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.

Squatters

"You have to have a sense of humor about these things, missy." said Kenneth, directing a big smile down at me. My ears were hot, eyes drawn as far back in my sockets as they would go. I couldn't even look at him. I was trying not to explode with disgust for him, and the situation, and not succeeding very well. The entire downstairs floor of our house on D Street had smelled like some mix of dead rats (reminiscent of old vomit, or worse) for just over a week now. He plodded around putting flashy blue light mouse preventer contraptions in all the rooms downstairs. They were his way of saying he wasn't going to do more to address the actual problem, and they gave the trip to the fridge at night the feeling that you were on a tiny landing strip with erratic unpredictable signals.

Abandoned Train Station, California, Simon Christen

In its better days, tenants of this house had nicknamed it buttercup, cause it’s yellow and used to be kind of sweet. Still holding some of the prettiest little chandeliers and charming quirky little traits I've seen in the Capitol Hill Historic District, Kenneth was leaving buttercup, and we who lived there, to the rats, robbers, and slow decay that comes with 100 years of bandaid only maintenance. We weren't supposed to put nails in the walls, because when you did, a steady stream of some of the finest, dryest dust I’ve ever seen came out of the nail holes for an average of 30 seconds-to-a-minute consecutively. Most of the light switches and panels in the house still use push button electricity (you know, before electricity was really electricity).

Somewhere, between the smell, dust of death walls, belittling smiles, nuclear hazard night lights, and the phenomena that my roommates and I weren't sure we felt ok about hanging out anywhere but our beds themselves, and really only under the covers at that, my urban single girl brain began to wonder if we were really getting such a good deal on the rent. None of us are in a position to buy a house. We're renters, at least for the next good chunk of years. But at what point does a tenant become a squatter? Did we live there, or were we  just storing our things there, holding over for the night like some cave in the wilderness? 

Our souls cry for home. A place to belong. This was not it.  Three weeks til Christmas, and we all agreed & began searching craigslist for an immediate escape en masse. One click gave me pause. 

Beautiful. Why do I know that address? 

Impossible. My parents' house. 

The same two people by whom I entered this world, who originally defined my home. The same two people I just had to let go to the other side of the great beyond. The same two people who wouldn't be there on Christmas. There, staring at me on craigslist was the very same house my parents first lived in when, as 20-something west-coasters, they moved to DC in the 70s. A home. A veritable castle. A four story victorian, four blocks from the Capitol - and with a view of the dome from the top two front windows.

Seven days of jockeying, six close to sleepless nights, adding a couple new roommates to fill the extra rooms, too many texts, emails, and one of the best exhales in a long time, the lease was signed and we moved in just a few days before Christmas. It's like something out of a movie, an act of God. Is this a new beginning? The real life stuff of great books’ literary themes? A divine returning to the same ground to deepen the plot? These are the questions that go through my mind. These are the things of adventure, real life, a good lift to ride the wave of this human experience. We search for a lot of things in life, without really knowing exactly what they are. Maybe the gateway to many such expeditions is finding what I’ve just found at least some small part of. A starting place. A resting place. A home. Not just for being, but for belonging.

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.