Medicinal Love

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the first post, "Poison Love" here.

Love is, perhaps, the most remedial thing in the world. Most of us are quite confident that love is probably the answer to all of our pain and incompleteness. Love is strong medicine. It is a powerful substance. But, like any potent chemical compound the medicine of love can act as poison perhaps more easily than it can act as an antidote. It is a dynamic, volatile solution that - like dynamite or wet cement - left for too long in the wrong state, becomes obstructive, harmful or both. 

Love's natural state is active. It has to be applied to be restorative. It has to be given and received over and over to act as the remedy. 

The dilemma and the miracle of love both arise from the same characteristics: we cannot survive without love, love is more powerful than anything, and love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. 

We cannot survive without love. We were born incomplete. Individually, and collectively - we find ourselves taking the shape of simple, elegant equations, missing one key variable. We are symmetrical creatures, eternally searching for the piece that would complete our symmetry to make us as whole and beautiful as we sense we should be, but currently are not. Love is exactly what we need. In this need, most of us spend our whole lives. Children need to find belonging and provision. Women need to find value and beauty. Men need to find honor and respect. In this need for love, manifested in what I will not, here, attempt to list in it's potentially innumerable ways, we almost always try to use love for the sake of and solely unto ourselves. That will never work, because love is necessarily relational. It cannot be gained or kept. It must be given to be received, and it must be received to be given. For love to bring healing - both must hold hold true and constantly return to reciprocate. 

Better Me, Ilja Hackman

Love is more powerful than anything. Alone, we are weak - naturally moving towards death. Love is the thing that we can take up - we can wield it, but only for the sake of each other - to move each other towards life. Love is necessarily humble and sacrificial. Those you love are the ones you return back to serve consistently, whether in your mind or in the flesh. Love is to directly engage them, to come alongside and join them, to relentlessly vote with your attention and affection. Those you love are the only ones in a position to give you the love that can heal you, if they are able to rightly make use of it's power. Think about what fits the above description in your life. Really everyone is in love with something or someone, even if only in their minds. They are the ones you are in a continually revolving servant-master, master-servant relationship with. They are the ones that can love you - but how will they treat your trust? Love implies risk for the lover and the beloved. For the lover it is in fear of rejection - fear of what you will become if the love and service you give is not reciprocated, and risk that you will begin to wield love as poison on yourself or your beloved in your weakness. For the beloved it is in fear of mistreatment - fear of the lack of sufficiency and grace in your lover's wisdom for how to wield love to heal your ugly and delicate wounds. In these fears, love has more often been used to do harm than to heal, but even so, love is the only medicine. Like only diamonds can cut diamonds, even the wounds caused by mis-applied love must be healed by love, although it may best be done by a more wisely chosen lover. 

Love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. For most, "love" evokes sunset romance, and "medicine" evokes salve or antibiotics, but medicine and love are really much more broad than that. Either might more completely be defined as "what will do you good," or "precisely what will restore you to more complete wholeness." Both are necessarily subjective, and most commonly non-physical and non-erotic. This kind of love permeates and infiltrates every part of the universe. No one can escape it. No one can escape the need for it. No one can escape the desire for it. It is an implied, inescapable risk of danger - which would be horrible were it not the only exit from a worse fate. To approach love is to face fear, but to remain in love is to continually cast it out. Deep consistent healing love always results in the expansion or creation of families, whether biological or not. Love can rarely be sustained as an applied healing force outside of family.

Each of our lives - each of our families - are a history of love. Love desired. Love remembered. Love abandoned. Love grown out of. Love received. Love abused. Love restored. For each one to make sense of it, the history may be approached as an epic adventure or a tragedy. Many potential outcomes lay ahead of you, but you cannot survive or grow alone. To live in love, you must be a champion. You must continually risk pain and face fear. You must relentlessly serve, then allow yourself to be served. You must consider your resources, and wield them as agents of healing and strengthening. All of us interact with, and make use of love, but only those who take it up to heal, overcome and discover will be able to be healed, find victory, and be discovered.

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the next post, "Constitutional Love" here.

Remember- I'm a Person

Usually it happens when you're walking down the sidewalk. It's the thing I love and hate about being out in public. People don't really know who you are. I was doing just that-- walking back to the office from CVS & decided to grab a coffee across the street.

