness mixed with the hopeful indication of a possible romantic match. I naturally responded, as I often do in these cases, less openly than I would have liked to. In fact, I am pretty sure I went to the link just to prove how wrong writeanya was about everything in the universe. If she wasn't actually wrong, I was sure I could gleefully find a way to make her wrong.

What I found instead were words, beautiful, flowing words. They spoke of magic and spirituality, of the raw, open places of the human heart, of the mixture of pain and joy and craziness and connection, of the balance between possibility and the possibility of impossibility. They were honest and unafraid, fiercely vulnerable, profound and wonderfully cadenced in the skill-tongue language of a poet. And this is how I found streamsandpools, who seemed to sense me finding her, turned around and with a flash of wolf teeth, grabbed a piece of my soul and hung on.

She commented on my Live Journal. I commented on her blog. Both of us were going through some difficult pain, pain that we could share, pain that experience had allowed us to relate to on a deep level. We jumped almost immediately into the language of transformation and into the realm of the dharma. It wasn't long before we were emailing epically-lengthed compositions that detailed each little step we'd taken on our lives, seemingly since being born. We fell into each other rapidly and deeply.

What I found then was Jo, a shaman, a homeopath, a healer, a Buddhist, somebody that shared my belief in magic, somebody that shared most of my team of totems, a musician and a talented writer, a person so open-hearted, so dedicated to honesty, so committed to personal transformation, growth and empowerment that I could scarcely believe she existed. And I did what any single man in my situation would do. I refused to entertain any thoughts of any romantic relationship between us.

You see, the twist in this story is that Jo lives in Brighton in the United Kingdom, while I live in Seattle, Washington in the United States. For those of you without a map, that's 4800 miles away and 8 hours in time zones. That rather large fact I saw as an impassable obstacle, something to which possibility had given a wide berth. Nevertheless, and quite undaunted by my resistance to romance, we continued to email, and then took our email to Instant Messenger, often spending hours and hours every day typing in little windows our connected and silly conversations, opening further and further to each other.

I received my first video from Jo in August of 2006. She'd discovered, geek girl that she is, that her phone could record short movies, and through certain online services, she could email those movies to me. I'd purchased a video camera earlier that year and so I eagerly jumped in to the project, often spending an entire night in the shooting of, importing of, mixing down of, exporting of, and uploading of my little soliloquies.

Our videos began simply, as little trips through our houses and our lives, but they soon expanded into hour long "conversations", which we'd share three or four times a week. Each video was organized around a growing list that we'd make in watching the video of the other, topics to discuss, questions to answer, stories to tell. We'd move down this list one by one, ticking off each talking point, and continuing to create new areas of exploration. Eventually, we were almost entirely video-oriented, and our compositions took up more and more and more space on our respective computers.

What I found then was a woman with a powerful, sensual voice who was funny, beautiful, so full of life and so able, willing and excited to speak about it. She was emotional in the way that one wants to be emotional, passionately honoring each tear, depression, laugh, foot stomp, and giddy bounce. She was challenging, staring her demons bravely in the face, embracing the soft parts of her being and asking for me to do the same. As such, she never let a single one of my diversions go unnoticed, never allowed for anything between us but full truth to nurture the growing of our intimacy. I'd never met another person who shared this priority for communication and could do it so openly.

Somewhere along this time, I sent her a wolf to match the wolf that I have in my bedroom. She named hers Blue. I'd named mine Lakota. We discovered then a shared love of, and an immense ability to play. We also discovered that we were a wolf couple who had become intensely attracted to the other. All wolves were very pleased.

As 2007 arrived, we were emailing, instant messaging every day, swapping videos three or four times a week, and discovering how amazingly expensive text messages on cell phones can be across international borders. I of course reacted to this as you might imagine. I put my fingers in my ears and yelled LA LA LA LA LA LA as loud as I could. In the meantime, Jo was very rightly developing a sense of our possible romantic and personal compatibility and potential.

In 2007, Jo, continuing to be the one who pushed each phase of our relationship forward, called me on the telephone. The situation was unfortunate and emotional and sudden, and we talked about it for some time together, each somewhat mesmerized by the reality of the moment. This was the first actual conversation that we'd had, and it sparked something in us for which we both began to hunger. And so, a regular phone call was placed into the routine, once or twice a month, which often ran four hours in length, and which very nearly caused me to have to sell both cats to pay my phone bill.

By spring of 2007, we were emailing, texting, swapping videos, having phone calls, and instant messaging with web cams, as well as sending each other cards and letters in the mail. We'd explored every single avenue of connection available to us given technology and time. And the question lingered even in the haze of my somewhat convincing carefulness, defined boundaries, and hesitant steps. What was truly happening between us, and did it have a romantic nature?

