Ingrid Schmithüsen and the Art of Archetypal Love
Or, A Love Letter to a Remarkable Woman
Ingrid Schmithüsen came to visit the week before last. She arrived while I was gone, picking up another dear friend of the Magic Cow Bridge House, Leslie Greenwood, from the train station in Utica. When Leslie and I pulled up in the truck, Ingrid and her brother Georg ran up the lawn to greet us. My experience with Ingrid over the course of these last three years has been as a small box on my screen during the occasional Zoom call, but here in person, she was so much bigger (and smaller) than I could have ever imagined (I, like many others I heard over these few days, imagined Ingrid as a very tall woman, and it was a bit of a jolt to realize that her physical body is not very tall at all. My theory is that her dignity affords her an extra 10 centimeters, if only energetically).
Ingrid exists in spaces the way that a hearth does in a wintery room. For those who have not had the honor and privilege of meeting Ingrid either in person or online, let me be the first to relay to you that she is an angel, sent here to Earth to shower those lucky enough to be in her presence with her Love. It is hard to describe, but anyone who has met Ingrid knows what I am talking about—she walks into a space and Love happens. Ingrid also has ALS, an ultimately-fatal neurological disorder. This was part of the impetus for coming to see us, to say (in some cases) hello and (in all cases) goodbye.
The weekend was magical. I feel angry writing this because the space that we created together over the course of two and half days was so unusual, so heart-achingly beautiful, that it tests the bounds of language, of what can be described in words. However, it would be a disservice to all not to try:
There were ATV rides and beaver dams and heart-sharing spaces and fun in the kitchen. There was uncontrollable laughter and even more uncontrollable crying. There was a four course meal (with a mayonnaise cake!) that originated from nowhere but the sheer joy of eight Beings Being together. There were walks and visits with the pigs and dancing and listening to music and sitting in silence together. But of all of the wondrous moments that made up this weekend, there are two distinctions that have carved themselves into the very fiber of my Being.
The first was delivered to me as a few of us sat together in the living room. Ingrid was sharing videos of her singing—in a past life, she was a concert soprano and if you have not heard her music before, go look it up now. She quit singing in almost fifteen years ago and was sharing about her relationship to giving up something she loved so much. She shared that she had faced the choice of surrendering to a new reality or giving in, and that she chose surrender. She did not say much more, but this is how it landed in me:
To give in is to resign oneself, and resignation is the forfeiting of responsibility and joy. Resigning is to throw my hands up in the air and then sit quietly in a chair by the fire, waiting resentfully for the end. There are certain things that none of us can avoid in this life, mainly sickness, old age, and death. To give in is to become a victim of these eventualities, to live my life boxed in by the fear of what will inevitably come. Surrender, on the other hand, is rapturous. To surrender is to say I have no control over Death, and so I live every moment in the full expression of Being, because every moment becomes infinitely and profoundly precious when I am not waiting around to die.
The second distinction is this: to love Archetypally is to let go of the assumption that loving takes work. Being with Ingrid, the distinction of Archetypal Love as a Bright Principle became so clear to me. Love is not something that we find or even create, it is sourced from something far beyond any single one of us. All it really takes is surrender, surrendering all of the structures in our bodies that insist that Love cannot truly flow. After this, Love flows.
It flows through the air like a Leonard Cohen song in a hot kitchen, waltzing and weeping and so much laughter.
It soars like Ingrid’s beautiful voice in any of the hundreds of recordings of her singing. (If you are curious and want to have a listen, click here).
It sits quietly like those four people on the side porch watching the sunset stain the sky pink like none of us have ever seen before.
When you truly let go and surrender to it, Love happens. Love is. And in Ingrid’s presence, that intangible force becomes a bit more tangible.
I’ve heard it said that some people are like stars, that they burn so brightly in life and can only go out in blazing fashion. I’ve also heard it said that some stars we see in the night sky went supernova thousands and thousands of years ago, but still we see their light. Ingrid is like this. Her star is entering the final stages, but I have no doubt at all that we here on Earth will still see her shining long after she casts off this mortal coil. I know this because I have felt the warmth of that distant sun up close and personal, and it is impossible that her light could ever go out, even after a thousand thousand years.
Ingrid said something in one of her Anti-videos the week before she arrived here with us in person, “La vie est le danseur et je suis la danse” (Life is the dancer and I am the dance). Ingrid, I am going to bend your words (and the words of Eckhart Tollé) to try to distill what I learned from you— L’amour est le danseur et nous sommes la danse. (Love is the dancer and we are the dance). Merci, chère Ingrid. Thank you, Ingrid, for everything. I love you.
