the paradox of love
the heart-opening kind
i am afraid we are diminished when we love. we are reduced by needing this person. to love seems so against our independence as a free spirit.
and yet, we know it is the thing we cannot live without.
it is so powerful, love, that it makes us better people. that person who inspires us to be better, to be ourselves, to try to be good, to fight for what is right.
when we are on our own we cave into greed, but when we are with that other person, we expand. and in that space, right there, reflexively, we think of all the ways we have been hurt. protectively, we start to think ourselves into more and more problems.
i remember his face after sneaking into the park late one night and climbing up the outdoor gym, into the enclosed space, his eyes sparkling from the motion, his stillness. something about his softness drew me in. i pulled away after a brief moment.
life had a funny way of making me think i needed to be on my own when i knew deep down, i was never meant to do this thing by myself. i despise how vulnerable i feel saying this to you. admitting we need help feels like defeat until we listen out to the response.
i suppose it’s understandable. realizing that you feel a deep fire in your soul for someone raises the alarm. fire purifies and illuminates and it also burns. but wouldn’t it be nice to experience 5 or 10 or 50 years of sustained burning only to realize the whole time you were the fire, not the flesh.
if heartbreak is a reflection of life, protest is a reflection of the imperishable human spirit. protest knows you will not benefit, but your kids might. protest raises the spirit as much as it raises hairs on your forearms and shoulders zapping you internally with that limited resource, energy. it brings you into contact with life and the idealism of truth, the thing so despised it gets rained on by teargas of the mind, the voice we give to the status quo.
we were never meant to only heal alone or live alone or be sad or experience music alone.
it was late when we came back from walking on the grassy, moonlit hill, the time i took mdma. we climbed back into sam’s car and sat there listening to jimi hendrix play his star spangled banner. i felt the awe and the devastation in every cell, in all three of us.
i suppose love hurts for the same reason we feel grief when we look up at the night sky. grief for our smallness, our shortness in life, for our powerlessness against nature. something in us shrinks at the sight of something so totally expansive. nevertheless, something persists. expanding. the mystics from centuries past remind us that we too are the space that holds the sun even when he sleeps. we see ourselves up there, undimmed even as the day tells us to go on.
love and awe go hand in hand. the feeling is deep because it is ancient. awe relates back to the feeling of being hunted, of being vital prey. the skin on your forearms and shoulders get hard and you breathe in and realize this person can break you, and you stare at them, looking up with expansive eyes pleading for life, other parts of yourself, growing.
when we feel awe, we remember our mortality, when we see the night sky, when we think about them. we think of how fragile we are, how diminished. for some of us, we hate that feeling. we react to it with violence. anything but smallness, anything but diminishment. but, to the one who knows wisdom, smallness is our savior.
it is easy and appropriate to think little of yourself when your purpose is big. compared to the grandness of the cosmos, to the order of our lives and function of society, even to the intelligibility of the universe, we are but an element, a note in the whole.
can we live in that tension between the small and the large in such a way that we do not yield to either side?
photography: stills from the film, drylongso
