Life goes on, with us or without us.
I was a much younger child when all this started. I learned about love before I could actually understand it. Feelings, touching, holding, hugs. Sensual and sexual, the books would call me a promiscuous child because books like their labels and our culture is so very afraid of sexuality. We fight so hard to stay alive, to stay in these bodies, yet we are so afraid to experience all thee bodies can feel. That was the first puzzle this life presented to me and it still has no real solution because fear still dominates everyone I see. Where are the ones without fear, the ones I do not see?
I know you're out there somewhere.
After puberty, which came earlier than the books and people wanted it to, I fell in bed at parties and bonded the way we are all told we are supposed to. Mostly with clothes on at first in a room full of other couples with clothes on. That may have been the cultural norm of the times or perhaps that is just the way teenagers explore, in the safety of peers, but I only know my teenage experience that intimately. What's yours?
When I fell in love for the first time, it was the beginning and the end of the world. I have never wanted anyone as much as I wanted that first love. Obstacles stood in our way, an existing long term relationship, that first experimental one, and a best friend who wanted me and who was more eager to show it. It is challenging to resist someone who wants to make you her whole world. I should have, but I didn't. Two weeks later, the one I wanted, her best friend, confessed her love and many months of confused duality ensued. It ended badly, as all secrets between best friends usually do, and the break in my heart never fully healed.
It seems so sad to say that was the most blissful time my heart ever knew. How much ego played a role in my decisions to accept multiple partners who did not want the other to know and how much was genuinely not wanting to break a heart is not easy to say. I do not deny ego played a role, but the depression and self-destruction that followed the break-ups seem to demonstrate how much heart dominated my decisions. I denied myself the chance to truly love again for decades after that. Maybe forever.
I turned away from the flesh for the true love I had always dreamed of and turned to words. Not that the flesh was denied, but the heart was not ever as fully engaged as it was that first time. Much to the chagrin of post-first life partners, I chose to not hide my feelings of longing for that first love even as relationships bloomed as much as they could without a complete falling in love on my part. I made the decision never to hide my feelings again, a lesson learned too late, but a lesson that has brought me peace, comfort, security, and happiness throughout this life.
I wonder how many of you reading this can understand what I mean.
The written word became my written gardens into which all of my hopes and dreams and thoughts and feelings were poured. I found that I could see rainbows through my tears by putting everything into words and seeking the happiest resolutions through understanding and compassion and what I came to call honest love. Love felt and expressed without any hesitation or doubt or fear. Beyond unconditional, which can be more subconscious than conscious (hence, the falling in love experience, honest love is simultaneously unconditional and conscious. It is the only way I know how to love and the only love I accept as love. Even if that means I remain alone.
Infants instinctively offer unconditional love with unconditional trust probably because as an infant, we do not consciously make choices about hiding feelings or holding back trust. We quickly learn to put up walls and doors in part for self-protection, but even more because we are taught to fear and the rules of fear very early on in life. People do not even consciously acknowledge most fears and many deny them cloaking them in rules of religious or other socially accepted normalities, conformities, and formalities. For a cursory example, perhaps you would rather I had used the words normality, conformity, and formality. Let's just call them NCF for now.
I made a conscious decision to rebel against as many of those NCFs as I could get away with from as early on in this life as I can recall and I still do, though with so many layers f compromise and modifications I sometimes wonder who I am. I know I'm inside, somewhere, sometimes buried under a reluctance acceptance, a mask that allows me to maintain an income and interact with others, but there are moments I wonder if I completely lost myself in the interactions virtually required for survival in this modern culture.
The words are my sanctuary. And music. Yet even here, I forget myself too often.
I may continue this thought...
In any case, the words found their way online and the presentation and paths have changed due to web servers going out of business and my own learning of web presentation (I still have very limited knowledge mostly for the same reason I am not published beyond my own uploads, I would rather be writing than editing). I never met the collaborator of my dreams along the way, at least not so far.
This entry has no clear conclusion for the moment, much like some of the previous thought-threads woven within it. Perhaps one point I am making is the reason I continue putting words out here online is there is still hope for the true love dream, for sharing the unconditional love and trust completely once more... there is still hope for falling in love again.
You'll have to go a whole lot deeper than details with me and within yourself to find out more, no less to inspire such a fall, but there is the open door.
if you want to know me...
