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.