Day 11 – Your beliefs, in great detail

I believe that if you love, then you will know comfort in this world and beyond.  If your capacity to love surpasses all other emotions, you will be successful.  I think I started believing this at a young age.  In fifth grade, or so, I realized that there was something wrong with me- I was growing less aesthetic in a time when most girls were starting to blossom.  In the rabid, dog-eat-dog world of middle school, my social and emotional stock was quickly plummeting.  This is when kids start doing weird shit like going “goth” or garnering an eating disorder.  This is when the first thoughts of suicide enter your mind.  I could have gone down those paths- but I didn’t.  Instead I chose to love.  Even as a young person, I was able to see the core of pain in the mocking of others.  I knew their hurtful words were misguided and misdirected reflections of their own insecurities.  How did I know this?  Well, partially because it was already in my spirit, but also because church, children’s books, tv and Disney movies all told us so.  So even when it hurts, and even when I feel like I just want to catch a break, I love, instead of despairing.

I believe that people do not tell one another “I love you” nearly enough.  I believe that when you say, “I love you”, it is the breath of God spreading a blessing on the person you say it to.  It’s like those three words are an incantation, a perfectly formed block of words that unlock the heavy burdens of anger.  If enough people said “I love you” enough times to the right people- this world of war would end.  I believe that all faith based societies pivot on sharing and spreading the emotion of love- and all the intolerance that is carried out in the name of religion is actually just fear of love- of sharing and expressing love.

I believe that Jesus and a whole bunch of other cool dudes like Muhammad, Buddha, Martin Luther, George Fox and Gandhi figured this out and tried, in the most vocal of ways, to unite people under a banner of love.  Even though some of the message has gotten confused, I believe that the core of any and all religious texts, is love. God is love.  People take many paths to get to the God is love realization, and I don’t think that one is any less valid.  I do think that my path works for me, I believe in it with my heart and soul- I know that I have found love, and therefore, God, and it is my duty to love and forgive and teach love and forgiveness in every way possible.  Don’t get me wrong, it IS hard, and I fail all the time.  It’s easy to hold a grudge, and it’s easy to let people’s cruel words and violent actions wreak havoc on your love mojo- I let it get the better of me a lot.  But I keep trying.  Because I know that through my awesome, glorious, powerful and all consuming love, I am helping the people I love to make their way to God.  And that’s freaking awesome.

Day 06 – Your definition of love, in great detail

Oooo, really throwing me for a loop here.  Yesterday I am talking dikon radish and today I have to define possibly the world’s most illusive construct?  Alright, blog meme, I’ll see what I can do (do you like how I have to throw my two cents in about each day’s subject before I answer the question?)

The Greeks, whom you know I admire deeply, had four different definitions for what we currently refer to as “love”:

1. Agape love is unconditional love. It is love by “choice” even if you are not pleased. A good example is “God loves us with our faults.”
2. Philia love is the dispassionate virtuous love, guided by our likes or our healthy or unhealthy needs and desires.
3. Storge is the word for family love and the physical show of “affection”, the need for physical touch. Sometimes the love between exceptional friends.
4. Eros is the physical “sexual” desire, intercourse. It is the root word of erotic, and eroticism.

Those Greeks were pretty smart, weren’t they?  I guess this is the sort of “definition” that I aspire to.  Breaking down the different types of love makes it easier to rectify that the one word cannot truly be defined by one, singular meaning.  In fact, there are many more loves that the Greek definitions don’t mention (like the protective, sometimes ridiculously fierce love a person feels for their dog).

So, I’m not Greek.  And even though I admire and appreciate their help and their useful definitions, I am not Greek and this is not their blog.  So I suppose, I have to come up with a definition of my own.

