Why love fucks me up (and I'm going for it anyway)
Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Iranian 13th century poet Rumi says your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
I think he’s right. My experience of love has been entwined and wrapped around in most parts with intense fear and suffering, because until I feel safe enough, I just won’t let go.
And there’s the rub. Life is inherently a risky business. You can die at any point.
Venus, morning star, also my nemesis.
Loving too is a fundamentally foolish endeavour from one standpoint. The decision to love is also the decision to experience pain.
As CS Lewis writes: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
But that’s assuming you can even let go of enough fear in the first place to let anyone in or let any of you out. I have accumulated walls around my heart, and often, they just won’t dissolve. Not at least, without seeming to cause a great disturbance as they tumble. And who wants that level of disruption?
Welcome to the citadel. Expect boiling oil.
Sometimes I half let go of some of the blocks and live in a semi bomb site as bits of the fortress crumble but not enough to set anything free. Letting go can feel like loss.
And most things I’ve let go of still have my fingernails left in them. But really what I am letting go of is old pain and beliefs that keep me safe in the same way that death is safe.
Some cages, however ornamental and pretty, are still just cages.
Love is not a gripping force but to me it can feel like gripping because whenever I touch the part of me that loves, shortly after that I come up against the parts that are afraid and will desperately cling on to anything, even things that cause me pain.
Things like control, or beliefs like ‘I need to show up in a certain way to be loved’ or ‘this person doesn’t like me or will leave me’ or fixating on something small ‘wrong’ with someone.
I come up against these and many more elaborate blocks that try to grab and trap me in intellectual mazes just as I start to surrender and trust what’s in front of me. Those are my blocks to love.
Lost in a maze I’ve designed is essentially one experience whenever I get close to intimacy - whether that’s expressing myself in creative ways and being visible out in the world, or letting someone in. Or even, vomit, intimacy with myself.
I’m relatively young but I feel like I’m late to this game, and perhaps that’s a universal experience, collectively because we’ve been attempting this love business for thousands of years. It’s hard.
These blocks are immensely painful and releasing them often involves reacquainting oneself with them.
Sometimes when you are pulling a thorn out, you re-feel the pain as it goes. And yet, if you can let it go, it releases, and then you have more space to feel more freely life as it happens.
Because these blocks are both the result of hurt through disconnection and additionally perpetuate disconnection, and disconnection is inherently agonising, the process doesn’t much feel like love, it feels like shit.
And it’s pretty easy to get hijacked by these feelings and forget all about why and when they got touched in the first place.
Feeling these blocks can be so overwhelming it’s easy get confused about whether they are happening now, what’s old, what’s new, what’s yours and what belongs to someone else.
And it looks messy and it feels out of control. And I don’t like feeling fucked up. And I certainly don’t want anyone else to see me like that. No, not me. I’m together. In my tight little casket, awfully polite and erudite.
Look at my castle isn’t it beautiful? No you can’t come in , the place is a mess.
Choosing love is inherently risky. And yet it’s the only rodeo in town worth it. There’s suffering to suffer and suffering to end suffering.
Choosing a life without the risk of opening your heart and feeling, you can drift about for a bit and just be ok with the routine of it. But if there’s anything in you that’s awake at all, you realise it’s not really the spot. And so you’re left with the excruciating option of Rumi’s path. And there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever make it through all the blocks alive.
And yet there is something inherently sacred about being willing to try. I have immense respect for anyone attempting this work.
Love; the only rodeo in town worth attending really.
Treading the path of trying to live a more full life, with more freedom to be oneself, to express the love you have inside, whether in relationships or through art of all forms.
And to be willing to let the world in, and be moved, whether through nature or people or animals.
To allow oneself to care and to be cared about is, in my experience, immensely difficult.
Is difficult. Also nice.
Maybe love isn't that hard.
Maybe I’m more attached to struggle than most.
Maybe there is an easier route.
And yet I don’t think I’m that special.
Sometimes the only comfort is that receiving love and loving is the only real rodeo in town, so I at least know I’m setting off in the right direction.
The rest I’m happy to leave down to the universe, because in my infinite wisdom, I’ve realised I don’t know rather a lot. At least with this rodeo I know I’m connected to finding something true. And that is my own loving nature.