UnSelf-Discipline

Punishment
Originally uploaded by Skip the Filler

There seems to be no distinction between Discipline and Punishment in most Western definitions. And from what I have come to know of myself, ostensibly there wasn’t much distinction for me either growing up.

About a month ago I was mulling over how parents discipline their sons and daughters, how one of the more annoying catch phrases by religious types is “God disciplines those he loves.” Because let’s be honest, most of the world feels like “God’s” idea of discipline sucks, and thus, so does his love. And for me growing up sans father for a good chunk of adolescence, I wondered aloud in this mulling moment driving down the street, “Then who disciplined me?”

Life responded, “You did… and you often punished yourself more than disciplined.”

I had to admit I really didn’t know the difference between the two. I came home and looked it up in various dictionaries and saw they didn’t know the difference either. (Stupid dictionaries) All Discipline felt like Punishment to me, and so when I encounter the idea of a Father loving those whom he disciplines, I don’t see it as love at all. (I’m guessing I am not the only one at this party.) So, I said responded, “Got it. Let me know when I am punishing myself and calling it discipline, if you will.”

And he does.

Mistakes I make, balls I drop, relationships that are crumpled messes in a pile, words I never should have said – I dissect and revisit far too many times not because I am trying to learn from them (like I told myself all these years) but because I let their weight sink me as self-punishment, never letting me off the hook that you, God and everybody else would in a heartbeat. THIS is what he was talking about. Because as Matthew Ryan sings in his new song ”The World Is…”: ”Some would say it’s maudlin and some will say bullshit, but there’s no living without living, and the living shows you this: That the world is held together with lies and promises and broken hearts and brand new days for you to start All over again.”

In these moments when I have the choice to carry on as always or change direction and let some One outside of myself do the disciplining, there is such a draw of freedom in the latter that it pulls me out like an ocean current. “Ultimately, I do not master truth but truth masters me... We may bring truth to light by finding it and speaking its name—but truth also brings us to life by finding and naming us,” wrote Parker Palmer I thought I was being truthful in my self-punishment, but it was truth that called my bluff, and it is Truth that named me otherwise. And maybe that’s what is meant by discipline

Playing In Fire

Thunder Storm over the Aiguiiles de Chamonix
Originally uploaded by WhiteGoldWielder

Above trees. The highest green is alpine grass. Soon enough, my hair is standing on end like that grass. A surprise lightning storm crawled over the ridgeline.

In the midst of the storm I not only feel the hairs on my arms stand up, I can feel the electricity. Smell the ionized air. I imagine that my bones are glowing as the tension hovers just outside my skin. When it’s upon you, it’s all around you. Even the ground feels unstable, like it might just vaporize under my next step.

Fear is a given. But so is awe. Enter power this size and voltage and I can’t help but giggle at the certainty that I have no control. I believe that if you die from a lightning strike, well, it was most definitely your time to go. If ever there was a moment when death was out of my hands, it is the second before the bolt strikes. So there is nothing left for me but to be afraid with a smile on my face surrounded by helplessness.

Experts say I need to squat to the ground, hopefully on some form of rubber, make myself small. Really the are trying to tell me to become as small as these blades of grass. Even grass gets burned. They are only offering some vague form of comfort knowing full well that you, me, and anything taller than grass is toast.

Running helps. I often run during these moments. Run is more a trot with seventy pounds on my back up a steep incline. Fireballs. Yes, I said Fireballs, bounce around and ricochet here and there with a blue-red otherworldly glow. The giggling part of me thinks I am in a Mario Brother’s game and there are no mushrooms in sight to give me superpowers.

I’ve been here before, in these storms. So much have I been here before I am probably too nonchalant about it. Maybe it’s the freedom of knowing I can’t control the outcome. I can only keep moving forward, or, stand still, small.

There is a light beauty on the other side of the storm. There always is… eventually.

Beyond Survival

Schafe am Morgen - exploding
Originally uploaded by publik_oberberg

"The world and it's strategies may help you to survive for a long time, but they cannot help you live because the world is not the source of its own life, let alone yours." - Nouwen.

And I've been un-learning all the ways to survive. Though those ways have their place in time, Surviving isn't living... it's just not dying. Surviving is like living at the bare minimum, it's getting by.

Apparently, we are made for more than survival.

We are made to Thrive.

Which sounds like we are made to explode with Life all over the place.
In my case, it's only going to come about by letting go of survival strategies...

Just something I've been thinking, learning, listening to of late...

