Perspectives on Love and Loss
Recently I’ve found myself strategizing how to stay out of romantic relationships, mainly because I find the break-ups so time-consuming and painful. Then two days ago I was writing about my ecstatic dance journey, and I wrote, “Once I learned how to end a dance, I no longer had any fear about starting one.”
I was immediately struck by the parallel between falling in love and having a dance with someone: if I could just learn how to fall out of love gracefully, then I wouldn’t have to fear and avoid falling in love.
Sometimes I wonder why a relationship ending is more painful for me than, say, a rainbow ending or a sunset ending.
I think part of it is biochemistry, or whatever it is that makes me bonded to someone; it is painful for humans when a beloved pet dies, or a parent, or the worst, a child. Perhaps the grieving process is just the way we get rid of an oxytocin addiction. Maybe we have to re-wire our whole brains to adjust to the absence of a beloved rather than their presence. Maybe some people, either through genetics or learning experiences, are better and faster at the grieving process than others, and find loss less debilitating than I do.
If I go through the grieving process over and over, will I become better at it? Will losing someone I’m bonded with become less painful?
Just as ecstatic dance has been my intimacy training, living in my Hawaiian community of Puna largely populated with transients has been pretty good training for letting go. So many of my best friends have left since I moved there — three major waves of making best friends, losing them, making more new best friends, then losing them too; at first it was harder, then after a couple of cycles of making friends and having them leave, I experienced that 1) losing the daily presence of close friends made space in my life to make new friends, 2) I’d still have the old friends occasionally available, and 3) sometimes the windings of our paths would create times when my old friends were in my life more constantly again, and that was always joyous. I got better at letting friends go with less grief because I had more trust in the process; even though there was a kind of culture shock when their leaving created a vacuum in my life, I knew that it was temporary, so it made the transition easier.
Puna is a site of active volcanos, hurricanes, and the pounding of the Pacific ocean, so I even get lots of practice letting go of physical things — my local beach got covered with lava a few years back — so much for my idea that it’d be my special spot for the rest of my life! A magnificent tree tunnel I loved fell down in a hurricane recently, and every year we lose forest to lava and bulldozing. Even our social things tend to be transient — red road market, ecstatic dance with Elizabeth, SPACE market at Bellyacres, Seastars. Each one was a bubbling up of energy and community coming together; each one has passed in its original form. The markets keep moving location; new ecstatic dances have formed; Seastars (a woman’s group that sings and dances together) keeps being reborn with new women and a slightly different focus. As with my best friends leaving, the death of one thing allows for the birth of another. As with my best friends, I feel a nostalgia for the time when we were all together, when we were bubbling over with synergistic energy. It occurs to me as I write this that if those friends had never left, our synergistic energy might have turned old and stale, become cliquey, and lost the juice of new beginnings.
Noticing the temporal and temporary nature of things has mostly encouraged me to embrace the moment and cherish things while they exist, then let them go and embrace the change. I certainly know better than I used to that if I procrastinate in experiencing something, it might go away before I get a chance to check it out, even if it’s a geological feature!
Shoots, the thing I love most in the world, a little corner of a 23-year-old lava flow I live on, could get run over again by lava anytime…guess I’d better hone my letting-go warrior skills as much as possible!
I see the benefits of death. They create space for change, for a rebirth. I wish it took less than five years or more to turn that intellectual knowledge of goodness into emotional acceptance and forgiveness of the deaths of my romantic relationships. Sometimes I wonder if I really have accepted and forgiven the end of any of my adult relationships, even the one that ended almost ten years ago. I don’t know why I’m so good at letting so many things go, but not my idea that love lasting forever means a partnership lasting forever. When will what I feel in my body catch up with what I know from my reason to be true?
