Being Loved

Being loved is hard for me. I don't really ever believe I deserve it. I believe I deserve respect, to be listened to and paid attention to, treated as intelligent and experienced and trustworthy. I believe I deserve responsibility, even sometimes power. But love... I have such a high standard for myself when it comes to love. It's hard for me to believe that I should be loved endlessly and thoroughly and absolutely. I try to believe it, but in practice I don't live like it's true. I apologize too much. I need too much reassurance. I simply don't understand how it could be true.

Then there's this person who is on the wrong coast right now, who is exhausted, stressed, and has a million things on his plate. But he calls to say goodnight without fail. He supports me no matter what. He'll repeat himself over and over until I've heard what I need to hear. He's never too busy for me. I'm always the most important thing to him, even when I don't think I should be. Everything he does says "I love you."

Sometimes it makes me so uncomfortable to be loved this much, but I've never felt so safe as I have for the past two years. I've never felt so free to give love, and giving love is something my soul starves for. Pouring myself into someone else is how I breathe.

He lets me love him too much, and that's something I was built to do. I feel too deeply. I long too hard. I fall too fast. I yearn too strongly. He is an unweatherable rock under the onslaught of my affection. He is the mountain that grows taller in the storm.

Do I romanticize him? Absolutely. Intentionally. I'd like to think that's part of my charm.

It's part of his, too. He is romanticizable unlike any other. He deserves to be romanticized. If only I could dress him in a suit of shining armor and put him on a white horse with my words, I would. Who wouldn't romanticize a fairy tale? That's what they are there for.

The fairytale goes like this:

There was a girl who needed to love someone. There was a boy who knew her well enough to know that she needed to be loved herself, loved extra well, extra strongly, or else she wouldn't feel it or believe it.

There was a boy who needed to love someone. There was a girl who knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't give his love to just anyone, and if he was willing to give it to her, he would give it to her alone, forever. She knew he needed to be loved, as well, but that boys who are built like mountains require a special, strong kind of love.

She loved him, and then he loved her. They left the city, bought a house, and drank tea together in their house. She grew vegetables and he painted small statues. They read books about love, and listened to songs about love, and played games about being in love.

Whenever they had to be far apart, the boy always called her to say goodnight, and when she hung up the phone, the girl always thought to herself, "This is what love is. I'm never forgotten. I'm never alone."

I don't know how the fairytale ends, although I could probably make a pretty good guess. What I do know is that it will get boring in the middle for the reader, because it will go on like that for a long time. Boring old love, steady and implacable, a mountain unmovable.

Letters to The - #7

How can I tell you that sometimes I am so sick of your world? I have watched three documentaries now just describing how Instagram is ruining people’s lives. Not just for a moment, either. It ruins their minds, their perspectives, their relationships, their ability to see reality with clear eyes and unburdened hearts. It rips them apart, like by like. It turns young girls into gyrating titillations who think it’s normal for married men old enough to be their biological grandfathers to comment on the size of their breasts and ask to see them naked. These children armed with self-destructive weapons called camera phones think they have things under control because they don’t reply to the haters and the creeps, because they’ll never meet that man in person. They don’t know that they meet them every day. Nothing is under control. Never have I felt the nauseating spin of the earth like I do now. I’m about to be flung off, and I know that the moment outer space sucks itself into my lungs and freezes me from the inside out and vaporizes all the liquid in my body, it will feel normal and innocuous, because that’s what we are all doing to ourselves down here. We are turning into vapor and empty skin, shoving a vacuum free of true being into our souls and rupturing every nerve ending and blood vessel with overexposure. We are lost in a universal, unending thread of posts and comments and upvotes and downvotes. We beings of only sight, hazy filtered sight. We can’t even call a lie a lie anymore. It’s fake news. Things that are real are not “real.” They are “unfiltered”, and even that might be fake news. We are numb. We don’t smell or taste or feel or hear. We take photos and we see photos and we scroll and scroll and scroll until we are sleepless and nearsighted and we think that’s all there is because that is the brightest thing in our world now. How big is your TV. How new is your phone. How perfect is your selfie. How cute is that filter. How trendy is that hashtag. How lit how dope how fire. We are disintegrating into pixels and bots and AI, and there will be nothing left of the species that was once awestruck by a sunrise, deafened the roar of a waterfall, awakened by the cold wind on a winter morning, humbled the cry of our first child fresh out of the womb. We are too busy taking a selfie, our Crest Strip teeth and fierce eyebrows in the foreground, the new innocent promise of the future in the blurry background, her own first precious moments stolen from her by more love for half a million followers than for the seed of our bodies. We are falling apart, and the earth is flinging me off it. Ultimately, I don’t belong here, but I have to stay, don’t I? I’m a third of the way done, perhaps. Please promise me there are no selfies in heaven.

