in search of the love-specific....

"i love you but i am not in love with you." that has to be one of the dumbest statements ever made out of a grasp for a convienient answer for an inconvienient question. it is a way of saying, i think you are great but i want more than great. i want the greatest. why not just say that? clarity is the best way to go when in a tight corner. that phrase has always annoyed me. i have never bought the tale that love is a thing you can put in compartments, that you can love in this way this person and in another way that other person. of course you have preferences,some momentary and some otherwise but i think that is like. intense like but still like. love is the great objective. it hovers above our in and out feelings, our passionate affairs, our attractions. like makes us selfish, more time with ...., more space in .......'s life, more, more, more. love makes us whole. it is the great oasis after a desert of the unfulfilment of arms that flap in and out of our lives. love is an end, like is a means ,to our own satisfaction. i have liked and liked all my life. i am only now learning to love.

and then there is the love-specific.

my val's day was a disaster. nothing went well. i just got caught up in useless fights and destructive anger. when i have days like this the remedy is a long bus ride. so i took one. i sat at the head of the bus, facing everyone else. it was there, defending myself in my own head, that i caught it. there was a girl and a boy to my left. she was wearing a veil, dressed conservatively, you could tell what religion she was. he was fair, looked like he was from the southern part of the country and talked like it too. they could not have been more different. except they were holding hands. they looked in that fine heat of romance. they looked like they were in love. now, this happens all the time. in youth we forget social,religious, tribal differences and fall in love. or intense like. but it was a beautiful thing to see. i know that a christian can quote the "unevenly yoked" scripture and a muslim can quote the Quran on how this is all a sin but i think God smiles down at this. for these two are defying religion and family and seperate inclinations to try and make an attraction work. it probably will not but they are closer to love than all our singles' seminars, play-it-safe, use 'wisdom' to decide, false sense of security decision making processes. they are advancing toward the love-specific. we are still stuck on safety and convienience.

on my way to work on another morning i saw a man and his daughter. he bought her a seat and showed her the city as the slow, red bus opened up to the early streets. she looked content to be in her father's presence and he looked happy to spend time with her. this man was poor. he did not look neat nor did he sound particularly intelligent. he was probably solving a thousand problems in his head. but he gave his full attention to this young mind forming and growing. he showed me another glimpse of the love-specific.

love is the great objective but its expression is the love-specific. for it is not a general zen state of love toward humanity but a love toward every man in your way, every person you encounter, every opportunity you have to make a life better or not worse. we fail at it but we grow in it. we catch it in glimpses but we are moving toward the whole picture.

so i am in search of the love-specific. today is my older, much older (hahaha), brother's brithday. there is hanging out to be done. they may or may not be booze. my younger sister is getting married on saturday. i think she is a marrying a g.....but i will think so of anyone who marries any of my sisters. i have not been as into it as i should. that stops now. all my anger, all my disappointment,all my thoughts of rage and revenge at people that have let me down is evaporating. for they were not born to please me but to live their own sacred lives. i love them best by allowing them enter their own fullness than in forcing them into mine. i am in search of the love-specific.

and so we come to the women..if i am totally honest the woman i really want does not exist. she is a figment of my mind. i created her. God has refused to follow suit. so i have to trust Him with the love-specific. on this road of truth and redemption lies mrs. white. i may know her, i may not,she may be part of my past or only part of the future, she may be reading this and thinking "what an idiot!" but she exists. and when we dance around and then into each others arms to hold and make all kinds of love in all kinds of colours, when we break ground and move past the feel of the thing and into the life of the thing, there will i, she,we have the closest shadow of that high communion with God. the love-specific.

so, i live.