Actually, I am at the Flying M again and I am wearing a highlighter-orange dress. Even though I had to climb in through the kitchen window at 4 am yesterday, I woke up saucy and put together around noon. My yoga practice is deepening. My meditation practice is deepening. I drew an “Extend Love” card from the Intention deck…
I know what it is to feel love, especially when coupled with attachment, intimacy, or limerence, but how does one truly extend love to another? Is love best shown through patience and acceptance, or is that not it? I have found many ways to express love to Devin, but how do I best love those with whom I do not have an emotional connection? Is it something that radiates when one connects with Love?
I keep thinking back to the scene in Donnie Darko in which Kitty Farmer draws a continuum of “fear” and “love” on the chalkboard, explaining that all actions are a product of either fear or love. Donnie responds:
Life isn’t that simple. I mean who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.
Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions.
Donnie: Okay. But you’re not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else!
Recently, I feel like I’ve been sucked into this false dichotomy full force, and believe me, I agree with Donnie, it is a false dichotomy. However, as I started to contemplate in my previous entry, I have been faced with fear and love equally lately. I don’t want to be ashamed of my fears so I can better work through them. I want love to be the motivation for my actions and how I treat myself and others. I’m not sure if or how these emotions interact within me, but I think my awareness of them is deeper than coincidence. Still, I doubt that if I face my fear of falling down an eroded hill, I will be able to better extend love to Devin’s sister or a stranger. I may be able to better extend love to myself, but it would be a conditional love.
A few days ago, Devin and I cuddled in the rose garden at Julia Davis Park and talked about what we want to be when we grow up. Neither of us could pinpoint a particular occupation, but I realized in the past two years, my life goals have become much more practical. I want to continue to love life and strive to understand how I connect with the everything that moves around me, but part of me wants to do this “settled down.” It’s not that it is exhausting to be a sex radical or just radical in general all the time, but I know that it is possible to build a stationary life and make it radical. I’ve grown to value raising kids, and my previous reasons for not wanting them more accurately reflect internalized misogyny than feminism.
But I’m not making any plans. I’ve been skipping around town with “Que Sera, Sera” scrolling through my brain, and I feel like, for the first time possibly ever, I’m becoming genuinely okay with whatever will be, will be. The last time I felt this awake I was eighteen. The hurdle is always believing that I am okay, that what happens in my life can be made into something thrilling, that I can love myself (whatever that means).
…part of what I don’t like about Eckhart Tolle is that he talks in abstract new age buzzwords. When I re-read this entry, I see so many of them. As a writer, this is displeasing. I intend to transcend abstract new age buzzwords… but I guess I ought to accept them when they are unavoidable.
I’ve been trying to write more, and I think that keeping this blog will be a good practice.