Letters to The - #6

The older I get, the younger I feel. When I was a child, I didn’t understand why I was treated like one. I saw the world clearly, factually. I was frustrated at my lack of privilege. I felt the endogenous wisdom of my soul, and hated that no one saw or acknowledged it. I took myself seriously, and took the world seriously. I’m not a young woman anymore, by any nation’s standards, and yet I feel more like a child than ever before. My sense of playfulness seems to expand with my freedom in the world. I find joy in smaller and smaller things. I laugh with greater abandon. The angst of my adolescence has been replaced by awe and silliness and curiosity. I don’t feel like I’ve grown up. I feel like I’ve grown into my own childhood and that it will last until I die.

Letters to The - #5

I did want to disown myself. I wanted to learn about purity, about earth purity and divine purity, by rinsing the body clean of the buildup and the constant furious input.

The only truly pure things are air and water, and even then, I must equivocate. The air has to be good clean light mountain air, or the puncturing hot air of the empty dessert when there is no wind, no dust to interfere, or the strong ocean air, not of the beach, but in the middle of the sea.

With water, it’s even harder. There is so much we don’t know or see and so much we can’t control. The most pure waters, fresh rain from a clean sky, hot springs, or melted snow running in a clean and clear riverbed, can’t always be found--can almost never be found in my life--and the water from cities has unknown chemicals and additives. "Chemicals and additives" is something we hear about a lot. We don’t know what it means, what they are composed of, but we’re quite afraid of chemicals and additives.

Still, even city air and city water are more pure than hamburgers.

I went ten days without hamburgers. I went ten days without any food at all. I had coffee, which is probably the least pure of all the semi-pure drinks. And I had bottled, colorful, calorie-free drinks from companies I’ve never met, made by people I don’t trust. Those are not pure at all, even though the labels have pictures of beautiful slices of fruit. There is no fruit, and the lie makes it even more impure. I had tea, which has a different kind of purity. Tea has the purity of being, in the leaves and their scents and oils and greenness. And I had water, which has the purity of non-being.

I had to teach myself the art of fasting. I first didn’t eat for a day, then two, three, five, seven. Finally, ten. This seemed a stretch. How did you do it for forty and in the dessert, not in a home with a WiFi enabled thermostat, memory foam mattress, and a water purifier? I felt weak and dizzy. My stomach churned in anger, resentment, and confusion. My legs were heavy, my spine slouched down into itself as though all my energy had fled to the four corners of the earth and I was the center of all gravity, caving in on myself. I lay on the floor and told my husband I might vomit. He looked at me with concern, but he didn’t say to stop. He didn’t say to keep going. He told me to listen, to think, and to do what is right.

It’s so hard to know what is right.

I ate again, and then I didn’t. Three square meals a day felt foreign, like an ancient American myth. Funny, I thought, how people used to believe in that so long ago.

Womanhood and food are complicated when mixed in the same bowl. The apple and Eve both tempted Adam. We have curves, flesh that is ripe for biting and suckling. I think the most pure meal might be a raw mango eaten whole, when you let it drip down your chin, onto your breast, the pulp clinging to your throat like a strand of hair. There is woman in the mango. I’ve always felt close to food, especially fruit, leaves, stems, and roots, like these are my cousins, and I have to keep them close.

A woman eating is a woman being a woman. A fruit being eaten is a fruit being a fruit. So what am I when I am not eating? I find myself genderless. Disinterested in sex, like everything is too holy to touch with my body. Only the tea leaves still dance in my heart. Everything else is in silence, waiting for the fast to break.

