Constitutional Love

This is the third in a series of posts about love. Read the others in this series, Poison Love and Medicinal Love.

Love is, perhaps, the most foundational thing in the world. The things a person identifies with, the places they hold the most confidence for where each one stands in life - the way we love or abuse love becomes our own constitution - a foundation by which we establish ourselves and build onto what we find. These establishments allow us to build and grow. They are given to us and we are built into their forms by love, or the lack of love. This is true even in toxic, mutilated parts of our identity - which can also form platforms for growth, but only like tumors - quickly and parasitically causing more demolition than construction. We are bound incredibly deeply to our own understanding of love and what connection means. It is the basis for all we do and manifests itself in all forms of our life. 

I want to make something of myself. I want to build something, but how, and what exactly? I'm not sure. So I go to my thoughts, search my talents, connections and ambitions. They come from the reservoir of what I am drawn to. Who I know or want to know. What I have compassion on. What excites me. I sit at my desk and stare at my computer screen, dreaming and searching for how I can build up and be built up. We commonly call these things our babies - and sometimes they actually are - but does the artistic wisdom and practical discipline it takes to build up a human child, a healthy company, an actual building, or any thing else come from entirely different places? We spend our lives building things. Creating edifices and looking to be edified. The passion and dedication we use to set out and remain on these courses - especially if repeatedly - points directly to the character of our individual constitution in love.

WWII Cannon Foundation, Three. By Wink.

The best place to start when you're trying to build something - to establish a foundation or make a create a new constitution for a way forward, includes two types of information: historical and differential. What kinds of similar establishments have already been made, and how were they constructed? How is what you are going to build be different and take what has already been done to new levels? Both must be thoroughly and simultaneously considered in overlap and by contrast and from every conceptual and physical or other kind of angle you can possibly imagine. Lots of people talk about and imagine these things, but do their loves move them to actually bring the thing to completion? Rarely.

The foundation of a building. The constitution of a nation or of a mountain climber's stomach. They determine, almost entirely, the character and integrity of the success of entire edifice they are supporting or feeding. Underpinning all these things, the authorial element highlights the nano-coding of love and love-turned-bitter into every millimeter of this for any version of any person involved in any kind of similar process. Who the founder (and eventually presider) is personally, and why they are doing what they're doing infiltrates the whole establishment. Under this, all things are tested and submitted. If you want to build and to be built up - start with where you are rooted, and consider the loves of those whom you are rooted among. Rotten roots and foundations will kill the whole edifice. Healthy, deep roots support, nourish, stabilize, and can even resurrect the edifice like a new tree growing out of what appears to be just an old sawed-off stump.

Our work. Our children. Our art. We cannot create something that does not bear our image. What we build will always have a profound connection to us and affect on us. Even small things. Even in mundane, seemingly soulless things - those we'd argue the opposite for - there is a sinking and a callousness represented in that desired disassociation. The glory or the shame of our creations edify or deconstruct us. What do you love? Who do you love? Why do you love it? How do you love it? The answers have shaped your human constitution. And everything you do will be built onto their platforms, and take on their forms.

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.

Poison Love

Love is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing in the world. It comes softly, easily - as though a complex chemical cocktail planted in your pocket by a ragman on the street. The ragman hasn't stolen from you but he's planted something loaded on you, like the seven year death touch. 

Love opens your heart. The ragman exposes you. He soils your soul's sterility with "the dirtiest of all dirty words....promising." It's overpowering. It's too strong for any of us. Humans in love are like toddlers playing with matches and sticks of dynamite. The cosmic farce seems to be this: to open your heart to love and to be loved is to risk serious pain and suffering, but to shut your heart off from that same love is to choose immediate impotent death. We seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

Sweet Poison,  Jose Schmersen, Jakarta

Waking echoes of daydreams of the wide oceans of waterfall love that my soul knows it needs to stand beneath to be whole, brings me the nearest thing to what might rightly be called "alive" that I think a person can now be. Returning to reality to find the distinct lack of the same - as if waking to find the quite real protrusion of an arrow's feathered tail coming from my chest and being greeted by the one I'd loved to say they'd put it there, and weren't the feathers beautiful- strangles the same within an inch of being "alive." I do not mean to say that I have been uniquely accosted by this arrow- we all have, and have all been the marveling idiot of an archer as well, which is worse. The point is that we need love but cannot handle it, as starving east african children need food, but cannot digest it.

