Mins,
“The
lessons of love and friction”
That appearance of a rare
reply from you was a welcome distraction and purpose to a day off. I remember early
on I used to rage and riot at your non-replies. I had that problem. I thought
it was unfair to not match word for word and expressed sentiment for expressed
sentiment. And you called me “mushy” and said it was a cool thing. I did not
think so. It sounded like “corny” and I said to myself that you were
emotionally stunted to equate my words to a greeting card. As I write this,
there is rage still there.
But these are all stupid
things of my own creation. There is a freedom in love that allows the things
that truly matter to become prominent and the things that are a matter of taste
and preference remain that only. And not even in that odd way when the other
person goes on about it in a ‘loving way’, like “well I love you but you have
that thing about snorting at questions you dislike. I hate it but I endure. Because
I love you so very much” This is the thing I started this letter with. Forgive me.
There is nothing to endure in love. There is nothing to endure in your
loveliness.
Once you start to measure
love and weigh love and watch love like an errant child you have to rein in
then you will miss the train. We have to eventually graduate to that idea that
this is the person I see and this is all they will ever be. In better or worse
condition, closer or further away from the divine and never the shape or the
form our anarchic minds are always trying to make other people into. We belong
to each other but we do not own each other.
Lately I have tried to look
at my friends that way. If you cut and choose your friends along lines of ease
and unease you will lose the lessons of love and friction. There is a disagreement
involved in intimacy, the assertion of the aggressive individual over the rule
of the collective walk. Our road has both. We are to be individual enough to
choose love over fear, the other over self and the high call of God over the
low voice of the things that make us feel better in the moment but colour our
damaged souls with more of the old weights. We learn from others our ideas are
not as great as we think, our walk is not as straight and our motives are not
as pure. Now, I do not mean that people who go on about your wrongdoing and
flaws should become the gods we follow or try to love. I am saying that if
their words have the crippling effect they always do then it is proof that the
locus of our identity is not in Christ but in others. Many times you will go
against the grain of those who love you on earth. I am saying that when you do
so you must choose to do it because you are following the heart of the one who
loves you eternally in both spheres of heaven and earth. I am saying follow God
and love people in that light. They are mostly no better or no worse than you, just
closer or further from the divine light. The locus of our identity cannot be
others but it cannot be ourselves either, both are not good enough. We must
look up and locate our very lives in the things that will always be.