It is, perhaps, possible to love too much, I am told.
I have experienced several sides: loving so much I was consumed, crazed; loving so much that others felt they were drowning in me. Loving so much that others worried severely for my sanity, for my health, for me – because I did not care about anything but loving.
In books and poems and movies and music and religion, we discuss the ideal of loving others more than ourselves, about not being able to love others more than we love ourselves, about passion being all-consuming, about poets who were so moved by their passions that they committed suicide, about love driving people mad. We talk about all the minor, insignificant beauties of love, of falling in love, of being in love.
So often, we come back to love.
For me, it is the only thing.
I know the thought is enough to drive anyone mad. In truth, it drives me mad: to try to conceive, to try to grasp, to try to understand – and, sometimes, to try to express, to communicate in its simplicity and depths, in all of its varieties. And yet: it is true; it is the greatest truth in me, the driving force for everything I do, for every emotion and for every peace. It is so great that it seems not to have anything to do with anyone – even as it embraces, deeply, everyone and everything.
It is a driving instinct, integrated into everyone and into everything we think and do, into every motive we have for others, for ourselves – it is self-preservation in the extreme: to mend and maintain our hearts, our minds, and others; to mold them, meld with them so we can love them more.
We struggle and work to communicate our love to our parents, to our friends, to each other – through the tasks we do, through our affections, through our words; and that which is our greatest strength so often shields us, plays against us…
…Or, at least, I find my strengths play often against me with painful, hellacious results.
My love consumes me, and I would do anything – anything – to defend my feeling, my understanding…
But, does the love change?
My recent ex-boyfriend showed me it does not, no matter the depth or greatness, no matter the shallowness nor distance of understanding, no matter the number of people. The heart remains the same, even if he is on the other side of the world from me, even if we are broken up (literally: broken up emotionally, mentally, spiritually) over the loss – or supposed loss – of each other.
The heart remains the same.
We are not together, but we are not apart.
This is the way of love: it is a paradox, it is magic. It makes things happen that could never happen: mad catastrophes based on minutiae of misunderstandings; fierce, productive energy towards a common goal; great chasms of distance and time made bearable and infinitesimally closer by the acceptance and embrace of one’s and another’s love.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all – because, in the wake of love, even if there was loss or even monumental destruction, so long as we still love, there will come learning, there will grow something new, there is the appreciation for something old, there is the reincarnation and resurrection of what was true.
We poets and authors and artists of love who would embrace all of reality, all of humanity, who would be consumed by our love and by the love of others – even to our destruction – we are the conscious voices of this insane, sometimes mad, oft-perfect desire to understand, to speak the depths and heights and vastness of love. We embrace the pendulum-swings of our existence, the to’s-and-fro’s across the chasm of space-and-time; are capable of sitting mesmerizedly still for hours in excited study of a single flower, of a lover’s eyes, of the perfectly curved line of his gaunt cheek. We are the ones who do not forget, whose love etches deeply and timelessly and methodically as into tall mountains or into tiny grains of sand; who sit for hours, contemplating, waiting, fed by nothing but our love.
It is hard to understand, for those who would not be us, for those who fear being so consumed. It is hard to bear, sometimes, for those who love us, who are swept up in our intensity, who care so much that they would not have us so completely absorbed that we forget ourselves, forget to care for ourselves, forget even the objects and subjects of our love – that we forget even them.
But, we always come back, re-born by love, lured and tempted by love, by intensity, by great and small and beautiful things that we love.
If I could give any advice to those who love us, I would say: Be patient with our intensity. If it is too much to bear, find other things to distract you – and rarely try to stop our swinging, for, like a great pendulum with intense force, it will likely hit you hard and hurt or startle you – and, in hurting you, will hurt us more intensely, swing us harder or shatter us completely. But, if you manage to find us stopped, isolating around a small thing, be very careful and keep us there with gentle strokes and quiet love, drawing our attraction slowly, so we do not suddenly bowl you over with our immediate attraction; so we do not hurt you, nor hurt ourselves in hurting you.
And, if you are – like us – a great, swinging pendulum of love…
We must be even more careful of each other, with each other.
Our likenesses and differences will be strongly attractive – and repulsive – to each other; our individual powers are capable of creating immense happiness and extraordinary destruction, should we not love and respect and embrace our commonalities and divergences.
It is the embrace that is perhaps most important; and then, the release.
(Until time stops again for us, my white-linen-handkerchief friend.)
Oceans of Mine 