How to reject unconditional love one step at a time
My aunt told me she is happy my uncle has retired because he is around more. I told her she is the only woman who would say such a thing. Then she gave me an example of the other day when she was in the utility room and saw the complete outline of a snake from where one had just shed its skin. She called him, he was there.
I was speaking to a very close person to me and I said I feel as if I am shedding my skin right now and the transaction has me at polar extremes – very sad and very joyful. And that I keep vacillating between the two with such rapidity that it is mind blowing. My own acid without the acid trip complete with hallucinations.
This morning, I took the dogs on a good long walk – I needed one and they did too. The guy working on my house had just cornered me to tell me the patch we are trying to effect on the dry rotted wood from the addition, which gets no shelter from the storm, and because it is wood that is low-grade cypress, from up north no less, and wasn’t back primed, needs to be replaced, not patched. Of course it does, I said to him, my eyes glistening.
We (the dogs and I) walked through the park listening to Be Love Now, an audio book by Ram Dass but narrated by an actor – sort of perplexing in and of itself. The message, it is the opening of your heart that will bring you to the next step, because once you open it, you will accept love. Dass also speaks about gurus, whether you can find them or whether you will ever even know them and I thought about that while I walked. I’ve always believed my heart to be open, but it’s not.
My mother poured unconditional love into me my entire life and I rejected her at many passes around the sun. My partner pours unconditional love into me and I sometimes receive her in anger for the gall of her to love a wretch like me. I’m grown very adept at rejecting love and so I tried to think of what Ram Dass was telling me his guru had told him, reject evil you see, hear or touch. I thought about rewriting some of the last scripts of people who loved me – how they walked with me, alongside me on my journey, and how each of them was crucial to my getting to the next step because each loved me. The nerve of them.
Love comes to me in waves, I feel profound love and then I feel isolated on an island of indifference at times. To stay in a constant state of receptivity is challenging, but not impossible. But this morning as I walked and rewrote the script of all the people who are on my shit list, I began to see them anew, enlarged, but instead of this having a calming effect, it made me breath heavier, and walk more deliberately, and I thought my head would explode.
Neurosis runs deep in the Jew’s blood. Enlightenment, in the words of Van Morrison, “don’t know what it is.”