.We’ve talked a lot about violence.
Now let’s talk a smidge about love.
Love is good mutater.
The meaning of “love” changes throughout life. It does not mean nowadays what it meant when I was in fifth grade. It takes a lot of self-examination and life experience to see the full capacity of love. One of the key hallmarks of real love—which our culture fails to identify for the most part—is a commitment to adore the asshole that someone is. To fully protect and revere someone’s weaknesses, phobias, insecurities, and maddening habits, as much as their glowing qualities. It is easy to love how great someone is. It is difficult to love what an asshole someone is.
And make no mistake, everyone is an asshole.
If you think you are not an asshole, then that is one of the most assholish things about you, right off the bat.
Me, for instance, I am a claustrophobic basket case with social anxiety. I am prone to outbursts of anger, which usually stand in for frustration or helplessness. I am cranky when I’m too hot and bitchy when I am too cold. I often hurt people’s feelings with direct statements that are unnecessarily candid, and I mispronounce words a lot.
I suck!
So do you.
Wheee!
In nature, I have noticed, there aren’t many rectangles. You can find them in crystals under microscopes, but unless you look really, really hard, nature doesn’t produce much in the way of rectangles.
In contrast, the people of “civilization” can’t function unless they’re doing it inside a rectangle, holding a rectangle, and/or staring deeply into the maw of a rectangular screen.
Rectangles—that is, our obsession with creating them and our growing dependence on them—are a mass manifestation of our disconnect from nature and the world.
This teevee-, computer-, and iPhone-induced fugue-like disconnect must be maintained or we may discover real intimacy with the world around us and with one another.
If your goal is to achieve these things, you’ve got to think about love differently than you are used to.
Real love means finding value in most everything, and new ways to value yourself, the planet, animals, trees, people you like, people you don’t like, and so on.
In love, you do not care if your child does “well” in a sporting match. You care simply that your child is having the experience of sporting.
In love, you do not consider someone “marriage material” based on their income.
In love, you do not bury your emotions so deeply that others become fodder for your deepest fears. Therefore, you do not start a whisper campaign about the nice-looking woman in your office who rebuffed your sexual advances, or because you are jealous of her appearance.
In love, our aging parents are our elders to whom we owe a great deal. You do not stick them in an old-folks farm, unless they express a desire to live in such a place.
If we are a culture that loves, none of our children would be “banned” from the family because they are homos, or because they chose someone outside the family’s race or religion, or because they are transgender.
In love, you bolster and support, you do not try to “change” anyone.
You can change the violence of our world sooner than you can change an individual.
Many people who choose not to partake in the violence of our environment—but don’t teach themselves to give and receive love—end up offing themselves.
I’ve contemplated suicide many, many times.
But when I sit down with myself, I gotta admit that suicide counts as violence, not love. It makes no sense to commit an act of violence because I can’t hack the violence around me.
Dang, that’s out.
So instead, I’ve cobbled together a way to love in the world.
Every fall my mother cuts her roses back.
Another way of looking at this is: she ventures out into her garden with her clippers and ruthlessly wallops off the branches that provided her with literally hundreds of roses over the last six to eight months.
Oh, dear god, when I was little, I cried.
To see my sweet, caring mother orchestrating this massacre seemed like a betrayal. I threw fits and begged her not to carry out these unspeakable acts of torture against her otherwise treasured and beloved rosebushes. Was it only a matter of time before she turned on my siblings and me with the clippers?
“Look,” she’d say, sweaty and annoyed. “In order for the flowers to happen, the branches have to be cut. This is how the bush rests and gathers strength for a new year of blooming.”
Crying, inconsolable, I’d retort, “Why do you have to decide how it rests?”
“Inga, there won’t be any flowers next year if I don’t do this.”
How could my mother be so cruel and callous?
Our dad was an asshole who yelled at us and made a big ruckus. If he had been the one who “cut back”—a.k.a., decimated—the roses, it wouldn’t have been nearly as horrible.
It was a baffling mystery until I was ten or so and finally caught on to the rhythm of the roses. My mother’s roses grow lush, so much so that you get all heady in their presence. Then it starts getting cold, and they get all brown, with rose hips filled with nutrients. When the rose hips die, Mom lops off the branches, and they are ugly all winter long—ashy and gnarled, mean and nasty.
A winter rose bush is one of nature’s most frightfully ugly creations. Unearthed, it could be a medieval weapon. If it’s old enough and if someone were to fall in agreement with certain laws of physics, a winter rose bush could impale a person.
The green and red, pink, or yellow beautiful, grooving, blooming orgasmathon from three short months ago is unthinkable. If the winter’s real bad, you can maybe completely forget what all that graceful graciousness looked like before.
But then, we have here every spring when them little green nubs start in, and soon, the spectacle of untold beauty explodes. Gently obliterating what looked like artfully arranged dried, spiky colons for the past few months.
In order for the roses to dazzle your days, painful acts must go down and really bad ugliness has to be the reality for a time.
That’s the rhythm of roses.
It is also the rhythm of sex and love and child rearing.
And the balance of life.
And many other things.
This is the garden where I learned that bad things and good things are part of each other, and there’s shitall you can do about it. Cry, bitch, moan, manipulate, or claw your way to the top, nothing will change the fact that things will totally suck in your life, consistently, from time to time.