Moments from a Wedding

Don't give me people who WANT to dance.
Originally uploaded by trapezemike

Recently, I was at my first wedding in two years, oddly enough at the same location as the last one - which is pretty cool because it is on a lake surrounded by mountains. There are moments when I am not so caught up in the party inside my head, when I get to hear and see moments of grace. This was one of those nights and...

I heard a 4-year-old boy ask, "When are they going to Kiss?"

I met an Iranian woman who has only been in the U.S. a year and is making a career as a photographer, that, through broken english, said profoundly and intricately more about the Art of pictures in ten-minutes than books have said over a lifetime.

I saw the face of Redemption as two jr. high sweethearts with 20 years of painful and adventurous story behind them exchanged vows for the first time and it made more sense than any other marriage I've seen.

I heard from a man I've known from a distance as he talked of not ever having a context for the idea of God as Father (since he never knew his dad) and how surprised he is at how God meets him in ways He will be seen most.

I heard a dad's deep gratitude and pride as he talked about his son, the Groom, and how he saw so much redemption in the evening's celebration; having watched his son go through a previous marriage that ended in a heart-wrenching divorce - what divorce isn't heart-wrenching? They were the words of a dad that knows his son knows full well what he is getting into and stood beside him as his Best Man, as if to say "I believe in you and your heart, that's why I am here, son."

I watched that 4-year-old boy dance with uninhibited abandon and style surrounded by adults making us all understand what it means to dance in the first place.

And morning came too early but not without rainfalls of gratitude for all that I saw, and all I heard, for being reminded that I was a 4-year-old-boy once, born with the same kind of reckless abandon, that I still am that boy in so many good ways; that redemption isn't just some battered old religious word because it is far too brilliant to be contained religiously; that I met an Iranian photographer, a fatherless man, a gently proud father; And weddings sometimes pinch a corner of reality, peeling it back to show what's on the Other side of the Sun.

...that doesn't love a Wall

Beyond the wall
Originally uploaded by Giuseppe Bognanni

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down…” – Frost.


Quite awhile back a friend and I were talking and he noted that I tended to live in the future. In a voice of curiosity he asked me, “What do you gain or lose by doing so?”


I lose the present. And I lose what’s happening in the people around me.


If I am honest… living in the future is a wall built. If I can plan for the future, I can protect my interest, right? The future-living was nothing less than a survival tool learned by a boy to navigate a slew of uncertainty alone. Walling in what I thought I could control. Walling out anything and anyone that might make the landscape more threatening, or treacherous.


My American culture says this is a good thing, though. Boundaries! People, we must define and stay in personal boundaries, right? And so we are a nation of isolated and lonely individuals all staring at our drinks shoulder to shoulder in a packed cocktail party, or crying in the mirror in some side-room like some Manhattanite in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”


But I am moving back towards that place in the heart that doesn’t want as many stones stacked for walls. Growing up seems to bring with it higher walls, and keeping those stones in place gets wearing. Growing young, though, has the child’s heart at core and “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down,” wrote the Poet. In wanting my walls down, I tend to remove the bricks in your walls too. It’s infectious and admittedly sometimes invasive, but “good fences” DON’T make good neighbors – that’s the point of the poem, after all. It just means I have to step more into the grace of my humanity, and so do you.

Words by which we Live

what are word for?
Originally uploaded by Darwin Bell.

There are words that say more about who I am that I don’t fully believe and may take a lifetime to accept. And there are words that lie more about who I am that are easier to believe than the others… and it may take a lifetime to get them out of me.

Awhile back I was in a group of people (many had MA’s in Counseling, which will show itself soon enough) and a question was asked along the lines of “if we all had tattooed a word on our foreheads what would yours be?” An interesting question to consider and how one answers says much about how they view themselves if not others. After all, the word is something everyone ELSE will see and may just as much be a word for others as much as it is a word for my self. When it came time for me to give an answer there wasn’t much hesitation.

There is a word I’ve spent years learning, hearing, repeated back to me, approached from so many different angles; a word that the more I am asked to look at it, and chew on it, the more I get the sense that it is a word to who I am, that was there when I was born, written on my flesh in invisible ink, and maybe even like the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, the invisible writing glows when near fire – when I am living in my skin. It’s a word that ultimately isn’t about me to begin with, though. It is a word that has numerous meanings and is used first and foremost in reference of God in the Torah. In English it sounds like “Pala.” Here are just a few of the words it can mean: to be wonderful, to be extraordinary, to be amazing, to appear impossible, to be surpassing. And for as much as those words should and easily are attributed to God, he seems to keep saying, “Hey, kid, that is also some of what you were made with from day one. Live in that realty.” As if to say “Like Father, like son, kid.” And like Father, like son, it can’t be self-aggrandizing in the end. As Hassidic Rabbi Moshe of Kobryn said, "Anyone who think himself bigger than the word is not the kind of person we are talking about."

