Anyway. Back to MzNin (not to be confused with Nine Inch Nails, that's a whole other brand of poeticism and social commentary). I like her because I'm a word slut, and the woman has an uncanny ability to paint feelings with words, in such a way that you can feel them wrap themselves around you. Peter Gabriel describes the feeling best, for me: "Words, they climb all over you...'til they uncover you from where you hide..." I love that lyric too, because it accurately captures and expresses my experiences with words. They have power, if you believe they do. I do.
So I was thinking about MzNin, as i read a blog entry recently. Since I haven't asked the blogger's permission, I won't link to her blog, but it's the blog of a bcom user that I really enjoy. She's sweet, she's genuine, and even when I don't agree with her, I'm always willing to hear her out, because I know that she speaks from her own perspective and from her heart, without presuming to foist it on anyone else, and how can you not respect that? That, and she's hot and adorable, and I can't resist her. Like a button i'd like to carry around in my pocket, i tell you. Anyway.
The blog was about love. Or, more specifically, about the value of it, and how it shouldn't be tossed around and said without a depth of feeling and without conviction and commitment. Commitment, not just to the person, but to the very words themselves, because they're powerful and sacred words, and should be treated as such.
(I should interject here that that was my intepretation of her post, and knowing her as I do, she'll correct me if I'm wrong. Or at least, I can hope, 'cause correction is hot, especially from a giggling cutie with a black eye, who's willing to mud wrestle to split the difference. Consider yourselves interjected.)
Right. So I agree with her interpretation. Love, to me, is a powerful and profound thing. More powerful and profound than water, which, in my world, is king. Water has the power to give life, and to take it away. It has the power to quench you and sustain you and make you feel more alive -- and it also has the power to snuff you out, to smother you with one overwhelming swell. Water's a thing to be feared, and admired, and revered, because of the awesome power it has to give life, and to take it away...despite our fevered and futile attempts to control it.
Love's like that too, at least for me. There are differences, sure: It's going to rain whether or not I choose to accept it, and I can gnash my teeth and wail and denydenydeny the rain, and i'll still be wet. I don't have to admit love, I can choose to express it or lock it away, and pretend it doesn't exist. If i work really hard, i can convince myself it doesn't. I can't do that with the rain.
So what does this have to do with Anais Nin, you literate whores are asking? Nothing. Hush, I'm not there yet. Get a coffee and a smoke, you'll be here a while. It's ok, I'll wait.
Back? Good. Anyway. It's here that lilmissblogger and I take the fork in our respective roads, i think. For her, she says that saying love too often detracts from the value of it, the power of it, the sanctity of it. I see her point, as i too have seen people toss it around without any reverence or awe for the neurosis that is love. Let's be clear here, dear kneejerkers, on what neurosis actually means. Neurosis: a mental or personality disturbance not attributable to any known neurological or organic dysfunction...what better way to describe love? It is most assuredly a mental or personality disfunction, because, as the adorable missblogger stated, love is NOT about convenience. It's decidedly inconvenient, for the most part, and while it brings you joy and peace and warmth, it also brings confusion, and fear, and a propensity for harm and danger.
Because it's love. That's it's job. It's like water - it'll quench and refill you, but if you aren't careful and don't respect it, it'll pull you under and steal your breath, before you can fight your way to surface again.
Yeah, i've seen those people too, those ones that think the ocean's as tameable as a kid's Mr Turtle pool, because they're both just bodies of water, right? Uh huh. Take a snorkel, lovemuffin. No, it won't save you, but at least it'll be easier to identify you with a rubber tube hanging out of your mouth, when we drag you up from the bottom of the pool.
But then again, I'm not so sure they don't respect it, don't have the reverence and awe that I think it deserves. I'm not so sure, because i know it's been said of me, many times. Me? Most people think I'm willy-nilly with my love. I say it often, in places and to people that i'm told i shouldn't, because i'm devaluing it.
Am I? Or are you just worried that somehow i'm devaluing you, because of your fear of it? I don't know, but i do know that it's pretty hard for others to know how profoundly i can feel...because half the time, i'm standing there with an umbrella trying to deny the rain myself. How on earth could anyone else know?