Walking Shadow. Oliver Raffy, from the walls of Dubrovnik, Croatia

My head was up, laughing to myself as I remembered some dumb joke one of my co-workers had told a few minutes earlier. It was warm and beautiful outside. There was a big truck right in front of the coffee shop with four construction workers leaning up against it facing the street in the sun. They were smirking and I felt them looking at me. I looked up to say hi as a courtesy and immediately shrunk back. Not because they weren't smiling, but because of the way they were doing it.

They were looking right at me, but their eyes said they saw something else. I could tell I was an impersonal invaluable thing to them. I tried not to react, just to dignify the situation, make eye contact, say hello and keep walking. Not all of them were necessarily even bad looking, or too old, or too construction worker-y, but they made us into foreigners by their demeanor. I passed by and continued toward the coffee shop's glass window front and saw them all whip around in the reflection as soon as I'd passed, gesturing crudely. I stopped, my arm halfway reaching for the door handle, then turned around to face them. I stood there, all of us staring nervously, and I was trying to think of what to say.

"Remember - I'm a person," was all I could manage.

We all do it to some degree. We treat each other like caricatures--ideas that meld themselves to what we think the world does or should look like. I don't know any of those men, but I hope that I can continue to treat them like human beings. The truth about that interaction, which is commonplace, is that they were attempting to express their manliness, but did just the opposite.

When a man objectifies or disgraces a woman, he innately dishonors himself --and vice versa. It is impossible to separate. It will always be to the glory of all people (but especially true between men & women) to treat each other with dignity. When a woman cuts a man down it is to their mutual shame, even if he doesn't treat her badly. But by the same token, when one treats the other with respect, it is to their mutual honor & glory.

Holding Back Accomplishment

Maybe it's this city. We value accomplishment. We praise proficient multi-taskers. We're high achievers. Friends my age are drafting federal policies, flying multiple times to multiple continents to do really revolutionary work in the developing world, spearheading really useful and creative local skill sharing forums, or just about singlehandedly lobbying congress to turn waste heat emission into pure energy. Seriously, we are knocking it out of the park. We're doing so much good. That's just who we are and we love it. It's really really fun to be good at your job.

Hopper. Nighthawks. 1942.

But with that, many of our identities are tethered tightly to our resume. And if not, then it's easy to get lost trying to relate to others within a culture of people flirting with the achievement trap (seriously, even the people working at fragers and peregrine have smart phones). I think I've often chosen to invest in my accomplishments and work over people often because I find it's easier to control. When I accomplish something substantial, I can step back, and say, "Here's something to put my weight on. Here's something measurable that shows my value."  Relationships are harder to predict. Even having truly great friends in this city, if I'm not super busy, then everyone else is, so we often miss each other. I literally have to schedule time with my super-close friends who live blocks away two weeks ahead of time. Apart from living in a culture of demanding jobs, maybe having saved the world a time or two makes us idolize that feeling. Even when we're not working on some heroic project, we act like we are, but really it holds us back. I'm there. I think I've forgotten how to really let go and rest. When I have spare time, I often don't know what to do with it, so I start another project. It's like voluntarily acting like a paraplegic. I might have really great arms if that's all I use, but it's pretty dumb not to use my legs just as often if they aren't actually impaired.

I have a beautiful community of friends. Really, it's life changing to belong to a local family that you love and respect. Show me your friends and I'll show you your future. However, I often think to myself that I'd enjoy the people in my life a lot more if we all lived somewhere else. When do we just linger and enjoy each other? Time together is joyful, but always neatly punctuated. I have long, lovely glimpses at their hearts, and it's enough to survive, but we lack consistency and depth in that. Why aren't we so resourceful in casting our nets wide for simple time spent on friendships, even if they may not represent any concrete gains for us other than the love and joy of the person themselves within those moments?

Hopper. The Sheridan Theatre. 1937. 

It's hard to do every day. For example, even just waiting in line for salad at lunchtime, I can barely stand to tear myself away from email or twitter on my phone for the 10 seconds it takes the girl behind the counter to ask me how much dressing I want, do I want bread, and is it for here or to go. It seems a small thing to give her my attention, so I skip over it. She has to raise her voice to get me to answer. I reply, not really looking up. What about courtesy? Why does it seem less significant to show patience and discipline in dignifying our interactions with other people as showing the same in our life's work?  In interactions like these, I make people an object to my goal, and innately reduce myself of dignity by not dignifying them. I sincerely love and am very proud of what I'm able to accomplish in my daily work and continuing education. It is good and right to expend oneself in such a way. But, for all the genius solutions, all the glorious essays & books, and all the huge, admirable accomplishments we all have made, loneliness still creeps in. Especially in the city, because of the fast pace, I think. It does for me, even often sitting in a room full of people I know and love. I have to connect with them. I can't go without it, and I'm one of the most task oriented people I know. Living jointly at this tempo often means cutting people out, not making more room for them. Loneliness should be a sign to us.