Back in that group, when I said that this would be the word tattooed on my forehead, one of the guys (one of the MA’s in Counseling) responded, “Why don’t you just have Narcissist there instead?” Narcissist - a word that many in this group were obsessed with, but probably more out of their fear that they were one than anything else. I was initially shocked by his response and of course a bit hurt because he seemed to miss the point completely. But then, most of us respond out of our own crap more than out of truth, and this particular guy always seemed to wrestle with thinking he was not good for anything, and more a good for nothing; had a pretty low view of himself. And as I said, I never thought of it as just a word about me, but a reminder for others, too – that we are made for things impossible, extraordinary, spectacular, to be amazing. Maybe he wasn’t ready to receive that possibility

Truth be told, it’s taken me years, though, to receive this reality, this word, this Pala. And it will probably take a lifetime to feel comfortable wearing it. But unlike other words spoken over or against me through out the years, this one seems to have been there before I took my first breath, which might just mean it is the truest thing about me. And maybe the truest thing about you. The trail of risks and impossibilities in my wake seems to affirm it true or I am just another nutcase for the asylum, but of course it is the lunatics that run the Asylum, right? :)

it is Life

365/365
Originally uploaded by zebra.paperclip.

Being a writer I write many things in a journal of sorts that most will never see. Sometimes it takes near a year to fill one up, sometimes months. With all that has gone on this year so far, I have managed to fill one in the span of 6 months. I flipped to the front to see how it started and this is what I had written:

”For three days I have tramped the desert, have known the pangs of thirst, have followed false scents in the sand, have pinned my faith on the dew. I have struggled to rejoin my kind, whose very existence on earth I had forgotten. These are the cares of men alive in every fibre, and I cannot help thinking them more important than the fretful choosing of a night-club in which to spend the evening. Compare one life with the other, and all things considered this is a luxury! I have no regrets. I have gambled and lost… I’m not talking about living dangerously… it is not danger I love. I know what I love. It is life.” - Anoine de Saint Exupery

And I didn’t know when I wrote those words that the months to come would show me so much of life and death in so many ways literal and metaphorical. Some days the weight of it all can suffocate and other days it’s like being stripped free to breathe in deep, taking in air to places that were so stuffy and deprived of oxygen.

I know what I love.

It is Life.

Digory's work

Haley throws an apple
Originally uploaded by jessakka.

I keep thinking on something that caught my eye re-reading “The Magician’s Nephew.” At the end of the book, (yes, there might be a spoiler or two here, but what’s wrong with you if you haven’t read this great book???) Digory – the main character – is lauded by Aslan for doing such a good job planting an apple tree that will end up being the defining symbol of protection upon the whole of the land. The trick of it is that Digory didn’t plant anything. The only thing he did was toss an apple in a near random direction the way any one of us would throw a rock at a river.

Even so, the significance of the apple might have more to do with the “work” of planting than any physical labor. The apple had the power to heal his sick mother, and even more so to give everlasting life. And in an act of trust towards Aslan, he chose not to eat of it or keep it for his own agendas. To reference another great kid’s story Digory had a “Golden Ticket” that would be priceless in any context, but it’s as if he let it go to the wind – letting go the source of his hope; tossing it aside, I’m sure not so easily.

Then after leaving hope, and any chance for healing his mother, and thus easing his suffering back home, Aslan does the unexpected. He asks Digory to go grab an apple off the very tree that grew from his tossed out fruit. It is in this apple that his hopes - a better hope than he could have created, will be answered. Lewis writes. “For a second Digory could hardly understand. It was as if the whole world had turned inside out and upside down.”

Isn’t that how it is, trusting? I mean really trusting seems to come with a willingness to toss over my shoulder the very things I hold closest to my chest. And there isn’t a guarantee that the outcome will be as good as what Digory walked away with in hand. If anything, the only promise is that the good I had in mind isn’t the best.

But even believing that requires a certain trust, also. The kind that has more to do with intuition and gut-sense than anything rational or definable… and often looks like tossing out the best I ever had.

