MindSpinner

Much of what I’ve come to understand about my hopes for a relationship I learned years ago from Milton’s reasoned arguments in “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.” (Ironic, no?) Milton, in arguing the case for divorce (he wanted one), managed to define about as well as anyone can what an ideal relationship might be. He argued that we human beings have a “rational burning,” an innate desire, for fellowship and intimacy with a “fit conversing soul,” a “ready and reviving associate” with whom we can carry on a lifelong “meet and happy conversation.” This has always seemed right to me since, the only course worth steering. Love is the whole - the challenges met together, the small thoughts and observations of the day, a resonance of minds, nearness of bodies, touch of hands, a flow of regard and affection, desire and interest between two people that serve to weave happiness like brightly colored threads through our lives. While I’ve always been a capably independent soul and regularly recharge by spending time on my own and by undertaking creative projects, I know that one of the holiest goods in life lies in two people creating what Leonard Cohen calls a “tent of shelter” together, one airy with space for two individuals to be themselves, open for going out into the world and coming in once more, sturdy shelter against storms, as intimate and warm and safe as the closest embrace.

Anyone who has lost greatly will affirm that to love greatly is to risk the very fabric of one’s being to be rent to shreds by grief or worn threadbare by years of indifference. Poet Donald Hall writes of love several years after the loss of his wife, Jane Kenyon:

When I fall in love
I jockey my horse
into the flaming barn.

I hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
I tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
I scan the obituaries
looking for my name.

As Hall suggests, there is assuredly risk in attempting real intimacy. The question is not finally whether we will lose it all - we will. In this sense, the barn was always burning. There is nothing we have on this earth that we will not lose at last or far too soon. The real question is which of life’s gifts we will risk receiving with open hands for the time that they may be ours.

As his own death neared, Raymond Carver wrote a poem entitled “Late Fragment”:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

The only peace and the greatest joy we are given to know comes simply from opening our arms wide, as Dickinson would say, “to gather paradise.” There is flow in this, giving as well as a receiving, whether we embrace a love, or a task, or the cultivation of a garden. We are part of the gift, part of the giving.

In much of the South, barns do not burn and are not torn down, even when they fall from use. They stand through winter sun and summer rain. Certain artists come to draw or paint or photograph them. Their beams sag like bowed backs. Their hollow halls leak beams of dusty light, and wind whips through spaces between gray boards. Mice and feral cats and likely snakes make homes in corners. Children disinclined to disbelieve in danger play there in unnumbered imaginary worlds. The builders have gone, and the owner, the horses and cows with them, but nobody comes to tear empty barns down. They stand, more alive than monuments, until they sag finally into the earth or fall in a storm.

I cannot help but think that lives lived well, lives in which love finds genuine expression, are not burning barns at all, but halls of air and light that stand as long as memory or the words that express them - and catch the light at dawn and at sunset.

Here in middle life, I am less afraid than I have ever been, and more at peace - more able to spread my arms wide. For one thing, I have learned that though I may be burned, I am not consumed.

My Valentine’s Day tribute is to one who sees likewise, hopes likewise, loves likewise, one with whom I’d like to share conversation - and days and years - until I can speak and listen no more.

A recent meme exhorts bloggers to “say it so” if “there is someone on your blogroll who makes your world a better place just because that person exists” and whom you would not have met were it not for the Internet. I’m saying so. That story will wait for the day it can best be told.

Truth is, I have several abiding friendships that have come to be because the Internet is a serendipitous place, and I am grateful for them all. I’ve become a part, either vocally or quietly, of conversations that matter to me. Today seems the right sort of day to say “Thank you.” So Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody. (That’s it. This will have to do. Can’t post real chocolates.)