A Vindication of Love

And then, my eyes opened and love became less about the object of love and more about the Love itself. It was not whom I loved, but that I loved that became important.

I was sitting in an airplane on my way to a conference in Cancun, Mexico, of all places, when this revelation occurred to me. I planned to stay there for a couple of extra days, and I was meeting very good friend there who would help me while away my time on the beaches, in the bars, and in the bedroom. Our relationship was very complicated and had had a lot of twists and turns. I felt excited to meet him in Mexico, but also a little bit nervous. Should I be doing this? Was it a bad idea? Would it just make things more complicated and painful?

My plane reading was a book that I'd had on my shelf for awhile, but that I'd never been able to get to. Eight plus hours of plane and airport time finally gave me the window of opportunity, and I eagerly cracked the book. I don't think I put it down for the whole trip . The book is called A Vindication of Love, by Cristina Nehring, and she uses characters from literature and real life to illustrate the fact that love is rarely as simplistic, safe, and consistent as we are told it should be in our culture. Using the examples of the most famous lovers of history and literature - from Romeo and Juliet to Heloise and Abelard to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera - the author points out that love has nothing to do with contracts or social rules, and everything to do with emotion, difference, and tension.

The book, for all of its intellectual flaws, was fun to read and made it OK for me to be flying towards yet another adventure with someone whose relationship to me not many people in my life - including myself -  seemed to understand. It gave permission for me to explore the idea of loving without limits, of dropping my expectations (even if only temporarily) for the safe, simple, and quietly happy one man-one woman relationship that I had always assumed - and been told - was the norm and my birthright.

And then, in the midst of relaxing my judgments around the consistently supreme weirdness of my romantic life, the veil dropped from my eyes, and the love I felt for this man became not something he did for me, but something that I always held, something that I created out of my own heart. It wasn't about him; it was about me. It was a gift that I carried with me always, something I could give away endlessly and never lack. It's the first time I've felt that in any relationship, always assuming as I have that any love I felt was directly linked to a particular person, and always feeling that that person, somehow, had control over me because he had the power to create or destroy that feeling within me.

Love is not something that someone else does for us; love is something that's always around us, in us.  The person we're in love with acts as a mirror, a prism, for the love that already exists. When we feel love for another, we can absorb that love, sit in it, feel it, embody it, and use it to remind ourselves of the love that surrounds us like air.  And when the love we have with another doesn't look the way we're told it's supposed to look, or if it goes awry, we can still feel the love itself, and make the decisions that are right for us, but know that the love itself is still there, no matter what happens. It's in our heart, and not dependent on what anyone else feels for us, or what happens to the relationship.

The Things that Open the Heart

The talk was on When Hard Things Open the Heart. Spirit Rock Meditation Center is WAY out in the hills of Marin, outside of San Rafael, CA. As I drove, twisting and turning through the unfamiliar neighborhoods, opening out into a stretch of rural road nestled between soft, rolling, green hills, I was shivering from the cold and the wet and from ending a relationship I had hoped would last. Wet grey felt lay across the land that day, dripping and primordial. I didn’t want to leave the house, but in the interests of “moving on” and my sanity, I decided to get up at 7:30 am on a rainy Sunday and go. I had paid $50 for this event, after all, and had never been to Spirit Rock before, though I’d heard about it for years.

Settling in to the meeting hall, listening to the teachers and audience members talk, I heard stories of dead wives, of fathers who had suffered strokes, of losing 401(k)’s to Ponzi schemes, of traumatic brain injuries that crippled a budding career. My problems seemed so trivial in comparison, but, in keeping with the spirit of the talk, I tried not to judge myself for feeling so lonely, lost, and bereft. Sadness was a comfortable old coat I wore, and that was OK. As another teacher put it once, sadness is a teacher, too, and my job was to welcome it in, to talk to it and learn from it.

After lunch, tired from not sleeping well the night before, I decided to leave the talk. I had heard it all before, and though at first I had been comforted by hearing the same information I already knew, now I noticed I was falling asleep during the meditation exercises. So, I snuck out, walked out into the dewy wetness that surrounded me in a strangely comfortable embrace. The world was muffled and resting, drinking in the water that seemed like it would never run out.

I walked, bundled up in my coat the color of the clouds. Up into the Spirit Rock complex, past the dining hall and the dorms, where I found a creek rushing under a tiny wooden footbridge. Stayed on the footbridge for awhile watching the water churn muddily. The water that flowed and eddied around any obstacle without complaint, but slowly, irrevocably changing the landscape as it did so.

Walking back to the parking lot, I passed a serene stone Buddha and made an offering of a quarter, wishing peace and happiness for all beings.

