Dear Love #1

Liz Gilbert inspired me with her Letters From Love project. I've asked my higher power for guidance before but apparently when you call it Love, and sit down to write its answers it has a lot to say.

Check out Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letters From Love project and be inspired to write your own letter to Love. I have no idea if it’s ok etiquette to add her as a guest collaborator here. But Love says “do it” so here goes nothing.

Dear Love, 

What would you have me know? 

Dear one, 

I wish for you to know me. I want you to easily and deeply know me.  To know me from the place that is beyond all knowing.  It is easy, this knowing.  But it is complicated by you, by everyone.  It seems so difficult just to accept.  Everyone wants their way to be the best way of hearing me.  The best way of being loving.  But that’s so silly. Loving can only be itself by being beyond the best and worst.  It is the tugging at the ends of that spectrum and pulling “best” to touch “worst” like a piece of fabric that has been held taut by two hands that suddenly take the two ends and turn them into a parachute.

You want so badly to know me and then tell everyone else.  You want to know if everyone feels that way about me.  If everyone wants to tell everyone else the way you do.  I don’t know that.  But I know that you want that.  I can only blow into you like wind that inflates a sail and tell you about yourself.  But when I blow out of you and into someone else I inflate their sails and when I am with them, I am not with you.  Or I am, but in a different form.  It’s so hard to explain to you, who measures everything, the way in which I am beyond measure.  In which we are - beyond measure.  Because I am not one.  I am many.  I am every.  I am like light.  Light doesn’t break into pieces and neither does love.  It suffuses.  It illuminates.  I, we, it illuminates.  Are there any other pronouns you have in your language?  Ze illuminates.  They illuminate.  It’s funny how you need everything to be in person form.  I wish I could tell you the pronouns that fungi use so we could have a good laugh about trying to pin love down the way you do.  The way humans do. 

You are a little scared by this right now.  Like you do with most experiences of great joy you want to slow it down, cut it off, have only a little at a time.  Why?  Do you think it will hurt you?  You think it will hurt you to want it.  It will hurt you to become attached to it.  To love it.  To love love.  So many times you have been on the brink of ecstasy and you let yourself feel some of it, but then you ration.  I’ll stop that for now.  Get serious again.  Maybe in a week or two.  It’s like the pipeline of magic starts to flow, you get a taste, you LOVE It and then you take a big old clamp and crimp that pipe so it just trickles for awhile.  You think you’re safer that way.  That you won’t get addicted that way.  You won’t get addicted to joy.  

You are a recovering joy addict.  

And you think you shouldn’t do this drug.  That anything that could feel this good should be suspect.  But then you know, and I know you know, that Jesus was a joy addict.  He was into the joy of standing in the light of love.  And you have known that since you were a little girl and there in the church he, we, spoke to you and told you that you and he understand each other.  You felt it there, you cried, you were moved, and you were under nine years old.  

We don’t want you to be Jesus.  We want you to be you.  To join the joy addiction.  To take it in and gorge on it.  The joy of love is what everyone is seeking when they do any other drug.  It is, my friend, the original drug.  It’s the one.  

So, go ahead.  Indulge.  I’m right here.