25/10/2016

Mins,

“I think it is important that we do not let the serious win.”

There is a certain place in you that I always want to encourage. It is your funny side. I do not see it often enough and it is not the side of you that our experiences together really support but as the years go on I want to live in this part of your house more and more.

There is no such thing as stoic joy. There is no such thing as joy without laughter and lightness. When you enter that quirky, dorky, voice-melding mode I am always there for it.

Now, I am reluctant to say these things to you because you might think that this is my favourite part of you or it might lead to the idea that I always want some sort of performance. I am mentioning it now because I think it is important that we do not let the serious win. Life is serious enough without us frowning at it all the time.

There is a note in the music that surrounds much of life that is pure joy. When we are told to “count it all joy” it is so we can find that note in the most ugly of circumstances. It is the note that speaks to those feelings of beauty and peace and tranquillity captured in most poetry and in our tamer dreams. It is that sense of eternity that says there is something beyond the injured body and beyond the fractured soul. It is a call deep in the human spirit to perhaps glance up at the endlessness of the stars that will outlive the dangers of human cruelty and the purpose driven calamity of demoniac rage.

The call speaks to the eventual cure for all ills but joy speaks to the circumstances of the now and the promise of tomorrow. It joins both worlds. I cannot speak to the billions of people under the crux of the varied injustices of this world in any intelligent way. I can try and share a little of what I know from my small suffering and bleeding. I know there is a light above all lights. I know that it creates joy in the most awful of circumstances.

I know that my joy is situated in your funny now. It is my very loud cure against the silent madness of the world we presently live in. 

20/10/2016

Mins,

“The things that will always be.”

I am sure that is how it looks from the other side of things. I get your point about unity and I am not at all against the idea that we should seek peace when we can with others. It is just very hard to do so. I have a tendency to switch off that I am quite sure is not godly. It is how I defend myself against the crushing indifference of others.

There is something contrary about love as told to us by God. It does not run along the same lines as we imagine as the feeling of love or the acts of being loving. We think of love as narrowing our circle, building a home and making it easier to shut out the muddy world. He presents love as widening the circle of concern, making the community a home and opening up your heart to one person as the first step in opening up to one billion. And then on and on. There is no secret church. There is no inner circle of truth. There are no barriers between what is human seeking the divine so there cannot be barriers between all seekers sharing the warmth of true communion.

I am saying this with a certain pained expression of you being absolutely right. There is this fear that if we are open the wolves will come. Sometimes we forget that fear makes us into wolves. We also forget that the spirit of fear should not control us. The spirit of love, courage and a sound mind should lead us. Love puts our heart in the right place, courage makes us face danger with a sense of the eternal weight of things and glory and a sound mind gives us judgment so we do not fall for everything but only the things that matter.

There is no need to be too neat. We were made to get a little dirty and then a lot dirtier than that. We need the living waters to come cleaning every day. We cannot hide from the filth of the world. We have to face it and speak to the things in us and in others still caught up in that temporal trap. Once we accept the love of God all bets are off. We cannot hide it under a bushel anymore. We have to let it out. It is scary what this will do to the well planned out and safe life but it is joyous what it will lead us to, that glorious life of the things that will always be.

19/10/2016

Mins,

“My lover, down below.”

Does it sometimes feel like we are having the same argument over and over again?  A wise man, wise from experience, once said that every fight is the some version of “you don’t understand me.” There is something to that. Intimacy comes with a lot of baggage. There is the sense of slight in everything. A loose word and some careless act can lead to a mighty fight. There is this heightened sense of betrayal in everything.

Romantic love particularly has this way of making us feel like everything is at stake in every argument. It heightens the stakes because it is one of those things we can choose to walk away from. We are not as entangled as we can be with families and complex friendships. If pushed far enough we can endure the separation and the divorce court, push past selfless love for child and other points of union and escape into freedom. For a long time I did not even believe in romantic love. I did it. I went through the motions. Yet I hid it all under the banner of general love. I tried to keep it out of the specific. I had a template for loving others. I had a template for lovers. I had a wedding date set and all my children named and a way to act and be without really feeling one way or the other. Of course I fell short of all my ideal. First of all, I am human not God or even Godly. Slights hurt whether I was the tin man or not. Second, the other person could see the deadness in my eyes. They kept on wanting more but I was efficient enough to make break ups their fault and keeping the leaking ship sailing my preoccupation. Love was general and I was an army of one spreading the fairy dust of indifference over the un-salty earth.

Then I met you. There is nothing more real than running into the absolute love of your life. It is like getting hit by the fastest train known to man. It comes up on your blindside. I had written about you all my life and tried to dress others in your peculiar dresses but nothing fit. I guess that is the way to describe that first moment of holding your hand: you fit. The joke I always make was finally true in reverse: I was powerless against your light arts. I could not look away. All the things that were hard for me to say or do or be became simple and all the things that I thought were just general became very specific. The problem was you were frightfully human. Just like me. You did not come with angel wings or a heart made to bear my stupidities. You were a real human being and not an illusion. You were not made for me. You had an existence outside me. Yet, you loved me and I still struggle with that. You opened your life to me and told me things I did not want to hear. Still I could not bear to not look. All my troubles, all my perversions, all my excuses for inertia and distance disappeared at the idea of loving another human being from knowledge and wisdom and understanding and with all my emotions thrown in. It is not that you are some deity up above. It is that you are my lover down below.

Everything is real when set to the music of loving you. Of learning to love you.

I still struggle and I still fall. This is fine. You are not Christ to redeem me or God to anchor me in the eternal real. You are my lover, down below. Life is an adventure and you are my co-traveler.

I am not above you and you are not beside me. We sort of mingle into one. I don’t know what life will be without you. You are all my hopes and dreams and fantasies come true but as a real person. It is scary really. It is scary meeting the person you should have waited for.

Yet in your eyes I do not see my own regret. I see the future and finally it is in the shape of love.  

17/10/2016

Mins,

“Love bridges the gap between us.”

It has been a week off writing but not a week off you. Intimacy has this thing it breeds, this sense of seeing each other not as you aspire to be but as you really are. Maybe love bridges the gap. Or maybe it is the drug that makes you immune to the great surge of reality that dawns on you when you realize the person you love is an absolute idiot. It keeps you going in frenzied hope of change.

Larger than that feeling, however, is the sense you get that you might be the unwell part of the crucial duo. The mirror is held up at your own angles and the constant rumours of a blind side. You do not only focus on all the things the other idiot is doing, you get a sense that you might be a bigger flaw in the scheme of things to do with love.

All of this is healthy and all of this is good for love. Love demystifies in much the same way as light and all revealing of truth. It is not to support the lie we tell ourselves about how good we are or the alternate lie that we are bad beyond repair. It is to say, this is who I am and this is who you are and love will bridge the gap between us.

I know we have been arguing a lot lately but we have these specific circumstances that make our fights not only expected but perhaps necessary. In the end we must even learn to disagree with levity and lightness.

I don’t doubt our love in the midst of all our troubles. Every single time it is only thing I never doubt.