The Earth, Further and Further.

1.) Still seeing so much good in the world despite being abandoned, neglected, disregarded, put-down, belittled and otherwise shit on by nearly everyone I thought I needed love from. 

2.) Remaining love-driven above all else! For being an endlessly self-regenerating watering-hole of love.

3.) For keeping myself beautiful in accordance with my own personal conception of beauty, in which beauty in aesthetic appearance is the highest plane in a hierarchy whereby inner beauty is a prerequisite to outer beauty. A striking and attractive face can be just that, but there must be a beautiful person—a kind, compassionate, sympathetic, thoughtful, loving person—within to turn those looks into something beautiful. 

     3.5.) I see myself as beautiful because I know what fills my heart. I know with the certainty that only I can know, that my intentions are pure and always rooted in love. Despite what may gurgle up from below from time to time, I do not allow myself to act in vengeance or spite or jealousy, nor in greed or competition. (Although perhaps sometimes in fear.) To be filled with love is to be beautiful. 

4.) For purging from my experience all feelings of embarrassment and of being offended. Embarrassment is nothing more than handling a situation badly. To never feel embarrassed is a statement of grace. And to never feel offended is a statement of logic. The thoughts and behavior of any person outside of myself have no logic or reason to cause me distress. People simply are how they are, independent of who happens to be around. Sometimes, when I happen to be around, people are rude, tactless, inconsiderate, and worse. Only my reactions to these situations reflect back on me, not that I’ve been in them. 

     4.5.) I’ve bettered the rest of my life in internalizing these idea(l)s. 

5.) For endlessly self-perfecting in these qualities. 

Beside you,
lying down at dark,
my waking fits your sleep.

Your turning
flares the slow-banked fire
between our mingled feet,

and there,
curved close and warm
against the nape of love,

held there,
who holds your dreaming
shape, I match my breathing

to your breath;
and sightless, keep my hand
on your heart’s breast, keep

nightwatch
on your sleep to prove
there is no dark, nor death.

The Six-Word Memoir Project

The above link will direct you to Smith Magazine, home of a global project known as The Six Word Memoir Project. (See also NPR, The New Yorker.) I heard about it in this TEDtalk by Sebastian Wernicke, in which he uses only a handful of examples to illustrate a point on brevity. But one of the examples he reads is: 

FOUND TRUE LOVE, MARRIED SOMEONE ELSE. 

(It turns out to be by Dave Eggers.) 

When Wernicke read that aloud, the audience had a laugh. I had a pang of heartache twist through me and onto my face in an expression of horror. My overwhelming empathy! A memoir, a LIFE in six words defined not by wealth or status or success, not even by travel or activity, but by love, and lost love at that. I wonder, how many among us might borrow the phrase for their own 6 word memoir? At present I might write mine as: 

RESEARCHER ON LOVE. LOVES THE SUBJECT.  

or

LOOKING FOR THE ANSWERS: A DERAILMENT. 

But in 15 and 20 years I should hope to rewrite myself:

MOTHER AND WIFE, BURSTING WITH LOVE. 

or 

FULFILLED. INSPIRING OTHERS TOWARDS THE SAME.

But definitely NOT something like, FAMED PSYCHOLOGIST WITH GREAT DINNER RECIPES, or NEW YORKER blah blah blah (blah), or  WRITER, etc., or REDHEAD, etc., or any other epithet centered on any identity outside the realm of love.

The implicit instructions to writing a 6 word memoir are to decide what matters the most to you and then assess how you’ve done for yourself with it. Even if I do become a famed psychologist, writer, lifelong redhead and urbanite, none of those things even make the running for the theme of my memoir, of my life! It’s love. It’s always been love and it will always be love. 

FOUND TRUE LOVE, MARRIED SOMEONE ELSE. My heart gulps at the thought of it and my head bows to the many who read their own lives in those words. I’ve heard enough explicit confessions, witnessed enough passive complacency, been told about enough regret, enough uncertainty, enough longing to know that Dave Eggers wrote a common story. 

It freezes me with fear, because I know the the truth to my own words, that nothing else runs against love as monarch of my meaning in life. The subject is set, but what of the predicate? What if it’s not up to me? If it is beyond my control? I can only love as I love and hope for a garden to grow. But what of the weather? What of the wild? What if I, too, have him only briefly before he swims back into the vacuum of the world, a diamond slipped from my hand into a city of broken glass? What then? 

A memoir in 6 words:

TENACIOUS YOUNG LOVER FEARS FUTURE PREDICATION

If I reminded myself that I will never play like Mozart, I would never sit down at the piano. If I allowed myself to think that I will never write like Shakespeare, I would never pick up a pencil. And where would physics be today if every scientist post-Einstein suffered the paralyzing pressure of never measuring up? We have learned to revel in our efforts for our efforts’ sake. It would be an act of impoverishing deprivation to allow comparison with living gods to incapacitate our ability to enjoy our own achievements and pleasures. Thus, we have learned to take pride in lesser victories: a perfectly paced trill, the recollection of just the right word, the wrong answer bringing us one step closer to the right one.