I’ve loved a lot of people in my life, a lot of things too, and one thing I am sure about, is that love is one of the only things that you continue to do, even when it hurts.  If you smashed your foot in the door, or sliced your hand on a mandolin, you would feel pain, and you would go out of your way to avoid ever doing that again.  Not so, with love.  Despite the HUGE chance that it will be continuously painful, people pine and strive and go through unspeakable torment in the sake of love.  What’s more, when love ends for one reason or another, the pain is even more intense, but that makes a person even more likely to look for new love faster and more desperately.  On a similar but different note, love also defys pain in a more literal sense when given the fact that many people would put themselves in physical danger to save a loved one.  All the various and complicated ways you can define the deep, spiritual, ethereal qualities of love are beautiful, but to me it all comes down to the basic fact.

Some might say that they can give examples of other times a person my put themselves in harms way, not for love- money, for example, might be their claim.  I argue that the desire to acquire money is only a person’s manifestation of their desire to gain love.  A person wants money so they can buy good and fancy things so they can enjoy life and attract the attention of people and earn their love OR they want money in order to help other people and in doing so gain their love.

So, what it boils down to in the end is that my definition is this:  Love is the only thing that is stronger than a person’s instinct to avoid pain/ruin.

 

Love Letter

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110100101100101011100110010000001110011011001010111100001110101011000010110110
0011010010111010001111001001011000010000001100111011001010110111001100100011001
0101110010001011000010000001101100011011110110011101101001011000110010000001100
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Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?~ Greta Garbo

It’s almost 2 am and I am alone in my apartment.  I can’t sleep.  I did a full day’s worth of activities, including a web steering meeting, a communications team meeting, a screening of the batman movie (amazing! disturbing!) with Serge and some general cleaning and organizing of the house space.  There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to sleep, and yet, there it is, sitting in the small of my back as I lay here on my stomach, typing, the weight that is cool and clammy and oppressive, daring me to move, daring me to make a sound, daring my thoughts to stray to a place where the colors and sounds are much more simple and  much more connected to memories.

You know, without him here, the house just feels wrong.  Even with an echo of a dinner party, even with company in my bed, there is still something missing- the smell of his wet soap in the shower or the dim glow of his computer screen from his bedroom.  It makes me wonder when it happened that a solitary world became a joint world.  I like him better than practically any other person I’ve ever lived with unless you count school roomates which personally, I would not.  He’s a very good companion. Safe, reliable, steadfast.

Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep- but it might also be the feeling of overwhelming dread that I cannot seem to shake- I cannot seem to find, in my head, the way to work everything out so that I can make it through the rest of this run of BARE, pack the house, move, live in a compromised space until our new place is renovated,  start a new semester, teach a class, plan a season of fudge…theres even more things- a few weddings, Lavan getting spayed, and officially changing all of my documents to MA ones, to  name some… it isn’t that any one of these items is overwhelming, or even all of them as a unit- it is that I am missing something that I cannot quite name.

It’s a feeling.  Like the glimmer of joy I got when Anise facebook messaged me from Spain, a jolt of electricity that comes when you know that someone you delight in is thinking of you- that notion that for the briefest of moments you are more than just one person, but a combination of feelings and emotions and slimier stuff like blood and marrow from two different people.  I don’t know how it is that he can still make me feel that way, and why Serge, for all his loveliness, doesn’t make me feel that way- which makes me think like it is pointless to go on dates with him, even though he’s a very nice man.  I don’t know what I want except to feel that glimmer of joy more often than I do now- I guess I never put the words together before, but I’m looking for my east coast, appropriate, all weather Anise.  I don’t know where he is, but if I could find him, I’d feel a lot better about the months ahead.

Do you keep dating a nice person you don’t ultimately think will be the right person?  I mean, generally I think the answer is no, but in some cases isn’t it healthy to just -be- dating, even if they don’t fit the pristine model?  I mean how many Anise’s are there out there?  At least my model boy’s merits are almost purely intellectual (though the hair was nice- and the tallness) and spiritual.  Sigh.  This isn’t helping me to get to sleep;  Maybe a shower will help- or a glass of green tea.

pointless rambling of an insomniac.

Ever Virgin.