In ten days, I saw my body shrink away from itself. I saw my skin hang from my bones like a damp sheet on a line. I felt miserable the first time, but it felt better than being full. I only know how to be full or empty, nothing in between. Empty is pure, and full is a different kind of purity, a different kind of commitment, one that demands self-sacrifice. It is a demand that you stretch yourself to meet. The second time I fasted for ten days, I learned how to take care of my body while fasting, and I was less tired, less dizzy and weak. I drank more tea and water, less marketing and packaging and chemicals and additives.

I continue to fast often. I am a woman who has a complicated relationship with food. I feel too close to it. Sometimes, I just need a vacation from it. I restore the purity of my body by fasting. I let my human urges go unsated for a while, and when I return to being fully human, I am more in control.

Today, my husband sick in bed with a virus, I rose, and I performed the tea ceremony without him. We used to sit and do this together, but not often enough anymore. We always say we’ll get back to it, that it’s one of our foundations. Pour the water, count the seconds... tip the pot… blow… sip.

Pu’erh is an ancient tea that was once so valued, it was used as currency. It was carried by nobles and kings across China, aging, fermenting, growing dark and mild like a strong old warrior. It has purifying properties. It is a good tea for a person who hasn’t eaten in seven days.

I rose, and I made the tea dance with my hands. The pot is brown Yixing clay. It sits on a tray made of slatted bamboo. There is a glass pitcher, called a fairness pitcher. It is used by amateur performers of the tea ceremony to ensure that all who come to sip receive an infusion of equal strength.

In the tea ceremony, you drink the tea many times, pouring the water seven times, maybe eight, until tea is nearly just water again. It is a cycle of birth, life, and death.

First, you rinse the tea, and throw away the first infusion. It is a short infusion, a few seconds, to let the tea bloom, shake off the dust, and prepare itself to give its best. It is a mother’s water breaking, the first sign of new life, the precedent. We live for the following eight infusions, the following eight decades. Each steeping, an age. The first is light, youthful. It hints at what maturity will bring. It tastes like itself, but it is not yet itself.

You smell the underside of the teapot lid before you first sip, and this reminds me of new love, a nose nestling close behind a paramore’s ear, catching a scent of perfume and shampoo and musk, the sensitive skin sending messages that even better sensations will soon follow.

I think the tea knows that more is expected of it.

The second steeping is an abundance. Over-eager, masculine, and far too forthcoming. You only have a moment to pour it out, or else it exhausts itself by giving too much, and you ruin the strength of the remaining six infusions. Carefully, you take the adolescence of the tea, begging it to hold something back, to not let everything be revealed before its time.

The twenties are also rocky, but more moderated. The journey now depends on the character, the quality. The thirties, the forties, the fifties, they are smooth, some ups and downs. You get to know the bitter edges, the sweetness at the center, and the nuances of each note. There is cocoa, coffee, smoke, mulch, the scent of a forest floor after it rains, even sometimes pine, amber, and ocean. It all depends on where the tea came from, and where it has been until now. The final infusions are gentle, sweet, faint. They don’t rush out. You have to wait for them much longer.

I’m turning thirty soon. I looked up the other day my age on Mars, and learned that if I had been born on Mars, I’d be turning sixteen soon, just a month after my thirtieth earth birthday. I find this comforting. I also tell myself that it’s quite a coincidence that I am about to turn thirty and that I live in a culture with a base-10 numerical system. The number means nothing, if I am not of this world. But I am of this world.

This is why I fast. I cease to be woman, to be American, to be twenty-nine, to be beholden to the conventions that put lines on our forehead and expiration dates on our vitality. I have long conversations with leaves of tea that live their entire lives in the course of a morning, so selfless that they cannot help but overshare, like a loquacious socialite who spills bubbling secrets into your ear on the dance floor. You find yourself feeling like Ruth at the helm of a pot of pu’erh, noticing in astonishment that the harvesters have left behind too much grain, that your gleaning is being made abundant by a benevolent source.

You probably never drank pu’erh when you were on earth, but things that you never touched can still be holy. The sound of the canopy of a Costa Rican rainforest. The light in early morning in the Sierra Nevadas. The first snow of winter. A cake of pu’erh that travelled from China, to Seattle, to me.

I’m not sure when it becomes holy, but I know that it is. Set apart. Dedicated to worship. Glory to the divine.

My husband and I consecrated our marriage with prayers to you, the name of Jesus, ancient Celtic rituals performed quietly away from the crowd, and a small cup of tea passed tenderly between us. It was hot, light, and hallowed. A protestant pastor stood by, his first marital tea ceremony underway, smiling, blessing us.

