Love

I went on a run tonight and as often happens when I’m out on the street in the dark I started thinking. This time I started thinking about what attracts me to a girl. I started thinking about the difference between the surface person, the one we show to each other and the inner person, the one we keep to ourselves because it is scary to let people see it, but also perhaps because we actually have not figured out the right way to express it. And to have someone misunderstand that, misinterpret that inner being, would be so much worse than if they had never been exposed to it at all.

Criticism is the most profound mask. It is a shield that lets us hold strongly to our outer selves while not letting anyone see that inner bit of us. It is probably the most superficial piece of ourselves, the things we don’t like, which makes it a great starting point. It is much easier to have a conversation with someone and find common ground around the things we dislike rather than the things we like. I can make a long list of the things I hate, and go on at length about them, but I can feel myself seize up at the prospect of explaining the things I love. The things I love are personal, and I’d hate for you to misunderstand them.

I don’t mean the things that we like though, the things we want. These are not us. I could tell you I like chocolate cake, that I’m craving ice cream. I can tell you how I would kill for a Ferrari or that I just have to move out of my parents house. Those things aren’t loves, they are needs that of course are not needed at all. If you asked a drug addict what he loved, and he said “I love heroine” you would probably just think he’d missed the point, he doesn’t love it, he needs it.

What I love? I love cooking, I love art, I love myth and stories, and religion. These things are things that drive me. They don’t pull me towards them, they push me forward, drive me towards higher and better being. This is what love is. You see when you love something it is something that makes you a better person.

But I don’t talk about love between people yet. Love between people seems complicated, so often we fall in love with the mask, with the superficial aspects of a person. And most of the time it becomes love of the former category, the love of needing, need to be with that person, do anything to be with that person, like addicts to a fix. Love of a mask is only a love of appearance. To love something like dance there is no choice, dance is not a thing, there is no body to hold on to, no cemented figure, dance is an expression, an experience, that is why it is easy to find the purest love in it. Same with art, same with anything of that caliber. Of course some people would spend a billion dollars on a painting by some famous artist effectively turning pure love of art into the need to have of pornography. What is art but that which afflicts us with awe, and what is porn but that which drives us to desire.

But when a person loves something tangible it can become very hard to see which is which, a person may love a car, may love it truly and thoroughly and spend hours a day washing it, working on the engine, driving it to feel it move under his hands, but a man who simple wants it will buy it, and spend hours making it pretty spend hours driving it around town. If the actions are the same but the motivation is different then it is not love, if he drives it around so that others may see it, if he cleans it because he wants it to be as perfect as the day he got it forever, if his motivation is to have, rather than to love the machine. Love will take the man who has the car to greater heights. And someday when he no longer has the car he will hurt, but his love of that car with have truly moved his life onward, it will have been about something. The man who simply wanted to have it will lose the car someday and be angry, angry at the money he lost, at the cost of a new car, but his life will not have changed, he will be the same person after the car that he was in the beginning.

When a person attacks something, says that’s too ugly, that’s too stupid, that’s too annoying, then you must see that these things are just nothing, they are not the real person, they are just a shield that they have constructed, but when some tells you about what they love, describes with every word they can muster the feeling they get when they are acting, dancing, painting, running, working or anything, and then their words trail off because they find there is no words, there never could be any words to express what it feels like to love something like they love, that is true love.

When a person is being drawn towards something and they devote their path towards getting there, getting money, getting the girl, getting a big house, getting what ever it is, and then that thing disappears, they are devastated, they are lost, their lives fall apart. But when a person has true love, love of a woman, love of art, love of life, love that dose not pull them put pushes them forward, towards the unknowns, towards faith and something they can’t know or explain yet. then even when that things disappears, they do not fall back, yes there is pain, with love there is always pain, but they will not collapse into nothing, they will not lose their life, they will see that they are strong for the love they were lucky enough to experience.

