Karmic love

In the last two weeks, inside a container that contained the universe and timeless timelines, I fell in love.

It is a strange, inevitable sort of love. I’ve known it was coming for a while – six months of teetering on the edge of his gravity, reaching out tentative fingers only to pull them back, singed.

The shape of our attachment wounds are so perfectly matched – spikes where I have soft edges, diffuseness where he needs solidity. We are yin and yang, he says to me; stones with rough edges, carving each other into our essence. Strike after strike, we whittle each other into purity – returning each time with intensity, fear, resistance, devotion, and enough wild pleasure to keep us from throwing it all away.

We have done this before, lifetime upon lifetime. I look into his eyes and I see my beloved, my companion, my best friend. You found me again, I breathe. I will always find you, he murmurs back.

There is something we are teaching each other, learning through each other, about relationship. Deconstructing everything that was handed down to us, flailing in the openness beyond, recreating from truth. It is precarious, beyond anything we know, and so wildly liberating.

We are living in the question of how deeply free relationship can be; we are breathing the poem. What is it like to love the exquisite beauty of the wildflower, knowing that they will never belong to you? He cannot be picked, or contained; cannot be held static; loving him is not convenient. It is wild, disruptive, rain-filled, mud-thick. I will never have him. All I can do is stumble into his forest and let the intricate complexity of his being take my breath away, allow myself to be broken open.

And what is it like to love the jaguar – vital, dynamic, beyond control? She cannot be leashed – she fights against binds that would contort her soul; her nature is freedom. All he can do is wait, day after day, watching me leave and return and leave and return. Surrender to the pain and sorrow. Trust that in my deepest freedom I will softly pad back to his side.

Attachment wounds want us to tighten to find security. I will be this for you, and you will be this for me, and we will be safe – right? We create implicit contracts, silent agreements for the shapes we will contort ourselves into to stay secure. Micro-adjustments to keep within the structures that ossify around us. Fear creates contraction, until the binds become so tight we cannot breathe.

But contract says: I do not trust that you will keep wanting this; I am afraid that you might no longer want this; I will try to pin down the future. You cannot pin down the future. All you have is this moment. Living beyond the contract says: can I trust in this moment, and the next, and the next, and be willing at any moment for my heart to break? Can I feel the grief of impermanence?

When we’re tiny, we need consistency and stability. The same routines. The same blanket. We need slow titration into variance – look, a new room, and mamma’s still here. We slowly learn that variance is okay, loss and newness and change is okay, love and care will remain. But if we don’t get that, we stay in the world of the tiny one. We look for permanence. We look for the security we craved, the mother who will never disappear. We block out the truth, asking each person to be our mother, or our father. And in that, we lose so much of the aliveness of what is real – impermanence, and freshness, in every moment.

There is a deeper truth to impermanence. It is not: I might lose you, but: I will lose you. I could never even have you to lose in the first place. Death will come. Change will come. You will become a new person over and over. The only thing we can do is live with what is alive right now. Beauty and loss commingle. Only in feeling the loss can we let in the depth of the beauty.

And somehow, in this view, every moment becomes infinitely precious. Gemstones I cradle, only for them to dissipate. No matter the valence of the moment, its complexity itself is precious. We are constantly receiving and letting go – anything else is story, holding back life force like a child clutching her blanket.

I have always felt, somehow, like loss was an ocean rippling just under the surface of my whole experience. That if I were to really let it in, it would never stop breaking me. So I never let it in. But your greatest pain is your greatest teacher is your greatest gift. Living in truth means loss, second by second. But in opening to the loss, I also open my aliveness to bliss.

Somewhere in there, in the loss and impermanence, is space for what is real. For the truth of how vibrant, and alive, and important this love is. Spontaneous desire to be here, renewing itself every moment. Knowing that we will step in when our stories are telling us to run away. Knowing that we will shatter mountains to be here, until we won’t. It is not a promise, it doesn’t pretend to know the future, it is just here now.

Trust. An opening to beauty and sadness, timelessness and impermanence, falling, and falling, and falling. This is what we are teaching each other.