The best course of action, I have found, is to face and accept bad things, and not try to make them seem good.
Also known as giving it up to the lord.
By the time I was a teenager, I’d cut back her roses for her.
When my brother Nick passed away, Grammy bought sixteen rose bushes, one for every year of his life.
My mom put her grief and love into those roses.
They are quite beautiful. They stay alive on your kitchen counter for two or three weeks after you cut them.
If she ever moves to a different house, the roses go with her.
Love is a verb.
Love is something you do.
It’s not something other people bring into your life.
Many people are looking for love in all the wrong places.
A five-minute perusal of personal ads looking for love on any website will either consciously or unconsciously address any or all of the following questions:
What am I gonna get out of this?
What kind of financial, sexual, and/or emotional security will I gain?
Are you physically attractive enough to make my friends envious?
How will my self-image improve if I sleep with/commit to you?
Will my esteem in the family rise or fall if I bring you home for the holidays?
This is not any way to go about “getting” love.
Love’s a manner of being present in the world, not a perfect set of circumstances that leads to untold happiness for you, your lover, and your life.
You can’t control love, and if you try, bad things will happen.
Some things are bigger than you and love is one of them.
I think the misconceptions surrounding this simple tenet are at the root of many abject failings of humankind. It is the reason the mineshaft collapses, the reason the wildfires tear through newly constructed housing developments, the reason there is no water and our food supply is poisoned, the reason the earthquakes are quakin’, the reason there exist terms such as “dead zone” and “fished out,” the reason coyotes eat the family poodle. People just can’t face the fact that some things are bigger than them. If we mess with things that are bigger than us, bad things will happen.
The oil holocausts in Nigeria and the Gulf of Mexico, for instance.
As I described earlier, humans failing to comprehend that some things are bigger than them is the reason for all of this and much, much more.
When something is bigger than you, it’s always best to relax and comport yourself in a respectful manner. It is not best to suck it dry and/or make the most money you can off of it.
The language of violence that we grow up to see as normal provides us with a totally useless definition of love.
To propagate this useless definition, children are told .
It goes like this:
You are a kid now, but one day you will be a grown-up. You will fall in love, get married, and have children of your own. If you are good at being a grown-up, you will have a college education, a rewarding job, a mortgage, and car payments. You will really, really, really care about sex, romance, religion, sex, romance, fashion, and/or NBA championship games.
is meaningless to a child. It is impossible to conceptualize being a grown-up. “Having” children is inconceivable—no pun intended—when you’re a kid. Even when you’re a kid who is raped, impregnated, and bears a child.
I had the kind of parents who think it is best to let their kids know where babies come from. The thought of my father putting his goods inside of my mother’s body utterly nauseated me. I could not believe they had done such a thing enough times to have four children.
Ewww.
Nonetheless, is also profoundly impactful. Therefore, it’s important to understand why it is told. Regardless of whether or not parents are truthful about how babies are made, is repeated in so many different ways by so many different adults that it heavily influences the parameters of every child’s cultural identity. As every grown-up knows but could evidently give a fuck about, parameters cause a lot of problems when the realities that shape your cultural identity and who you actually are do not seam up nicely.
Which, by and large, is what almost always ends up happening to most grown-ups at some point. Which is why, for instance, male federal judges and stockbrokers wear frilly panties under their bespoke tailored suits.
Living an endless series of lies is a form of violence.
Hence, Wellbutrin, road rage, suicide and divorce rates, the booming porn industry, and the prevalence of sexual violence.
Among other things.
It is only a story, but it makes you feel real bad when you don’t measure up, and most folks don’t measure up.
For example, some kids are homos. The whole “marriage and kids” story can get really depressing after a while and often leads to suicide. Since homos can’t get married, you know this big-assed annoying story does not apply to you if you are a homo.
Some kids aren’t sure if this life they keep hearing about is the life for them. Maybe marriage sounds like a bad idea. Maybe having kids and a mortgage is not attractive.
Some kids are artists, musicians, or writers, and they know there is no money there because almost everyone in their lives will discourage them from believing they can make a living according to their talent, often referencing someplace called “the real world.”
Some kids have talents that are not considered appropriate for their race, religion, ethnicity, or gender.
Gordon Ramsay is one of the richest chefs in the world.
His father told him that being a chef was “poncey.” You know, pretentious and kinda faggy. So Gordon, he sets about becoming the richest, most hypersexually masculine chef on the planet, but his father didn’t live to see it, so having no peace on this, our Gordon becomes a caricature of himself, a macho commodity destined to create a corporate empire.
He’s a winner! Look, Dad!
He’s won!
He’s rich and famous, and his beautiful wife is referred to as a “limpet” in the UK press because he is so not poncey that he is known to assert his masculinity via other women.
This is called overcompensating, and it happens to a lot of wealthy “winner” people.
So these things are important, these stories people tell kids, these lessons children learn and the culturally imposed experiences they have while they are growing up.
In aboriginal culture in what is now called Australia, when children are born, people watch them closely to see what their natural talent is. When everyone discovers what a child’s natural talent is, the family and community do everything in their power to nurture and bolster the child’s talent.
Or at least, for many people, that was the common practice before the white man and his frontier-nation mentality came to their land, and in just a couple hundred years, ruined a place that had been quite lovely for thousands and thousands of years prior.