Bonk

Originally uploaded by HolmesBartonHolmes.

I bonked the other day on an 8-9 mile run.( If you’ve ever seen ”Run, Fatboy, Run,” you will have a great picture of what this looks like.)Bonked techinically has to do with glycogen depletion in the muscles, blah,blah,blah. What it feels like, though, is utter failure and defeat in a realm you thought you were excelling. And I haven’t bonked on a run in ages. It irritated the hell out of me and I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why I crashed so. Glycogen aside there is a mental/spirit aspect in play, and mine failed me.

Later in the day it hit me that I hadn’t had much of a supper the night before as I was in Boulder all day at BoCo and left happy hour (and, thus, food) there to hear Don Miller back in Denver. So, yes, there was that. But there was still that lingering grey cloud following me like some kind of Charlie Brown.

And there is so much more going on in life than a bonked run. From moving out of my place to making some significant changes inside of life as much as outside to finding out Monday that my last Grandmother – whom these past 20 years I knew as well as a stranger on the street – died (the fourth person I’ve known to die in as many months) and on and on. I’ve had a bit going on… but the bonk, bugged. It informed something else, somewhere else in life.

I knew I had to get back on the metaphorical horse, put my shoes on, and go run. So I headed to Boulder to run The Mesa Trail before it starts snowing here in the next few days and makes it all the more difficult to get motivated. It wasn’t easy. The trail demons kept persuasively suggesting, “Stop trying. Give it up. You are just in a slump and need to resign yourself to it. This isn’t worth it.” And I almost did give up. After all, I would have plenty of good reasons to talk my self into “taking a break,” take a few months off.

But I didn’t. I pushed through.

It wasn’t until I was back in the parking lot that I felt the gratitude well up, that I was glad for the run. And it was back in the parking lot that the lights came on for how much my life and running, once again, educate each other.


I have plenty of Bonks in life. But they aren’t the norm. They are the exception. And the stuff I learn on the backside of ‘em is exceptional. Sometimes it’s taken being back in a similar “place” to find out the bonk was just a thing, and not the defining moment. Or to put it in other’s words: ”And every time you get cut/You know you might get scarred/But don’t sweat it kid/Just remember who you are” - G. Love

And so I do….

Smile

smile
Originally uploaded by zinkwazi.

So just short of a year ago I posted a poem and a small bit on Rudy, wee one born with HLHS.

Well, Rudy is about to turn 1! Which, in case you don't think that is anything to celebrate, go and read what this little guy has been through. He's had more surgical procedures in the first 6 months of his life than most people will have in a lifetime.

And he's smiling alive today. October 1st is his birthday, and to see how excited he is go HERE.

Underneath
these tubes and tape
and wires
I am
Smiling.

...And We're Off

Take My Hand..
Originally uploaded by rose lovering *.

About ten years ago, I was driving around Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic with a friend, running errands. That task alone is quite a bit different than here in America – much more chaotic and potentially dangerous. I hardly recall what we were picking up because the conversation is what stuck with me all these years later.

Her and her husband had been the primary builders/creators of camp in the Dominican Mountains (yes, there are Mountains in the Caribbean – up to 10,000 feet high). The camp had been bulldozed by a militant branch of the government for no real apparent reason – months of work, years of planning wiped clean by arrogance. The day the machines showed up, her husband was literally standing in front of them, blocking their path, protecting the camp. The machines prevailed and everything he and his wife had come down to the D.R. to do was gone.

It was this moment in their marriage she was sharing with me. See, when they got married she had engraved on her wedding band a verse from the Tanakh in which Ruth says,” Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Sitting in the gridlock of Santo Domingo traffic she turned to me and said, “A few days after the camp was destroyed I took the ring off my finger and said to my husband that I wasn’t sure I could keep my promise anymore, that this was too hard, too much. I wasn’t willing to stay here in the D.R. I wasn’t willing to go where he was going anymore.” But she stayed. They relocated and built another camp and then went on to start a school in Jarabacoa called Doulous Discovery School that they still run to this day. A nice epilogue, yes, but they didn’t know that when she was standing there with her wedding ring off, the weight of it in her hand.

Ten years later this conversation comes back around to me as I re-learn what it is to be “married” to Life. Do I trust the One that loves me even when things seem lost in a fog of unknowns? When it feels more like a ride on Space Mountain – a rollercoaster in the darkness, than a jaunt in a sunny meadow? Though I might remove the ring on my finger am I willing to not give it up completely, hold on and go where Life goes, stay where Life stays? As work grows scarce, and so the bank account, as things might seem bulldozed by inexplicable means, how much am I willing to trust the story of this marriage does not end here? No, I am not going all Eeyore on things. And there is far too much Light and Life to give in to the Dark and Despairing. But that doesn’t stop me from having to face these questions… how far am I willing to go for Life?

