Go Ahead, Push Your Luck

Dar Williams has a beautiful song called After All, which is about passing through debilitating depression, choosing to live, unraveling the demons of one's family past and letting life choose us with openness and gratitude. It's the kind of song that reminds you that some singer songwriters are karmically charged with carrying the weight of the world until they grieve from it all in their work. They carry that feeling-life for the rest of us who tend to want things clean and organized, and they give us a chance to reconnect with heart, with the mess of life, with how we bleed hot blood in the midst of a sometimes cold and calculating world. 

A friend of mine (from whom I also stole the above photograph) describes the process of getting through life year after year as a "shit show peppered with heartbreak," and this seems apt somehow. Not in a bad way. I think this is a good thing. I shy away from the people who are always on top of everything, who have it all figured out, who are all about clean, straight lines. And let me tell you, they shy away from me too. First, they tend to judge me and/or offer advice. Then off they go. Which is usually a relief. 

As much as I was hurt or even temporarily pretty much destroyed by A's impetuous love for another man and her decision to end a partnerhship that I felt could have rekindled, I admire her courage, her fierce commitment to love. I admired it when I benefited from it and I admire it now. 

From Mary Oliver's most recent collection of poems, Felicity:

NOT ANYONE WHO SAYS

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
  careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

My recent brief and magnesium white light intense flashing fall into someone who briefly turned her flattering admiration and brilliant heart my way, but who is unavailable and in love with her existing life in all of the best and most beautiful ways, is a perfect example of what I want to be willing to do. It's a fierce acknowledgement of and respect for my deepest intuitions, my gut level yeasaying to this life, no matter the yes-buts. It's at least partly along the lines of something I heard when I was maybe 10 years old that I have taken to heart ever since-- It's better to regret something you've done than something you haven't done. 

This is of course assuming there will be regret either way, which I guess my Irish/German soul finds an acceptable axiom. I'd like to say that I am one of those existential geniuses who has everything arranged so as to not have regrets, but I'd be lying out the ass. The same friend who described the shit show peppered with heartbreak once also described her situation as "trying to make the choice I'll regret least in the future," and, while this made me laugh, it's also maybe one of the best ways we can be ready for the care and protection of something like divine love. For me, that choice is usually to fall rather than to back away from the cliff. To take the leap. To stay up with it. And to learn how to let go with gratitude when whatever love it is eventually, inevitably departs. Whether the departure is after many years or two weeks.  

From that Dar Williams song: 

The sun rose with so many colors it nearly broke my heart

It worked me over like a work of art

And I was part of all that

So go ahead, push your luck

Say what it is you gotta say to me

We will push on into that mystery

And it'll push right back

And there are worse things than that

Because for every price, and every penance I can think of,

It's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all.