What if we were a culture that encouraged everyone to do according to their natural talent? What would such a culture look like? Isn’t that what the whole idea of America was in the first place?
Natural talent is bigger than your desire to be successful in playing out the stories you are told as a child. You aren’t gonna feel right if you are living in subdivision hell, in over your head with crazy payments, if all along you’ve wanted to be a trapeze artist in the circus.
Same for the love in your life.
But the thing of discovering what a child’s natural talent is—that seems like a good practice to me. Imagine all the unhappy people with stifled dreams who could be happy people with realized dreams.
La, la, la.
Love, American style, goes something like this:
You meet someone.
The two of you come together.
If this is a one-night stand, you have sex—possibly quite wonderful, spontaneous, passionate sex—and you never see each other again. Or, if you do see one another, maybe you will have sex again, and maybe you will feel uncomfortable and awkward, and maybe you will pretend you don’t see each other. When the awkwardness happens, it’s generally because you allowed someone you don’t know to partake in the most intimate biological act you are capable of, and it feels weird to have shared this part of yourself with a total stranger.
If this is a love affair, you will maybe do a li’l courting before you have sex, maybe not. Your whole experience will revolve around maintaining the honeymoon period. Neither of you can do any wrong, the sun rises and sets upon your heads, you have wonderful sex, your heart pounds when you hear each other’s voice.
All is bliss, the rosebush is in full orgasmic bloom.
Some people can carry on love affairs for decades—especially when they are extramarital. Some love affairs last a couple weeks. It all depends on how long the two of you can maintain a reality based on illusory bliss.
Then the actual relationship begins. The length of time this lasts also varies fantastically, but it can result in marriage and the whole until-death-do-you-part thing.
Sex, usually sooner than later, also happens. There is the honeymoon period. Oh, dear god, no one has ever loved in this way in all the history of humankind.
Blah, blah, blah.
Then come the times when you begin to notice that your lover’s cute little idiosyncrasies are, in fact, annoying as fuckall. Possibly, your lover is even abusive and controlling. But you remember the sighs after sex, the warm times, the hot times, and you decide that these idiosyncrasies are bearable.
You learn to ignore them or negotiate them in other ways.
But then, eventually and inevitably, the shit hits the fan. The real complexities of human nature seep into the honeymoon bliss. This is when the “problems” start in a relationship. Unless you are willing to accept your own failings and those of your partner, these “problems” will end in separation and/or divorce.
Sometimes everything sucks, and there is nothing beautiful in the world, and that is the truth. It’s awfully important to keep in mind during these times that the focus is to learn and grow and to have good times even while bad times are happening.
Good feelings and times are just as natural and easy to come by as the bad ones. Of course, this is complex, and what is bad is not always obviously bad until after you experience the badness for a while and say, “Man, I feel like shit.” Who knows how long that might take? Prisons are filled with women who killed their lover or spouse after twenty-five years of serious rape and/or ass-kickin’.
So you can’t always feel those heady love vibrations. This shit is fleeting and grows into really deep affection. I don’t know why we are taught that love is some kinda wonderful thing. It is such a lie. Sometimes you and love are ugly and gnarled up, and you are probably hurting pretty badly.
Most cultures and families don’t offer this teaching.
After the thrill is gone, after the honeymoon is over, that’s when the rosebush gets lopped off. Pining for that honeymoon time dishonors all that is to come, but generally, folks get stuck in that feeling of wanting things to be the way they once were.
I have seen thirty-year marriages base their existence and identity on the first two years of immature bliss, and man, them folks is unhappy.
You can’t ever get back to the feeling of how things were when you first met. You did not know each other then.
It’s retarded, it leaves no room for growth.
Lop, lop, lop the relationship back.
Allow it to be what it is, to nourish itself, and grow back again.
Teevee and the movies have, for many generations now, offered up false realities about what love is all about. Love stories evidently sell, and they end right when the couple comes together, gets married, and rides off into the sunset.
Happily-ever-afterness ensues. Wheeee!
The only problem with this is that most people don’t cease to exist once they fall in love and get together with someone.
After that, your lives happen together.
And life is some butt-ugly shit sometimes. It’s hard to be in love in the face of your or your lover’s butt-ugly shit. That’s where the real, true-blue, difficult love comes in. And yes, it’s best to accept the fact of butt-ugly shit with someone who has your back, who really admires you, and who is committed to protecting your solitude. It isn’t easy and it isn’t fun, but it is love.
Once, I interviewed a brilliant performance artist named Kristen Kosmas. I asked her about love. She paraphrased Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet and said, “The highest form of love is to protect another person’s solitude.”
I’d never read Rilke and looked for the quote Kristen referred to. I couldn’t find it but found a similar one.
It goes like this:
“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and greet and touch each other.”
I’ve always liked Kristen’s version better. This is what she took away from Rilke, and it meant a lot to her. I heard what she heard, and it moved me as well.
I remember thinking about it while I was walking home after the interview. At the time, I was considering ending the relationship with boyfriend number two, and this quote really spurred me along.
I did not see him protecting my solitude.
I decided protecting solitude is what lover love was all about. A lover would know my deepest thoughts, traumas, and joys, as well as my body, sexuality, and how I express sexual intimacy. Someone who would know my family and all their truths. And mostly, someone who would know what an asshole I am, and proactively protect all of it.
