Rivers of Light: When Love’s in Need
It feels a little tricky to write about love. I’ve come to age in an era where being openly interested in love, any kind of love, is perceived as naive and gullible at best. At worst, the labels needy, codependent, or enmeshed get thrown around. Or really, any of the words used in industrialized Western culture that wants us to believe in rugged individualism, self-sufficiency, and complete independence as the healthiest ways to be.
I feel a fierceness about love these days that borders on wrath, which Naimou James, in a moment of complete grace, names as “a sweetest kind of love.” The kind of love that will ferociously correct us when we are not truly loving. The best way I can articulate this wrath for myself is as a form of protectiveness of love itself — Capital “L” Love, the grand Love, the Love that encompasses our kinship as human and more-than-human beings on the planet. There are ways it seems we are not doing Love justice, not doing the best we can with it, not giving Love the time and space to show us what may be possible.
There is a rhetoric about Love that has become so commonly and casually utilized that it becomes that dreaded crime against humanity: the spiritual bypass, a state of walking around with rose-colored glasses, of not being realistic about the world and, in that rosy haze, ignoring harm where harm is being done. The sentiments that “all you need is love” and “love is the only thing that will unite us” are true. But there’s a subtle implication that Love is a simple and easy thing to access. And the truth is, it isn’t always. The truth is that Loving is sometimes very hard.
Perhaps the biggest heartbreak of my growing up was learning how much we are expected to settle. “No one gets everything they want,” I heard.
The first time I heard someone say that, my heart broke a little bit, and in the crack, a seed was planted that I could never be what someone truly wanted. More than that, it planted a seed of shame about expectations, dreams, and desires. This seed of shame was not only planted in ideas of romantic intimate partner love, but also in the romance of what is possible for the world. It carried the armor of shielding against disappointment, while insinuating hope is a child’s game.
Or worse, that hope is not an expression of Love.
What if we consider that romance is not just for intimate partners, but for all variations of Love in the world? So often, we conflate romance with sexual love or attraction, but what if all our relationships could benefit from the kind of attention and depth of feeling we bring to romantic relationships? Most industrialized, capitalist-consumer cultures have prescribed romance to intimate partnerships nearly exclusively. What do you see as the impacts of conflating romance with partnership-love only? I’ll bet most of us have felt the constraints and limitations of funneling romance into this one arena of life. To use capitalist terms, it results in many of us not having a diverse portfolio of Love. We overly rely on our intimate partnerships to give us everything we need — to be perfect — to make up for the fact that we are expected to dismiss or deprioritize the gifts of other relationships in our lives once we become part of a couple. It’s not just family, friendships, and community relationships that suffer from lack of romance. Our relationships to the earth and nonhuman beings (pets, for instance), and humanity at large are deprived of the sweetness of romance too.
My ideal version of romance has never been about attaining a kind of perfection, though I think it gets mistaken for that often. For me, love was and always has been a bit muddy and messy (and yes, in some of my more gruesome years, a pummel of what I call trauma chaos: those painful, reactive moments of just trying so damn hard to get what we think we need).
The ultimate romance has always been about being enthralled by Love and surrendering to it, no matter the shape or color. The ultimate romance is seeing the wacky beauty in the jigsaw of jumbled humanness, interlocking in such a way as to create stability and a broader, more expansive view. Wholeness by way of offering a more complete picture of ourselves, not by completing each other.
I believe that love looks like slow dancing almost all the time. Maybe not actual slow dancing, but rather the sense that we could break into slow dancing anytime, any place. A sweet, swaying undercurrent riding on a thread of light between us. A river, always there, that we can lean back onto and be carried. That we could splash into at any given moment like children on a summer’s day. That we can plunge into and be cleansed of our grief.
A flowing sanctuary. This is what Love is to me.
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There are many deities of love and I am smitten by one in particular. She is a sacred being of West Africa, prominent in African Traditional Religions. I won’t say her name here because she is deserving of the energy of seeking and study (please bring your heart to finding her!), but I will share that she is a bearer of the sweet waters, a bringer of abundance, who demands devotion or else she dries up and takes the waters away. Not just what can quench on the earth’s surface but, when she’s really neglected, she’ll pull the blood from the body, leaving no vehicle for what nourishes to be carried to you.
I’ll be bold in saying I believe we all deserve the level of devotion this deity requires, that the river of light that is Love itself requires. Constant. And yes, this takes a distinct level of attentiveness and discipline. It takes tending. It takes conscious remembering and effort to decide to feed this river of light, this field of Love, between us. It requires the intentional opening of our heart centers to the world, this terrifying and awe-ful world.
Here’s a truth: it is not always safe for me to keep my heart open to the world. The world has been conditioned to relate in ways that hurt me, that hurt many of us. It is not always beneficial for me to release the boundaries that are often required to protect me from further harm, and I wouldn’t suggest that as the most appropriate course of creating more Love in the world.
But here is another truth: rivers have a source, a wellspring of some kind, whether up from the ground or down from the mountain-sky. When my heart feels most afraid is when I don’t feel that river of light being filled.
Friends, this is where I have been failing us lately: I have forgotten to keep my heart open even when the rest of me is afraid. I have forgotten to keep my heart open, not specifically to you all and the world, but to the stream of river-light between us. I can’t always love someone directly but I can be scared, insecure, in need of comfort, and still, still have a heart open to Love. I can feed what carries the Love between us, and I know we can be fed by that when we cannot be fed by each other.
This is the living river. It will carry us when we need. It will protect what Love there is between us, but only if we have been pouring into it, filling its banks with patience, kindness, and attentive presence when we can. Filling it with remembrance of all the times we were able to do so in the moments when we can’t. This loving of each other, this filling from the heart into a field of Love, is an act of stewardship, a practice of devotion.
I will keep practicing, for us.
Practice for Loving**
Take a few moments to sit comfortably, close your eyes or soften your gaze, and breathe deeply into yourself. When you feel yourself more relaxed, imagine yourself on the bank of a river. This can be any kind of river — a river as large and deep as the Mississippi, or a trickling creek you can see the bottom of.
Let the sounds of the water soothe you. Let your heart soften just a bit, and as it does, let the kindness and sweetness your heart carries flow just like the water. Allow it to flow into the waters themselves, joining easily and naturally with the current. Let the water absorb your love.
When you feel the steady stream between the waters and your heart, let yourself imagine your beloveds on the banks across the river. This can be a family, a community, a whole world of beings you care for and about.(If someone or something you have felt harmed by or have been struggling with shows up in your minds eye, imagine them waaaaay downstream, so far you can’t see or hear them).
Whoever they are, recognize and affirm that as they approach this river or stream, they will be touched by the Love in the waters. Recognize and affirm that is more than enough.
Engage this practice whenever you find yourself feeling tight and petty, scared and hurt, open and loving, or whenever your intuition lets you know more Love is the key to whatever is going on.
**If the above exercise feels challenging, listen to the link below**
