The written word is such a rarity these days. We all send each other text messages and emails – little blip-verts, fifteen second phone-calls, forwarded messages – someone else’s words substituting for our own. Even when we’re together, it seems, that we rarely touch on what is true to us – to the individuals we imagine ourselves to be, and to the larger consciousness, the we, the us, the togetherness that arises when two or more share space, share a meal, a conversation, a bed.

We ask lots of questions of each other, and imagine that this, somehow, is communication. That in this question asking, in this subtle, and at times not-so--subtle steering of a conversation in a particular direction, we create a safe space into which we can express an idea, having prepared the ground through minutes or hours or days of pre-conversation before ever getting to the point.

Some would call this the art-of-conversation.
Some would call this manipulation.
Some would call this marketing.

Perhaps, when it comes to expressing a new idea, a new concept, or service or product, this process may be useful.

Perhaps.

But what about when we are talking about how we feel? What about when we find ourselves wanting to tell someone that we love them? That we find ourselves feeling something for them that is unexpected, unasked for, unknown and unknowable? Do we prepare the ground, wait for the right moment, ask some questions to gauge where they are in relation to this relating, and then decide what we are going to say [if anything] and how we are going to say it?

I imagine that all of this rapid communication, this unwillingness to actually sit with each other and say it like it is, is guided by some misbegotten idea of freedom. That freedom is found in the non-attachment, the non-heart, the non-risking and hence the non-breaking of things. I imagine this because I am watching, in this moment right now, this breaking of my own heart.

And I know that this is not freedom – that this keeping quiet, this wanting to be having a different experience is a shackle that binds me to my self, to this limited idea of lovingness, to this apparently safe place of making-love without loving, of observing without seeing, of hearing without listening – this place that I imagined I could live, that seemed to be the right and the safe and the enlightened place to be.

And I laugh at myself for my hubris, for imagining I could ever know the mind of god through my own limited mind, that I could ever experience love by attempting to control the experience, that I could ever be touched by another human being in that most intimate of ways without feeling a breaking of my heart, a piercing of my self, an opening to the wonder of drowning in the ocean of life.

I share this with you because I love you. I share this with you in this way, perhaps, because I am a coward and I would rather not hear you say “we need to talk about this [which inevitably we will]”. I share this with you because it is true [how could it not be if love is all that exists?], and no amount of efforting on my part is going to make it any different. I share this with you as an invitation – an invitation not to experience love in all of the limited, controlling, pre-defined ways we have experienced before, but to open ourselves to what is bigger than us in every moment we are together – in the way we do with our friends, our families, a puppy or the ocean.

Without definition, without expectation, without limitation – the only commitment being to the deepening of our own experience of loving.

And this invitation, like all invitations, is not one that needs to be accepted. There is no RSVP. There is no date on which this offer closes – because at the end of the day I am making this invitation to my self in as much as to you.

And I have already accepted.

Let me know if you’d like to dance.

I realised last night, after an invitation to friendship, that I don’t really have any friends. Not because this life is lived alone, without intimate connection with others, but simply because a particular way of relating that once used to mean so much to me now has very little meaning at all.

Once, some time ago, I was challenged by a brother of mine that I ‘paid lip service to family’, and it was true. True because I was scared that if I really let someone else in, they would see in me what I was so desperate to keep from my self.

That I craved connection, and was terrified of what it would feel like to know that and to feel it ripped away by circumstance.

Since then I’ve come home to this moment, and have discovered in that a depth of emotion that is drowningly intense at times, an enormous crashing ocean of sensation that annihilates reason with tender mercilessness.

And the price of being here is that everything cannot be helped but be felt absolutely, completely, insanely beautifully, and every emotion is a glorious feast of indefinable, indescribable beauty.

And in this I’ve discovered the meaning of family.

My life is shared with others with whom there is a common felt understanding of that place where we are one – beyond form, beyond self-perceived, self-imposed and self-perpetuated boundaries, beyond all ideas of what is and directly to the heart of It.

Directly into life’s most magnificent heart.

So why express all of this? Because friendship is something I lost contact with some time ago. The promise of friendship, in my life, was something that I realised was a promise made to hold others at arms length.

Several years ago death whispered in my ear, she wrapped herself sinuously around me, seductively embraced me. She robbed my lungs of their breath and my heart of its rhythm, and I relaxed completely into her arms. I didn’t struggle, I didn’t fight. I didn’t resist.

I simply relaxed.

And it seemed in this that her fascination with me, her desire for me, her need for me fell in upon itself, collapsing like the banks of a river in flood, dissipating across the endless span of existence.

So she let me go, rejected me, decided perhaps that if I wasn’t going to fight her, or if I wasn’t going to fight for her, if I wasn’t interested in her one way or the other, she was no longer interested in me.

I had nothing to live for. I had nothing to die for either.

So I was cast aside by death and washed ashore on the banks of this life.

And laying there, in the dark and the cold, hearing nothing but the stuttering of my heart, the quiet breeze of my breath across my lips, I knew such perfect peace.

And I knew that every moment, every seemingly insignificant, irrelevant, inconsequential moment of our living is a Niagara of experience, a torrent of sensation, and that life simply seeks to know itself through me.

And all of my ‘friendships’ were washed away in this flood.

I don’t know what it means to be a friend.

I do know what it means to be family.

To be family means to be willing to be exposed, beautifully, brutally, without subtlety or art. It means being willing to be known, available to be known absolutely. It means an openness to being loved, to loving, to becoming love itself in the moments in which we are touched by the hand or the heart of another. It means to live without expectation that someone will give you what you tell yourself you need, to accept all that comes as a gift, to ask for nothing, and to celebrate without reserve in this moment of being with those who share their lives with you.

I know only one way to dance – with all of my self, with everything that I am. I am neither courageous nor fearful. I’m quite simply a man life has placed in your path for a reason I cannot fathom, and consider I don’t need to know.

I have no desire for life to be different to how it is. I have no expectation that life should look a certain way.

All I know is that you feel like family to me.

And I thank you for that.

Life is too short to be spent in safety and compromise.

I live recklessly abandoned to love – to the flow of it through me into the world, whether for my clients, my nephews, a lover.

I invite you to share this with me - somehow, anyhow, in no particular way or form - just however it arises for you to share it, if it does in any way at all.

Regardless, I know your face is turned towards the sun, and my world is that much brighter for the brief reflection of it I’ve seen in your eyes.

Thank you for the gift that you are to this life.