love for the fishes

I love fishes a lot as a tasty dinner object. But could I love fishes more as another organism and aspect of life?

Maybe.

The last paragraph of Tsem Tulku Rinpoche’s blog post kinda poked me in this next step towards vegetarianism: Please go vegetarian. So much food is available without slaughter of animals for meat. Bring your spiritualism to another level by not eating animals but loving them please.

I’m inclined to see how many days I can practice vegetarianism (fish and shellfish being the last meats I eat). It might be easier than I imagine.

hey, everyone, i have a bad metaphor!

This post has been sitting around for several weeks. I’m still not sure it says what I mean, but I suppose it expresses my perplexity well enough now that other people could share it.

I feel like the world needs a better way to think and talk about love – well, all love, but here I mean specifically romantic or partnered love – than possession. The language of “my” this or that applied to any being with will or sentience is weird. Unfair. When I talk about “my” possessions or “my” feelings, for instance, it’s assumed that I get to decide what happens with them. I’ve certainly thought about people and animals in that way & with that language before. It often leads to disappointment – people, strangely, do not tend to behave according to my desires (leaving aside, for the moment, what business I have desiring stuff of them in the first place). And it’s just not the way we ought to think of others, with that sort of disregard for free will.

Some of “my” non-people things have hatched an idea of a different way to conceive of possession. I own a house, for instance, in which live three cats. Conventional wisdom would say that all these entities belong to me in the way I described; I purchased them (for the most part), so they are mine to control. But. It’s clear to me that the cats aren’t entirely. It’s easy for me to impose my will on them by force (they’re very small, and largely dependent on me), but they do in fact have their own opinions. My relationship with the house, too, isn’t entirely about control: a big part of it is about responsibility. Both cats and house provide things for me, and, in exchange, I have responsibilities to them. Like keeping them from freezing. Or not setting them on fire.

So. I’ve been pondering for a bit what that means with people.

Hugo Schwyzer’s epically titled We have used our power to dominate and our weakness to manipulate: more on the egalitarian vision, and the fundamental sinfulness of traditional gender structures helped me solidify this idea today. His post reminds me that “my wife” and “my husband” used to – and still do for many folk – come with a fairly specific set of encoded responsibilities to that other person you possess (and yes, some control and imposition of will, too). Egalitarian approaches to love, with [implied heterosexual, since that's where gender disparities are most obvious; I feel like queer couples skip to the next paragraph in this post] marriage as a focus, tend to start from de-gendering those responsibilities. It’s a good starting place; that set of roles directly constrains people’s time and happiness.

So, we remove – or at least question – some of the gender-based role constraints in love. Then what? People complain on occasion that they don’t know what to do now, and that’s probably true. There’s still one familiar notion, though – that the other person in a relationship should conform to your will in some way (yeah, the wording here is a bit strong, I admit). We still end up with an awful lot of manipulation and ego in play.

I’m intrigued by the idea of using the language and ideas of this third entity construct. It’s apparently not very popular, since I can’t find a good, non-sexist [Seriously. One dude uses the notion that "all men want group sex" as his example in an otherwise not bad definition, and in the process I think misses the point.] explanation of it online, even from the Center for Right Relationship people who invented it. Simply put, the third entity in any relationship is the relationship. It’s a thing some number of people create among themselves.

Shifting to a language about that entity seems pretty easy. Conceivably, we could stop saying “she’s my friend” and pick up “we’re friends”, and that problem would be solved, semantically speaking. It also offers a much wider range of specificity, whole sentences in places of nouns: “we’re sleeping together” vs. “he’s my *awkward pause*”. Perhaps the majority of people wouldn’t be so direct about it, but you could be if you liked.

Shifting our thinking might follow along naturally from the language change. Naturally confusing at first, maybe – if we take away the gender role and the conform-to-my-will language (heh, and then add all the complexity you want to the new language), it turns relationship definitions into a bit of a big white hole. I feel like that’s what they ought to be, though: like, if we acknowledged that each relationship is at most only similar to another & not the same thing, we might make better choices. Be less burdened by expectations, at least by ones that don’t relate to the other party in a relationship.

I also believe that thinking about relationships as a separate thing that people participate in, rather than a thing that people are (or at least are as individuals), could move us to think of the responsibility we have to a relationship. Not things you owe a person, a role you play, or things you must do for them, but the care you tacitly agree to give a relationship. Making it a little like my house: your relationship is a container you can inhabit, but don’t freeze it or set it on fire.

falling

Convention holds that love bears some kind of metaphorical resemblance to falling: out of control, maybe, or crushing, sinking, something like that.

