After I completed university, and perhaps before I got one of my first jobs, I spent a fall afternoon on the phone. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what cycle it was. Most of my past swirls together in a pool. This is my best approximation.
A phone call with an acquaintance from college, or a semi-acquaintance, I’m not sure. Sometimes I find it easy to blur the lines in relationships. Maybe I’m not good with boundaries, or maybe because of how I like my relationships makes it easy for them to bleed. I love just listening to others, and maybe that accelerates how comfortable others may feel around me.
An eon of moments ago I remember confessing to a good group of friends how it didn’t really matter to me whether you had close friends or semi-close or acquaintances. It was an innocuous question at the time: would you prefer 5 good close friends or 10 semi-close friends, something inane like that. So my answer was the latter, and perhaps it soured my relationships then, or at least scarred it. Funny how the seemingly innocuous hides its fangs.
But that’s how it’s always been. I confessed it at the time because I couldn’t see the difference between close friends and get-along friends or distant friends. It all feels the same to me; maybe it’s a confession of unfounded hubris: this strange assumption that, well, whatever relations we have, we can surely figure out what we need from one another, right? I guess the idea behind close friends is that you could be more vulnerable, or seek some advice and wisdom, but of these I doubt it crosses the simple minded. And as that simple mind warped within our shared Eternity, so it settles in its simple-minded habit.
What’s the use all of all of this? Well, it serves as an ironic contrast: here I was so indifferent about proximity, or formalities, or any sort of certainty of who has your back or not, who’s going to be with you or not, whatever else, yet fervently I was grasping about Love on the phone.
The person on the other end found a lot of stability and warmth in the gospels. Sometimes when you see the worldview of the more devout, you feel like the funny one. You wonder how you ever made sense of the world beforehand. That somehow all of these things happened and now you’re here, instead of grabbing some cloth back in the garden.
Anyway, we were talking about Love – Divine Love, to be precise. My disposition on our Creation, whatever Creation Myth you want to abide by – but whatever rests above us, I figure it to be something completely incomprehensible, contradictory, dwelling in some oceans of paradox. Impartial, too. With such an amorphous complex structure in reign, who am I to say or contemplate something more human-like in its cores? As above, so below you may whisper. There’s a piece of the author in every character so you’d add.
I wouldn’t deny those statements at all, though I never gave them much thought either.
However a phone call conversation meanders so somehow we landed on Divine Love – and it struck me strangely, it stabbed at my identity, and though I’ve since surrendered to it, sometimes in one’s conception of things you hold onto the thorns. Because it makes you feel alive. And it gives you a reason to keep going: to eventually heal the wounds and know some serenity in its roots.
They stated that Divine Love is bottomless, endless, and that The Creator loves us all the exact same, and such love has no bounds. I couldn’t comprehend it at the time. It seemed like Love was always reserved for a select few amongst all the things I’ve experienced. And even within its utterance I never could discern the warmth behind it. Still, one could observe any animal family and I guess that’s a good enough working definition on how some view it.
So I couldn’t accept it at the time. If you loved everyone, you loved no one, was the idea. A friend to all, a friend to none – do you see the irony now?
The only love that made sense in that phone call was one out of lack. Out of contrast. Out of selection. Are we to damn all of those who never find it, then?
As the mind warps more, so it finds comfort in its hardening. This person later sent me photos of all of these beautiful places – places I would probably never go to. They’d tell me about old castles, lakeshores and river bridges, a meadow of sunflowers to greet a spring aboard. In my reflection so I bet their state of mind brought them such beauty. I hope they’re doing well and found their hearth.
There’s a poem of William Blake I usually hold onto – held onto it even then, and still didn’t grasp it.
But when it comes to Divine Love, I think it’s the best answer.
He who clings to a Joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s Sunrise
Perhaps a subconscious reason why I sustained lukewarm friends, or love-out-of-lack, was because the pain of goodbyes stung too much. All of Suburban life you slowly say goodbye with each school grade. And in Suburban life you never say hello to half of one’s neighbors. And if you do go off to a big school to learn fancy words, it’s there for a few years and back again – as it was that afternoon. What is the simple-minded to do, other than harden?
That’s the funny thing about Divine Love though, as Blake guides: the Suburban existence is the perfect sort of monastery for the devoted. Learning to enjoy each one you come across, even if you’ll never come across them again. Loving them all the same.
With each day adding a bucket of memory so lately I find myself wondering what I could do to add warmth, too. If one hopes to add any warmth, then I suppose it’d be in that bottomless love.
My Elven kin, so I wonder when we’ll find Divine Love again.