So why can’t we allow ourselves to do the same thing with love? It seems perfectly healthy for those who want to paint to keep on painting, regardless of whether immortality may ever be achieved. But it seems fraudulent to feel content with anything less than maddening, commanding, utterly stupefying love. Love is supposed to slam a brake on the axis of the Earth, and anything less than the impossible perfect is romantically unacceptable. Everyone learns that Romeo was of little more than misguided callow passion, and yet still we cry, Wherefore art thou?

“This photograph is my proof. There was that afternoon, when things were still good between us, and she embraced me, and we were so happy. It did happen. She did love me. Look, see for yourself.” 

This is my proof, Duane Michals, 1974

(via theformofbeauty)

My life is essentially as good as it is ever going to get. I am swimming in a sea of golden hearted friends, I am well-liked, excelling in graduate school; I am well-fed and well-read. I dress myself to express my inner mood, which I am allowed to feel and nurture and coddle and cry about if I feel like it sometimes. I recently wrote out my gratitude epiphany (below), but where I’m going with this is not quite as positive. 

My life is full as a soap bubble filled with tremulous light, and yet I feel as though constantly quivering on the cusp of the instant it all bursts. I am aching for someone to love and share this light with! My life is filled with love, but it feels like a belly stuffed with grains when the body aches for nutrients. Food is food and love is love but nothing compares to fulfilling the craving! And what I crave is so precise, so rare, a delicacy.

I’m thinking of receptors and molecules, how they fit together like lock and key. Some locks are better than others, binding only with the perfect match. Others are more easily confused and deceived, such as by drugs. Me, I do not get intoxicated with the generic version of my desires; I wish that I could. I wish I could be as these girls I know that always have men around, all of whom make them equally happy.

And why am I inculcated with guilt and shame to confess these feelings? Feminism has had the very unfortunate effect on romantic love of making us believe it should always be of secondary concern. We regard the thirst for love as a gluttonous lust, even as pathetic, as some symbol of dissatisfaction with the self; it is not a respectable ambition. When someone aspires to succeed in sports or academia or their career, we say they are dedicated, committed, passionate! Why don’t we give the pursuit of love the same honor? We all know that love can make us happier than all else, so why not devote ourselves to finding it, developing our techniques and strategies, studying ourselves, seeking mastery over it? Instead we turn our attentions to our appearance, our possessions, our resumes, our bank accounts.  

Well I speak with conviction and confidence when I repeat that I am brimming with self-satisfaction. Yes, I have a fabulous pack of friends who care for me deeply, and yes all of my needs are met: my emotional needs, my physical needs; they are beyond met, they are indulged regularly. I sit on the throne of my cozy bed swathed in silk and down and I feast on the banquet of life. And I am grateful for every morsel, yes. But without a love to share it with, without shared romance I do not feel truly full, fully satisfied.

Sharing. Sharing is a gift, it is an act of giving. I want to share my life, my treasured life, my very life with someone. But it cannot be just anyone, and I don’t even know who it can be, I’m just hoping I’ll be able to recognize him among the throngs of ordinaries. Not only am I hoping he’ll be there, that there is such a he, but I am trusting myself to find and identify him, based solely on intuition. This is absurd. Love is impossible. 

I’ve made offers to share my life, the life I find so beautiful, with men I’ve thought I could love, and I’ve had this, my most esteemed of gifts, rejected: a most disabling dismissal. I can’t bear how disappointing it was this last time. I have post traumatic stress. After my car accident, I was jumpy for years anytime I found myself in a car. I had anxiety around the stimuli associated with the past trauma, and now I will have that same anxiety with what is supposed to be the best feeling a human being can experience. No feeling is more satisfying, more elating, more thrilling than that and now I question if I could ever again relish those thrills. I will be cautious, I will be suspicious, I will be on guard. Because I can not suffer the trauma of that disappointment again.

I fell from too high. I broke my heart like a bucked-off jockey might split his skull. I won’t get back on that horse I’ll just walk beside him from now on. And should he knock me down again? Will I abandon him forever? Is this how it goes, giving up on love? A fall in several steps, each one representing a disappointment of unrealized hopes and beliefs and dreams? 

Or I could be like that madcap jockey who gets thrown from his horse but continues to climb back on the wild thing to see where it takes him, regardless of the consequences at risk. How committed to love am I, really, if I allow the setbacks of injuries to dampen my courage, to constrain my ambition? I remember when Keri Strug injured her ankle during the 1996 Olympics—she kept going and she won. That is my inspiration in the savage sport of love. 

In fact, I wrote an analogy of love and sports around this time last year. Upon review, this may be one of my favorite pieces of my own writing. 

I haven’t had a lot of nice things to say about love lately. Maybe it’s because the whole idea is a crock of shit, or maybe it’s just because it hasn’t given me a fair shake. (Remarkably me and just about everyone that I know.) Regardless, I was a strong advocate of this fundamental human belief just a short time ago. After all the battle scars I have walked away with, I still swore I would never give up on the fairytale. The idea that the perfect someone was out there waiting was a necessary delusion, as it probably is for everyone because ultimately no one wants to be alone right?