Every last bit of me—not just the good things.
That’s metaphorical solitude: all the things that make you, you. That which you can never escape from and that you will always face when you are alone with yourself.
When you can find someone who will protect that and when you are willing to protect that in someone else, dang. Sky’s the limit with y’all.
Literal solitude is time. Everyone needs to have quiet time to reflect and be still with themselves.
Someone who actively protects my moments with myself? My god, I love you.
This deep love happens, and continues to happen, when you provide all the same services for your partner. And conversely, the ability to protect solitude only comes about through a lot of communication and spending time.
Also, people are failures.
Adam and Eve, Shakespeare, and Grimm’s fairy tales are some of the stories that consistently remind us that humans fail.
We all have failings, no matter what. Sometimes they show up more often than usual. It’s always our responsibility to have the courage to look at our failings, learn from them, and move on.
Nothing brings out our failings quite like sexual, romantic love.
No one is attractive, perfect, and great in every way. This never happens. Everyone is an ugly asshole in some way or another. The biggest trick to being in a committed sexual relationship with someone is to love what an asshole they are. This is tricky, I admit.
Misty Tenderlove is recalcitrant with her feelings. She tends to hold things in until she explodes. Sometimes she tries to communicate, and I totally think she is just telling me about the weather. She is from the South, and her communication style is rife with innuendo and codes that I find baffling and, frankly, fascinating. She might say, “I checked the oil in the car, and it seemed low.” And I’m supposed to magically understand that she’s communicating resentment over how much I ignore the car except for when I want to use it. It terrifies her to assert herself, but dang it, she tries, and I am constantly inspired by her courage.
I come from stock that hollers to raise the roof when we are unhappy. I have no problem saying something hurt my feelings or pissed me off. I am an emotional Abrams tank. I’ll say, “What the fuck’s up with the way you fold my pants? Stop folding my pants.” Misty completely ignores this kind of communication and any attendant details. My style of communication strikes her as being unnecessarily rude and abrasive. I don’t know if she’s fascinated with it or not.
Probably not.
She has taught me the importance of pacing my words, and I have taught her the importance of saying “no” and “fuck off,” but we will probably never improve greatly on either of these fronts. We struggle constantly with miscommunication. It is part of our marriage. My wife holds in her hurt and anger, and I jettison mine on the spot. This is an insurmountable gulf. Even if we go through three decades of therapy and counseling, she will still never jettison freely, and I will still never hold stuff in, and that’s the way we are.
Jack Sprat could eat no fat.
I am who I am, and she is who she is.
And we love each other dearly.
Riz and Rob can’t eat a meal at home together. I don’t understand why exactly, but the only time they eat together is when they go out. That is how their relationship functions best.
Bob and Mako never go to bed angry with each other. This isn’t because they have a pact, but because Mako loops all night long and won’t leave Bob alone until they work things out.
Every relationship has problems, and sometimes they seem insurmountable. This is because they are insurmountable. These problems are allayed not by “fixing” them, but by accepting them.
And again, this does not mean someone gets a free pass to treat someone else like shit. Abusive behavior is never acceptable. Being an asshole is about human failings, not abuse.
Unconditionally loving the world doesn’t mean being a pushover. Loving someone sometimes means drawing very clear boundaries and firmly asserting yourself. You do no one any favors by being a doormat. Saying “no” is sometimes the most honest and loving communication you can offer. Other folks may take comfort in manipulating or power tripping, but that is best left for them to face and deal with, should they choose to. And they will never choose to if no one ever says “no” to them. By making clear boundaries, you are loving yourself and providing someone with the opportunity to face themselves. Whether or not they seize the opportunity is none of your business.
Maybe you will inspire others, and maybe you will spark someone’s imagination, but you will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever change anyone.
There are repercussions for making boundaries. You can lose friendships, jobs, and even family relationships. It is difficult and sad to lose things and people that are important to you. But when you are firm about what you will and will not accept, you tend to attract other people and opportunities that will respect your boundaries without question.
Love is not a cakewalk in the park on a bright and sunny day, so forget about that.
The mainstream culture/environment will do nothing to assist you on any journey toward love. There are films and books that can offer support, but largely, only you can learn yourself some love.
The way to do this is to offer your love to the world, unconditionally.
This is almost impossible when someone jams their cart into the small of your back because they are willing the grocery-store line forward while texting their stockbroker, but it can be done.
As a culture, we meld sex and love with izzat in a very dysfunctional way, and the first folks to suffer from this are kids and teens. We grow up learning that if we’re physically attractive to others, then we must be awesome. Our strength of character, intelligence, compassion, grace, sense of decency, loyalty, honesty, kindheartedness, and joviality do not matter, so long as we look good to others. Likewise, if we come to the understanding that we are not considered attractive, then all of our awesome qualities amount to jackshit. If we’re fat, unathletic, poor, sickly, disabled, have bad hair or skin, then naturally, our “defects” will be pointed out to us on an almost daily basis.
Kids compete, bully, and belittle because that’s what they see every livelong day in our violent environment.
I learned in my teen years that my worth as a human being was tied to my perceived sexual status through high school culture, friends, teevee, and movies. When I was a teenager, I had sex with people to bolster my self-esteem. It never worked, but my friends all did it, so I figured I’d be a pariah if I didn’t do it too.
