Already Good Enough

Dear Beloved, 

What an interesting paradox I find myself in this evening, and how life always seems to be an incredible enigma of beauty. Every morning I wake up and only part of me revels in my own astonishment at how we grow and change together and apart. How each day, minute, moment is its own Last Thing always breaking, breaking, breaking like the sound of a cracked bowl set to the rhythm of a clock, each tick ringing in circles around this thought:

I'm sick of not having the courage to accept that I am already worth loving.

I continue to invite the changing of seasons to astound me and leave me gasping with bewilderment each and every year I miss it. If only I allow myself to take a beat to pause and look at what is here instead of climbing mountains to earn the next peak. I consider my ambition is only trying to get me back to Here and Now. To aspire to Earn This, I must forget it is Already Here. I think about all I cannot see which makes the world whole and the trees stand. The network of roots that intermingle and speak to each other beneath our feet, whether we realize it or not. 

I imagine our roots are intermingling and speaking beneath the floor, too.

Look, there's a small white bowl, painted with lilacs, a pink trim, and gold leaf around the rim, it is all over the pine wood floor in pieces, spread by the force of a fall from a height. For these moments, there are never any pictures. The only thing I'll remember is a feeling, and then I clean up the shards. I feel it in my stomach and the middle of my chest.

Oh, I really thought we would do more, this safe little bowl had such potential. Such a waste.

The bowl is broken, its shards are on the ground. I think about all of my near-misses, missteps, and clumsy elbow shouting regret from my neck leading up to the moment where the bowl is knocked loose from its perch atop the counter. Could I have been more careful, or was this bowl Always Broken? It hurts to consider either my clumsiness or my lack of control, but to me, it is still beautiful. 

In these moments, time no longer seems linear, just different parts of one big pie, that I was still holding the ingredients for, and had already eaten. I wonder if I'd be so happy, so carefree if I was already so melancholy about this relationship or that being over before it had begun. I wonder if I would be so grateful for every little thing that I could find enjoyment and peace in. I wondered while the bowl was on the shelf, what the greatest potential for the bowl would be.

"Just enjoy it"

I feel an ache like a punch in my gut as I begin to understand what this bowl was before it fell, what I failed to see as it was one piece on the table. How I flitted and fretted about the bowl and its placement and all the ways I could fill and empty and wash it. Now I see what it is to just enjoy the bowl being there, only because now it isn't, and I can't. I wasn't sure what that meant until now. 

"Just enjoy it" 

Perhaps if I had accepted that this bowl would break sooner, I could have stopped looking for potential and just seen it for what it was. This final thing spread across the floor reminds me moments are fleeting, and they mean so much to me. 

O the holiness of Last things.

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Counting the inches between all the crushed fragments, I am reminded of the aching hum between dissonant notes or magnets, they know of one another, and they dance around one another in honor of themselves and each other. This is you and I today, I love you and you love me, I know we do, even when it's true that we are not in love. I cannot hear you and you cannot hear me now and I am stomping around in the dark and my child is wildly bashing around, bashful, missing you, but it's not you. 

It's not just you, it never was just you whom I saw or chased or missed.

It's also the me who I get to see when you're around, the me who I put away until I meet the conditions of my society. That I am a young man who ought to have a woman on his arm. The me which is allowed to play in the bowl only when he has earned it. The me who is no longer safe to be here because the bowl is all over the ground. If only I had him, you could come and go as you like and I would be much more centered.

So there you are. I am holding you like water in my hands. I take sips of you as you trickle away. You will be gone and it will rain again. I will hold my hands open, in case you fall from the sky once again.

These shards on the ground show me more about the bowl in its wholeness. I see the water is on the ground and understand that it used to be held so sturdy. It is a gift to know what this bowl held by seeing what it has so absently spilled.

How quickly this lesson and this perspective of the gift leaves me alone with my less reverent edges jutting out and into your tender skin, your wholly unique and entirely real experience.

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I went on a walk with my mom and I asked her what to do, what to learn from this weekend. She said to let the part of me who only emerges in the arms of a lover be dead. 

My lover, my projection, the promise of a partnership by my society, our stories, our poetry. My mom said to let that part of me die, she has already taught me how to lose a part of myself and to have compassion for my grief in losing him. She has asked me to do it again.

Makes me think of the little things to consider how fragile this moment is.

