Allowing for Desire

Portland, Yom Kippur, and New Relationship Energy

I wanted to write a little personal update article about our upcoming move to PDX with some personal embellishments, but it turns out that’s not really what this article is about. As it turns out, a move is never just a move. Also, I just watched some Gossip Girl, so if my tone feels a bit catty or melodramatic in places, that’s why.

In 2005, when I was 16, I wrote Marley a poem. I was moving from Florida to California and started hitting up all the cute girls who went to my new school on Facebook. This was months before I would meet any of them. Marley responded that she resented me for sending the poem to her. A very appropriate response.

Once school started, I took her out to lunch, and she said my driving made her feel unsafe. Again, truly a very appropriate response. Once, between classes, she told me in passing that she felt sick or tired, and I told her to put her head in my lap. We sat on a bench, and she rested on my lap.

I dated a couple of her best friends, but they were white, and she was their hot Thai friend who looked Mexican. They kind of siloed her away socially, it was weird. At the time, I didn’t really understand how close of friends they were and how weird it was she was never included. Anyway, thanks to them for protecting us from one another, we weren’t ready.

More than half a decade later, in 2011, I was visiting Santa Barbara from college. Marley and I went on a yoga date. On the walk home, we got into an argument about God that was apparently so contentious we didn’t talk again for a long time. I was a diehard atheist and she was and is still riding a godwave. A few months later, I met my ex-wife at graduation. We were together for 5 years and then married in 2016 and we divorced by the end of 2017.

As my divorce was unfolding, Marley had been shopping for shoes in Santa Monica and met a girl who mentioned having just been to Santa Barbara for a wedding. The girl asked if she knew who Josh Raab was.

My wife’s friend¹ told my wife, and my wife asked me if I knew who Marley Taylor was. “Supposedly she is into tantric sex.” I immediately followed her on Instagram. We didn’t talk much, but I think I liked all her photos en masse.

Soon after, when the fact that my marriage was failing, or that I was failing as a husband (I still don’t know), became clear, I started to flirt and Tinder. I moved to a little studio in New York and was DMing Marley about my divorce. She was sorry to hear about it and asked if I thought some phone sex would help.

I don’t know what is wrong with me, but I said no.

And then we didn’t really talk for two more years. Then, less than 6 months before the Covid lockdown, we started texting again. Marley was going through a breakup and I had just quit my job and moved to Los Angeles.

We went out to dinner at Elf, she wore a choker, we made out in the vintage Jaguar her ex bought her, and we said goodnight. It was all very LA. But it also felt like a big deal. After this 15-year flirtation with no physical intimacy (and this was not normal because we were both sluts in our own way), our kiss felt insanely powerful. So much energy bubbling like a volcano before it blows.

This time around, Marley and I had seen enough of the relationship world to know that someone’s driving style and beliefs on God were not necessarily important aspects of a strong relationship.

We immediately settled into domestic life

Our attraction felt almost mundane but also a cosmic “duh”. The whole thing had a particular flow, and every decision felt throbbing strong and sexy.

Both of us were so used to meeting someone new and falling head over heels. It wasn’t like that. We were excited but we weren’t crazy about one another. It was an ordinary and familiar feeling in the best way. We really felt like we deeply knew each other without ever having to say anything about it. This stability was based solely on having known one another for 15 years. But those 15 years were almost all empty. I can’t underestimate how little Marley and I had talked. I feel like over those years, we maybe said a few hundred words to one another.

In any case, because we felt safe, we immediately settled into domestic life.

It went on like this for a few months before we intentionally conceived our first son Jahji Siddhartha Rose on the winter solstice.²

Parenting was obviously a seismic shift in whatever dynamic Marley and I had been building over the years. We didn’t take the time to explore—sexually, creatively, psychologically, pharmacologically—before starting a family. If you didn’t know, kids usually kill that exploration. There isn’t time or energy. But kids don’t actually kill that exploration, they transcend it, they become it.

The thing about exploring is that you don’t really know where you’re going or what the terrain looks like. You don’t know what your destination is supposed to look like or who you will be when you get there.

Allowing For Desire

As much as I now wish that I had gotten Marley pregnant in high school and we would have 6 kids by now, I understand the interceding years were needed for us to harness our own fires and understand our needs.

Desire is the universe pulling, pushing, or ushering you in a new direction. I believe it’s vital to give your partner’s desires free range to explore and be fulfilled. Whatever their desires may be, however scary, taboo, weird, annoying, expensive, or time-consuming, it is your duty to facilitate what the universe has in store for them. Your partner is the particular jumble of atoms you’ve decided to bond with in this lifetime. At any given moment, no matter how strong you feel, that bond may break for any reason, from death to cheating to something you can’t even imagine. But, in the time you have the bond, love is the goal; safety is the goal; fun is the goal; and getting healthy in multiple realms is the goal.

While allowing for your partner’s desires is scary and often brain-shifting, I believe it’s paramount not only to a successful relationship but to attaining the potency of your magnetism to one another. Imagine your partner if they had all of their needs and desires met. Desires are energy, and being free to fulfill your desires results in your best qualities being accentuated and consistent. In the polyamorous world, it’s called NRE: new relationship energy. Like all forms of energy, it can be harnessed when used consciously and safely. Again, I’m talking about sexual energy here, but all energy is sexual energy—it’s being aware of it that matters, not necessarily where you go to find it.