To have produced beautiful fruit from your labor is very satisfying, but it's not even close to enough. There comes a point when to continue working without sweet, long lingering pauses to enjoy the fruit and the hearts of those laboring around you, you subtract from yourself instead of adding. 

To Share These Streets with Her Has Been a Blessing

Two years ago today, my mom died of breast cancer after an eight year struggle. She was a beautiful lady, inside & out-- a giver, empowerer, analyzer, counselor, sometimes a nag, loud laugher, organizer & often creative genius. She constantly assumed the position of coming alongside people to the point that I have a hard time thinking of stories specifically about her, despite missing her constant presence over my lifetime. A lot of my best character traits came from her (although I didn't get her amazing legs, a damn shame.)

Like one plant gives shade or nutrients to another, we belong to each other. Life is not an individual experience, it is a collaboration, whether we realize and choose to accept it or not. She contracted cancer of the breast, but that wasn’t what killed her. It was the intimacy between organs- tissue connection and shared body fluids. As each gives, takes, and communicates with the others, they pass on subtleties too minute for them to influence or defend against. It is the same with our lives.

Capitol Hill Rowhouses in the fall.

I find peace and purpose in small things my family and I have shared with my mother-- knowing it falls to us to carry her torch now. In 1976 she moved to DC from Oregon, a greenstick sweet little doe of just twenty three. My parents lived on Capitol Hill while my dad went to law school at Georgetown & she often told me how she used to love the neighborhood and watching the leaves change in the fall here. Over thirty years later, just weeks after her death, I had made the same move at the same stage in life and found myself with a weekly reason to walk through Capitol Hill for the first time in my life. It was not premeditated, although it was a kind coincidence. Below is my reflection on the experience of that sweet happenstance one evening after I made the connection, just as autumn was setting in.

I let my mind wander and we're both twenty five, with bright brown eyes and long auburn hair, wandering through the rowhouses on Capitol Hill in the fall, enjoying the neighborhood, wearing burnt orange-brown boots dad bought for her and her leather gloves. Both with peaceful, satisfied, subtle smirks on our faces with little noise but the leaves crunching beneath our feet and sporadic conversation.

We are full of life, healthy, at rest and going places. I shake myself back to the physical reality and it is just me. To share these streets with her has been a blessing.

On Death (briefly)

Death is always painful for the living. Even for those who believe deeply in a better life after death--the loss of a loved one produces (as it well should) a powerful reaction. It can be a beautiful thing. The experience of death WILL re-shape the lives of those who survive. "Normal" is different now. The question is how will we be re-shaped?

The grief of those who mourn is directly related to the relationship they had with the person who died. Initially, it's like being burned--the tissue is exposed and anything that touches it is either excruciating or doesn't register at all. To move on and form new bonds is more difficult to do--like skin that doesn't grow back the same over a wound.

In the best cases, families that experience loss are drawn closer together. One relationship is severed, but in speaking of the dead often, we honor the past relationship and simultaneously build new bonds with those still living. When my mom died, I worried that my family would fight more without her there to mediate. I am finding instead, a sweetness in our relationships that honors her memory. My father's sickness & death also uncovered more of a deep compassion in us for each other that may have been there in some form earlier, but is now shared and seen. In many ways it's what we needed.

Grief is often the process of forgetting and remembering over and over. It will never be normal for a loved one to be gone, no matter how many years are lived without them. I do not yet identify internally as a child whose parents are dead. It sounds strange to say, because I forget that it's true. In telling their stories to each other--we continue to learn about my parents and know them better.

The challenge in death is to go on living. To be affected, but not defined by loss. It is a beautiful thing that we cannot walk through this without being changed--we belong to each other and it's right to feel deep pain. Grief is never over--but to continue on and to live is glorious. Life is worthy of pain suffered and does not erase, but does surpass grief. In time.