love and fear

The other night I was listening to a song and misheard the lyrics, but in doing so, struck upon a line I may have to use in a poem.

More importantly, it got me thinking about this thing called love. It seems that many people don't have the slightest idea of what love is... clarity on this issue seems about as rare as a truly blue colored flower. And, to be sure, I don't pretend I have it all figured out. My life is a testament to the fact of my trying and failing and sometimes succeeding, and, while I do tend to learn from my mistakes and am willing to assimilate new information, I certainly don't have any answers.

What I've observed, however, is compulsive pairing. It seems the phenomenon is two-fold. To begin with, it seems that many people are absolutely terrified of being alone. So much so that they hardly seem to know what to do with themselves if they do not have a partner. It's how they identify themselves. It's what they do with their time. It's where all their interests seem to lie...

Related to this, is what also appears to be a deep and abiding fear of desire. I think this bears further explanation. Most people have likes and dislikes and are pretty comfortable saying, hey, I really like this thing, but often it seems to exist on a very surface level. When one digs deeper into one's desires, sometimes what one turns up is not always what one expects or wants to talk about in polite company. Acknowledging one's deepest desires takes courage and strength, especially if one hopes to not pervert and distort one's desires. True honesty is difficult, even if you are only dealing with the self.

Bodily desires open up a whole bunch of anxieties. Lots of shoulds and shouldn'ts and shame and, of course, lots of fear. What I have observed seems to indicate that the response for many to this kind of fear is this compulsive coupling, which then gets slapped with the label "love" and everybody just sort of accepts it. But (and here's the line I aim to use in a poem) love is more than just a fear of desire.

If one cannot accept and integrate the various aspects of the self, including those desires, if one cannot reach past fear, work through it, and be at peace with the experience, I'm not sure one can find love either. To love one's self is challenging. It requires work and sacrifice. It requires removing the veneers and the blind spots we put in place to comfort us from the truth of ourselves, which is often more unruly than we'd like to admit. It requires that one develops, as Gurdjieff put it, a controlling "I" so that there is, in the self, some consistency, some measure of reliability. One has to have a self in order to share it with another.

And what is love, truly, if not union, communion, partnership among equals? What gift can one give one's lover more fine and true than the gift of one's highest and greatest self, a surrender of that self, a flame ignited within that is so fierce and pure that the beloved cannot help but ignite his own fire within to offer up? When two are not completing the other, but whole in and of themselves and coming together to burn even more brightly together, is that not love? Is that not beyond fear? It most certainly is not compulsive.

This is the love I aim to cultivate in myself. This is the love I aim to share. This is the work I am undertaking and I can't imagine settling for anything less.

between the darkness and the light

I have not emerged from under the weight of all the work I have to complete before Thursday, but I am taking a moment to gasp for air. I've had a lot of things on my mind lately. I won't pretend to understand them all.

Earlier this week, I found myself thinking about love and cruelty. It's no secret that it is easiest to hurt those we love. But I wasn't thinking from this perspective. It was more about the dissolution of boundaries. About trust. I was thinking of the darkness we all carry within ourselves and how we can't truly be present with another in their pain, in their darkness, unless we have a firm grasp on our own. I was thinking of what it means to join someone there, to allow someone inside to see that part of ourselves and to trust them enough to be gentle. I was thinking that one would have to love me, truly love me, in order to be cruel with me. And that in the right hands, with complete trust, this pushing of the boundaries would not manifest in more pain, but would actually harness the power of that pain to liberate one from the darkness. Does that sound fucked up?

A dear friend once said to me that he thought anyone would have a hard time hanging on to me, because I really don't want to be caught. I asked B about this. Wouldn't I know, if I were to meet that proverbial "one" (letting go, for a moment, of all the crap associated with such a concept)? If I were to meet, face to face and heart to heart, the person I was meant to be with, would I not somehow just feel that and know? Don't people know such things? B's response was that yes, people know, but that I would not. I have, he said, too many doubts to be that certain of anything. This struck a chord with me. Am I so faithless? And, the truth is that, for the most part, yes. I believe in many things, in many people. I like to think I have faith in them and in myself. But the doubts creep in. They are poison. I have never had such blind and committed faith in anything and I slightly envy those that can. But how to rectify this? How to reconcile it with all the things I say I believe, and which I really do believe in?

I've had it in my head, I don't know from where, some saying I remember reading, or hearing about, that said, essentially, that when one meets their soul mate (again, casting aside all of the problems, misconceptions, and confusions associated with such terminology) they will not feel the chaos and giddiness that is typically related to new found love, but instead a profound sense of calm. I wonder then at my tendency to want to be swept off my feet, to swoon and gush and otherwise lose my mind? I am so eager to believe in those sensations, but rarely do those things work out. I have had good love, and very good partners with which to walk around in that love. I will not categorize my past relationships as failures because I am somehow still not in the place I thought I wanted to be. Every person whom I have loved or who has loved me has taught me something, usually lots of somethings, and generally quite important things. They have helped shaped me into who I am and give me the strength, daily, to push forward. I can only hope I have gifted them with something of myself and that this is a source of strength as well. I want to let go of the hurt, the misgivings, the confusion.

I want to be anchored.

I realize full well that such anchoring is largely my own responsibility. I cannot look for it in others, though often others provide exactly that. I need to seek out and discover what I lack, which makes me flail under duress, looking everywhere but right here, within me, to find some way of pulling me back down to earth, to keep me from drifting out to sea. I need to become my own anchor. I know this. And yet, there is still this dark space, on the edges of my being and right down in the middle. It is not necessarily negative, this space. There is power there; something which requires unlocking and mastery. It can drive the white light of all my other pursuits. And it waits, untapped, unharnessed. This place, it feels to me, has something to do with my need for anchoring. But I don't know how to access it. I don't know how to push past my own limitations, to dissolve my own boundaries, to love myself cruelly enough, passionately enough to access all corners of my own being and thus free myself from my own habits, ideas, and poor patterns that no longer serve me.

I wish to be uncategorizable. I wish to be worthy of one I deem worthy. I wish to unlock what I have inside, to become free, limitless. This is not to say that I wish to have no constraints, that I want to do what I want and damn everyone else. I simply wish for the limits I have to become conscious ones, the boundaries in place, chosen, not imposed from outside, and certainly not stemming from my own sickness, or weakness. I want to learn to trust completely. I want to be still, in that place of profound calm, without being pinned down or trapped in place. I want to finally and completely have faith.