Crash (tick)

Crack (tock)

Kapow (tick)

We do not fit, we did not change so that we could fit, and so we have called in time and space to hold us at a safe distance. That we may walk and be in the same realm together. I am grateful for this chance to think. (tock)

To be alone without seeking a partner. To accept alonehood and accept Love on their terms as they make their visit, make sure they have the key, and always leave my door unlocked. To accept you are me, and to allow myself to be in the same bliss being alone as with another? Why would I put myself out there if I'm just as well off sitting on my couch? What would move me if not fear?

I do not realize yet that love itself will move me, if only I allow it to.

I get off my couch and seek out togetherness and so enter into relationships overwhelmingly hopeful. I continue to forget that people will always surprise me, that I could never really count on things staying the way they began.

Oh, to earn your love is to give my body's internalized beliefs permission to accept your love! Even in a sea of unconditional love, I need to prove that I've earned my rations. Congratulations! Great work! You have earned my love! 

Then I am met with a tone different than I expected. "Love has always been here, it is already there"

I consider the prodigal son. The one son who was "good" and stayed home and felt like he had earned his father's favor, while his other brother squandered the entire inheritance and came back home covered in mud, only to be received with a party. God's love, agape, unconditional love is unearned. It is the same as

So I abandon myself again and again to work harder to earn more love, and I feel like you must be bothered by my inattentiveness to the vast expansive beauty of Love Abundant. 

"How could you not believe you're already loved? It's so real, it's so expansive."

Like I should have already known about the Abundance of Unconditional Love.

I think of how I am ashamed to be so slow to simply arriving in this Present Moment, so you must be so smug as to have beat me! (I speak now of what I presume your experience to be, how presumptuous!) Smugness I will see through my wobbly, self-imposed shame lens. Shame that I should have finished the race at the same time as you, realized Love was here all along. That what I've been looking for was never gone. What a shame to have looked so hard for my keys which were already in my hand! Shame at making you wait because I hadn't practiced enough to know I'm already enough. Is it True? What is it in me that cinches around the perceived smugness? It is not your smugness, no, you are not being smug. I am Proud.

I invite my Pride to sit at the table, pour some tea.

Pride, my enemy, my soul, my dear darling self who takes offense, why do you take offense here? What are you asking for here? To be heard? To be known? Why are you so insulted by honest care and sincere expression of Another who is already also enough as they are? One who is here to teach you that you are Already Loved, you need not have her or own her in order to prove that to yourself?

"No!" Cries out my Pride, "Love is in limited supply! Love must be hard-fought and earned in the eyes of my peers or my peers who work harder and have made themselves stronger will take the love from me for their own."

I turn back toward myself, I consider a quiet, mute absence of passion. Passion lives in the world of Partnership, this is the way to know I am loved, to show others I am Chosen. I reach and ache to wear my badge which says I have been Chosen, to feel the excitement of romantic Love! To show myself and others that I am Worthy.

I grow reserved in this lonely melancholy alonehood, a bachelor's walk. Already having died lonely. I appreciate all my visitors coming and going, regardless of how much it tears me apart, because even at its worst: Life is a dreadfully beautiful thing.

All of these feelings are valid. Period. 

But, Beloved. 

Am I really not passionate about this relationship with myself, or am I afraid of finally being good enough? Am I truly afraid of being dismissed and disregarded in my seeming complacency of alonehood? And, I think the answer to these inquiries is: yes. And, so what if I don't have a pretty lady with with dozens of adorable dresses and all of the sweetest stories of how we met? So what, if people aren't jealous of me with such a woman on my arm? Why do I need that validation? Why do I feel so bad about having a stereotypical attractive partner? Why does that make me feel so worthless? Why am I allowing people to make me feel bad about my choices and about who I already am? Why do I value the opinions of people who look down on others? Who can say? Only Time.

 

Amazing!

Beloved, I cannot tell you how sick I am of not having the courage to be enough just as I am. I'll put it on my desk so I don't forget. I'll write it down in all my notebooks, and I'll spend my life searching for a way to break away from my fear of living a Whole Life as my Whole Self. 

 

And in some future little infinity, Beloved, I am always figuring it out, crying while I type my grand revelation and my vision blurs.