If a person tells you they don’t like something that you like a lot, and you get angry at them see it for what it really is, shields clashing against each other. Masks calling each other ugly. It is not really you, and it is not really them. This is why love exists beyond those things. This is why love seems so mysterious. When a person loves, wholly and truly, then you see them truly for the first time if you are able to look.

I once heard someone say “love is not a two person thing, it takes a lot of work to come to a place where you are capable of love, and if someone loves you back that is wonderful, but the other person is not what makes you love, it’s yourself, it’s your own soul that is loving. To accomplish that even for a moment, regardless of what anyone else responds with, is a miracle. If you love someone it says far more about you than it can say about them” Because when we love we are true, we can’t describe it, we can’t explain it, but when you love you are put in a place where you are utterly you, the deepest, strongest you there can be.

home sick for a foreign place

I miss China, I miss it so much. I miss the people, the culture. I miss walking down a street surrounded by sky scrapers and cars, and know that where I walk now is where people were walking over 5,000 years ago. I miss wandering through a city and discovering the core from which it sprang, which is usually a small community of houses, so small, with paths far to narrow for cars, made of brick and mud constructed so long ago, yet still standing, and still being lived in today.

I miss being gawked at while I walk down the street simply because I'm white. I miss going into small villages where strangers ask to take their picture with you. I missing being loved. I love, the pain, the fear the adventure. But also, the people. People who are joyful. still young as far as the modern world is concerned, but on the edge of greatness. I miss it all. and I've missed it all the more these days

I began reading "The Good Earth" a wonderful novel written in the 30's set in rural china. Pearl S. Buck, the author, painted such a beautiful and true to life picture of Chinese culture, and it reminded me so much better than anything I've seen in a while of exactly what it is to be in china, that I suddenly had a flood of memories, and feelings, and I felt so strongly that I was away from my home.

When I finished the book, the next day I went and finaly watched the video of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies. and boy, I was crying so hard. not only because I missed it, which was probably part of it. but also out of pride, out of the strength of it all. Because on the face of every Chinese person I saw a sense of joy. They were so proud to be just one of the 50,000 people in the event, they were so happy to volunteer, to give everything to make their country great.

I got choked up from time to time watching the amazing artistic part of it all, but really started to cry when china entered the stadium, and people who had been cheering for so long, and been sitting in their chairs for hours, who were all tiered, and hot, suddenly rose up, with all the pride of a nation that has worked so hard for so long, for over 50 years, to get to this one moment. That's when the tears really started to roll.

But finally, when the little boy was introduced. The boy who had been in his school in sichuan when the building collapsed. He was one of only 10, out of 30 students who lived. he scraped and dug his way out of the wreckage and when he was finally free, he didn't run off. this little 9 year old boy stayed, and started digging out his classmates. and when they asked him "why did you go back to help the others" he said "in my school, I am a hall monitor, so I had to go back, it was my duty" god I started just sobbing.

I lived in Sichuan for over 5 months, and of all the places I traveled to while I was in china, Sichuan was the only one I made my home. When the earthquake hit just a few months after I'd come back to the US, I felt so helpless. I heard from people I had considered my friends and family that were now homeless, who couldn't find family members, who continued to feel aftershockes for months after the event, and each time they thought they were about to die. I watched on tv as I saw places I had walked, places I had loved that were nothing but rubble. I wanted so much to go to sichuan, if I had had money I would have gotten the first flight to china, and worked as hard as I possibly could to save people, to rebuild buildings. help people find homes. And I've never gotten over that, I guess they call it survivors guilt. When the people you love are dieing, and you are sitting at home, watching it on the news, sitting on your comfortable couch, and no one around you could possibly understand because none of them know what it's like to see their home destroyed.

When the boy was introduced, I began to cry so hard , so passionately, for this little boy who had done everything that I couldn't. I was so proud of him, I was so moved. and still, if I just think about it, I well up again.

as all these things have come together I have decided it's time for me to go back to china. As soon as I can get a job, which is taking forever, I will save all the money I make this year, and next year I will go back. probably for a year, but I may consider staying longer than that when the time comes to make that choice.