Approaching my car, I felt balanced and almost as serene as the Buddha, though still sad and longing to for home and sleep. I was heading to a friend’s music performance that night, and wanted to get some sleep before heading out. But my car was blocked in, another car – a Honda hybrid - parked behind it, and surrounded by cars so no fancy driving would be able to extricate it. Shit. I couldn’t believe it. In a minute all of my equilibrium collapsed and I shouted angrily at the trees. Wondered : should go back to the meeting hall and ask the staff to make an announcement? The car had a pair of crutches in it; I couldn’t see myself asking someone to come out of the talk, get on their shoes and coat, and walk all the way down here to move their car, especially if they had mobility problems. And besides, everyone would know I was cutting out early. I swore. Should I go back in and sit out the rest of the talk? No, I didn’t want to do that. The smell of wet leaves was calling me. I couldn’t go back inside.

I realized after a few choice comments about whoever designed double parking spaces for a place like this, that getting pissed off at a Buddhist retreat center was missing the point. The universe, I decided, was telling me something. So, reluctantly, I walked some more. Heading down the long winding driveway, past the sign that read “Yield to the Present”, my shoes getting wet from the grass and mud, I walked.

The clouds were doing a dance with the sinking sun – dark grey was interspersed with the most delicate gold that lit up the green hills with some previously unknown color. Clouds were caught up in the hilltops like seaweed, the light grey showing up in stark contrast to the dark green of the pines. I felt like I was in a cinematographer’s dream. I walked down to the highway, watched some nearby horses for awhile, then turned back and climbed into the hills. My feet were getting wetter and wetter – squish, squish. I jumped over a small pond that had formed in a hollow in the grass, and clambered up granite laced with pale green lichen. There was an old moldering bench placed under a crooked, wizened tree. The view was immense and green and rolling. The sky dripped. A damp breeze blew. Hawks circled above, while in the trees, crows hopped from branch to branch, gossiping with one another.

My sadness and my wet feet and the grey sky and the gold-lit hilltops and the crows and the hawks and I sat and watched the world for awhile. There were no problems or solutions, no dashed hopes, jealousy, or angry “should have beens”. There was only this moment. And below me, people sat around in a room and talked about opening the heart. I realized for the millionth time that for me, my heart only opens in a place like this. The only place where I know viscerally how it feels to be interconnected with all beings and the planet: outside, surrounded by teeming life and light and wind.

After that, I trudged down the hill, me and my sadness, and eventually I got out of that parking lot and drove home.

Sometimes you get kicked in the teeth. Not in a bad way, but in a way that says "wake the hell up." That happened to me last night. Someone I love very much, struggling with his own frustrations and fears, took off the kid gloves and made me look at myself in the mirror. After I got over being defensive, hurt, and angry, I realized that, though he maybe could have been kinder about it, that he's right. I am holding on to the pain, I am choosing to be here, in this morass of confusion, hurt, disappointment, and anger. I have lost my way, become somebody I'm not proud of. I continue to cling to things that no longer serve me, and I'm deathly afraid to let them go. My ego is ascendant, trying to force him to be someone he's not because it would feed my ego, because I think it would make me happier. I've become a whiny, depressed, sad little child, hungry for something I can never have, and I continue to seek solace in the cave of my own fears.

In talking about each of our fears, I remembered going into a trance once, at an experiential workshop in Portland, and encountering, in a deep, dark, dripping, primordial and feminine forest, a laughing fox and a beautiful laughing naked woman who took me on a flying, laughing tour of the forest, and who told me I was perfect, that I'm in the right place, that there's nothing wrong with me. I had forgotten the feeling of being OK, deeply, profoundly, perfectly OK, the way the enlightened ones say we are.

Remembering it again made me sad - sad that I had let go of the memory, and sad that I can't seem to let go of other memories and other stories of who I am. Me the lonely, misunderstood one, the ugly one, the one nobody loves. My friend, who sees auras and energy, looked at me with tears in his eyes and told me that he can't understand how I can't see myself the way I am, can't see the kindness, compassion, beauty, and light that he sees. I felt like crying, too, wanting more than anything to see that.

He told me something that others have told me: that one day, I will drop the baggage, just open my hand and drop it, just like that, and that only then will I be free to embody my true self. As he said it, I felt a deep sense of fear, fear of letting that pain go. As if that pain is my only identity - what makes me who I am. Fear of having to discover a new way to be, one where the self-pity and sadness, so comfortable to me, are no longer valid paths. The one where my ego is not the most important thing in the world, where my longing for someone to make it all stop hurting, and my tendency to take out of rage and hurt on others, is simply no longer acceptable. The one where it's my responsibility and mine alone to be my joyous, kindhearted, compassionate giving self, and where I can no longer blame the world or anyone else for how I feel. That kind of responsibility is terrifying.

I don't know if I have the strength yet to let go. Even knowing all this, I feel the fear and the resistance. I make plans to hole up with vodka and movies, to numb myself yet again because I don't want to face the truth. I worry that I'm losing my friend, yet know that this worry is just my own grasping on to something I'm comfortable with, even if our relationship has been painful and confusing almost from the beginning.

For awhile now I've felt that I'm transforming into something, someone else. This kick in the teeth is part of that, I feel. Maybe, as my friend said, I'm not yet ready, but maybe I'm getting closer. Maybe I need more kicks in the teeth. Or maybe I can steel myself to face myself, finally, in a way I never have before. And to let all those old stories of pain go.