The ability to love and ask questions
In this universe we are given two gifts:
The ability to love
and the ability to ask questions.
Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
~ Mary Oliver
Love can be one of the most life-changing forces to grace our lives. It is arguably one of the most powerful and mysterious energies on the spectrum of perception - of such profound delightful and, ironically, the most dangerous. Love, with its ability to build the most magnificent castles in the sand and just as easily flatten them with the forceful momentum of a crashing wave.
It is my meager yet earnest experience of love that knows it is the force that holds not just brightness and joy, but equally and seemingly as seductively, holds darkness and all that comes with that deep, decadent descent. To me, love is the most vivid representation of the paradox, somehow existing simultaneously in one unified felt emotion. It is an existentially torturous liberation with such a fine line between unbounded freedom of the soul and grueling mental shackles.
No wonder then, how those, like myself, who love so incredibly deeply are also the ones who feel such an immense potency of suffering.
Would I discard or abandon this process if I could?
Sometimes I plead for the option.
However, the more I release my tight grip of attempting to understand the silken, impermanent fabric of reality, the more I come to fancy the insanity that this love of life has introduced me to… dare I say befriend it. Why I am being granted these lenses at such a young age, or even at all, is beyond my scope of knowing or theorizing. Maybe its beyond my capacity to ever understand. With each tinge of rejection from the attempt to weave my emotions back into the fabric of ‘normalcy’ or try to organize them neatly, the more they rear their head and charge at me with the force of a thousands suns, thrusting me deeper into the infinite expanse of awakening into this world beyond worlds.
And terrified I often become as the waves crash over me and undulate through me. One moment, feeling the collective suffering of what seems like every being on this beautiful yet challenged planet, the next, so overcome with potent bliss and gratitude, so full of pleasure its almost unbearable. Maybe it’s the seeded recognition of the paradox, this dense interconnected algorithm of life that serves as the teacher of both/and instead of either/or.
The source of suffering and peace, flowering in and out of me, in and out of the other. From the micro to the macro, the threads that bind us, inevitably, in the web of weaving and wefting.
Oh how I laugh when the heaviness dwindles and I remember how, I myself, have asked for this - both directly in spoken word and with the subtle, almost invisible intentions of desire. I have requested that life show me the deepest of truths, the deepest wells of being, far past those known in a conventionally human-centric ideology. The unbearable lightness of being joyously dances and rejoices in the shadows of pain with a smile on her face and tears in her eyes.