Inspired by lines from The Weight of Love; Negative Capability Press 2020
It is heavy and light and full and spare. It is immovable and fluid. It takes your breath away and fills your lungs, at once. You can feel the press of its hand against your back moving you forward, yet see the hand signing you to halt, palm out, fingers straight. It is flirtatious and cruel. It is compelling like a cudgel and enfolding like the comforting arms surrounding a baby. It is Monday or Tuesday or Anyday. It is Valentine’s February or blazing August or the frigidity of January without a hope of spring. In a moment it can tell you its life story or recede from sight a mystery, which you will never solve. There is no clear description for the weight of love though poets, writers, and high school horneys continue to try. In the end they all lose, the vision, the tangible nature, the weight is diffuse.
You want to say I know love. I have experienced love. I have known its joys and blows and pains and pleasures. It has companioned me through all my 15 or 30 or 50 or 70 years. But it has not. It may have come in and out your door, but it befriends no one daily. We are often caught in the disorder of our lives and forget to recognize its face. It will leave for a time, while you play with your watch and calendar; it cares nothing for such temporal constructs. It is a feeling. A feeling with texture and girth and requires attention, going elsewhere or into hibernation if not attended to.
You want to shout I know love; I have a wife or lover or mother or friend or family or child and they fill my life with love. But that is illusion. They present us with the opportunity for love. The chance to share or partake or protect or project but when we do not take the moment, love is gone. It has moved on to one who appreciates it, shares it, feels it in the instant you do not; since you are too busy to hear its music.
You cry love is not so fickle and I agree. It is not leaving you for someone else and someone else again and again. It appears where it is wanted or beckoned and when you do not beckon the opportunity of love evaporates. You are not feeling the moment with all its weight and wonder. You are elsewhere occupied. It may come back if you have not spent so long away the return is overgrown with brambles. Given focus it may manifest all its sparkle and splendor, sorrow or pain, meeting your need with purpose.
After all, you are not required to believe. Love will be regardless of your beliefs. What is required is you be open to its presence. That you shed your ego, which so often declares its right to love and be loved, and discover the only way to know the weight of love, to maintain an open path to love is to realize it is you and all your walls and expectations and demands you must kill to feel the true weight of love.