Have you reached your edge?
Love is not fucking around.
This is not the kind of answer that makes you feel good while you are in the feel-good seminar and then leaves you hanging when you are back home in front of your TV.
This is the kind of answer that makes you feel good while it is ripping you apart.
Love will not make the pain go away, it will not even make it recede for an instant.
The lover feels every pain more sharply.
But she does not recoil. She does not ever feel powerless, meaningless, insignificant. When you are love, you are willing to live at your edge.
Don’t mistake me here. This is not about extreme sports. This is not about martyrdom. This is not about codependent relationships. This is not about the kind of burn out you felt in your last job. That shit is all too familiar. We’re talking about the kind of edge which never feels familiar, by the time it does, you’ve already moved past it.
It’s not some kind of “push push push” thing. We don’t have time for your self-hatred. The world is fucking suffering and you are masturbating your mind away hating yourself? It feels terrible but you still do it. Why? Because it’s comfortable. As long as you’re hating yourself, then at least you are real.
The edge that love calls you to may feel like a cliff. You may feel that if you take anymore into your heart, it will burst. That if you allow yourself to care for one. more. living. being. you will collapse from the pain of it. But you don’t collapse, and you don’t fall off the cliff. This is the kind of edge that when you reach it, it gets a little farther away. Your heart gets bigger the more it is used.
If you rush, you can trip yourself and fall to your death. Love has no place for your ambition. Never exclude yourself from your own heart. If you can embrace yourself while embracing all beings, you can walk to that cliff and stand there, taking in the joy, the pain, the longing, the exultation, the misery, and you can be wide enough, balanced enough to encompass it.
If you are worried about safety, love cannot find you.
Safety is the most dangerous choice you can ever make
Of course you must eat good foods and avoid getting hit by busses. Of course you must use a turn signal and check your blind-spot. Perhaps even steer clear of dark alleys. Don’t even swim until 30 minutes after your meal for goodness sake. Of course you will take these precautions - you ARE LOVE.
But if you are trying to ultimately save yourself, you will always fail. Life is coming to get you. The longer you run, the more painful it is. Your own pain, and the pain of all living beings is waiting for you, biding its time. Why not face the music now?
Spoiler alert, I know how it ends. The bogeyman of the world’s pain catches up to you eventually and you suffer. Hey, don’t blame me, you knew it was coming, you knew it from the marrow of your bones. But there’s an alternate ending - the one that the censors didn’t approve - Plot twist: Child turns to face monster and somehow starts to GROW. Don’t worry, it doesn’t get boring, because the monster grows too.
Pan out and the scene shows child and monster continuing to outdo each other until the fade out and the credits. The implication here is that this will go on and on, at least until the sequel.
The coolest part is that eventually the child and the monster get tired of fighting. They decide to become sparring partners instead. Because you see, if the child ever overcame the monster, her purpose would be over. And similarly if the monster got to eat the child. HOW BORING. No one’s going to watch this show.
You’re waiting for the day that you’ll be big enough to handle what life throws at you. You are praying for boredom, but you are growth. You will always sabotage this prayer, it can never succeed. God doesn’t let you invoke your own suffering for long, it is not in her nature.
The lover’s mission is not to “be open” but to Open. Not to “have grown”, but to Grow. This is dynamic, you are a verb trying to be a noun and it just isn’t working. Growth, Dynamism, Openness, these are not couch-potato comfortable, they are rich and alive, and they are your true home. Who puts a potato on the couch? What good can it do there? Put it in the dirt, or in the oven, or in your mouth, let it live its purpose.
If you hold back from living at the edge of openness, part of your heart will remain untouched. This part of you mourns for lack of love, it needs your presence, it needs you to step forth and embrace, embrace deeper, and then when you think you have embraced all you can, embrace more. In embracing your heart, you embrace your own being. You become an elite athlete, always testing the limits, and some days it feels like hell. But you push on, because you know that on some days you transcend your limits. Some days you forget what you knew was impossible and you soar in the fucking sky. You are on the ultimate runner’s high.
You take the pendulum swing between soaring and being sore and you call that business home. This treacherous edge is the safest place you can be in life - you’ve escaped the only danger that can truly hurt you - the possibility that you’ll close your heart.
When you live this way, at your edge, you can die with peace. If there’s any single thing that should not be left in you, spend it now, you don’t know how long you’ve got. What are you waiting for? Strive to end this life completely spent - like a lover who has spent the night with a powerful sexual foe lies exhausted in bliss in the morning. Ride your edge like this.
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