Nowadays, we have the whole “save it for marriage” trend going down. This is where girls pledge to their god, fathers, and future husbands (in that order) that they will save their virginity for their wedding night. I don’t know what gay virgin girls are supposed to do, since our marriages are not legal, but there you have it.
If all this virginity business does such a great job of controlling teen sexuality, then why are the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rates in the Bible Belt, Einstein?
Let’s be clear, saving it for marriage does not mean not having sex. Teenagers with raging hormones cannot control the sexual force building inside of them.
Broadly defined, saving it for marriage means not having vaginal intercourse (this, by the way, is also Bill Clinton’s definition of sex). This does not include oral sex, hand jobs, anal sex, and titty fucking. So now girls are learning—1950s June Cleaver–style—that sexual pleasure is mostly something for men and our job is to get pleasure out of his pleasure.
This is an acute retardation of progress.
The virginity trend is a cultural construct courtesy of the Victorian, puritan, and misogynist foundation and framework of our social environment.
Our concept of progress here is deeply mired in the past.
From my own experience as a young-timer, I believe in saving virginity—and all subsequent sex—for love and only love. Sex never happens between two people who don’t care for each other deeply. Elaborate masturbation, procuring orgasm via the objectification of self and/or another, and projecting a perceived identity onto someone else happens—and none of that is sex.
Sexually protecting solitude is also big part of love.
As teenagers, we’re pretty much left to the elements when it comes to sex and love. Sex education in schools—when it exists—is of absolutely no assistance. It merely teaches kids how babies are born and how to keep from getting diseases and procreating. What is lacking is an education about intimacy and mutual respect. You don’t have to have sexual intercourse with someone in order to experience sexual intimacy, but boys want sex and girls want to feel loved, so teenage sex results from that.
A lot.
By the time young folks are in their late teens or early twenties, they’ve developed a very sophisticated language and belief system around sex. If you’re not having sex, then something is “wrong” with you. You must have sex in order to “prove” to yourself and your peers that you are attractive and worthy of love. The more sex you have, the better. The more flippantly you discuss your sexual conquests, the more sophisticated you appear.
Reality teevee endlessly models canned versions of what passes for sexuality. This mostly involves adulterous heterosexuals, two girls going at it to somehow enrich their sexual attractiveness, the token homo and his/her (almost always his) conquests, or an endless series of one-night stands.
None of this is sex.
It is using someone else’s body to bolster one’s sense of self-worth and to achieve (or pretend to achieve) an orgasm.
Biologically communing with another human being in the nakedness of your body and soul.
Get on down.
Here’s my in-house computer definition of sex:
This definition differential is why people almost universally feel shitty about themselves after having a one-night stand. It’s like craving a home-cooked meal but eating a Bell Beefer.
All the stuff you see on teevee and the movies is not sex.
The porn industry is not sex.
Porn movies aren’t even usually about sex.
Almost all porn is about power and control.
Power and control are the foundation of our nation.
Wheee.
Every time I have had sex with someone that I am not emotionally invested in, I’ve felt bad. I allowed someone I did not know to touch my solitude. Oh, lordisa, that’s a bad feeling. It’s definitely possible to have sex with someone you are not in a serious relationship with, but it is imperative that you care for one another deeply.
Sex can only really happen between people who are emotionally invested in each other. Protecting someone’s solitude in sex means knowing what comforts and pleases, knowing when to be gentle and knowing when it’s hot to be beastly. You can only know these intimate realities when you spend time and invest yourself.
This can’t happen overnight, it can’t happen in two weeks, and it can’t happen in six months. It takes a lot of time to know how to protect someone’s solitude. A lot of time, a lot of love, investment, patience, curiosity, and caring.
One of the most powerful things two people can do together is learn how to have sex with each other. This can involve books, movies, music, and art, but mostly it’s taking the time to talk and have sex. Like gender, sex is fluid. Maybe you’ve been married for twelve years, but the sex you and your partner need to be having now is not the same sex you were having when you first met. In fact, the time to learn about each other and to really start talking and exploring sexually is after the honeymoon phase, when the reality of someone’s failings sets in.
Unfortunately, in our culture, we learn that when the going gets tough, it’s time to find another lover.
The best way to be a great lover is to learn to listen. Listen to what your lover is saying, certainly, but moreover, listen to their body. A body will always tell you when something feels good, indifferent, bad. Listening to someone’s body is a skill, and it cannot be learned if you don’t also know how to listen to your own body.
Here are some of the ways your body talks to you:
It tells you when you need a rest. If you don’t listen, it will get sick. It tells you when it needs nourishment and exercise. If you feed it bad food and do not exercise, your body will become out of shape and listless. If you continue to eat bad food and not exercise, you will probably become depressed, and if you still don’t listen to your body, you could become obsessed with “fixing” your mind through (legal or illegal) drugs or alcohol. If you are uncomfortable or in a tense situation, your muscles might cramp up and complain. If you are in danger, your body will tell you before your mind does. It tenses, its hair raises, and the heartbeat quickens. Often, when someone is lying to you or otherwise mistreating you, your gut clenches up. Your body is talking to you all the time, and the more you listen to it, the more you will hear it saying stuff to you.
You can always, always, always trust your body. For people who have been abused, especially as children, this is a very hard lesson. It is nonetheless true.
