Sometimes Love Doesn't Look Like Itself

Yield

Several years ago I found myself in a rhythm of writing - short pieces. Pieces that became a bridge, keeping my attention in the present, keeping me connected to a wider truth as I moved through acutely painful emotional and mental patterns. I wrote these pieces at the end of a relationship that I had hoped would be a lifelong partnership.

I find myself revisiting these poems and the person who wrote them now as I navigate another arc of shedding into expansion. Another, deeper layer of yielding.

I see now that I was grieving not just the relationship but the pain of my earliest losses and disappointments, my own feelings of failure and illusions of permanence and control.

I was learning to care for myself in places that I had not been cared for and to let go of patterns that kept me in separateness, longing and pain. I was learning to let life show me that change is not something to be feared and letting it meet me in that emotional longing and mental conflict with all its miraculous complexity and diversity.

These poems helped me to come to an embodied sense of the love that I am and the love that is everything and includes everything, including unbearable pain. They helped me to accept and allow something private and sharp to open and soften into wholeness.

I thought I was done with this little pile of poems and I find that it is not done with me! As I move through grief again now I see that another way I cling on to isolation and alienation is to finish work and not share it. Part of me believes if I don’t share it I can keep it and I can keep it safe and keep myself safe. Putting this work out into the world is its own form of loss - I cannot keep my private idea of the work. I cannot protect it. I can only give it over to life as some small offering and let it go and let it flow and land and nourish/compost as life decides. This act of completing the work feels so tender. Just like when you finally accept that you cannot keep another person or force them to see you, or to see as you do, just as you cannot even keep yourself.

The gift is that I can finally love without gripping or controlling, I can relax and expose my own unloved places and my tenderness. I can open to receive a wider love, a love that is unconditional and available in all directions, all the time if I am open to it. I can offer without being identified with the offer.

I’ve named the book ‘Yield’ - over the course of my life yielding to grief has become a portal out of my possessive, personal delusions and into the wider oceans of existence. A portal into a joy and clarity that is not subject to things in the external world looking a certain way.

For my former self at a time of intense emotional pain, observing life as it arose, inside and out ended up being a way of letting go and receiving support from life. A method of staying present and allowing that observation to open me to beauty and love that did not require anything of me or anyone. It became a practice. One that required intense attention, alertness and deep receptivity. I’ll read you a poem from the book here and I will come back to the title theme in future posts.

Thank you so much for being here. You can listen to me read this aloud (at the very top) and me read a poem from Yield below!