Nathan,
I feel that pieces of me are spread out all over the world.
And I feel nostalgic.
Nostalgia
is an identity crisis. I think about everyone I love and know that
they are beautiful. I think about how quickly the details of their
lives are changing and I want to be a part of those changes. I want to
be a part of everyone I love before they get too far away from me.
And I feel that these people are not really
changing. I will know them when I greet them. I feel the pain of
knowing that there are now too many too greet, and they are too far away
from each other. We will not live in a big house, all together. I
cannot spend the rest of my life with all of them. But I like to
imagine spending the rest of my life with each of them, when I am
feeling nostalgic.
Nostalgia is the funniest thing. Thinking about how
odd it is, how lovely and how insane makes me feel excited and upset.
That is part of the process for me...Nostalgia's finish line is the
start of acceptance.
I want to revel in beauty without any fear of
missing it. That is an incredible thing to ask of myslef. I feel that
this incredible thing is within my reach.
I live a charmed life and I am in love with
it. I have found that, for me, there is no substitute for hard work.
There is no substitute for love. If I put them together I have made
room to be free.
I feel joy knowing that I will keep doing
exactly what I need to be doing. I feel joy with my life, the way it
is. I feel joy knowing the direction I am moving in.
I
saw a picture of you on facebook. I
almost do, but cannot fully recognize the look on your face. I wondered
how you are without having any idea; imagining you first drowning, and
then finding that place where misery and joy are married. That place is
an ocean of learning (the same as something more stable). You are
probably, like you so often are, sledding up and down a spectrum
of consciousness every day if not hour. I do not imagine that you are
happy. But if you are don't let my own ignorance keep you from it in
any way. It isn't meant to. I have seen you happy once, for months and
months.....when we both happened to be very happy at the same time.
Joy is so different from sorrow; each should know the other well (if it
is true joy or true sorrow) but still they seem incapable of being
with one another, just being, together. Or maybe, happiness
and sadness come and go, and peace is steady underneath those changing
tides. If someone has found peace there is much less sorrow in
them...sorrow seems to be mostly self created. But that lesson is not
meant for the saddest moments of people's lives. That kind of sorrow
serves a very special purposes. It is impossible to judge what is and
is not helpful to another. I have learned to respect the space of
sorrow even if I am not there. I have learned to respect the space of
joy even if I am not there. I have learned not to worry so much if this
difference keeps people apart.
Pablo Neruda said "Es tan corto el amor, y es tan
largo el olvido." A beautiful description of love. And also not love.
You said I should not take the words in your letter too seriously. I
know: Love is not personal: I know love, so I do not know
"relationship problems". I do not know the wheres or whens or hows of
love because there are none. I do not know the boundaries of love
because there are none. I am not proud of you because you are
nameless.
I also know that knowing love can be effortless at
times and can take effort at others. I am not afraid of effort. When
love requires effort a person has stopped moving with the "flow" of
things. But that has nothing to do with circumstance. Circumstance
exists outside of us and our connection with "flow" is inside, only
inside. Haha, we have had this discussion before...it always appears
peridoxicle on the surface...Just last night I told my neighbor "It does
not matter what we do, but there is a reason that monks sit in silence
among beautiful landscapes.". So many times
this has been a topic of discussion and it is very difficult to talk
about indeed, especially if the person speaking does
not entirely understand how these things fit together harmoniously. As
you said "things are what they are,". There is no right way to proceed
when we have lost touch with flow. It always helps to turn inward. It
always helps to give circumstance as little credit as possible. But on
our own journey we will do what do. And our choices cannot be the wrong
ones. I believe in the transformative power of love. I believe that a
loyalty to love helps guide us back to our "flow" and so I am not
afraid of effort.
Forgive and give space to those who cannot love you.
Be generous in this way and you will know what love really is. And if
there was a chance that the other may find love in you, it would be
then. It is a strange twist of fate that everything we desire can only
be realized when we genuinely find no wanting in ourselves. I suppose
this means that we will never have what we desire....and somehow, this
makes true joy possible. I feel that you could be saying this to me. I
am saying it to you.
Jess