Running, Spandex & Life

Friends together
Originally uploaded by hanninski.

Every once in awhile I run with a friend of mine whom I refer to as Math Genius Nate – he is working on a PhD in theoretical Math & I really don’t know what that means because math hurts my head. So Math Genius Nate told me about a run he did at Wash Park when a complete stranger passed him wearing spandex shorts. His competitive edge and the spandex provoked him to pass this guy and beat him the next few miles until he peeled off for home exhausted before the finish line. He told me that as he limped back home he thought to himself: “you can’t judge another runner by how they look when you meet them in the middle of a run; you don’t know how long they’ve been running before they got to you, how many miles they’ve got to go, or even their ability.”

As he told me this I half-joked, “Yeah, I think that’s how it is in life, too.”
Then it really sunk under water for me as I thought of all the people I know, the ones I’ve known for decades, and the ones I met in the past few weeks. When our paths crossed we had various miles behind us. Some had more, some had less until the finish line; some had sweated through many of those miles and others hadn’t even seen real exhaustion; some were new to the journey, some were veterans with the scars to boot. And if I were to live competitively, I would be working myself into a mess comparing how I was doing next to any of them, thus, missing out on the fun of getting to know them for the short while we live/run the Race together….even if they are wearing spandex.

There is a song called “Finish Line,” that somewhat speaks to both sides of the race metaphor and reminds to let lie the ways I beat myself up comparing to others:

”Last year was a good year, I beat myself to a bloody mess

But blue is the colour of the days I’m hoping for

What have you done to the mind you had
Out there somewhere is the finish line
” - Fanfarlo

100 Miles of Living

The Leadville 100
Originally uploaded by gutmann.

“Of science and the human heart
There is no limit
There is no failure here sweetheart
Just when you quit...” - “Miracle Drug”

Over my lifetime I’ve done a few things that have stretched me to limits I didn’t know existed, finding on the backside that the human heart must be limitless. This can come in relationships – obviously – but it is also in the physical challenges. As my old roommate, who is a Navy SeAL, once said, “Our bodies are capable of far more than our minds let us believe.” I’d add that the heart must be the space that stretches this. I got to see this first hand during a trail race in Colorado called the Leadville Trail 100. It might just be the best argument that certain people (distance runners) are truly crazy. A month or so ago my friend Cindy asked me if I would be part of her pace crew for this insane race. And to my surprise I said, “Yeah, that could be fun.” Since running my part I’ve been trying to grasp what it did to me, aside from destroy my toes.

My part of the job, along with a few others, was to meet her at various aid stations over the 100 miles and makes sure she had what it took to get to the next aid station. Oh, and we were to run some of the last 50 miles with her. As it turned out, I was running the first and last legs of the last 50 miles totaling about 23 miles for my part. Not to mention that this race takes place from 4am on Saturday through Sunday 10am –30 hours w/o much sleep –starting at 10,200 feet above sea level. And to boot, my first leg was 10 miles up and over Hope Pass with a 2,500 vertical ascent over 3 miles. And once I finished this leg I had about 7 hours through the night before I ran another 13 miles to the finish with her, the last 4 miles up hill. If you think I was a nut case, imagine her sanity to do all 100 miles. And that she did, finishing strong.

I can’t even touch what it is like to be beside someone as they endure and finish something as mind-boggling as this race. For all the insanity-jokes, there is an awe and respect that has nothing to do with words. To go through some of the experience with her changed my perceptions of my self, my abilities, and set fire again to that kid-part of me that truly is game for absurd adventures. Minutes before starting that first 10 miles I felt that tap on the shoulder and heard that reminder that this is going to be fun and I should enjoy myself no matter what comes. I had been caught in nervousness and self-doubt ‘till then, seriously reconsidering the whole game. An hour or so later, taking a break above treeline, looking back over the shadow and sunned valleys below I smiled with that knowing that yes, I was having fun. And then we ran on, over the pass to an aid station surrounded by Lamas, ate mashed potatoes from a coffee cup for a few minutes and then we were off again down to Twin lakes. Surreal fun!

