My moving to live with Kuuyux
So, I’m going to move to Alaska.
Following my heart.
I fell in love with her when I was 21. First time I’ve ever been abroad, first place outside my country I ever set foot on.
I was right out of my military service at the IDF – armed with sarcasm and distrust, and very militant. Alaska ripped my armor open with unconditional love, which was my inner secret language that I so vigorously tried to hide. I was left exposed, defenseless and forever in love with the one place open heart in public was allowed.
I thought maybe that’s the way all foreign countries are – she was my first. But as I came to the next one I realized it was not so, and have been missing my first love-country ever since.
Every time I felt this world had no place for me, I heard in me a whisper: Alaska…
Longing. She was calling my Jewish heart to come back from exile to her, my private promised land.
My exile took less than 2000 years. She sent a messenger. Kuuyux, an Unangan (Aleut) bearer of ancient knowledge into modern times. A native man from the Pribilof islands in its Bering sea. I saw him in a video talking openly about things I only shared with a handful of friends; things I have felt during pregnancies and when giving birth: about the womb at the center of the universe, about the masculine imbalance, about how women and females are sacred, about everyone and everything being your (out) other self, about synchronizing with nature, about the connectedness, and about letting go of the mind and landing in the heart that’s been waiting for you to come back to it from far long exile…
(And here’s that video, the beginning of which I’ve missed because my child woke up, so I didn’t even know he’s from Alaska till i looked up his name to ask him if I may translate…)
I asked him to let me translate it. As we were working on the translation, we went deeper and deeper into the teachings, into our hearts, finding there deep echoing understanding and connection, until we no longer knew if it was the Unangan culture, or Alaska, or our souls – it all became one, it all became love.
And so we’re moving – me and my two girls – to live with him in Alaska.
When he suggested we get married – I told him again that I’m against marriages. Love is such a private thing! Why would I want formal authorities giving me or denying me papers that are supposed to determine if we belong to each other? That’s our business, and ours only.
But he said: “Look, the paper doesn’t really determine anything, besides some financial rights you’ll have by being married. Because this is a patriarchal system. It’s the patriarchy’s way to know that which we already do: that we are together anyway, you are going to live here anyway, we are going to work together; and that going to happen anyway. So you have no argument to what they are saying. Why resist to a piece of paper, thus making everything you want – harder if not impossible?”
And I had to ask myself do I want the resistance, or the togetherness?
And I remembered the Elders that we work with say: “Let go of all attachments.” And I released my attachment to not marrying, realizing that it was just as stagnant as clinging to the idea of marriage.
And then I said:
We do ceremonies anyway – to the water (the picture here if from a water ceremony at the Sea of Galilee), to mother Earth, to healing – and this day, this rare occasion of giving focus to our true love, we’re just going to sign some papers? No, let’s pour some meaning into it. Let’s turn it into a celebration of the heart.
And so we’re on the home stretch for a fiancée visa. And we’re going to marry in several weeks/months.
Any ideas, tips, thoughts, suggestions?
