To Build a Home

So often we try to tame life into boxes of clarity by coaxing it into a cage of linearity and despairing when it roars ragingly to the skies and shakes at the bars of our desire to control it. With steel hands we try to mould life, but the trickster, she escapes through closed fists like the gentle water of a stream flows through great conglomerate rock and defeats its strength with its mere fluidity. In all our attempts to regulate our souls, they spill out in our breaths, our words, our cries and our sighs. Our bodies, which we believe we control, are mere stages for our essences to dance upon in a free-fall ballet of smoke perceived by the heart. Strength is not control but learning to enjoy the very loss of it. Strength is allowing oneself to love against control, against what one may think is rigidly right. If we cannot change ourselves or mould ourselves or challenge ourselves then we have lost to life; we have lost because life is about freedom and motion. Fall in love and fall and fall harder and smile all the while for it is the most precious feeling in the world to fall. Fall into it and fall out of it, for your bruises and your scratches will remind you that you felt, and they will be nursed by those whom love you still. It is life, to fall in and out of love, as we fall in and out of consciousness and so learn it will be ok, we are in an ever-evolving process of learning and changing and feeling. Learn that love is the acceptance of change and so love that is eternal is also one that is flexible and forgiving. What love may be at one point in time is never the same as which it will be at another, as for it to sustain itself for an eternity, love must mutate and grow to compete with Master Time and all his devices of disruption, chaos and progression. Eternal love is a house that starts with three rooms and no furniture but becomes a space that can be divided into multiple rooms and floors. It can be furnished in one style and then another as to suit those two that inhabit it, and its walls will multiply to capture the morphing memories of that love but its floors will stay sturdy and strong as to ground all that change by providing a foundation of consistency, a basic knowledge of a kindness that is unconditional. Love is kindness, never forget that. If those two people within that house disagree about style at one point in time, then that house, that love, must be large enough and generous enough as to have walls for their separate paintings and it must have enough rooms to allow for both sets of furniture to be placed without blockage so that both styles, both people within that house can operate and enjoy that shared space they have both built together. Love without a capacity to accommodate is no longer a mouldable space, a glorious house of reciprocity and balance, but instead, it is a roofless, broken pile of ruins that shall not withhold against the slightest drop of rain. If one finds oneself in a relationship (erotic or platonic) in which the slightest drop of rain breaks the very floors and foundations that house is built on then one knows this is not love, for with the right space and right strength, a love will be an infinite house that holds fast against storms, and rain and thunder.

So here it follows that we, as individuals, must change unashamedly. Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the world is when love restricts, wherein one builds that house in order to contain another by building the walls of the house too close together so that there is no space in which that other person may dance with arms flailing in an ecstasy of self-expression. Suppression is not love. Love is the balance between space and careful proximity; it is the knowledge that one will always be there waiting in the house with loving arms but that other houses may be visited too, for we love not just one person in life, but many. If a person attempts to contain, shame or control the wills and desires and expressions of another person then this is not love. It seems obvious but so often in life I have seen one person blast the blossoming tree of another’s selfhood with a force of lightning that stems solely from selfishness and an inability to share. The process of love should be as the process of two vines growing up a great Amazonian tree. These two must entangle and intertwine so that they may climb one another in an ever-ascending spiral towards maximal height. In this sense love is entwinement that allows for individuality, and this is hard to achieve in practice but like all great things, love is an art and one that takes mastery, mistake and patience. If one outgrows the love one is in then this is nothing to feel ashamed of, for we cannot love into a vacuum that fails to amplify or reflect our evolution as beings of progression. Hence sometimes to fall out of love is to fall into a much more brilliant ocean of progression that you must let carry you in its splendorous ebbs and flows. That is all life really is. Ebbs and flows, so let yourself be just that; an ebb and flow, a force and energy of one’s own.