Sometimes I want to ask your pardon for inventing new rituals to honor you. Sometimes, I believe that is what I was put on earth to do.

Letters to The - #4

People say that you wrote a book to guide us but there are so many human fingerprints all over it. I haven’t known how to read it in a long time with the spirit that I read it as a child. Parts of it, though, Psalms, Proverbs, James, the Sermon on the Mount---they will always echo in my conscience.

Genesis is one of the best parts of the Bible for me. There is a garden where people eat trees--certain parts of them. It says fruits, but probably flowers, roots, stems, and leaves as well, I should think, and let’s suppose not just trees but also other types of plants. People eat, wander, garden, make love, speak new words, and name things, even themselves.

There is one tree you aren’t supposed to touch, and another that you are supposed to touch often. You are in both trees, but just as with lightning and the ocean floor, you keep some things to yourself. However, we homo sapiens insist on keys tied to kite strings and deep ocean submarines, and we touch the tree that you reserved for no one, for looking but not for touching.

We then suffer. We are electrocuted, we are crushed and drowned, and we learn sin. But we also learn ironworking, long-distance electronic communication, and space travel. Nothing is ever the same again. I wonder if we regret it. I am sure that I do. I’ve been trying to get back there for years, but it’s quite hard to find Eden in first world west coast America. I try, though. I stopped eating animals, and the food that animals make for their children. I stopped pledging allegiance to war. I don’t drink cola. I live among trees and eat fruit every day. None of this is enough, however. I am still not in Eden.

Origin stories can make or break a mythology. Christianity got it right. There is resplendent beauty, simplicity and innocence, a grave but forgivable error, and genuine, pure sensuality. Our divine tragedy, our separateness, is elegant in its construction. We are here, but we are not supposed to be. We are animal but we are spirit. We forgivable but we are flawed. In being both of everything dark and light, we can never be all one and all whole. In being too much, we feel that we are nothing. And in feeling that we are nothing, we need you to make us Something.

I find myself enchanted by Eden, adjusting my dreamy-eyed lens on the world to a paradise-tinted soft-focus. It’s much easier and more lovely to proceed in this way, but this computerized, post-post-modern purgatory of my present is also mine, and I can’t disown it without disowning too much of myself.

Letters to The - #3

We don’t need to discuss the inauthenticity of labels at length with each other. We know that earthly institutions fall short of what you wanted to create. I found a word in Wikipedia a long time ago, “panentheist”, that came so close. I tried it out with a few strangers. It worked well enough, but “ists” and “isms” leave so much to be desired, and even more undiscovered. I felt defined, and that wasn’t acceptable because definitions leave little room for mistakes, uncertainty, and growth, so I mostly leave it on the shelf. It’s the kind of word one only breaks out in a particularly sophomoric sort of mood.

If someone asked what kind of believer I am, I would simply tell them “I believe.” I wouldn’t mean in the Bible literally, or in Christian creeds and missions. I would just mean that I believe in The Truth, that exists; in The Light, that it shines; and in The Way, that there is one.

I believe in The.

What does it mean to believe in The? Perhaps it means that I accept the heavy reality of my own existence, and in doing so, I also accept yours.

Letters to The - #2

They say you are Peace, but you always are, and peace isn't always, at least not with me. Nobody knows peace until they first lose it and then find it again. Before, it's like air. It's nothing, until you need it.

The first peace I found was in someone’s arms. She loved me in my agony, and that was the first time I felt what peace feels like. It was only feelable because of the contrast. I hurt, and she made it better. For a long time I didn’t know how to feel peace without the contrast. Peace turned out to be an acquired taste, and for a long time any hint of its presence upset me, like day without night would be upsetting to any diurnal creature. Her arms were warm, often bare, and something about the outside of someone touching the outside of me felt complete. I’ve been throwing myself at touch ever since.

I try to touch you, too, to further the completeness. You are much harder, and flimsier, though. Bubbles burst at a harsh breath, but you won’t even let me feel fire, or lighting, or the bottom of the sea. Why do you keep the most magnificent parts to yourself? This hurts me. My soul keeps whining, “I want to know. I want to see. I want to feel.” I want all of it, even the parts that would kill me.

