Pondering Relationships


It’s been a while since I’ve engaged writing here specifically as a practice.  The most recent posts have felt report-y.  So here I am.  I don’t know what I have to say, but I can trust this welling-up feeling.  Is it hope?  Hope that something good will come out of me?  Something helpful or insightful?  Yep, that’s definitely in here.  

Relationships.  That’s where a lot of the juice has been for me lately.  Just writing that, it’s like blowing on a bed of coals glowing in my diaphragm.  Relationships are hard, and I love them.  I think I take refuge in an image of myself as successful in my relationships.  When I get really discouraged and hopeless about my research, I find myself trying to latch on to and shore up my relationships.  “I refuse to be a workaholic, because relationships are what will really make me happy and proud,” I say to myself.  I’ve been doing a contemplation recently on impermanence and the reality of death.  Every relationship I have now will dissolve.  Even my relationship with Maitri.  Either she’ll die first or I’ll die first.  I can’t depend on relationships to bring any kind of lasting happiness or satisfaction.  Which I also know because the most meaningful relationships I’ve had always include some element of pain.  Also, I conveniently exclude my work relationships from this pride calculus.  

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m bumping up against a glass wall, trying to communicate to those close to me how meaningful Sacred World Assembly was.  Trying too hard is disappointing.  Unshakeable Lake came to visit.  And I’ve been bumping up against a similar glass wall.  Except this feels more like an enclosure.  I can’t even share how I feel with her.  Why is that?  The quality of my heart is unconfirmable.  I’m in it now.  It is now.  Any feedback I receive is necessarily about then.  So there’s just this being.  I’ve tried to convey this depth of being to others by playing up my excitement.  It doesn’t work.  I only find tenderhearted aloneness made more poignant in the presence of another, unplay-up-able.  

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