Echo

Why do we connect with one person and not another? Why are the things that are most important, the truth behind the great mysteries, bigger than our minds and hearts can handle, but too small for our fingers to grasp?

On a day like this, I can look out into the sky and feel you echoing back. I know to me, you are my other, but to the world, you are me. The interpretation is that I’m searching for me, but who can tell if one person’s projection is unique to themselves and not real if seeing through people to connect to you, I manage to pick up things that are real and tangible and healing to them.

I want to know you because I’ve had so many people try to tell me what I am that I just want someone who sees me and understands me and can appreciate the value of what I give. This is home. I want you to see me and be honest so I can see myself, so I can get my bearings, maximize myself, feel the expansion of myself but know what belongs to me. Nothing matters to me but the truth.

Yet somewhere in this search, somewhere in the tension of chasing a polarity that may or may not exist, something powerful comes out. If anyone takes the time to look, they can see it. There is evidence of something greater everywhere. Our thoughts and dreams, our hopes and wishes, our anxieties and fears, we all make choices both in what we take in and what we put out that affects the world around us. Each point of consciousness is a universe unto himself and within the outer world, its reflection.

Sometimes people want me to love them in such a specific way that they manage to turn what’s unconditional into what’s conditional. People can always sense that I have something, and while I share quite a bit, there’s a part that I’m saving, because that belongs to myself and my life partner. Personally, I feel that is my right and choice. Sometimes people want me to consistently see them the way I look at them even if their actions aren’t harmonious with it, because what I can see is a powerful, positive, beautiful image of their selves which includes their flawed, fallible humanness, and if I’m seeing it and reflecting it, it validates that there is great beauty and value within them. But they want me to see them this way all the time, giving me great responsibility to uphold an ideal of another person, even though I know it’s most important that a person comes to accept their own beauty and potential and their place in reality, and comes to terms that part of being beautiful is being human. And sometimes, I see a person’s path to their highest potential, a potential where they are free from self undoing, which can be reached with faith and courage but requires conscious work. While many will help a person strive towards the positive, no one can ultimately give you your freedom but yourself. It takes fearlessness, compassion, forgiveness and love. And sometimes, these are the hardest things for a person to turn inwards.

Some of the things people want from me can not be sustained because obviously, I am human. Unconditional positive regard, positive and warm human bonds, these are not only sustainable in our reality, but these are our lifelines that nourish us and replenish us. But a vision of an ideal…this is a glimpse of a far off place that’s possible, but does not yet exist. To believe in this ideal is inspirational, but to get so desperately lost in this ideal that you forget to embark on your journey towards it, is tragic. Even the idea of ideal love is illusory, as beautiful and grand and inspirational as it is, because the need for love is the hunger that pushes you to seek, but it is the truth of each person’s acceptance of themselves and their world, the truth of open-hearted kindness and reciprocity, the truth that one must value oneself and must give thanks to oneself first before one can accept it from others, the truth of human warmth conveyed through companionship and mutual growth amidst life’s rhythms and cycles that creates attainable beauty, beauty that is in this world, not of this world. Love is my passion, my life’s work, my life’s blood, my favorite gift. But beyond that are connections. Separate universes can not intersect except in the shadow play of symbols. And aren’t we all in human form just condensed symbols representing entire universes? Our projections and perceptions the interpretations of our infinite beings?

I have a lot of unconditional love to give to people who believe they deserve it. I have a lot to give even to people who deep down believe they don’t, but it’s not sustainable until they can find a place where they believe they do and can accept it. I have a well that is always refilling because of the connections I’ve made and the love given to me by those around me. I tend to let spiritually wounded people in because they are the ones most in need of faith and love. I want people to be people, not shadows and ghosts made up of a series of reactions to their past and their wounds and their fear, their bitterness, their disappointments, their anger, but flesh and blood beings who are here and present and connected…seeing, feeling, experiencing, believing with their full, infinite selves. I love David, despite his rejection of parts of himself and his past, summoning more energy than I’d ever given to another to try to push him out of his corner, to be open and vulnerable to him so he could trust me. What I wanted most was for him to step out of his cage and embrace himself, for his own integration and empowerment as much as so I could see who he is. Every day he looked more and more like himself and every day his light shined brighter from a place so deep within him. And I saw, a beautiful man give me everything he could so the love could go full circle. But I couldn’t keep maintaining my belief because his pain would cause him to cut me so deep, draining my own life force quicker than I could replenish it and keep it clean. I loved him fiercely, like I believed I could melt his pain, that my fire could burn so brightly that he could never believe in darkness again. But at the end of the day, that pain was his, and to try to take it away was like trying to cut out a piece of his flesh that had become a part of what he knew of himself. He always felt like I was hurting him, attacking him, and he would have to defend himself. It was this way that I learned it was for me to support but not for me to struggle, that each person must still stand up on their own if they are going to reclaim themselves and find their own path towards peace, and no one can do this for you even if they have the best of intentions. I am committed to work within myself to be the change in the world I want to see, but I also want the world to uphold its bargain and be the change it wants to see in me. But sadly, sometimes I feel people have always let me down by putting their energy into attaching to me and wanting me to support them, or attacking me for what I’m not giving them or because my singlemindedness is threatening to them, rather than by completing and integrating themselves to make themselves stronger which would in effect, keep me happily in orbit with them. The thing is, I care more than people are always willing to appreciate. People don’t know that I think about people who have come into my life all the time and hope that they are finding their peace. I may not want to be close if I feel like it hinders more than helps, but I’m always believing and hoping. I do get sad sometimes. Sometimes I fear if maybe the beauty and hope i see inside people doesn’t mean anything if no one really believes. That makes me feel truly alone.

I don’t like to make promises that I can not keep. And one thing I want to be able to promise, is that how I see my partner next to me, his highest potential as a flawed, fallible human being like the rest of us, is more or less where he is. With this person, I will be able to promise that I will always be able to look at him the way I do, because as with how I see most people, it really doesn’t
matter that he’s human, capable of human folly, weakness, insecurities, vulnerabilities, emotions. This means he’s normal. It’s because despite that, he is doing his best to integrate himself and make the most of himself, to challenge life and the potentially crippling fear it generates and still find beauty, to still find the capacity to fearlessly love and to love completely and fiercely…who stands up and forgives, both others and himself, and who does not let the strength of his vision die. What matters is he is who he is because he also believes, and because he believes, he can see me and appreciate me. This is the only person I can make this promise to, because I know I will be able to. This person is the question to which I am the answer, and with whom, I am the question to which he is the answer. This is the person who will understand when I tell him everything and he tells me everything and together, we unravel the mysteries by uncovering the light.

I’ve always been someone who aims at what others find ridiculous or impossible but sometimes, I come back with it. I’ve been told this inspires others. The one thing that has always been missing is my other, and it is the only thing I have ever really care about. In low moments, I question myself and the reality of what I seek, but the only truth I can feel to be all-encompassing, is that giving up is not an alternative. I can keep occupied but I can not fully rest in life until I’ve found my equal, and if the idea of my other half is the carrot that some greater power is using to keep me doing what I do, then I really don’t have a choice but to continue because I want it. All I know about the other is that I’ll know him when he asks the right questions.