huh-boy
here we go...
On the one hand: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love."
Ah, Perfect Love. What a Babe. What a Dreamboat. Who hasn't wanted to board that relation-ship and just cruise on through the rest of one's life powered by Unconditional Love...
And all the brave or bewildered souls who've dared to come aboard - only to find their fears not only weren't cast out as hoped, as they expected, but were in fact made even more apparent and exquisite. As it happens, they chased after them like gulls out into the deep, and then eventually came home - en masse - to roost and to breed in the masts, on the anchor, on the rails, in our hair, or hung around our necks like stinky albatrosses.
It's a high wierdness for sure, but here's the deal - the more you love and are loved, the more vulnerable you notice you become, the more it seems you fear - losing - losing your beloved/losing yourself/losing control/losing... the love. Or worst of all, the fear of finding out you've been decieved. You bought it. And it's not so perfect as you first thought.
At the point in the journey together that that fear first alights on one of the shipmates, all hell breaks loose. All the eggs that incrementally and exponentially hatch from then on, and all the resultant slippery poop all over the deck, eventually - inevitably - (unless you get a handle on it, which you can't - trying to get a handle on it is the worse thing you could do, but you try anyway) it all gets so out of hand that it puts a serious kabosh on so many high hopes you started out with. The hope turns out to be a cosmic tease.
And the love - it waxes cold. It's not the Loveboat after all. It's not even a Battleship. It's a dinky little dinghy. A ragtop rowboat with two oars. That inconveniently double as all too convenient shields or whack-a-mole mallets depending on which side of the whack you're on. All those wacky whackers and the wickets they whack with. Sooner or later you find yourself dead in the water and far out to sea, hungry as a bum and thirsty as hell. And tired. Bone weary. Exhausted. The wind is out of your sail. That's when you start hearing voices in the still air - of mermaids calling you out - and they're singing the Same. Danged. Song. The one with your name in it. The Song with the Heavenly Strains and the haunting refrain that enticed you go overboard in the first place - Perfect Love. Perfect Love. Just believe... take a chance...
Arise and come, and come to me.
The moon is soft upon the sea.
Oh come and lose yourself in me
And I will be the air you breathe.
A cloak of green, a crown of foam
If you will call the ocean home.
A salt perfume, a throne of pearl
If you will sail beyond the world.
Arise and come...
Come to me...
And by Jove, you're drawn to it! And for some ungodly (or is it?) reason you want to jump ship. Again!
Despite it all, The Dream Remains The Same! Go figure! What's up with that?
Well, that's how my travelogue reads so far. I'd like to read one that hasn't. One that isn't boring, that won't put me to sleep. I don't want to go to sleep. I want to wake up. And smell the roses. Or the stinky albatrosses. Either way, I want Real. I know how to deal with real. I think. I know I don't know how to deal with lies and pretense. Even and maybe especially pretty little lies - all the hope-sos and wishful, magical thinking. My own, especially. They're what makes me truly crazy. They skirt around the danger zone, and we don't talk about it later. They don't face the fears. So they disconnect even more. And so make me even more afraid. More crazy. That undying and incorruptible Hope makes me crazy, too, for sure - but not like that. So far, anyway. It kills me, as perfect love is wont to do, but softly. With His Song. But the lies and the ghosts - they just wreck it.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Trouble is, sometimes, when I'm especially hungry or thirsty, disconnected, afraid I'm going crazy, or just plain afraid, those damned pretty lies sound so hopeful, so hope inspiring... That's when I need extra eyes, others' eyes, for perspective, and proportion, for discernment. And even still the Draw, the Main Attraction which all attractions suggest and intimate, that Big Draw that draws everything and everyone upward and unto Itself as we dance along the event horizon of His Eye (hey, sounds more spicey than shuffle along this mortal coil!), continues apace. And me, I'm sucked into the undertoad for yet another go-round. I'm afraid so. Woe is me. Woe. I am undone. Or done in. Or just plain done.
But no. Like the Missionary to the Headhunters said while waist deep in the big soup pot plaintively asserted, "I'm not done yet!" When the pot gets hot enough, the Missionary will recognize he's a cannibal, too - a Maneater. His first communion.
Anyway, be that as it may - all that to say this: Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because *as he is, so are we in this world*.
Which is to say - absurdly, astonishingly - it's all good. And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
So I'm thinkin', maybe let's have another look at these nifty little oar dealies. And maybe take a another good long look at our shipmates, sans oar-in-the-moley-faces. And a good long listen. And definitely another look at the Mercy. A good, long gaze at that strange yet familiar Face. Maybe then we could start rowing in Eden a bit more in sync? Perhaps even tack ourselves into a sweeter breeze (or is it a whirlpool, the swirling eddies created by all the cross-currents?) that might give us dumsnut wannabe Ancient Mariners (with our handy-dandy but stoopid-ijit cross-bows) a chance of blowing this crazy pop-stand and getting out of Dodge? Maybe even remembering our First Love. Maybe. Have to hope for a second wind. What else can a Body do in such a straight?
I'm thinking about the church, here, too. It's all connected. Despite how it looks at first glance. Even so, lash me to your Mast, Sailor Man. Trust the process. Trust the flow. Like I have a clue what that means. But I'll keep a wet finger aloft.
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Doesn't it make you nuts when Oprah and Dr. Phil go on about how everybody owes everybody "unconditional love," as if they actually know what they're talking about? It's got to be one of the worst catch phrases since "I love you, even if I don't like you." Personally, I'd rather be liked. Tastes more like love.
But more to the point, love seems to endure, even if people don't. It's out there, I know it. Not that I know what I'm talking about either. As an emotionally immature gratification freak, I'm hopelessly subject to the thrill of infatuation. But I try not to expect anything. I do sense that love resonates. Once in a while, and without much trying, I'll be overcome with an unaccountable affection for someone, and without my saying a word they'll bloom like a rose right before my eyes. And I wonder 'Is this what's going on in the world? Is this what I've been missing? Is everybody in on this?' Well, no, they're not. Love can be, and is, rebuffed with such brutality as to make you turn away in shock. And how many angels have I shocked? Do I want to know?
My first love, that I can in retrospectively identify as such, was for a pack not a person. And that, for me, is the imprint and eternal paradigm. Which isn't to say that there haven't been singular experiences within that dynamic, or departures from it, and delightful, heartbreaking, and vile affections. I've even played house a couple times. But the heterosexist one-on-one model (whose imperatives I do acknowledge and honor) has never been the gold standard for me, as much, at times, as I thought it should be. But it's the tribe, usually tied to a pace car (preferably ad hoc and temporary), and if you're lucky, it's invisible counterpart, that haunts my heart. I'm at home at Seinfeld's, which is really just the church, in mufti.
Of course that arrangement is as subject to abuse and corruption as any other. Heh, there are more oars, and the whack-a-mole parties can be brutal. The upside is those extra eyes, perspectives and sources of mediation. It works if there's no agenda, and if any upstart Moses gets thoroughly mole-whacked from the get-go. Mutual skepticism, seasoned with respect and humor, and the independence that fosters admiration, gets you halfway there. But even a traditional monogamous relationship can be a micro cult. In fact, I haven't seen many that in one way or another aren't.
Now I'm thinking of Vonnegut's Bokononism in Cat's Cradle... " 'If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reason,' writes Bokonon, 'that person may be a member of your karass... Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.' By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries... Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person's trying to discover the limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete."
But hey, getting there is half the fun.
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