In sex, you learn to trust someone with your body and you learn to honor the trust of someone else’s body being in your hands.
When you’re present in the world, sex has a meaning at odds with our frontier-nation-gone-wild definition.
The frontiersman dad does a pretty good job of controlling the biological function of human sexuality by forcing men to live up to freakish ideas of masculinity by giving them Viagra, by pitting women against each other for the sacrosanct prize of said man, and homos and queers who more or less emulate the larger culture’s internecine gossip, lying, cheating, and stealing.
Still, he can’t quite get sex out of the grasp of nature. Not like he’s done with pooping and eating. Sexuality is a powerful force that must be tended to, just as one tends to one’s izzat. People defy their own intelligence and experience and do really, deeply, incredibly stupid and/or violent things because of the power of sex and sexual love. Tiger Woods and John Edwards are good examples of people who suffer from the deep confusion that comes from the raw force of sexuality and deeply ingrained cultural constructs, allowing them to lie even to themselves.
I read this Dear Abby letter the other day, and it reminded me of what happens inside your heart when you get an idea of who you are, maybe realize the sacredness of your life, and shun any acquiescence with lies. This column featured letters responding to “The Other Woman,” who evidently felt that life as a mistress was grand and that it wasn’t her fault her lover’s wife was a shrill bitch from hell. Or something to this effect. One woman wrote in, and this is what she said:
I was the other woman. Over time I have come to understand that I believed what I wanted to believe because I was lonely, needy and vulnerable. I learned as time went on that my lover was incapable of developing a mature, responsible and meaningful relationship. I experienced the calamitous consequences emotionally, psychologically and financially—as did our child.
Through counseling, friendships and networking with other women and getting to know myself in a rigorously honest way, I became too healthy to be the other woman. I’m now in the marriage I always dreamed of to a man with character and heart, who is devoted to me and “our” child. I learned that the right man would find me when I became the person he was looking for. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it.
—FINALLY FULFILLED
This is the sentence I love: “I became too healthy to be the other woman.”
By engaging with those around her and getting to know herself in a “rigorously honest way,” adultery just made no sense anymore.
She grew and found there was simply no place for the lies of passive violence in her life.
When you are intimately engaging with the world and those around you in a loving manner—and I don’t mean folks you are emotionally invested in and are therefore assured of “getting something back” from them, I mean passersby, clerks, cashiers, wait staff, trash collectors, neighborhood critters, mail deliverers, crack heads on the corner, or kids who ask to mow the lawn—you are loving in a healthy way.
When you are fucking your best friend’s husband, you are not.
If the rosebush is cut back and your marriage or relationship is suddenly a piece of shit and you are pining for the early days, you might seek to replicate this immature time by having affairs. A much more positive course of action would be to look at yourself, your fears and insecurities, your frustrations and weaknesses. No one else can help you out on this. If you ignore your own failings or refuse to accept your partner’s, you will almost assuredly doom yourself to repeating the same immature honeymoon relationship over and over again.
Have fun with that.
When you are present in the world, sex is always a divine experience. And it can only happen with someone you trust deeply—someone who will not betray your nakedness by bragging to their friends about “bagging” you. Someone who does not live lies like being married to a person who is not you or insisting on being in the closet. You cannot open yourself up to someone you don’t fully trust. And if you have sex with someone you don’t fully trust, then you’re not having sex (see above).
Sex moves through your body like a skeleton key, opening up all your fears and joys.
It’s biology!
It is a nonvoluntary action like sneezing, breathing, and shitting!
In healthy sexual relationships, you share yourself with someone else—your secrets, traumas, hopes, and dreams. What moves you to orgasm, what moves you past one into three more. And you take in, respect, and bear witness to your lover’s pain, sexuality, memories, imagination, and pleasure.
The only other time I’ve experienced that same kind of deep biology-based intimacy is with my family. Not in a creepy, incestuous way. I mean my siblings, parents and me knew biological and intimate things about each other that no one else really knew. Nick had to shit the moment he was halfway home from school. He did not like to poop at school, and it was a daily laugh to see him holding his ass as he tore through the front door. We knew when our mom was on her period, when our dad would hog the bathroom reading the Los Angeles Times, and when someone was (hilariously, unless it was you) going through puberty.
In a sexual context, these are all the same kinds of things you know about your lover. Pussy farts, premature ejaculation, not being able to achieve orgasm, and not being able to keep a woody are some of the sexual intimacies lovers share. These biological realities often bring up feelings of shame or embarrassment because of our disconnect from nature.
People think sex is voluntary, but people are wrong. If you don’t have good, honest, healthy sex and love (just like you hopefully have good, honest, healthy poops twice a day), all that pent up sexual force inside of you will come out in other ways.
Sometimes people can get sex out of their body by positive and beneficial means, like through art or music, perhaps.
Sometimes people with pent up sexual energy become objectum sexuals, who fall in love with—and often marry—objects, such as the Berlin Wall, a railing in a train station, or a broken down carnival ride.
Sometimes, actually quite often, you get yer rapists and killers.
A lot of that communist sharing goes down in healthy sex and love.
People who don’t learn to share generally develop few compassion skills, and sociopathic tendencies from childhood and adolescence become much more complex and acute in adulthood.
When people don’t experience and respect that deep kind of biological sharing, a potentially damaging isolation sets in.
Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, Michael Devlin, Phillip Garrido, Timothy McVeigh, thousands of Catholic priests, Andrea Yates, the BTK killer, and many other violent criminals all experience(d) varying forms and degrees of biological isolation.
Still, there are some aspects of isolation that can be profoundly life changing. Great epiphanies and ideas come from failure and feelings of hopelessness or depression. Grief, trauma, and anger fuel some of the most powerful political movements, art, and music the world has ever known. There is great potential in the hard times of isolation. I have found the trick of isolation is if I just keep muddling through it, eventually, it will be over and I will have awesome new insights, friends, passions, interests, or plans. The problem is, you don’t know how long the hard time will last and there is no light for you while you are muddling through the darkness of your despair.
The youngest kid in our family, Nick, lost his (our) life in a car accident when he was sixteen years old. I was going to school in Olympia at Evergreen. My mother told me on the phone, and I have hated answering the phone ever since.
Our Grammy oversaw the planting of the rosebushes for our mom. She and others who knew Nick and shared our grief understood that this was gonna be a long haul.
It was.
I went back to Olympia, and things got bad, fast. Few knew of my grief, and those who did had no idea how seriously awesome Nick was. He was the nicest, funniest kid in our family. He got along with everyone, and no one really got along with anyone else all the time. I missed him so badly over time. The enormity of him being gone just got worse and worse, and counterproductively, the more time passed, the more people figured I should probably be “over it.” I had no place to grieve and no one to grieve with, so I tried to express my feelings in my writing and schoolwork, but the grief was too big and I was too small.
Eventually the grief boiled over into the world, and I started to cut myself with pieces of broken glass and burn myself with incense. The idea was that if I could see that the physical healing process was going on in different stages at all times, then I must be experiencing emotional healing as well. I hid the wounds well and kept three to five in varying stages of healing for a year or so.
Along with writing, this is how I moved through the worst of my grief and was able to get it out of my body before doing something irretrievably stupid. Wounding myself was what I came up with on the fly and is also another one of those darling paradoxes where physical violence sustained my life.
This was a choice I made when a very bad feeling breathed each breath with me. In that pristine viewing mechanism called retrospect, I can think of ten other nonviolent choices. Keeping in mind that it was almost physically impossible to engage with anyone who did not know my brother, and that my budget was very low, I still could have:
When your heart’s broken, though, it’s not easy coming up with good ideas, but I did manage to find a way to heal while living in an environment/culture that offered me none, and now that I have had that experience, I have better responses and am stronger and more resilient when isolation shows up again from time to time.
And, I learned about the strange gifts that grief and isolation bring.
My father had an audio- and photographic memory. Soon after he died, I started remembering numbers. I know credit- and library-card numbers and the phone numbers of everyone I call with any frequency.
After my Grammy died, the sudden ability and desire to bake hit me like a bolt of lightning. I can now make gorgeous tiered cakes that feed two hundred people.
When Nick died, I inherited his love and compassion and became much more engaged with the world around me. Nick’s love was a fundamental love, a rare love, a love that didn’t ask a lot of questions and included everyone. And so, this book is an homage to the gift my brother willed to me.
If the humans were at odds, if there was tension and anger in the house, ol’ Nick took his big-ass love outside and hung out with Methadream, our desert tortoise, or the chickens, the cats, the dog.
Whoever.
He made ecosystems, freeways, Saran-Wrap lined fountains, loving the earth, loving the mud. He loved me, JoeB, Liz, Mom, and Dad. He had positive and intimate relationships with all of us, no matter who was being an asshole to whom.
That is how Nick rolled.
And when Nick died, I started rolling like that too.
Me n’ my boyfriend went out into the forest after my mom told us about the car accident. We built a shrine out there, and I kneeled down and begged the world not to take him.
But instead, I felt a churning wave of his big-ass love crash into my heart, and I knew he was gone and I wailed.
That is when I found out that just like there are external bombs, like the one in Hiroshima, there are also internal bombs that do the same thing, only you usually keep living and no one else can really see the damage.
But Nick’s love stayed there in my heart and it grew.
Before Nick died, for instance, I was terrified of dogs.
Until I reached my midtwenties, if I saw a dog coming toward me—on or off a leash, it didn’t matter—I’d cross the street. Sometimes take a different route altogether. This fear traces back to getting attacked by a neighbor’s dog as a child when I jumped their fence to get our ball, and that terror kept a firm grasp on my consciousness.
It grew as I grew, and by the time I was in my midtwenties, it had a firmly established place in my heart.
But with Nick’s gift inside of me, I could no longer maintain this fear. His big-ass love hogged up all the room in my heart, and it was just too crowded, you know? A lot of things had to go and being afraid of dogs was one of them.
So I started small.
If I saw an obviously happy dog firmly leashed outside a café with large windows so people might come to my aid if it suddenly tried to tear my face off, I would force myself to pet the dog.
I made a rule that I must pet every dog I saw in this context, no matter where I was going or when I was supposed to be there.
When I got okay with that, the rules expanded a smidge.
I would pet dogs in front of grocery stores, where people might not be able to come to my rescue.
Then I’d pet small dogs stopped at street corners with their persons.
On and on this progressed, every week or so—wee triumphs.
It took me two or three years to get to where I’d seriously romp with and love up dogs just like Nick always did.