I value love. I said in a recent blog entry that i reach out in love, all the time, in all manner of ways, and i mean that. I really do - because i love love. Yes, it's inconvenient, yes, it's work, and yes, it drags me along in its undertow time and time again. Miss blogger said that she believed there are different kinds of love, and i'm not sure i agree or disagree. I think that love is love is love, but the inspiration for it and expressions of it are what are different. I love my son, and I love his now deceased father, in different ways and for different reasons, but the love, like the song, remains the same. (Sorry Zeppelin, i'm duly ashamed). It's probably semantics, since, if i really think about it, she and i may be saying the same thing. No matter, either way.
Anais Nin. You've been waiting so patiently, so you shall be rewarded.
She speaks of love, often, and in colour. I like that, that she speaks in colour, because i dream in red, and i understand her. Her words give way to body memory for me, and it's the easiest and best way for me to really "get it". Or at least, to think i do. I don't even know where my keys are, i guess it's unrealistic to assume i get anything.
MzNin says "Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
I think most would agree with her, that's hardly a groundbreaking statement. I think most would agree too with the imminent ass-cancer that is oprah winfrey, in saying that love comes from within, and one must first love oneself before loving another. I wouldn't, but that's neither here nor there. Let's just assume opers is right, for the sake of blogging.
If love comes from within, and love dies because we don't know how to replenish its source...then, to me, that means we are responsible for feeding it. And how else do you feed something but by giving it food? Love feeds on love; it feeds on attention and conviction and acknowledgement. It dies of blindness, and betrayal, and witherings. Denial is all of those things, and more.
I do not want to deny love, because it's water for me. I've done it - i've lived without love. I've not thought it, not felt it, and for god's sake not SAID it, because if, heaven help us, i opened my mouth under water to utter the words, the water would fill my lungs and i'd drown, never to be found again because my stupid snorkel floated away.
I've done that, and it's no way to live. Your soul needs love as much as your body needs water, and without it, you wither and weary and die an unnatural death. I don't want to dry up and die, because i was too afraid to drink the water.
I believe love is valuable. I believe it's precious and sacred and to be revered. And i believe that being willing to express it, when you feel it and you know it's there -- or even when you think it's there, that irrigates my soul and makes me feel alive. Because saying it doesn't invalidate it, and it doesn't hurt you to be wrong. It's not wrong to think it was love, and find out it wasn't. It hurts, sure, but it doesn't kill you, even though our pride wishes it did. It reminds you that you're alive. And since none of us are going to get out of this with our lives anyway, we should feel alive as often as we can -- even when it kills us.
I say love all the time. I tell people i love them, as often as i can. Not just the chosen few friends and relationships that have earned my love, because i don't make people earn something that's water to MY soul. Because if i did? Good lord, i'd be parched, because that "holding people to a high standard to deserve this" thing is an awful lot of work, and even the mighty can fall. I do, and i'm the empress of my universe.
No. I love. I love deeply and profoundly, and, as a friend recently told me, "you love with your entire being, from the depth of you, and when you let someone in, to warm themselves at your heart and your hearth, they never want to leave, because there are fewer places safer to be than in your heart". Those were among the precious and most loved words I've ever heard, because someone i love saw it and acknowledged it as true, because it is.
I don't have a lot of money, so it's pretty damned valuable around here. When i have more money, it doesn't make it less valuable, it makes it moreso. I don't have a lot of time, either, so having more of that is just bliss. Having more of something doesn't make it less valuable, it just means there's more, and that's a great thing. Perhaps one day i'll have too much, and then i'll change my mind. Who knows.
I think refusing to admit love, i think refusing to say "i love you" because it's too soon, or it's not appropriate, or it's dangerous - i think that is building walls around ourselves. Dams around our oceans, that prevent us from rehydrating. I believe it's fear, it's not even being willing to dip our toe in the water, for fear we'll be washed under. That's not reverence and respect for the power of it, it's fear - of ourselves and our ability to swim.
Hate isn't the opposite of love, fear and indifference are. I will not hide under my umbrella and tell myself the sky is blue; i will not wander in the rain and not notice that my skin is wet. I will not be indifferent to love, because love is intoxicating. I will not fear love, because love is marvelous, and i'm a creature who marvels.
"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls." ~Anais Nin
Me too, MzNin. Me too.
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