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.

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. 

Are you an Employee or an Entrepreneur?

The declaration “I am an entrepreneur” is surely more satisfying in this social media age than wearing a name tag or passing out the “standard corporate” business card.  In my millennial generation, we like to think we’re calling the shots, writing our own profiles, that we have no respect for the man--when most of us are just filling out the “About me” interface handed to us with little but over-used quotes. Are we really the rebels we brag like? And if we are, is that even a good thing? Is it better to think like an employee or an entrepreneur?

My friend recently inherited a large, very full mini-storage unit. This friend also happens to be facing--through no fault of her own--a serious debt crisis. I came to help her clean the unit out. We found everything from $500 business suits & stetsons to weird but expensive collector’s items--star wars special edition dolls (new the in box), crystal music boxes, about a bajillion baseball cards & autographed gear. She was very focused on clearing the place out to avoid the monthly fee, because her temp job didn’t pay that well. I saw dollar signs all over that stuff & suggested she try to sell it instead of trying to find more regular work for now.

“Honestly, selling this stuff online is going to pay you a LOT more than any other use of your time.” I told her, but she wouldn’t have it.  She gave away thousands of dollars of ebay-able merchandise. I thought it was dumb at the time, but maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.  Maybe, given all of the other stress going on in my friend’s life at that time, it wouldn’t have been a good choice for her. She wasn’t up to it.  Let us be humans--not just producers. We have to invest what we’ve got wisely, but emotional stability is an economic resource just like dollar bills.

Many of us don’t invest our resources well because we don’t realize what they are. We don’t see value in what we have-- an idea, a skill, an audience--so we don’t do the pruning & feeding that could make it bear fruit. One of my biggest professional growth areas over the last few years has actually been evening the scale in favor of thinking like an employee. I’ve always had good ideas, but overstepping my bounds was the only thing that’s ever gotten me fired. Even though my boss was totally wrong & making terrible decisions --his business went under shortly after he fired me, but I couldn’t’ve known that would happen-- I let being right ruin the resource that provided for me, my job.

Business owners, even some of the really big top dogs are wise to think about investing in relationships-- even over-investing before it's really obvious that they need to. I like to think I’m smart. I’d love to own my own business, or write for a living.  However, even the most brazen entrepreneurial minds need grooming. For most of us, it’s at least partially in learning to operate like a good employee that we’ll find our niche in the market and find success in our ventures. Anxious as I am to show my stuff,  I think lengthy seasons of  learning-- serving under a good boss will give better results in the long run. Like a good bottle of wine--I could probably stand to stay on the vine for awhile.

Giving Your Life Away

I'm a student of Economics deep down to my soul. As luck would have it, I chose to major in ECON before I knew that. I love efficiency and the art of making things productive. I also grew up in a family that owned its own businesses -- knowing the empowerment and struggle of self-employment as a way of life. Lately life has been giving me a renewed love of small enterprises-- that risky business that costs a little more of your time and brain space, but gives you more than just monetary rewards.

We live in the world of the possible. I can communicate and transact instantaneously across the globe from the palm of my hand, and I'm not even rich. All this possibility, in my mind, sort of begs the question "what do we do with it?"

What am I doing with the best I have? How am I using my brain capacity? Do I write down those brilliant ideas and take the time to give them a shot, or settle back into the sofa for more re-runs of Seinfeld? They say if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. Well, I think you'd probably find a few of your days "work" no matter what field you love, but certainly a lot less of them. It makes me wonder though, how many of us have really researched what it would take to do what we love, or given starting or participating in small business a shot? Do we really know what would it take to create our own wealth from something we have passion for?

Are we trading our dreams for something safer? In our attempt to avoid risk are we sacrificing that stuff that makes us feel alive?