This doesn’t mean you both must be “yes men,” blindly agreeing to any desire that occurs. That would be called being unconscious and reckless with NRE.

Marley and I are lucky enough to be good filters for one another. Sometimes, we’ll call one another out and observe that maybe what feels like a desire is a mirage, a misdirection from some old pattern of being, some shadow side, something unhelpful to our core relationship. At other times, we’ll feed on the other person’s excitement and get excited with them because we can see how it will improve our bond.

Apart from both desiring to have a child together, our desires are often somewhat separate—they happen about different things at different times. All relationships are about negotiating and prioritizing these desires.

But our recent desire and decision to move our kids and dogs to Portland feels weirdly aligned. We both feel it pulling and pushing us. There is no arguing for it or against it, there is only the desire, the alignment, and the mystery. I can list reasons like food and politics and money, but the truth is, I don’t know why we are going; we are going to find out.

Burning Down the Temple

Portland has been on my radar for a while. I visited a few times with my ex, a few times with Marley, and when I used to run a literary magazine, I came for a bunch of events.

But that Portland was before George Floyd. Since then, Portland has been through a reckoning—in the public sphere and also on a community level.

It took a battering publicly—but most of that news coverage was for a few square blocks of a 145 square mile city. But I believe that superficial view will fade as Portland continues to grow into its own as a modern progressive city with deep industrial, political, and cultural roots. On a community level, it feels damaged the way someone does after a breakup that needed to happen: broken up, but on the road to fulfillment.

Obviously I haven’t lived there yet so my view is a tad rosey, but I know what I feel. I feel that the community has gone through what I feel is a vital element of spiritual evolution and growth: burning it all down. Instead of trying to move around it’s problems, it is doing what therapists advise individuals do: move through their problems. The community feels like it has been through something together, and that feels new to me, in a country that feels generally lacking in cohesive communities.

Marley and I are maybe a tad too good at burning it all down. Our love has grown over multiple decades, but only recently has been consummated on multiple levels. In 4 short years, we have birthed two children, moved 4 times to 4 homes, and added two dogs. These changes each came with some past identity burning to the ground. We’ve traversed generational trauma, generational wealth, marital conflict, the innards of our psychology, and the various stages of grief these explorations present. We now carry with us more strength and awareness than we ever saw possible, and we know from experience that we haven’t seen anything yet, we know nothing, and death/life always has more bliss and tribulations than we could have imagined.

When you decide to align with your truest desires, the obstacles melt away, and things start to feel freakishly aligned immediately. What happens on the physical level, all the moving parts, is barely a sliver of the whole picture. You only marginally have to pay attention to it. I’m not ready to go full hog into manifesting mumbo jumbo. Still, few of you will deny that when you make decisions that feel good and say “no” to everything else, you start to be surrounded by more and more amazing things, even if those decisions defy logic.

Does this mean you won’t ever get sick or that your business will 100% work out, or that everything will be honky dory? No. Marley and I are generally in flow, but we are severely out of sync on many things. But it’s a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of thing. If you’re moving toward your desire—in general—you’re more likely to get what you want. And along the way, life will still be life.

I’m reading this book called This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. It’s about Yom Kippur and Judaism and grief and mindfulness. Coming across this book was something that felt eerily in flow. It’s about the Jew’s search for home. Wandering through the deserts looking for home. Being chased from one place to another. The temples getting burned down again and again.

When the temple burns and you must leave, you become your own home, you’re born again, you’re reminded of what remains. Yom Kippur is not about fasting just to repent for your sins—that’s a Christian lens.

No, Yom Kippur is about rehearsing for death. Don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t fornicate—pretend you’re on your death bed and feel all of the regret and shame that would come up for the things you have said and done. And then, give that shame to god, allow yourself to be born again, vocalize it to a loved one, and wake up anew in a new temple you never thought you could build. And then start the process over again for another year.

We all go through these cycles whether we like it or not, but staying present in the process means you can harness tons of energy we often spend repressing our desires and feelings. I feel Portland did this as a community, and I want to be part of this next cycle the same way it is going to be part of mine.

That’s what this move feels like to me—watching the burning the temple and remembering that there will always be something left, and that something gets stronger and more pure every time it burns.

And what is that something? I think it’s what I call “me.”

What I Mean When I Say Moving

This whole post is really just an apology for such a long delay in posting and a promise that I’m going to stay on track. Moving means I’ll have more time to write. Lately, as life has been melting away, I’ve been finally able to say “I’m a writer. I’m going to write and write and write.” It’s a desire that has felt silly for a while, but as my paying subscribers tell me, I have something worth saying. It’s sad I need financial remuneration to fully embrace that truth, but I’ll explore that in another post.

For now, thank you for enabling me to document the burning of my temples, and thanks for your patience. I love having you here with me and can’t wait to grow together.

XOXO, Josh

1. Who is named Coco and I just am realizing now thats my son’s name. Cute.

2. Sidenote: Jahji, which means grandpa in Polish (dzadzie), was, unbeknownst to us until years later, conceived the day my paternal grandpa died and born the day my maternal grandpa died. Truly a reincarnated grandpa.