I’ve gone a long time thinking I maybe had a part missing or broken, because I’ve never experienced anything like falling when it comes to another person. People close to me talk about being in love, too, as if it’s another form of insanity or possession. It makes you do things, right? As though your actions aren’t your own, but some parasite’s. Well, as far as I know – though I doubt whoever might be researching this would call me right away, there’s no love parasite. There could be one, and maybe I’ve never ingested it. Anyhow. Let’s assume this idea is not the result of parasite evolution, and is purely figurative.

I don’t think I have a problem after all. No, I haven’t seen any kind of light. I still have absolutely no falling feelings, and rarely feel anything but fairly in touch with all my faculties. I’m just not bothered by it. There’s nothing wrong with the conventional notions; I have different ideas, and that’s pretty neat.

love

How can you ever hope to know the Beloved
Without becoming in every cell the Lover?
And when you are the Lover at last, you don’t care.
Whatever you know, or don’t – only Love is real.
- Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
(Translated by Andrew Harvey from A Year of Rumi)

I’ve subscribed to this year-long Rumi-a-day email course. It’s not a ‘course’ in the sense of a class or curriculum – just, a little Rumi every day.

This one I like because I don’t intellectually get it, but it feels true anyhow. This is pretty true of Rumi, period, come to think: lots of talk about God and Love and various other capitalized words used in ways that aren’t the ways people tend to use them today. And the God word. That word makes this atheist uncomfortable. I like it when Rumi says it, though. It sounds simply sacred.

Love. Yes. That’s powerful, inasmuch as I grok what he – and his translators – meant by it. Divine oneness, maybe. It seems like a more ecstatic version of buddhist love (or lovingkindness, maitri, or open-heartedness, bodhichitta). Buddhism has a lot of ways to talk about love. Some I understand and some I’m barely beginning to.

So I’ve been thinking about the role love plays in… call it spirituality, purpose, a life of virtue, rightness of path. My experience doesn’t contain enough ways to talk about love. There’s the way I love the office copiers multi-function devices, which is a lot like the way I love a new person or discovery of any sort: this is SO AWESOME, you are SO AWESOME. Or the way I love someone – or something – I really know, with all their complexities and frustrations and a subtler, deeper, recognition of their awesome. Or the air of an early fall evening, a sensuous sort of love. These are all the same word, a word that translates into buddhism as attachment. Sorta.

Yes, those things all include some sort of attachment. But. With the exception of the copier, my feeling in each of those cases includes a love that’s more like breathing. I imagine this is a hint of bodhichitta, love that rests you on its open palm rather than hold you in its fist. It’s not all grasping and awesome and mine mine mine; affection can also connect and open you to the world and everything in it, which is also you. Then we get all circular, and everything makes more sense if you just turn your rational mind off.

Affection contains a little of this maitri idea, too. Maybe affection could be all about that: close people could be the ones you most readily want goodness for. Beginners’ meditations about lovingkindness tend to start with the self, move to an object of affection and project desire for that person’s happiness, and spread from there. Until everyone’s happy. Or at least, everyone’s happiness is important to you. Clearly this isn’t a new or unique idea – the thing we label love is a well-trod path to love that’s good for everyone.

I’m trying to follow this gradually appearing path. When I pay attention, it’s as if I have infinite space and patience for everyone and everything I love. This is where we come back to Rumi, where only Love is real.

sharing is right!

I appear to have left myself a reminder – in the form of a saved draft with nothing but this title – last month to write this post.

That was around the time I had the startling revelation that the things I did, consciously or automatically (I think the automatic things are most effective) were making me happier than anything I did for myself. I’d started going to the dojo regularly because I feel responsible for the people who are even newer than I am, for instance. I started work on an article (or a book – sizewise, it’s somewhere between the two) sharing some of what I’ve written here about job searching. And I did a few unthinkingly thoughtful things – babysitting in the middle of the night is the first one that comes to mind. And. Yeah. I felt really great. Greater, actually, than the satisfied, on purpose feeling of meaningful career achievements. Greater than making art I like. Like I belonged to something larger.

Intervening weeks changed that. There was some job-search excitement, some bustle, some stress. Some days of dreading my daily work routine. I’m not moving to New York. I’m pretty sure that’s ok. In the process I got rather self-absorbed, though, and that’s… less ok. My predominant state is strained and discontented, with a touch of broken animal hiding in a cave. Now slightly sick, too.

There’s probably a baseline requirement for self-care: eating, moving, meditating, sleeping, learning & creating, those kinds of things. I’m not sure if it’s those things that I’m not attending to or the massive self-absorption making it so oddly hard to be engaged with the world.

So. Sharing is right. I’ll be working on that over here in my cave.