There was only one way to answer the question, and when boobirdsfly and trochee asked me to marry them, to be their officiant, the opportunity presented itself. streamsandpools was invited to the wedding and through a series of money-raising and detail-handling, and long conversations, decided to go. We were about to meet for the first time. She would fly here in late July and stay with me for five weeks. Her visit would be a combination of her return to the United States, a country towards which she feels very strong energetic and mythic pulls, and a chance to fully face the nature of our relationship and determine what form it should take, and where and how it should proceed.

Those of you who are clever are probably seeing where this is going. In fact, everyone in the world saw where this was going, but me. Undiscovered tribes in the Amazon saw where this was going. Small children grasped it with no difficulty at all. And Jo, again rightfully, came to this country with the hope that it would go where it was going, and that I might allow it to do so.

The months before Jo's visit were stressful for both of us, very emotional, very draining, and very long. We each experienced unexpected situations that caused us to have to delve deeply into the minutia of our lives in that hassled, want-to-be-doing-something-else kind of way, and to self-focus on a large level. As a result, when the end of July arrived, it took each of us a bit by surprise.

That's the end of the beginning of the beginning, because the next part of the story involves Jo walking off the plane and into an embrace and that's where it all goes a bit wiggy and fuzzy. From the moment we touched, we seemingly could not be in the same room without touching in some way, even just our toes or our knees, and we seemingly could not go a few minutes untouched without reaching out and being met. It took three days of this and a fateful, romantic, shamanically charged visit to the zoo of all places, to make me decide to do something that is unlike me, to make a decision that was the exact opposite of the decision I felt I had to make. It took a conversation with a wolf, a real wolf, and some bargain making to give me the courage and to make me believe.

We had our first kiss on the fourth night as Jo's dinner slowly cooked and then slowly burned and then slowly turned into sludge on the stove. I initiated it. I decided how foolish it was to keep up the pretense that what was happening was not happening. We together decided how ridiculous it was to ignore or to dishonor the way that energy was flowing and the story was being told to us. I jumped. And I fell.

For a long time, we didn't eat. We barely slept. Each of us lived with an intense muscular clench in our stomachs and solar plexuses. We talked constantly about what was happening, and we also let it happen when we weren't talking. We shared a famous, well-seen, slow dance to Tom Waits at boobirdsfly's and trochee's wedding. We had adventures all over the state and all over Canada, that you can see here and here.

What I found was one of the most amazing women I've ever met in my life. I found somebody caring and capable, creative and spiritual. I found somebody who loves me for me and who is fierce in her love and in her insistence of my fulfillment individually and in coupledom. I found the best playmate I've had since I met Calin. I found a lover and a friend, a slapstick comedienne, a big thinker, and a powerful shaman. I found a person with a visceral relationship to music, a love of adventure, and a nester with a desire for long stretches in sunshine and long nights with a blanket. In five weeks, we flowed with each other, in and out of hardship and emotional stress, in and out of bliss and relaxation. And at the end, both of us said that we'd felt we lived an entire relationship in a small timeframe.

I say it's the end of the beginning of the beginning, because those five weeks were a dizzy, happy, scary, transformative blur. I'm not sure exactly what happened in them, as I was too busy falling in love. And in love is where I find myself tonight.

J went back to the UK a week ago. There were many tears at the airport and many more in the days immediately afterward. We have talked for an hour or two every day, mainly to keep connection flowing, but also to discuss the next steps of our relationship and the spins, actual concerns, fears, hopes and joys of what may end up being something long term between us. We continue to move forward, and though I feel more than a bit lost and confused being back in my single, yet not single life, I too am dealing.

What we will be to each other is still unknown, but maybe that's always the way between two people. I am thankful for the experience, which has shifted as a landslide much within me and left my life a bit unfamiliar in the largeness of it. Regardless of the outcome, it was one of the most important five weeks of my life, and I think it will continue to change me in its rippled effect for years if not forever.

This weekend, Jo joined Live Journal and can be found at streamsandpools. Please welcome her. She's more than worth a read, a visit, a friending, and she now holds a part of my story as well.

This ring here on my finger was a gift from Jo. It sits and it spins and it catches light and it reminds me of who I am and want to be. It and my finger seem to have always belonged together, seem to have always been together. Time and distance are strange beasts. And it's often that I don't know my place within them.

And maybe that too is the way of living.

Jo, I love you. Thank you for what you've brought to me.