Trees are often an acceptable in-between. They last a while, they are both scratchy and warm, and they don’t need me, as you don’t need me. Trees, though, why do they get to sink so deeply into the earth? I’ve always found this to be truly unfair. I want to know the soil, to be buried up to my neck in the blanket of the world. You didn’t plant me, and you didn’t give me wings. You just gave me imagination barely sufficient enough to think of wanting to fly or grow roots. This hovering on the limbo of mantle and atmosphere nags at me. I am not yet settled in myself, and feet are at best a desolate kind of beauty.

Letters to The - #1

I’ve been praying to you for longer than I’ve been writing letters, but in truth, letters are more reassuring. Unlike prayers, which gush chaotically, which explode off my heart, across my tongue, and vanish just beyond hearing, letters remain. I can construct them, organize myself into neat, soldierly lines, and march up to you, terrified but resolute, words in hand regardless of my trembling voice.

I’m not writing to you out of anything more than sheer and utter perplexity, as well as a remnant of faith that is tattered, multi-cultural, semi-religious, vaguely scientific, and deeply reverent. Whether you are a great Master and Commander of a ship called the Universe, or the Universe itself, a garment-body of one limb of spiritual reality, I respect you, as only an ant can respect the Pacific Ocean. Whatever you are, wherever you begin and end, you are Something, and possibly Everything. Therefore, I feel the need to stay in touch, touch base, and send my regards.

If I may be so bold as to identify the Unidentifiable, I should tell you that I don’t think of you as a He, except during church on Sundays, where frankly it’s just unavoidable. Nor a She, nor an It. If anything you are a The. You are, have always been, not “a” god, not “a” lord, not “a” creator. You are “The”. You are the The. The Alpha and Omega, The Lord, The God of Creation, and so on. Why gender had to confuse this magnificent rendering of your non-personage, I can’t imagine, but early humans perhaps were too busy tangling with lions and uncatalogued species of poisonous plants to linger over the appropriateness of your pronouns.

However, as a twenty-first century construct, I am not so terribly occupied. I walk down the sidewalk on my lunch break, and when it glimmers a little underfoot, I think “ah, there is God, in the light.” I know that sidewalks sparkle because mica is added to the concrete, but to my Judeo-Buddhist-Protestant-Euro-American-Mystic mind, I see you in reflections, in surface traction, in explainable phenomena more than in the unexplained. I think that as scientists burrow deeper and deeper into reality, they are finding you, and calling your bits and pieces sound waves and photons, quarks and dark matter. Older explorers and diviners called other parts of you Flying Squirrel, Rhododendron, and Connemara. One of your fingernails might be Pluto. When I see the sun, it’s the Divine Neuron that conceived me, and all my earth-siblings. I think we are microbes in your terrarium, and even all the wires criss-crossing our world so that we can tweet angrily in California at news anchors in Manchester, are just strange new products of Us and You combined.

Us and You is another problem to me. Where do I end and you begin? I am within you, a dream in your waking, a part of your wheeling cosmos, just as the molecule in my stomach lining participated fully in the first dance at my wedding.

Where do I give up myself and look outside myself to find you? Am I not already found by being a part of you? I can sit very still sometimes and feel the tension of this connection. I can strum it like a golden thread in my mind that makes a beautiful albeit terrifying tone, and at times I cling to it as my lifeline, and at times I admire it, like an artist of found art objects, and I feel that I created our connection as much as it and You created me.

God, I dance within you. Abel brought you fruits, but really he brought you himself. His thorn-scratched fingers, his calloused palms and dusty feet and aching back. I bring myself everywhere I go, and I wanted to tell you that this is my most costly gift of worship. I am where I am, and I cannot see or know all of you, although I desperately want to. The dance floor you’ve given me in yourself--it is too big! The parts I’ll never see, I miss them already.

This is all I can manage for now--my own mythos of you, the one where you are simply You, and I am I, the same as if none of this had ever existed, no Exodus, no Popes, no BC or AD interpretations of the sacred, no sects or sermons. Not even the historical confusion of a man named Jesus. Just you and I wheeling together would still exist without all that, and this is how I found my way back to you--the long way round with sidelong glances at more Tao and Zen and pop psychology than anyone should suffer. There is more of your truth in my palms when they are empty.