Twenty-four hours into the race most of us weren’t all that together in the head, which is kind of a given, right? Cindy came into this last rest stop exhausted, having literally fallen asleep while running through the previous 10 miles. We were starting mile 87 together from here to the finish. We somehow made up an hour during that mileage along Turqoise Lake as the sun rose on hour 2nd day – Cindy had been running since before the previous day’s sunrise. As we crossed the finish line to the screaming, cheering masses, her 72-year-old dad bounded over to meet her saying, “YOU DID IT! YOU DID IT!” I had another moment that caught my breath as the two of them embraced, tears full on. What I didn’t say earlier is that Cindy’s mom died a few months ago from cancer. There was more going on here than just another race finished. ”There is no limit, there is no failure here sweetheart…Love makes no sense of space and time…will disappear.”

It is possible to celebrate Life by seeing how far you can stretch it, even if it is running 100 miles through day and night, over trails and mountain passes. Yeah, we can do far more than our minds let us believe. Life seems to beg for those who dare see how far to take it. I know for myself, I found another playground of the heart I’d forgotten existed.

Threads with Which the Pattern is Woven

silk
Originally uploaded by peevee@ds.

“We need to say ‘Thank You,” whenever possible, even if we are not able to reconcile the human creature’s free will with the Maker’s working out of the pattern. Thanks and praise are, I believe, some of the threads with which the pattern is woven” – L’ Engle

I read this sitting on the back porch as the sun set on another summer evening and leftover rainfall dripped off the eves, while doves and pigeons flew here and there around the alley, chased by small runt dogs. I read this while feeling that tap on the shoulder of soul that says my stomach is full, tonight I have a place to lay my head, and the clothes I wear for the most part are not worn out; as all my limbs work even to the point that I am to pace run a friend over the last 50 miles of the Leadville 100 next weekend; the same limbs that were soaked through by the sudden afternoon storm that poured down on me as I rode home in a shiver caught by rains.

Yes, for all the unknowns in my life right now, I still have much for which to be thankful. My city isn’t being bombed or exploded by IEDs. For the most part, I still live in a democracy. I have friends both near and far that I could call on in darkest hours if for nothing more than an ear to vent to. I have years of history with a few outstanding men and women that have made the Now tastier and fuller than the Then ever could have been. I desire adventure as much as always and sometimes fearfully sometimes excitedly and often times both, jump in when it arises. I’ve not lost my edge on the back nine of my thirties. I still get tears when I hear or see something extraordinary and I laugh more than not and often when I shouldn’t.

And even the “human creatures’ free wills” that have betrayed, disappointed, and dug deep leaving scars that sometimes still ache in that mild used-to-it pain, though not something I welcome, I can mostly say, “Thank You,” - for reminding me I am alive, that I am human, that you are, too, that we are not perfect, that you have been cut also and even if you meant it you didn’t mean it that way. Neither did I.

I don’t want to askew that pattern being woven because I spent not enough time crafting the threads of thankfulness and celebration. But I must confess I often forget these threads for my pre-occupation with all the ways I don’t understand the pattern, the design, and a lot more times I don’t understand the Designer. Still, it is not up to me to make it beautiful, it is mine to be grateful for its beauty.

The Third Rail

cartoon love...
Originally uploaded by zinkwazi.

”"… we 'love' as long as we see 'results,' but if the ones we love do not respond, we tend to despair.. because we love someone, we want them to be free of addictions, of sin, of self. But it might be that our love for them and our desire for their well-being will not make them well...their lack of response no more negates the reality of love than their quickness to respond confirms it." - R. M.

This is wisdom I’ve tried to learn and live by for at least the past 15 years. In friendships, in family, in relationships. It’s been a form of a third-rail for me in my dating life, and in the hard parts of long friendships.

Somewhere along the way these past few months I stopped believing any of it. Somewhere over time, negations chipped away. I came to think it was bunk, and that no one respects, honors, or dignifies this kind of love. So why bother?

But then I was reminded of the 15 years, and the years before that. I was reminded that this kind of love is True and Real because it is how I have been loved, am loved. This third-rail Reality is written in my DNA. The only failure is to not live, love out of it.

Its fuel starts with being loved and flows from there. As Peter Gabriel sang once:

”This old familiar craving
I've been here before, this way of behaving
Don't know who the hell I'm saving anymore
Let it pass let it go let it leave
From the deepest place I grieve
This time I believe

And I let go, I can let go of it
Though it takes all the strength in me…
Yes I love to be loved
I love to be loved.” - Love to Be Loved.