Traveling, the Self, and Life Forces
Still processing too much within, in South Africa.
Listening to: https://open.spotify.com/track/2hQuLyKl9kw15xW2cMeEhO

I’ve been reading stories from Migrations, and ruminating over the work and teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh as I craft this fluid, evolving self of mine. As someone with a bad habit of pouring into others despite herself, I’ve figured at the very least, such a pain had some greater purpose. But in reconciling self vs. selfless tendencies, one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s elementary teachings has given me pause for a while now, in considering how I may best communicate and build with others.
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.”
I’ve moved through several transform-instigators over the past few years, and the learnings from a most painful and personal of them re-emerged for me last night in an unexpected social situation.
In an evening of heavy drinking and debauchery at the backpacking lodge I stay in, a fellow traveler told me one of the tipsier young women there was trying to sleep with him, but he really wasn’t keen on it and feared refusing her advances. I hadn’t seen them interact earlier in the evening (or ever before, for that matter), but sure enough not 30 minutes later she planted herself next to him, and in an exchange I likely would not have questioned had it not been for our recent conversation, they began to kiss.
How often do young adults, teenagers, even children experience this kind of encounter? How many times have I unknowingly enacted this pervasive brand of non-consensual exchange? How ingrained is it within us that our bodies are primarily for the physical pleasure of others — that when regularly objectified humans have desires of their own, that of course the ‘dominant’ partner is interested; for he is always interested. For this is how he discerns how I am of value to him. Yet my own discernment, that I do want, is not received in the manner I am used to being met with, as a receptacle for desire. I can’t see my power, I can’t see my impact, and I am enacting violence.
It has shaken and deeply troubled me to acknowledge my own complicity in such destructive manifestations of ‘love’ — desire, really, for despite the softest intentions, a true life force of love does not enact this kind of dehumanization; a deeply disguised, seemingly innocuous mutation of its counter-force, fear, does. I have observed these two forces as consistent undercurrent of human behavior on varying levels, and I have observed increasingly complex, deceptive, painful manifestations of fear emerge without being recognized for their true nature. They show up as hatred and dehumanization: as white nationalism/Neo-nazism, as rape culture, as the enforcement of rules without consideration of their human value and contextual existence, as the valuing of harmful traditions in the name of love of our predecessors and families. And fear will leverage all of its aligned manifestations, also buried and disguised, to hold firm to power and control, pulling us in along with them with a kind of magnetism we mistake for love: loyalty at all costs, even gratitude for the life that gave you what you have. This is not the nature of the life force of love.
This. is. not. love. And it is not me.
It is my living intention to ride the undercurrent of love with ever-increasing frequency, recognizing that the existence and movements of both forces are omnipresent and flowing through our experiences as human beings.