 

I want to be seen by you, Beloved, as I am. I am enchanted by the belief I am capable of willing myself to be who you are looking for. And the vision of this enchantment fades. I am only Myself, always-and-forever-having-been, Will-Always-Be Enough. And even as you are on your way, you are simply on your way to wherever this Love would have you.

 

I will always, have always, will always be Worthy of being Sought After by Ever-Seeking Love.

And so the moment is gone, and we move on to other things. I feel like it is meaningful, in this moment, to acknowledge that there are so many first and last things that we don't want to notice or document. This intimate moment shows my soft underbelly. My human self and my higher self in one snapshot, in one moment.  

I take out my phone and gaze into the lens somberly, relaxing my face into the shape of my heart to document this changing season of my life.

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I am crying out for you to see me, to see how I love you even as parts of me struggle to accept you, parts of me which make you feel unaccepted. I cry for you to see how I am broken and my edges are sharp and I am changing and growing and cannot change even in my longing to change because I am Already Good Enough, I am Always Changing, I am Change Incarnate. 

I say your name, I hold it behind my eyes, I chant it and invoke all who I was around you, I know I am still here. I know in a timeless way, we lived a full life together and died in each other's arms. I know unconditional love says I am always worthy of love, as are you. Neither of us can betray the Trust of Eternity. Everything cycles back around on that timescale, all has happened, all is known, each heartbreak a mirror of Wild Love, Unconditional.

You're gone like she's gone because in the sense that we are One, neither of you were ever really here, it's just me, it still is Me, and I, You, Us, Them. Unified and split onto all these other living things around me, all of us freely moving and bound together by Love.

You told me I am you are me are we! You call yourself as Them. We talked of God, Spirit, the Divine as a Them and They.

I indulge in you by listening to our songs. I read your letters. I watch our photos snicker. I remember you holding me, tying my shoes, I remember flashes of all we had. These little sparkles push my awareness toward you, my longing to dance and play games again.

Oh, to consider a life without a lover to tie my shoes! To have on my arm at shows! It ought to be a measure of my character to walk outside, court, and sweep an impressive looking woman off her feet! If my arm is empty, surely it is a measure of me, myself, an undeserving lark.

I only try to realize the truth: There is no alone, there is no together, there is only a unified One, perfectly together, perfectly alone, different colors from the same prism of Interconnectedness.

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The bowl is broken beyond repair, it is shattered in a way which cannot be fixed, it is hot out of the kiln, it is on our shelf, and it is falling. I think forgetting pain can be just as horrible as remembering it. It feels like betrayal. Time is a strange thing. I believe that there are realities, little infinities. In some way, somewhere, I will always be here, in this moment. This bowl on the floor, bowl in the kiln, bowl full of water, safe in these hands. I don't want to forget about these young lovers. Not ever. 

I want to remember them and sit with them with love and understand for the rest of my days - their first sigh of relief into each others arms in a meadow; a couple angels holding them in their final embrace outside the airport.

I want to sit with you too, Beloved. I want to sip on our tea, and spend a lifetime in this singing bowl, praying on and on, taking it all in. Reveling in the intimate songs and water of us. Feeling our Most Holy Energy pour out of us, harmonize, flow into each other, and then come back into us. 

 

So rings the bell again, singing its song:

 

"We are all worthy of love before we even accept it ourselves." 

 

Bless this Truth. Bless the treacherous road that continues to walk me home to myself. Bless my grateful heart for each new day's opportunity to love without ceasing, to love without expectation, and to love without regret. Oh may loving with eyes unclouded bring me to my knees, and help me to see love in its purest sense. 

 

I read a Walt Whitman poem which struck a chord and his rebounded through my head every time somebody tells me I have once again loved too hard, too quickly, and too hopefully:

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,

But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

I have never wasted time loving someone, and as I accept that I already love myself, I realize my love never ends.

 

Consciousness. What a gift it all is, and what a heavy burden it can be, all at the same time. I have appreciation for every moment, even the uncountable unsmelled roses which cry out to me to be seen, noticed, listened to. I do believe that some part of me is Always savoring this precious vessel in its transit through samsara.

I have felt such a warmth in my chest and little jolts and sparks all over my limbs. I felt the vitality of human connections radiating all around me like electric currents. What a joy it is to love and be loved by the universe. What a day to be a human being, and to be patient and gentle with one another, creating space for vulnerability.

Always Changing and Already Good Enough,

Riley