As life goes on however, the majority of people don’t necessarily grow up or become wiser, they just become less idealistic. Dreams die hard when you’re half way through the race and realize you are nowhere close to the head of the pack—you’re just thankful that you aren’t the schmuck behind you. A series of defeats starts to slow your pace in order to get you ready for the very real conclusion that you will one day be dead. Your weight, your hair, the aches, the pains, the lack of energy: all signs on the highway of life that get more noticeable as you travel down the road. It’s laughingly nudging at us, reminding us of what’s really important:

Time.

You see, (and if you dont I will quickly point out to you,) love is an enemy of your time. 

Love sounds groovy doesn’t it? Affection, kissing boo-boos, wild crazy sexual maneuvers you didn’t think were possible. Comfort. All great justifications for man and woman to feel compelled to achieve this blissful state of happily ever after. Sadly, we know from the heart wrenching tales of others, as well as our own painful experiences that we aren’t all cotton candy and teddy bears on the inside. We have all been on the other side of the coin, we have been the ones bitched about to the sympathetic ears, and we have been called an asshole or a bitch by those naive and biased sympathetic ears. Love, as our already unrealistic, cinematically-influenced culture sees it, is the ultimate idealistic notion, and idealism is the blinder of moderation, consideration and truth. 

A relationship, as many comedians have time and time again pointed out, starts out showcasing all the finer points of our character. We express our selflessness, our compassions, blah blah blah, our ideals. We all believe in our ideals to a certain degree because in a perfect world, that would be us to the last detail. The other reason is that if you don’t believe in your bullshit, then 9 times out of 10 your prospect will see through your hollow banter as well. Half truths inevitably pave our roads to half successes because we would rather use maneur instead of mortar. (Most people don’t have mortar handy anyway.) 

Love is built on WEs and OURs. The most illogical thing two individuals can do is to think they could even remotely successfully achieve this WE and OUR bullshit. I have a will of my own, and so do you. So why is it that people could even desire being subjected to the expectations and willful demonstrations of another? Normally, there is a passive and aggressive role in a relationship—and this is the problem. Wearing the pants is not new psychology by any stretch of the imagination but it serves memory to point it out that WE and OUR is a clever way of saying MY!!! Eventually the aggressor takes control of the relationship and the passive person starts to suffer at the the lack of decision making they actually contribute to their own lives thanks to this WE/OUR propaganda. Their life, the one they were accustomed to freely decide upon and alter any way they felt fit, suddenly became the sole intellectual property of WE/OUR incorporated. Your life is no longer your own, and your hopes and dreams are now OUR hopes and dreams. Your clock is still ticking and time is running out with less ownership of it. “Love” is the enemy.

We all have good or best friends but on the whole most friendships never reach the critical meltdown that relationships do and here is why: Friends love, respect, and care for each other, and some occasionally even fuck and are fine with this. They say sex is what ruins it all for people but hark for I say this is bullshit. It’s the childish human tendencies we never grow out of that ruin the experience. It’s codependency. It’s two people having two different agendas and not compromising. It’s people holding expectations of your behavior to cave for the sake of “love” while you simultaneously expect the same. It’s when people fail to express themselves independently for fear of misrepresenting their Significant Other. 

Ownership. The dead end result of a relationship is always ownership. People make great pets, but they are so much more. Your partner says a lot about who you are, as they reflect your tastes. Nobody wants to look bad, especially at the expense of someone else, so it’s more than likely that instead of accepting you for who you are, there are definitely going to be some changes to cover up those blemishes. Now don’t fret because these “blemishes” are mostly trivial and highly disposable things like your friends, the way you dress, and/or the hobbies you’ve invested your life in. All the better to just not be a part of your life anymore. Now let’s throw in the social pressures of material wealth, quality of life, planning for OUR(my) future. But wait there’s more! Add in a dash of jealousy, the fact that there are plenty more qualified candidates, better looking and more successful even, cellulite, pot bellies, age undefiable wrinkles and many more tragedies that could at any moment culminate into something that is nothing less than near fatal and will be sure to breed a healthy cynical outlook, much like mine.

To end on a positive note, if you read between these lines of cynism, love is not the enemy, but the manner in which we approach it—with forceful expectations that the person we claim to love adapt to our own will. As an aspiring psychologist and longtime studier of human nature, I do think that understanding these traps is the foundation to avoid falling into them. But I also think it takes a lot of work, which we’re all happy to put in, at the beginning, but that work ethic typically loses momentum over time. What is needed then to keep it from petering out after a year, a marriage, a baby? My hope is that within the next 23 years I’ll have an answer for that one. 

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me — the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house— , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…

(via poetbabble)

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
jar of octopus, cuckoo’s cry, 5-7-5,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping,
another 75 of what you think staring out
a window. I don’t care about the plot
although I suppose there will have to be one,
the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent
seas, danger of decommission in spite
of constant war, time in gulps and glitches
passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,
speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled
outracing the wolves on the steppes, the huge
glittering ball where all that matters
is a kiss at the end of a dark hall. 
At dawn the officers ride back to the garrison,
one without a glove, the entire last chapter
about a necklace that couldn’t be worn
inherited by a great-niece
along with the love letters bound in silk.