Deep Love

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Illustration by my beloved friend Laurel Gaylord,

a.k.a. Studio Lolo,

used without permission

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This is a long post. I know better, and I beg your indulgence. But this essay somehow found me tonight and since I've been looking back as I look forward, the time seems fitting to share what I wrote almost four years ago; what I wrote before I called myself a Writer.
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I stand by it. My falling into deep love didn't exactly turn out the way I expected. My heart would be stretched almost beyond my capacity. And yet, here I am, wounded even, but still loving, still choosing love.
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I'm not alone. Maybe that's why each of us struggles sometimes. We have been to the alter of love, and we cannot settle for anything less....♥
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Deep Love
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In my counseling practice, I sometimes quote my favorite line from Paul’s Simon’s “The Boxer”—the one that says “After changes upon changes we are more or less the same.” But lately I’m thinking, “Pardon me, but I don’t think so”.
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These days 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.
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I also know how to navigate the prickle of practical and craft of creative: I get the 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 camera and click on the words and colors around me. Finally, I have learned to see the details-- even the woody path in Look Park and the small person-made lake where happy safe ducks float and bob and occasionally there is a wedding or some other celebration at 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.
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I’ve had six months of this good life. Exactly on June 30th 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. Some days I am moderately shocked that I don’t know. And other days I am significantly shocked that it doesn’t matter.
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So this is the context and the landscape upon which I have encountered deep love. How is it that anyone I say that to so easily understands what I mean? Sometimes I mention 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, and they understand that too.
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Other times I say it leaves me depleted by the sheer volume of its size and scope. Have I not loved like this before? How is it that I’ve lived these adult years, raised a family, worked hard, been a good citizen, and not until now truly felt and deep love all around me? Deep love: the kind that pays dividends on every emotional deposit—even the quickest glance in the grocery line, my hand on an unsteady shoulder, a decision to care and protect my friend who listens to me with sacred ears and will stand up at the alter with me, no questions asked.
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Don’t get me wrong. I already know how to love. And I’m not prone to melodrama. I’m also not in a permanent state of bliss. This is something altogether different.
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And actually, it’s 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 wide 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 again almost every day.
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Still, no matter how good it gets, death, drought, deception and disarray swirl around me like foreign objects—particles of dust descending on the blue pearl of my strengthening spine—but falling only on the surface, never beyond. The blue pearl is protected. I now 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 understand what it is.
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And what I understand is that my path starts with my own heart and ends at someone else's. I have been diverted and misguided and several tragic times dead dead wrong. I have twice committed the most unforgivable 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?
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But that was then. That is not today, because today I am breathing and writing on a green covered couch, looking around and seeing faces that offer me a place and purpose to be heard, who treat me kindly, who take the time, and who hear the rhythms too. It is not difficult to be right here right now.
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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 toothpick 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 under appreciated. And not the defenses that guard the bank account or strive for the promotion or protect hurt feelings.
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These first line defenses 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.
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So if you ask me what all this means to me day-to-day, I will 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 will tell you I no longer know how to operate my skimpy arsenal of protection, and yet I feel more protected in general, not less.
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I will 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 says “I love you” and 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 enough of her life has been right. 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. I look in my mother’s eyes and I know I have the deepest special honor of helping her prepare to say goodbye.
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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.
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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 sometimes 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 to laugh my head off.
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I am blissfully present. And surprisingly safe. Perhaps this is where I started, where I’ve been hiding all along, where I will now live and thrive. And perhaps, after changes upon changes, I have become more or less the same after all.