Love By Definition

What does it mean to be in Love? How do you know when it has happened to you? Who has the right to say? Why must it be that Love must last until, when? Forever? Feelings aren’t facts, and impermanence is our reality; must we make forever out of our Love for it to be real?

I would like forever. Someone who will wake up morning after morning and choose me, again and again. I want it for its predictability, the steadiness of it. A promise and then an action, an equation repeating itself. I knew a God like this once. I knew him, and oh how well he knew me, both in my knobby kneed confessions as a child, and my weeping and rent garments as an adult. I came undone for him over and over, and he was faithful to witness the performance. Faithful, even, to clothe me again, when he saw fit. I never understood him though, and could never speak to him in my deepest mother tongue.

I lost my language, the thing that was as natural to my tongue as air is to the lungs, long before I’d known to grieve it. By the time the sadness hit me, I was too far from the home inside myself. I was bereft with grief, and had no one around me to cling to but the one who I’d shed it all for. So I prayed night after night to be made clean, begged that the promises would keep. When I began to unravel, to understand that I’d lost something, home was but a distant memory. I became a bitter nomad, an angry beggar. I hoped for caravans to take me in, for their pity to give me some morsel or some warm thing to wrap myself against the cold wind on those long nights. Yes, I knew a God once, but no more. Even God is impermanent.

What happens to Love when your God himself is as shifting as a mirage on a desert plain, there at a distance but immaterial when you draw close? I’m tired of trying, discovering and uncovering these questions that lead to more questions, none of which easily surrender their answers.

Yet, I want to say I am learning of Love, learning its meaning and its form, the shape it takes by day and by night. I still hesitate to call its name too loudly, to say it too slowly, or with too much force, for fear it will mean something different and my understanding of love will reveal itself as crudely made. After all, I do know that my voice can give a thing power; that if I say something it can take root inside of me or pour its foundation before my eyes, concrete. What if I give my power to the wrong thing? Can I call it back to myself, if I discover that I was mistaken? I don’t know for sure, but I do not think so. Drawing power back is an arcane art, an art lost to us even more so than sending it forth. Power that makes us believe and belief that gives us power, these are the things we must be aware of when we use words like love. Still, if it is impermanent, what harm can a little power do?

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My sister has two boys, ages three and four, and their sweetness and wildness stretches the bounds of her Love daily. Watching her mother, I try to recall my mother’s love for me as a child. I cannot. This is my first confession within this space, and I make it with great pain. Who wants to admit that they do not remember the Love of their mother. It is true for me, though, and maybe even one of the roots that sprouted deep in the earth of me, growing up into this moment of recovery. I do remember, vaguely, when my mother went to rehab herself, for her alcoholism, and received a diagnosis of Bipolar (formerly called manic depression). She came back so changed, and I remember feeling such an ache at that. I was too young to understand that so much of our roles had been reversed that I was grieving the loss of my first child, as much as I was the loss of the mom that I knew. I never stopped loving her, but it took many years to come to understand her, to understand that my codependency could not have been prevented, simply because she didn’t have the tools to help me dismantle what she was unlearning herself. Even now, as I, childless, begin to tear down the walls around my own heart, the walls that keep me chained to others instead of free to give from a full place, I am learning to love her still more.

I wrote her a letter to tell her this in the first thirty days of treatment. I never mailed it. It may seem unloving or cruel to unveil these feelings here and now, in a place that she will, no doubt, see it. She loves me, though, and I think she will understand.

Isn’t that what Love is, too? A gentle holding of space for the parts of our stories, and the stories of those that we Love, no matter how dark or fragile the parts may be?

I think so. Like I said, and will say forever, my mother loves me. Love stretched her out beyond the places a heart can conceive possible, and even when she was unable to be a mother whose love I have memory of, Love still hummed there. Her love for me is what sent her to rehab; her example of what it means to love yourself is what has allowed me to make this journey now. Is it possible that the suffering endured in that season of our lives was designed to place me in a position of freedom now? I think, of its many attributes, Love should be a player of the long game, charting out the course that would make our lives meaningful, not in the now only , but at the finish line.

