its own kind of freedom…

I wrote love notes of various kinds… here and there… hoping I really was seen, feeling against thinking that perhaps finally, my trust was worth giving. I thot: this is what all those story books and fairytales were trying to describe. Swept off my feet, I fell.

Too late I realized I was wrong: when you looked at me, it was not a promise, it was not a meeting of well-mets; it was a warning.

… so many love notes.

Human hearts are fragile, made particularly malleable thanks to the mind-bending heat of misguided belief. Pain births deeper understanding as it sinks into scars you believed to be healed (or, at least, healing). Blame, lies, disrespect, and silence disappears love. We become rank with longing for something that never really was.

This is the struggle to Living.
This is why we pray for blindness.
Loving the Wrong One illuminates if our soul stays open.
I see you even more clearly now but more: I see me.

on lies, secrets, and silence…

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

— Adrienne Rich —

mantra…

there was time then
when love meant falling
love meant there was in
and out of it, love meant
so many adjectives
we kept losing the noun
under it all, remember the scraping then?
of naked knees against unwanted moments.
now love, love has nothing ha! nothing
but itself
and we rise
rise rise again
into each now
into this centre
where valleys and peaks
lie together in negatives
against a sky
and every image is love
making itself
i cannot fall in love with you.
do you see?
now we rise and meet on a line
where love opens these countless petals
your fingers yes are there
inside of them
your toes too, each eyelash
all fragrant fresh and fruits filling us
a harvest like a storm
love rises into itself
through all this geometry
and in becoming
we touch as one
with what was missing all along,

(auhm mane padme om)

– E.K. –