Sunday, August 21, 2005

I may not understand, but I accept.

One regret dear world
that I am determined not to have
when I am lying on my death bed
is that I did not kiss you enough!--Hafiz

I just got that from a friend and felt like leading with it. See why I like Hafiz so much?

I had a strange experience tonight. I'm cleaning out my bedroom, and on one of my shelves is a stack of mementoes. A Greg Brown ticket, many DMB tickets, a Lucinda Williams, the printout from my VA trip last summer, and some cards. One of them was a Valentine from my friend, Leslie, with some lovely sentiments about our friendship, and ending with a wish for a lovely V-day with Don, the man I loved. In the card were some photos I had stashed there, one of me holding my nephew, another of my older son playing with one of my nieces. The pics were from the previous Thanksgiving. The last one I came to was of me and Don. I didn't expect it. I stopped in my tracks, as the enormity of love I had had for this man hit me. We looked so happy. I felt certain, safe for the first time in my life. Six months later we broke up on our one year anniversary. As I looked at that picture, I said aloud, 'I had such love for you.'

I really don't understand love at all. I have it. A huge amount, in fact. And I feel at peace with what has happened. Our love was like a universe of its own. It stayed like that for me. I believe love is a choice. You decide whether you are going to really love someone, or you withhold a little part of yourself, so that when you want an out, you can feed that little part, begin to focus on the imperfections, create things to give you pause. Love needs to be fed and nurtured. That's one of the things that led me to be able to let go, realizing that he had such little regard for that love that he preferred to let it die a slow death by neglect rather than address it. A wise friend of mine said to me later, 'Maybe he just doesn't know how to really love.' I think that was the truth.

One thing I learned from that relationship is that I am capable of unconditional love. Without a doubt. I knew I still had the capacity for that huge love and more, but I thought somehow that I had let go of some of that which had been attached to him. When we broke up, I kept thinking of the good times, and there had been many. As time passed and I dealt with the grief, I saw more of the negative, remembered what it felt like to experience his increasingly parsimonious doling out of affection, knew I'd never accept that again.

So the smack of emotion was a shock. Joni Mitchell's voice began running through my mind. 'I really don't know love, at all.' For me, though, I do know love. I just don't understand it. It's outside of all laws and expectations.

Some Rilke came to my mind also, from his Letters to a Young Poet.

Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any explanation, any solution, any hint of way yet been discerned; and for these two problems that we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, it will not be possible to discover any general rule resting in agreement. But in the same measure in which we begin as individuals to put life to the test, we shall, being individuals, meet these great things at closer range. The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence - then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

That would be much, indeed.

We'll Make the Best of What's Around

I took the title of my blog from a song that has held great meaning for me.

The Best of What's Around
By: The Dave Matthews Band

Hey my friend,
It seems your eyes are troubled.
Care to share your times with me?
Would you say you're feeling low and so
A good idea would be to get it off your mind.

See, you and me
Have a better time than most can dream,
Have it better than the best
And so can pull on through
Whatever tears at us,
Whatever holds us down,
And if nothing can be done,
We'll make the best of what's around.

Turns out not where but who you're with
That really matters,
And hurts not much when you're around.
And if you hold on tight
To what you think is your thing,
You may find you're missing all the rest.

She run up into the light surprised,
Her arms are open,
Her mind's eye is
Seeing things from a
Clearer side than most can dream,
On a better road I feel.
So you could say she's safe.
Whatever tears at her,
Whatever holds her down,
And if nothing can be done,
She'll make the best of what's around.

Turns out not where but what you think
That really matters,
And hurts not much when you're around.

Some might think that making the best of what's around means not looking to make things better, that you 'make do,' but it's not, at least not in this sense. You can only get to the next place by how you use what you have available to you where you are now.

I could look back on my life and bemoan why I didn't make different choices, yet I appreciate finally reaching a vantage point where I know that I made the best choices that I could have, given the tools that I had. Would I do differently now? Yes, for some of the situations and no for others. And even with that, would different choices have led to me being a different person than the one some of you know? Had my life flowed more easily, I might have felt no choice but to stay at the places I was, because they'd have been what I'd asked for. I'd have felt even more obligated to remain static.

About 2 1/2 years ago I began to enter into a relationship which I thought was the answer to many, many dreams. Now, as Garth Brooks sings, thank God for unanswered prayers. Had it worked out, given the direction things were going, I'd have ended up miserable, trying to make an inherently unhappy person, someone who doesn't quite understand the meaning of love, feel better. I wouldn't have taken my Saratoga trip with my son. I wouldn't have had the time to spend to really get to know the people at Radio Paradise.

The future wouldn't be wide open to me, as it is now.

Thanks Housewives. Thanks RPeeps. Thanks to Linda, Kiah, Tracy, Jana and to those who have come and gone, to help me get to this place. I'll do my best with it.

I shall attempt to make my third entry less navel-gazing. Maybe something about my toes.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Beginnings

Eudora Welty said, "Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations. "

I understand what she says, but I'm not sure that I agree. I'm a traveler, and I am clueless about my destination. The child in me who yearns for safety would doubtless be gratified if I did, but kid, hang on. You're not alone in the ride, anymore.

I have a kind of a gestalt view of my place of arrival, but it's only a view of the whole, the gut feeling that I will arrive. The details have yet to be worked in. Sometimes that lack of certainty throws me into a panic. What if I choose wrongly? Pick too early? Wait too late? Or God forbid, make a mistake.

I try to then sit back, even if only figuratively. Relax. Gather the fragments which have begun to splinter out from residual fear and sink back into myself. Finally, at 43, I have gained a feeling that I am where I'm supposed to be. It started a few years ago, the knowledge that I was on the right path. After some detours and interruptions, I finally feel like I'm there. Not at the place where I'll end, but on that journey, the right one. I'm no longer wondering which train to hop, or worse yet, afraid that I missed the right one.

Destinations are good, but what I live for is the journey.