I admit I’m a hard nut to crack. I often deny myself the experience of love. By that I mean I am afraid of allowing myself to receive love. This is because love is powerful, and erases boundaries. It allows one to merge with another. I have been conditioned in my life to see this merging as threatening, obliterating. I am vigilant, suspicious of loving openings towards me. It is a survival mechanism. I think most highly sensitive people are this way, because of the intensity of pain we have felt with betrayal.
There is much grief involved in the experience of love. This grief lays thick on the heart like concrete slab over soil longing to breathe, to create openings, to invite microfauna and earthworms to penetrate and writhe in its fertile matter. It is the sadness of realizing the extent of lack of love, and it is the apprehension of the love becoming sticky. It is distrusting oneself not to lay claim to this love, to become addicted to this love, to place demands on this love. It is fear of what becomes of one’s individual perspective on merging with this love. It is the fear of allowing one’s precious soil to be exposed, only to be tilled and plowed and pillaged, leaving death and dust in its place.
These fears are not unfounded. These fears are legitimate, grounded in reality. Love can kill you, because it strips you of defenses, and renders you vulnerable, a target for the narcissism that is rampant and valued in today’s society. It is impossible to receive love, much easier to give love. Of course, it is all one movement, which begs the question does anyone really love nowadays, or have we killed those people off?
To love one another is a quality of presence and a feeling, a feeling of total openness and receptivity. It is a rare and beautiful gem. One must be strong to truly love. Strong enough to withstand the accusations, projections and targets, strong enough to say with confidence “I cannot be destroyed”. Those people in history that were killed by others for preaching love, like Jesus, only realized their own lessons upon dying.
An experience of true love will not leave you it will haunt you. You will try to bury it but it will keep surfacing asking you to embody it and honor it. It will remind you that it held you when you were mean, when you were a blubbering mess, even when you were absent on a flight of universal inspiration. It will remind you that even for a second you were able to withstand it. It will remind you that it was a mirror all along.
It will tell you to cry all the tears and feel all the emotions for as long as it is needed. It will forgive you, and tell you that the love you deny yourself is the healing you deny the world around you. Without this openness there is no soil for the world, there is no hope of beautiful existence. Without each one of us working to bear love, there cannot be anything but dirt and dust and ashes.
Here on this page I admit my utter failure. I can see the ash flying in from the West, and every rainstorm here washes everything away in a muddy landslide. I’ve no guidelines or answers for you. I see a lot of tears yet, in our collective future.
How are you faring with bearing love today?
I feel this so much. I love it. I only wish I could do with words what you do with them. But I can not. And I have come to accept that. Instead of writing, I paint. But my paintings are subjective and what people take away from them is never the same. You writing is beautiful!
Hi Frankie, thanks so much for your comment. I have seen one of your paintings ‘live’ at BR Gallery and thought it was absolutely mesmerizing – I’m so glad you found your way to my page. Interestingly enough, I try to write in an impressionistic way, much as I would paint if I could (I cannot, unfortunately). Some people resonate with my writing, but many people do not…all we can do is try to express our truth as best we can I suppose, wouldn’t you say?
Absolutely!!!! Thank you for the compliment! Your work is without a doubt impressionistic! Extremely romantic and some of the most beautiful art I have come across.
I feel like I can not just relate to your words because I am your words. I am what you are writing about. I am here now, I exist. Please keep writing.