On being saturated to the bone
In tending, I’m taught its effulgence.
Have we forgotten how to love each other? Or have we forgotten how to extend it to someone or something beyond ourselves, even when we ourselves are wounded?
Have we forgotten how to love that which doesn’t look like us, act like us, talk like us? When lost, scared, alone, or even tormented, can we love someone, that on the surface may appear foreign or different and may extend love in a way we don’t understand? Can we love someone who’s completely innocent and in the same heartbeat love the bully who never received it?
In this troubled time, can we lean into the words of Ram Dass and remember, that we’re all just walking each other home. We have it within us. In a sense we’ve already arrived.
I hold a memory of my little stepson sitting on the sofa. We were sitting side by side watching television. He snuggled in, wedging himself into my side and under my armpit. It was utterly precious. I wrapped my arm around his eight year old body. Yet, I couldn’t keep my arm there for long. An awkwardness crept up inside, almost choking me with discomfort. At the time I couldn’t sit with it—being loving while I myself seemed light years away.
I let go. So did he.
Why is it that we, me in this case, remain emboldened to the pain and the past, rather than melt into love? ‘We have to keep on cleaning the mirror’, said legendary jazz musician and composer John Coltrane. We keep at it until the end, or until we experience the undivided or that we may clearly see who we are and what we are making. I’m humbly learning love. There is no time to waste, no mirror to break.
Looking back I regret indulging in the pain. My mind wrenched and likely enraged from the residue of an argument about the ex, their mom, whom made me bristle. Ugh, that feeling. To feel as though I’m owed something rather than having any semblance of generosity to retrieve the benevolence this little boy and I both sought. Sadly, that evening, I was unable to share, to be touched, to receive, nor to give anything in return.
It’s quite terrifying to be numb to affection, this love force, while simultaneously desperate for its warmth. How deeply we want it and how desperate we are for it. Even when it’s present, why is it that we’re practically blind to it. I still have times where I feel as though I’m standing out in the rain without the slightest awareness that I’m, in fact, saturated to the bone.
I’m learning of love and finding the irony that I’ve never been undivided from it. In an interview with Atmos, Richard Powers speaks of the greater inter-connected human and nonhuman collective, and that it’s only through radical remembrance that we become well. “We have a limited ability to see that no one can be well by themselves. We know that intellectually inside the human community. Why should it be any different in the larger community of living things? The only well-being is interbeing.”
So may I dance in the rain, fully exposed, dripping wet, and not alone. Let the showers of mutual generosity flourish.
Yours, Erin
Very moving. Beautiful piece