A Wilderness of Heart; an Ecosystem of Love

I asked:

>> What is >> it that we do for each other? What do I do for you? Anything that you >> can put to words?

You replied:

> You and your words expand myself of human understanding and > expression. I delight in tracking your explorations through the > wilderness of the heart.

The wilderness of the heart - for it is a wilderness, isn't it?

Sometimes I think I've been like those folk one sees evidence of from an airplane now and again, homes clustered at the end of some long black asphalt tributary from nowhere to nowhere, swimming pools and stately drives scored into the earth in rigid squares of Sunset Magazine-induced community, and out of place with their loud insistence that things be more even than they actually are.

At the end of that road, there's always one last group of civil hold-outs, beyond which there's nothing that even pretends to a human presence, where mountains follow mountains in an endless chasmed chain that fades to gray at the end of the world.

Those houses face their only road - the only one they'll choose to see - their backs turned firmly against that wise, unending and unyielding expanse of rolling rocky life behind, with abrupt-edged lawns of watered green fending off the stark sparse stability of an unkept and well-balanced land.

And they keep their backs turned on that still unknown country, for quite too long I notice tonight, just like I've had my back turned to my heart.

I thought I'd been facing my heart, but now I think I've been wrong.

I think I've instead been turned toward that well-paved road, watching for those who drive along it in that certain predictable way my mother always praised, with variations in speed and chassis, and very little other else. I'd paid my taxes, bought my real-estate, and moved in, determined to cultivate the hybrid happiness of my heart with all the vigor of an energetic Victorian on a mission from Art.

But something happened in the passion and the work of *making* it, of carving neat thoughtful squares on that desert edge where winds howl and lizards roam. Little by little, the glide of the birds and the boil of clouds distracted me. I forgot to water the lawn.

And it was hard to stay inside all day, even though the air was silver and conditioned cool and the walls so safe and guaranteed - it was hard to stay inside all day once the mountains began to sing.

And harder still to stay inside all night.

Some point must have been reached somewhere, and I can't say what point, nor can I pick out the "where" or when of it, and still it seems like the time came when I was no longer in that house any longer, with my back to those hills and my eyes staring at the road for some faux unknown and very certain thing.

Like a dream that segues via punctuated revelation, without gradual transition or any hint of reason, I'm now swiftly standing in the middle of my heart. I'm facing my heart. I see mountains and valleys and mountains of my wondrous heart.

It's a wilderness. Unexplored. Very inhabited. Spacious and willing to be traveled lightly, and wandered respectfully - concealing and then sharing, with a grave and sincere decorum, deep grottos of peace that echo with my ancestors' stories woven in the RNA of it, scribed on its walls and read by firelight when the mood is right and the music near.

I never knew how large my heart's land was. I never knew how much could live inside it. I had no idea...

>I feel honored to be the recipient of your insights.

I'm glad you find something useful here. I love the muse you stir in me. >

> I think the most important thing you do for me is to provide me with > the opportunity to accept unconditional love, knowing that I can't > quite return it in kind or degree, but accepting it anyway.

The kind and degree elude me - I wonder how you measure them. I wonder how you know.

I'm having the very fine experience of loving unconditionally, not because I'm making any effort at all to love, either for love or loves' sake, nor do I have any need or compulsion to love *you* (though there is the you of it) - there is no cosmic reason for it, no purpose I can figure at all, but it seems to be what is just because that's what's coming along - and I tend to call it as I see it, surprised or no.

And I am surprised. I thought this might have faded by now. I didn't expect it to keep unfolding, like some journey down into a fractal's edge where all that happens is one unceasing approach, while pattern after pattern recites its shape and then expands and winds along another deeper coil. Curious. The initial resonance wasn't unexpected. The sustain is.

>I think allowing oneself to be loved is a necessary - and often overlooked > part - of the larger ecosystem of love.

We breathe and are breathed.

I'm letting myself feel loved. With you, it's both easy and very hard. It's hard because it would be so easy to measure the volumes between us, and compare them, and conclude from the apparent asymmetry that perhaps I wasn't loved. Avoiding that conclusion can be hard.

And yet it's easy to feel loved because, even in your reserve, you're generous. You're honest. You're careful. You imply difficulty, and perhaps disappointment - but you offer willingness to keep looking ahead, and you say "perhaps" and "we'll see".

As long as I keep feeling what I feel, and growing from it, I can offer the same.

Thankfully, I don't see degree - perhaps I'm blinded by my own strength of feeling. And I also know degree between us can't be measured right now in things like the number of words or minutes shared.

To ask the timeless, when it's mostly potential, to demonstrate itself before its time (and that might never even be), and to take any conclusion from that inevitably poor showing wouldn't serve at all the thing I love best about potential - its bedrock of uncertainty, that complete unknown that I can always count on to be forced to surrender to.

When I can live happily in the uncertainty and feel loved as I do, by you and others, without design on that love or any plan to pull anything from it, then I think I'm getting closer to living in an ecosystem of love.

And I know that the closer I get to that, the closer I am to being healed in my heart, and that can only mean that some day, maybe even soon, I'll be wiser in this place of wilderness that I truly do wish to know and love, and it will eventually feel like home.

in love and/of wandering while always in the name of the heart,

yours,

Cynthia

PLUR. Remember PLUR

Peace
Love
Unity
Respect

Peace
Love
Unity
Respect

Peace
Love

-- Anonymous, March 16, 2002