![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormA sort of roundabout chain of events has pierced through my recent fog of self-absorption for a moment: you know, the one that was totally concerned with moving, illness, family weirdness, relationship weirdness, and lawyers?
I have about fifteen minutes to myself, right now. It's funny how that sounds, like I'm a mother or super-busy business executive. Maybe it makes more sense to say fifteen minutes of awareness, fifteen minutes where I'm not running around doing something. It's hard for me to turn down doing-things, and I think at part of going to Kelowna is about removing that necessity for just a little bit.
That's not what I was going to use this time for, though.
I'm thinking about love, right now, and peripherally about enmeshing your life with someone, and how love relates to that, and what responsibilities love carries as to you impact on someone else's pain or joy.
I found my friend Trevor's blog through a roundabout chain of events. I don't think linearly when I'm really thinking, so bear with me. I love Trevor. He's the only person I've known since high school, and further and more importantly we have a lovely cyclic friendship going with no particular time-obligations; sometimes he's busy, sometimes I'm busy. We see each other sometimes. Time is measured in weeks or months there. He talks in his blog about being lonely because were pretty much opposites of each other in the form of our dating lives: I am polyamorous, have been dating since high school, and have always had many people in my life romantically wheras he has dated very very seldom and not had anyone around for any particular length of time or enduring intensity.
I think for myself that obligation degrades a certain kind of love, or perhaps it's that feeling as if I'm not living up to a standard all the time causes my mind to flinch away from the whole topic, and it fades. On the other hand, duty fulfilled seems likely to create a kind of a bond, where sticking it out together, toughing something out together, or sacrificing for another in a way that's appreciated creates trust after awhile.
I'm lonely very seldom. There have been nights in the last few months where the sharp shearing feeling of isolation cuts through me, generally at night, generally when I'm in bed and no awake person is reachable. This doesn't happen often. When I was ten, twelve or fourteen, around that age, it would happen all the time. It happened pretty much anytime I saw the full moon, as I recall, though there was no mental/emotional attachment. I think it might have just been that the moon tended to wake me up through the window, and I was alone and not busy building tree forts or tables or reading.
Time is opaque. Particularly the future is opaque to us; we can't see it, when we predict it we are sometimes right but more often wrong. It's not translucent, though we often believe it is, and imagine we can see dim shapes moving there. It's hard, therefore, to base decisions on how things will turn out in the future.
We have only one life to live; this truism is a statement of time not only in the sense of days being strung together, but also in the sense of a limited number of hours that we are given on any day. In those hours our choices lie. Further, our energy and enthusiasm is limited, though some choices boost focused energy or energy overall. We can make decisions that constantly make us more energetic and enthusiastic, but many times those energies can only be spent a certain way.
Love for me had always been a thing in which I lived, a constant state, a surround for me. When I was young I loved the world and everything in it, individually and wholly, and later that sharpened out into individuals in addition but not exclusively. I loved the climbing tree in the meadow and the river on certain afternoons and the mossy nook at the bottom of the property and every seed I planted and also just the feel of the whole world on me. I forget that, living in the city, where things are less a piece.
I'm not in love with Kynnin anymore, though I'm happy when he prospers. Jan is too distant for me to remember, let alone love. I had never fallen out of love until this year, when it's become something more intensely imtimate, more concealed and internal. I love things I see: snow falling through the tall towers of glass downtown, tiny noses of crocuses and daffodills sprouting. I love things I know: the BC redcedar ecosystem, the familiar habits of the Chrises, Trevor's wry tone, the way Bob hates his bellybutton being touched, the deep-down connected feel of standing in my garden that I know runs down to the center of the earth.
There is no resolution here. Merely thoughts, and the end of fifteen minutes.
One more thought: now, love flees pain for me. In the quad, there was a lot of pain and also a lot of love. With dad it was also so. Now I close up, lock up tight and quiet, when someone causes any pain and they have not spent years undoing it first.
I have about fifteen minutes to myself, right now. It's funny how that sounds, like I'm a mother or super-busy business executive. Maybe it makes more sense to say fifteen minutes of awareness, fifteen minutes where I'm not running around doing something. It's hard for me to turn down doing-things, and I think at part of going to Kelowna is about removing that necessity for just a little bit.
That's not what I was going to use this time for, though.
I'm thinking about love, right now, and peripherally about enmeshing your life with someone, and how love relates to that, and what responsibilities love carries as to you impact on someone else's pain or joy.
I found my friend Trevor's blog through a roundabout chain of events. I don't think linearly when I'm really thinking, so bear with me. I love Trevor. He's the only person I've known since high school, and further and more importantly we have a lovely cyclic friendship going with no particular time-obligations; sometimes he's busy, sometimes I'm busy. We see each other sometimes. Time is measured in weeks or months there. He talks in his blog about being lonely because were pretty much opposites of each other in the form of our dating lives: I am polyamorous, have been dating since high school, and have always had many people in my life romantically wheras he has dated very very seldom and not had anyone around for any particular length of time or enduring intensity.
I think for myself that obligation degrades a certain kind of love, or perhaps it's that feeling as if I'm not living up to a standard all the time causes my mind to flinch away from the whole topic, and it fades. On the other hand, duty fulfilled seems likely to create a kind of a bond, where sticking it out together, toughing something out together, or sacrificing for another in a way that's appreciated creates trust after awhile.
I'm lonely very seldom. There have been nights in the last few months where the sharp shearing feeling of isolation cuts through me, generally at night, generally when I'm in bed and no awake person is reachable. This doesn't happen often. When I was ten, twelve or fourteen, around that age, it would happen all the time. It happened pretty much anytime I saw the full moon, as I recall, though there was no mental/emotional attachment. I think it might have just been that the moon tended to wake me up through the window, and I was alone and not busy building tree forts or tables or reading.
Time is opaque. Particularly the future is opaque to us; we can't see it, when we predict it we are sometimes right but more often wrong. It's not translucent, though we often believe it is, and imagine we can see dim shapes moving there. It's hard, therefore, to base decisions on how things will turn out in the future.
We have only one life to live; this truism is a statement of time not only in the sense of days being strung together, but also in the sense of a limited number of hours that we are given on any day. In those hours our choices lie. Further, our energy and enthusiasm is limited, though some choices boost focused energy or energy overall. We can make decisions that constantly make us more energetic and enthusiastic, but many times those energies can only be spent a certain way.
Love for me had always been a thing in which I lived, a constant state, a surround for me. When I was young I loved the world and everything in it, individually and wholly, and later that sharpened out into individuals in addition but not exclusively. I loved the climbing tree in the meadow and the river on certain afternoons and the mossy nook at the bottom of the property and every seed I planted and also just the feel of the whole world on me. I forget that, living in the city, where things are less a piece.
I'm not in love with Kynnin anymore, though I'm happy when he prospers. Jan is too distant for me to remember, let alone love. I had never fallen out of love until this year, when it's become something more intensely imtimate, more concealed and internal. I love things I see: snow falling through the tall towers of glass downtown, tiny noses of crocuses and daffodills sprouting. I love things I know: the BC redcedar ecosystem, the familiar habits of the Chrises, Trevor's wry tone, the way Bob hates his bellybutton being touched, the deep-down connected feel of standing in my garden that I know runs down to the center of the earth.
There is no resolution here. Merely thoughts, and the end of fifteen minutes.
One more thought: now, love flees pain for me. In the quad, there was a lot of pain and also a lot of love. With dad it was also so. Now I close up, lock up tight and quiet, when someone causes any pain and they have not spent years undoing it first.
