an invitation

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.