I am no longer afraid of dogs at all.
I love dogs; they are the best of friends.
The person I was before Nick died is much different from the one after. I was pretty much like every other self-absorbed, vaguely dissatisfied, politically enraged person taking up space on the planet. I doubt I would have ever written a book if Nick did not die and will his love to me.
If I could swap book-writin’ for Nick, oh hot damn, I’d do it in a New York minute.
If I could swap being a big-hearted person for Nick to be alive again, I wouldn’t hesitate.
But this can never happen, so I try to make the most of his gift. I have grown accustomed to Nick’s love being a part of me for two decades, and it’s taken on a life of its own.
Before Nick died, I thought love was all about two people having fabulous sex with each other all the time, going on fun trips together, and being lovers. Maybe settling down one day, getting hitched, having kids.
Sex is a good thing and having a lover is a good thing, but it is no more life changing than enacting love toward every being I come into contact with.
Here are some ways to love:
a) being present
b) interacting with the organic world surrounding your organic body
c) touching an organic substance
d) listening to the wind
e) smelling the air
f) picking oranges off the neighbor’s tree
g) playing with the kids, dogs, chickens, and goats
h) being aware that the full moon is fabulously glowing in the sky
i) intimately engaging with a loved one who is physically present and thereby communicating realities, fears, hopes, desires, needs, and possible resentments that require your physical energy and emotional attention
j) baking sweets for birthdays
k) building a chicken coop
l) raising chickens and bartering great stuff for fresh eggs
m) knitting a tea cozy
n) dancing, which, second only to sex, is the most important physical/emotional activity you can practice
o) disciplining the kids, dogs, chickens, and goats
p) planting seeds
r) tending to the plants
s) harvesting your bounty
t) volunteering
u) jerry rigging a tree fort
v) gathering up trash somewhere trashy
w) helping the lady struggling to get on the bus with groceries, her toddler, and baby in the stroller
x) using your voice to communicate
y) having healthy confrontations
z) cleaning house
With or without you, love exists in the world. Just like violence, just like war. The most awesome, most fun challenge is bringing all this love out into the violent world we live in. Consciously choosing to be a life force inside of love’s ecosystem is a way to actually thrive. It requires imagination, a sense of humor, creativity, resourcefulness, openheartedness, and figuring out how to make the very, very best out of the very, very worst. With all the pain and grief that love brings, it is nevertheless very, very fun to enact love in our daily lives.
This is how we can reconnect with nature and our own humanity. This is how we can protect ourselves and the world we live in.
After I was bequeathed Nick’s love and after Arun Gandhi’s words sent me on a knowledge quest, I started doing this thing where I would conjure up the love I have for my sister and then I would pretend that I had this exact same love for everyone I came into contact with. Like in the grocery store, as I was handing the cashier my money, I’d look at her and think about the love Liz and I have, and she would just erupt into this huge smile. Or I’d do it when I thanked my mailman or held a door open for a grandmother with a stroller and a toddler. Every time I did this, I’d feel this warm gush of love flowing all over the place.
Sometimes I have problems with my sister and she pisses me off, or she has problems with me and I piss her off. But I held her in my arms on the way home from the hospital after she was born, and no matter how much she sucks and no matter how much I suck, we are still sisters and we love each other heartily. I chose that familiar, comfortable love as the one to direct toward people.
Sometimes people suck, but regardless, I make myself pretend that I have that same love for them.
This doesn’t mean I’m a namby-pamby who doesn’t speak my mind, act out in anger, or is generally an asshole. I am a total asshole. I just force myself to look at how much love there really is in my heart and consciously allow it a place in my life and in the world.
It became a kind of habit to interact with people from that strong place of love.
Over time, I found that I became a happier person.
I know this sounds very corny, but that is only because it is a cultural construct to look upon one another with distrust or solely within the limited scope of our self-interests.
Those things are reflections of the society we were born into and not necessarily reflections of us as family members, friends, lovers, or total strangers.
You might notice an absence of tension when you engage with someone you do not know in a spirit of familiar and comfortable love. You might even notice an alien warmth or closeness. That feeling—however fleeting—is a result of loving the world.
So these things happened, where I had more love in my heart and became happier. I found that my happiness brings out happiness in others. In doing this, many learned behaviors came to the surface of my consciousness, and I saw the patent absurdity therein.
I realized that I am my thoughts and actions.
And this reminded me of another thing I have heard all my life, something I have believed since I learned about a chicken’s journey into my red and white bucket: You are what you eat.
This is the thing.
Having faith in god—whatever you perceive god to be—may or may not serve you, I don’t know. Having faith in love, however, will always serve you, in every imaginable capacity. Learning how to seek out and protect love is a skill, and as I have mentioned, our culture/environment will do little to shore things up for you. Strip away your indoctrination, and you will see the love that surrounds you.
Every day, I pray.
Sometimes I do this while I feed the birds and other critters in the neighborhood. It takes about ten minutes to tear up half a loaf of day-old bread. During that time, I am quiet and thinking about the animals.
I wish them the very, very best.
This is a prayer.
I give thanks for the people and animals around me. I give thanks for the people and animals that are not around me. I offer what I can and give thanks. This generates an enormous amount of love.
It is very simple and powerful.
How can you love the world?
Let you count the ways.