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Love takes many forms and has many bedfellows, among the most intimate being Fear and Courage. Watching my sister raise two young black boys in America, the fear and courage that lay beside her love for them is tangible, tangy-tart, viscerally felt, sickly sweet. I have watched her speak life over them, and discipline them from the complex place between the reality of a soft home and a hard world. How do you raise young men who will know their own power, and fully know that others could exert total power over them? How do you train up a child in the way they should go, when you can’t ever really know the journey ahead of them? I was on the phone with her one night when the tension of exhaustion, physical pain, emotional frustration, longing and Love collided over a near missed potty opportunity. I love her, so I tried to tell her to “take a beat,” let the emotions pass through her. I was afraid of the size of her love, her fear, and her courage. I wanted her to shrink them, back to a size I could fully compute, a size I could relate to and understand. At the moment, however, that wasn’t the right thing to say. How can a mother, a single mother of two young boys, two young black boys, enjoy the privilege of “a beat?” How many times does she think of the ways in which the world will try to beat them down for not being good enough, not being smart enough, not kind enough, not fast enough or strong enough, and then hate them for becoming more than enough? I hear her fear say, “If he can’t learn to wipe his own butt today, how will he pay tomorrow?” I hear her courage say, “I can raise boys who believe in themselves, even when I can’t believe in myself”. Writing it like that makes a false farce of a moment real enough to burn your tongue as you swallow it. I watched her work her way through it, and listened as the man, who I cannot yet publicly say that I love, spoke words which seemed soothing. Love reproached me then, for wearing its name outwardly like sack cloth and ashes, when the body of my actions were selfish underneath. Love reminded me of how it sees us, how it is present to us, how it moves through and around us even when our attempts to wield it are clumsy and misinformed. 

Unlike the love of my mother, this newest lover came out of left field, and I was staring hard down the plate at third; safe to say I wasn’t expecting him. The universe is busy being itself, so I won’t say it took the time to  conspire for me to face my fears and desires so quickly, but damn am I. I want to say with earnestness that I Love him, because of the swelling inside my heart when I see him, hear his voice, experience the comfort of the space that he creates for me and surrounds me with. I am building a new home inside myself painstakingly, brick by brick, but this new lover lays mortar on my trowel and encourages me to work through the heat of the day, to rest in the cool of the evening’s shade. And, is this not Love, which sees us and assists us in the seeing of ourselves? What has time to do with these lessons, which Love would so graciously teach us. And who are we to say that Time does not agree with her, in ways we can never fully understand. 

Time is a keeper of our memories, but we are not Time’s keeper. Perhaps these precious boys will not remember these moments of painstaking and frustrated love. Knowing how good my sister’s memory is, forgetting is less likely than if they were my own. I know she prays that  they forget the ways in which her attempts to show the depths of her Love fall terribly short and shallow, just as she prays that they would know more intimately than most, the height and breadth of her Love for them, more than her words could say. She prays to the God I used to know, and I know petitions Him on my behalf too. I don’t begrudge or belittle this act of loving kindness, no matter how confusing it is for me to receive it. It feels somewhat like when a child holds a kitten or their younger sibling for the first time; I hold my hands open with eyes wide and a bit worried that I will crush it, or it will fall out of my grasp and have an unpleasant meeting with the floor. Still, I try. I try to remember that Love doesn’t expect you to know how to receive it, because it is, after all, as solid as mercury and as dense as air. 

When I think of Love, I think of a mother. I think I always have. I think of the things that go without gratitude because they show up so daily and are so mundane that we forget to be thankful for them. I also think of her as D’Angelo’s Spanish Joint played while cruising down the freeway at 75, a cup of hot water and apple cider vinegar to chase away a sore throat, a piece of seven-layer chocolate cake. Love tastes and feels and hears and smells. Love is alive, and her memory is long but her mercy is longer. Love, like her sister, has many many faces. Her form takes many shapes. She is complex and nuanced, bold and straightforward. She takes you for your strengths and weaknesses, dashing you down to raise you up again. Love is not easily captured, by photo or word; this, too, is part of her nature.

