How come everybody wanna keep it like the kaiser?

Here’s an unusual perspective you don’t hear much about. It is possible to love someone you’ve never met, never even spoken a word to. It’s possible to love them completely and totally unreservedly, with no strings and no expectations. In fact, i daresay its quite common. I’ve loved my son since well before I met him. He never had to earn such affection. It was given freely and without hesitation without merit. With no guarantee for my own return I tied my heart to his and have never counted the (not inconsiderable) cost of doing so.

And yet it seems as a people we don’t apply such notions beyond the parent/child relationship. For love between peers we look for some sort of quid pro quo. There are probably many reasons for this and some of them may even be valid and true. To be sure you need to be secure in your own situation first. You must have faith your own needs will be met to be open. Indeed, the drunken idiocy of fresh romantic love might even be a biological adaptation which catalyzes pair-bonding. In our stupid twitterpated state we never ask the tough questions of quid pro quo which we worry so much about the rest of our lives. Buzzed and horny we just take a leap of faith and hope it all works out. Then, when the buzz wears off, we start keeping score again and start getting divorced.

But ponder for a moment how much it diminishes us. This planet is full of so many lonely Eleanor Rigby’s, so many broken hearted souls freezing in the cold indifference of the world. Fear and loneliness make us so terribly small. But imagine the bliss of opening our hearts to others without need of return. Imagine the limitless, meritless love of new-minted parenthood writ large on the canvas of life. Imagine being not small, but limitless and inexhaustible. Imagine being big heart. Or better yet, don’t imagine, manifest. You are big heart. We all are. We just tend to forget.

I did. I’d even found it again for a while, and amazingly forgot it anew. And then, out of nowhere, amid a most disorienting and chaotic emotional tempest, a crisis which threatened to plunge me deep into dark places forgotten for 20 years, it was there. Open. Like someone switched a light on in me. Big heart incarnate, flooding the world with life. Still blissing on it as I write. I’ve missed this.

Welcome home.
Namaste