Love & Belonging

When you think of Life or Earth, where does your attention turn? Is there first an image conjured in your mind at the words? 

Or do you look around you to notice them in every direction? Do you see them in your hands, the improbable glow of this screen, feel them behind your eyes?

Note to self:

You know you love you, right?

There is a concerted effort being made to undo the Western thinking that leads human beings to abstraction rather than deeply focused attention. There is a fallacy that Western thought has built an empire upon - an empire that is made up of the minds and bodies of those who are convinced they are missing something. 

The emptiness of this fallacy is palpable and horribly disorienting. Many of us experience this perceived emptiness and its effects in the form of Capitalism, which necessitates our belief in such an emptiness and seeks to contrive it in actuality through fostering inequality that divests the energy of millions into individualistic mindsets of scarcity, thinking they must compete for their happiness, and altogether contriving a market built on desperation and disenfranchisement. Yet the more we believe in and live by these constraints of emptiness, the more empty we appear to each other, and the more real it all seems. 

Reminder: 

You leave the light on outside when you know you'll come home after dark 

This is not to dismiss the ramifications of Capitalism and the havoc it is causing. Like race as a social construct - it is something we ‘made up,’ yet the consequences of what we have created are now very real. And in order to unmake the harm we have caused, we need to both recognize the impermanent nature of the paradigms that sustain our current unjust reality as well as look deeply and honestly into the machinations of what we have created if we are to ever undo it (and do something else entirely) together. 

Reminder:

Your hands are able to tend to your feet

So, what is this emptiness and how can we unmake it? In the realm of Alan Watts, Sophie Strand, Tim Ingold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and many others, we have the opportunity to close the spiritual gap that is our belief in our own separation from each other, from ourselves, from our environments, and from our gods. 

I believe one way of doing this is by un-abstracting love: turning it from an ideal, a principle, or a concept into a practice, a given truth of being, a birthright, and a force we can both reside within and create from. Easier said than done, of course. What does it mean to be a student of love? To be held unconditionally? To be capable of anything, and yet compelled to try and be good? To be a part of something intricately woven with care beyond imagination? 

Reminder:

Your heart was pumping your blood before you ever knew it could

I could try to prove love to you - but I could point at anything in order to do so. I bet you can find it to your left: maybe a coffee cup, a blanket, a bracelet on your wrist (or the absence of one), any gift from life to you or you to yourself. Or to your right, or wherever there is a window, or a mirror, or something made in the image of something else.

I could try to prove belonging to you, but it is equally as simple. Another fact of life that is so apparent, but sometimes so difficult to see, because it is right in front of you. Belonging is evidenced by being at all. My teacher put it so simply once: there is food you could eat and water you could drink. Which is another way of saying we are made of this place, we’ve all grown up together and come into this shape together. We were made for, with, and by each other. 

Love and belongingness are not things we have to earn, deserve, produce, or search for. There is no definable distance between any of us, between myself and yourself, myself and any place, myself and the forces that rule me. Just by existing, we participate with all the rest of existence whether we know it or not. 

This fact of interconnectedness is only a way to glimpse the enormity of love as a universal truth. It’s an example to say, ‘Look how all of this is held together. There is something that allows us to be here and to continue, even though we cannot measure or define it.’

To me, good stories are ones built on the truth of Love. Stories that support me and hold the most meaning are stories that speak to the open hands holding me and holding us. Stories that are big enough and patient enough to remember: there isn’t anything that exists that should not be so. 

Reminder:

You think to write love notes to yourself, that's all you ever write these days