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In seven days, everyone I’ve met and built relationships with in treatment will be scattered to the four winds. Only two of us will be staying in the area, and I am the only one making a “permanent” relocation, as far as I know. One client, whom I have a close friendship with, left on Saturday. Yesterday and today we coined out two more. On Friday, the last of my original house mates will leave to go home an hour north, and on Saturday, I will be moving out, and I’m not sure where. Is it possible to truly Love that which is removed so quickly from our grasping hands? I think so. Everything changes everything, and the practice of love is as much an exercise to enlarge our hearts as it is to fill them up. Sometimes, I think the space left behind serves to show us the size of our containers, the vast expanse of space we hold for goodness in our tiny mortal frames.

Grief and Love are sisters, and best friends. They work in tandem, one making space for the other everywhere that they take up residents. Grief and Love are both strong and able to fight the fiercest battles, and both are able to be a balm to the deepest wounds. I think about Love and Grief a lot these days. As change and transition hover at my door, Love and Grief bustle in and out of my heart without so much as a moment to close the door behind them. I’m learning to appreciate them both, the sharpness and warmth in their voices when they speak to me, the callouses on their hands when they hold me tenderly. Love’s hands are the tenderest of all, handing us gifts that we hold to our chest like fledglings. Grief’s are strongest, taking from us the things which we hold so close. Yet, they work together, their timing interlocked, so that when one gives, the other makes room for more, and when the other takes away, so the first gives again.

So, do I love him? Does she Love me? Do we love each other? Yes, of course. I know we do, not because I know the definition of Love but because the word has power, and power brings forth the word in action. Love can’t be bottled or distilled, and it certainly isn’t trapped by my measly understanding of her, yet I can feel her with every fiber of my being. I know her the way I know the taste of honeysuckle nectar, a sweet secret between this city girl and mother nature's urban wellspring. I know her the way I know the small rise and fall of breath entering in and exiting from the chest of a baby. I know her, and so do you, if only for the yearning.

Yes, we know Love, if only for a few of her faces.

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Love gives us so much, but her altar needs its offerings, too. No matter which of her faces you are looking for, she asks the same thing from us all: a place inside our hearts. You cannot give her your time, because you are not Time’s keeper. It is only after she’s agreed to share the pleasure of her company with you that any work can really come; you must maintain the place inside you where she stays. You must leave her clean towels to dry her hair and make sure there’s enough coffee in the pot for the both of you, in the morning. Be careful to do this, these small acts of acknowledgment and worship. Love is the most considerate of the gods, and the most observant house guest. She won’t ever overstay her welcome.

So, it is a place inside your heart, that inner home you have built and rebuilt for yourself, that you must offer to her. It’s this request that is at the root of the tragedy which befalls so many of us, a life without the depth and breath of Love’s presence. After all, how can you invite someone into a place where you will not stay? How can you be hospitable in a place that you do not feel at home? So many of us are ships out to sea, so far away from that harbor that is our inner self. I may not have an adequate way to describe her, but of one thing I am sure: to experience the truth of her presence and the fullness of her beauty, you must have a home within yourself to give to her. Far too many of us have left abandoned or derelict, the very place we long for her to be.

For a long while, I was a nomad, a foreigner in a strange world. Now I am a brick layer. Now, I sleep in a tent, content to camp out and explore the terrain that has developed since I was last here, the homeland inside my soul. Recovery has moved mountains and carved out valleys, and my soul is at once familiar and strange to me. I accept this discomfort, because like all the other things in life, it cannot last always. No matter how humble my home is, I extend love the warmest invitation I can, and I see that she will visit me. Even here, even now. I may never know all of her faces, but I know she visits me, wherever and whenever I give room for her. Today I hope you find yourself at home or, at least, with room in your tent for her. The journey home may be long and, at times, the road may be rocky. Still, I believe you can do what must be done to create a sacred space within yourself for Love to abide. I hold the cultivation of that space in the Light for you.

May you find yourself soon home.

May you make space for love,

And have the courage to invite her in.

With all the Love I have to give,

Auntie Alie