C.S. Lewis suggests that really, what we call love is most of the time just the longing to be loved, and that loves which we are left to manage alone become malevolent gods, and actually exist as complicated forms of obsessive hatred. 

I think you can look at most tragedies in the world, whether widespread political-economic tragedies, or simple domestic ones, and rightly say, "They didn't manage their love well." Or, "I wish we could have loved each other better." We all came to know love before we understood it. We were born here, giving and receiving love before we knew what it meant. Before we knew how it would devastate us.


This is the miracle. That for every shattering of our hearts, for every bodily gasp that can't bear to abstain from touching the beloved even one more moment, for every instinct to to scrap it all and start over- to run away with the wind and "to do it right this time" like my dad used to say- we've already known love. By contrast every memory of a sweet giving smile from a mother, every rushing into a place we called home- elated to embrace people we called family, every soaring butterfly of romantic love in which you though you might somehow BE the other person because you were so connected, the sound of raucous deeply knowing laughter shared with a friend, is an unthinkable miracle. The fact that we have any ability to see, welcome, understand, and bless each other in any capacity is otherworldly. It is not from us, but it is through us and for us. I fear it and long for it more than any other thing.

Love, affinity and affection present as a sweet glowing child, and left to us, almost always morph into a pandemic titan. Nothing, save omnipotence can subdue it to fruitfulness- but it must be done. Love upsets me. It makes my pride into a disgusting feeding baby bird, and saves me. Love does not suffer sterility. It agitates my personal space.   Love is poison, but it's an antidote. Without it, I am dead already. With it, I am out of control - at the mercy of another. In danger. In love.

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

Lift Up Your Heads, O You Gates

Unsolicited, the thought came through my mind,

"Lift up your heads, O you Gates!

 And be lifted up, O you ancient doors."

I wasn't quite sure where it came from. It marched into my head like a victorious army processing back into it's hometown, building a bridge to something else that has recently been present in my thoughts. I've been reading about the habitual connections of the synapses in our brains. Discoveries in neuroscience over only the last few decades suggest that a healthy mental state requires perpetual interaction with other people's right brain. This gives experiences of relational narratives that create thinking templates. Once our brain's synapses have fired according to a certain template, they are significantly more likely to fire the same way again and again. Unused, many areas of the mind simply shut off eventually, like an abandoned, overgrown neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

Autumn Composition,  Deduar

Common example: "I don't know how to trust anyone, because I'm so used to finding people unreliable or untrustworthy." Even when we come across people who would break our mental stereotypes, we shut them out, because we're following the somewhat implicit neural template. The physical pathways in our brain literally form ruts. Once they're formed, according to some research, most people never change them. Although, unlike at least most other beings on the planet, humans do have the ability to re-form these pathways.

The psychological distress of many can be correlated with the literal lack of physical connectivity between the right (emotional, relational) and left (linear, logical) hemispheres of their brain. It could even be said that people whose brains don't integrate enough with other people's brains, will not be able to form healthy patterns of thought,  and have trouble integrating their own brain, as well as nerve connectivity to "the extended brain", or visceral organs (the heart, lungs and gastrointestinal system), eventually causing physical sickness in some. This gives new meaning to the old wisdom that you shouldn't have a divided heart, or a divided mind.

"Lift up your heads, O you Gates!

 And be lifted up, O you ancient doors."

It's originally from a song, written thousands of years ago, actually by King David, returning victorious from war, with the ark of the covenant, restoring authority, the life of the people, and communion with God back into his city.

For the first time in a long time, I've found myself venturing out into pathways I've left unexplored. After years of trauma, and subsequent hiding in fear, I'm daring myself to love again, to trust. What a welcome verse. What a bold procession. O, dearest hope, that I could find the right levers, that I could find the courage & stamina to join the song and open those gates.

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.