Love Others As Your Self

It's a suggestion that begs the question of how do I love myself?

And basically my answer is that I put up with myself because I am unable to get away from myself. I'm left with making the best of things with myself because there's no escaping being ever in my own presence.

But with others, the proximity is not so close nor so immediately necessary. Not only can I remove myself from being in the presence of others, I can't help but be removed from being in the presence of most people most of the time. So I can't really love them the way I love myself in terms of time allotment. I can't attend to them moment by moment like I attend to myself.

So it must mean something else. Some quality having to do with when I'm in the presence of others. And then perhaps it's suggesting that I would have to put up with them like I put up with myself. I would have to take them for all their goods and bads, like I have to take myself. I would have to take responsibility for their faults and errors and mistakes, just as I have to take responsibility for my own. I would have to include them in my personal responsibility, just as I attend to my own. Hm. That sounds pretty impossible, or at least quite imposing, difficult, overwhelming.

I like the idea of people taking care of themselves for the most part. I notice society gives a lot of lip service to that, too. "Nobody can make you feel any certain way. It's your own responsibility for how you interpret and process your feelings." "Anyone can be anything they want to be if they put their mind to it." "Nobody is a victim." "Everyone is responsible for their own happiness."

"Loving" is a rather vague word much magnified by the power breathed in it by culture. It vaguely, almost admonishingly, suggests we should all be more loving toward each other. "Love is the highest calling." "What the world needs now is love sweet love." "Love is all you need." Meanwhile, I rather like loving what I find lovable which has to do with my own preferences, aesthetics, interests, tolerances, choices as to who and what and how much I deal with at any given time. I like to express my personal traits for discernment. And this has a way of measuring some people more in and more worthy and interesting and satisfying to relate to than others. I rather like that freedom to decide. In utter frankness, I have to say I like turning away from some people while turning more toward others. Ugly as that sounds.

But I notice it gets me into trouble. I have my list of people I've turned away from. And that doesn't make me so happy that they're not happy with my turning away. I'm actually not always all that proud of my aesthetics. They encroach like a prejudice willing to abandon that which doesn't live up to my intrinsic or acquired tastes. And I notice they tend to like to get more refined over time. Quite self congratulatory! Yet I also notice there's something ugly about their increasingly sensitive justification for rejecting that which appears too ugly to relate to.

So, love the ugliness? Love the murderer, the confused and deranged and dysfunctional, the bore, the kook, the rude, the irritating? As though all of these qualities are in me to love in myself, too? I'm not sure I like the sound or challenge of that.

How strange the universe should make such unlikenesses, and then send a savior down to suggest we get along anyway. Where after all, is the likeness among so much unlikeness? Why create creatures who tend to be increasingly ever so finely attuning to their own tastes and temperaments, and then mess with them by suggesting they love beyond their limits? And why wouldn't a savior take their own advise and love us as we are, without asking us to change a thing about ourselves?

There must be fun is such maddening conundrums, of which, the universe has made me such a fine fit to be tied to.


--Steve

All About Relationships

It's so simple when looked at from one basic premise: Life is the opportunity to relate. And then so magnificently difficult the complexity of how much we have to relate it. It is as if out of God's desire to make sure there are relationship, such an abundance has been made that we almost can't help but recurrently be overstressed among the ubiquity of what do make and do and how to feel among them all!

It would be like being given infinity for Christmas, where no amount of opening will ever open all of the gifts of relating poured out to us. And everywhere you turn, more and more and more. The tedium of them, the tiresome endless stream of them, the questionable nature of each, the cautions and excitements we quake at our questions of how to relate, how much, how little, what's sufficient, how do we feel in response to their relating to us? And on and on. This excess of relationships, and still we can want more and different and other and better and more particularly satisfying, and less of what doesn't feel so good, and all the guilts and resentments and jostling for position when feeling too left out of some and too caught up in others!

JESUS and Hallelujah! that we get to relate!
And OMG! how will we manage it all?
And then on top of it all
another Christmas comes around
and those damn wise men had to go and give baby Jesus those gifts
and now we're obliged to give likewise
to the already too many relationship we're trying to juggle and balance
and attend to and be enough for the maintenance of.
And meanwhile, the Kingdom of Heaven
is apparently already inside us.
And how sharply our attentions can shift
to feeling anything but already heavenly filled.

So, yes to relationships
and may we each get very good at being involved
with just enough
to not overwhelm ourselves
turning the whole thing against the value
it started out to be
which is very simply
to simply have something to relate to.

--Steve

A Slow Trickle of Blood

This is hard to write. Hard to write because long ago I learned the hard way that writing about other people can lead to misunderstandings that don't untangle easily.

But I've been thinking over the past few days about old wounds. The kind that never heal. The kind that don't boil over, but instead just trickle.

Its strange how much power these wounds have, leaping forward from the past to the present, seeping into the day to day living. Like, lets say for the sake of argument, a little girl who didn't just feel unloved, but who felt in the core of her being that she was unlovable. She isn't of course. In fact she is adored. But lets say that there was a parent who had a problem. And that problem came from something completely unassociated with the little girl, but the little girl became the emodiment in the parent's mind of the problem. In that case, at the age of three and six and nine and twelve, does the little girl have the sophistication to understand whats really going on. Probably not. Definitely not. She is only going to see what is in front of her, and feel only the effects of the parent's reaction.

Lets say she remembers trying to be good. And she remembers trying to be pretty. And she remembers that nothing she ever did made any difference. She tried to love more, and was rebuffed. She tried to be beautiful and was mocked. Is there every going to be a time when she is enough? In her own mind?

Years and years go by. The people around her are confused. The more she tries the more they wonder. The more they wonder the more she tries. She grows into a beautiful and accomplished woman, but the mirror still reflects the little girl. The one whose brother tied her hair into pigtails with bailing twine because he was helping her to be enough. Which somehow didn't work.

What happens next? She is able to understand now, with her adult mind and her advanced training, she is able to understand what was happening. And yet the wound still slowly bleeds. The struggle now involves more people, and more efforts, and it is becoming exhausting. Not becoming, it has always been exhausting, only now the weight is becoming unbearable.

How does she unlearn the false lesson of those many years ago, and come into an understanding of her own worth as a person, not based on what she does, or how she looks, or how much she makes, but simply her own worth as a person on this planet whose space and value never had anything to do with anything more than her presence.

Can she learn to see the love that is around her as all the love she needs, and let go of the need for that one love? Can she learn to walk past the dry and ungiving well without longing to look one last time for a drop of water?

Does a wound inflicted on the giving flesh of a child ever heal enough? Can love withheld ever be replaced even if it can't be restored?

I have my own answers. But then my life is my own, my experiences, my wounds, my loves, my accomplishments. I don't know about the wounds of others. I know the answers that have staunched my own bleeding, but this slow trickle is not etched into me.

I wonder.