Deep Love Revisited

It's too long a post and too familiar a refrain, this crop harvested just from a weekend of writing at the Big Yellow. Here I am talking about deep love again. But I'm reminded of a quote about writing from Life Coach Martha Graham: It is not your business to determine how good it is...It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

So if reading any part of this post helps you as much as it helped me to write it, I'm glad. And if not, that's ok too!


Deep Love

Shape up
Dig in
Catch a break
Give and take
Steady your chin
Don’t give in
It’s not sin
After today
Have it your way
It’s not too late
So your fate
Will abate
Then it’ll be
Your scenery
With pieces back
And what you lack
Will fill again
And in the end
You will suspend
Concern and care
Instead you’ll dare
Toward brave and true
And wonder who
Could not renew
Every loving act
For you.


Jeez. I’m coasting along in this internal existence where time is on my side and I’ve mastered the important details. I know how to squeeze my privileged budget to drip out that trip to Italy and freely partake of the should-be smoky ambiance of the hole in the wall Smithsonian restaurant. .I meet my friends there almost every Friday night and we laugh and catch up like the family we are becoming. I also know how to navigate the prickle of practical and craft of creative: I get the damn chores and requirements done first on those sometimes grey and sometimes stunning early mornings and then I write. Sometimes I doodle, or walk around this sanctuary of a house with my little canon one shot and click on the words and colors around me. In these times, and some others, I have learned to see the details--details like the woody path in Look Park, just before I turn to the small person-made lake where these happy safe ducks float and bob and occasionally there is a wedding or some other celebration in the smallest open air wooden chapel that always strikes me as a sacred place. I haven’t yet but I would go there to pray in a jam.

I’ve had six months of this good life. Exactly on June 3oth I stopped my billable hour schedule and let my own rhythm put me to bed and wake me through the brightness of the sun or the damp of the rain. I hasten to add that I live this way because my lifelong partner is supporting me: working and keeping track of it all so I can ease into this transition of the writing life. “Ease” is a too safe and not fully honest verb here: I am feeling my way along an unknown wall. It is pitch black and I count on the wall to guide me, one step after another, and it does, but don’t ask me where I’m exactly headed. Somedays I am moderately shocked that I don’t know. And some days I am significantly shocked that it doesn’t matter.

So this is the context, the framework, the landscape upon which I have encountered deep love. How is it that it is so easy for anyone I say that to so easily understands what I mean? Sometimes I say that it is the kind of love that makes you cry, just leaves you standing there wiping your eyes with your sleeve because you never saw it coming.

Other times I say it is the kind of love that leaves you depleted by the sheer volume of its size and scope. Have I not loved like this before, where I can hand it over in the quickest moment and find myself soaring from my generosity simply by the reciprocal look on your face or the wonderous comfort of your voice? How is it that I’ve lived these years, been mostly good and kind to my family and friends, that I’ve excited and elevated the people around me through my uncommon work slant and my enthusiastic energy, and not until now accepted deep love? Deep love: the kind that pays dividends on every emotional deposit—even the quickest glance in the grocery line, even my hand on an unsteady shoulder, even my decision to care and protect someone—not just anyone—who stands outside myself but not just so—who also listens with sacred ears and will stand up at the alter with and before me too?

I am surprised that this is not an easy existence. My heart is equipped with these little toothpicks, ready to protect itself should someone particular try for entry I cannot handle, Little toothpicks: now that’s a fortified defense. This might be the problem. I don’t have a fortified defense. I don’t have much of a defense at all. I am walking along, strolling the crunchy streets of Northampton, planting my sun garden with wide hope and even wider grins, writing poems and painting words with my buddy soul mate, and I am loving deeply. So deeply that I deplete and refill and expand and deplete almost every day.
--------
It should probably be said outloud: it’s not always an easy life. Death, drought, deception and disarray do not escape me. They swirl around like foreign objects—particles of dust descending on the blue pearl of the kundelini itself—but falling only on the surface, never beyond. The blue pearl is protected. I know this from faith. Mostly these days I walk around stunned by the love around me. Sometimes it is quiet, like a prayer, other times it spikes up my spine and I gasp, sometimes I am overwhelmed by it for no other reason than I now understand what it is.

And what I understand is that my path starts with my heart and ends with someone elses. I have been diverted and misguided and several tragic times dead dead wrong. I have twice committed the most unforgiveable crime of betrayal when only love was needed, and I have watched my ego dance around every stupid purposeless question asked and expected of me: Am I right? Do I have power? Will I come in first? Am I strong enough? Smart enough? Full enough? Do you love me enough?

But that was then. That is not today, because today I am breathing and writing on Nerissa’s green covered couch. I am looking at her determined thoughtful face as she also writes and I am seeing her little daugther’s smile wallpapered on her full expression and especially in her kind and fortified lower lip. I am looking around and seeing faces that offer me a place and purpose to be heard, who will treat me kindly, who will take the time, and who will hear the rhythms too. It is not difficult to be right here right now.

But none of this relieves me of the weight of deep love. Living and loving this way means that I have not only diminished my ego, but I have dropped my defenses and cast open my full and fragile heart. Not the defenses you would expect of someone who does not want to be taken advantage of, or misled, or underappreciated, but the defenses that size up and then respond to trust faith and value and virtue. And not the defenses that guard the bank account or strive for the promotion or protect hurt feelings, but the defenses that for all these years have also fortified me--the ones that do not allow entry unless you come bearing gifts. The ones that measure friendship and connection first by what is given and received and only later by what is real and true.

These are first line defenses and most of them are now gone. They melted. Or maybe they shriveled from too little use. Or they recognized the little toothpicks of my heart would give it all up anyway, so what’s the use.

If you asked me what all this means to me day-to-day, I would tell you that I am way more vulnerable than ever before. I am quite unprotected and quite unanchored. I cannot tell you what my life will look like tomorrow or next week or next year. I would tell you I no longer know how to operate my arsenal of protection, and yet I feel more protected in general, not less.

I would also tell you that I now cry at the drop of a hat or the sound of a gentle word, and I don’t try as hard anymore not to. A friend whispers “I love you” and I am in the arms of the angels because I know it is true. My daughter’s voice carries a calm wisdom I have never heard before—she talks about this baby she will soon deliver and I know in the deepest safest place that she is happy— enough of her life has been right that she has taken her place in the circle of life with grace and substance. I would tell you that my partner walks out the back door and I swallow hard knowing she will help me find myself even when it looks like some of me will be lost to her. And I would tell you I look in my mother’s eyes and I know I have the deepest special honor of helping her prepare to say goodbye.

I am transformed. I am transformed by deep love. That’s what it is. Am I happier because of it? No. Am I wealthier, or wiser, or clearer or safer? No.

It’s not any of that. This is all it is, I think all it may ever be: I get up each morning, I put on my red fuzz slippers and my purple silk nightshirt, I make the coffee, feed the dog, skim the paper, greet my family, and I do what is expected of me, and I do what is not expected of me. i look for and welcome opportunities to love, to connect, to work, to create, to share, to understand, to see rightly and laugh my head off.

What has changed—I think forever—is that I now know I am reliable. I can count on deep love. And because I have so much to give, I can count on getting so much back that I will never ever be alone again. Maybe lonely here and there, but never alone.