Love and Delight

I just finished Ocean Vuong's novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous,  and was reminded by the incredibly tender, honest, immediate, passionate, shy, yet bold love story therein of a very simple place in life. It's when we meet and get to know someone in whom we, quite simply, delight. 

Love, romantic and otherwise, has felt clouded and heavy for me for a good while now, and one of the great gifts of Vuong's novel was the reminder that, at its best, this wild, fierce, gentle and direct encounter with a single other human being is really just about sheer unquestioning appreciation, the natural desire to be in their presence, the way being in their presence has that feeling of home, of welcome, of natural and easy time, spent in simple delight. Vuong captures these plain, unfettered experiences very well, and it was a wonderful thing to be reminded of. 

It may well be that circumstances complicate these simple feelings, sometimes quickly. Like Blake's Sick Rose, these immediate joys can be destroyed, and the arc of many of my partnerships has been similar: what starts out as flat out joy and appreciation, delighting in the everything-ness of someone, their way of talking, thinking, laughing, their smell, their taste, their humor, their way of being in the world in all ways, has often, eventually, become fraught, problematic, troublesome or heavy, one way or the other. This also reminds me of Seamus Heaney's Blackberry Picking. 

Blackberry-Picking

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

***

I have no idea what it is that creeps in between me and the sheer delight I initially feel for particular women (I'd say, a total of four, in the sense of utterly clear, unfettered, simple, unmitigated delight in who they were). But it has been a regular pattern. I suspect it is "presumption born of boredom," as one of my tarot card reading guidebooks warns about the Four of Cups, that sulking, sullen lad turning down one of four perfectly fine cups with which he has been presented. 

I do know that, through a series of deeply altering forgiveness and equanimity meditations last spring and early summer, I discovered, as I wrote about here, that I had never gotten truly free from a few of my earliest attachments, which were absolutely rooted in sheer delight. I also felt, somewhat surprisingly and with a sense of deep resistance, as I read Vuong's novel, the realization that I had not yet properly grieved an ex who has died, and with whom I thought I had reached settlement. An astrologer told me once that my Capricorn Moon means I never forget anything, ever, and that it takes me forever to process things, emotionally. The entire past 31 months in my little trip through Hades seems to bear this out. Well, truly, the entire past 42 years or so bear it out. 

The most important thing in the midst of CoDA recovery work and inventory around my relationships, is for me to be reminded of this simple, joyful, admiring, appreciative, delighted spark that has drawn me to people, friends or otherwise, but especially women with whom I pursued a romance. Even if subsequent reality can sometimes become quite heavy, dark, troubled, problematic and often, impossible, it all starts with that simple, innocent, unmediated and pure impulse of delight. 

And this realization is quite timely, as I recall some of the happiest experiences of my life from two years ago this exact week. I don't need to resist, interrogate, diminish, dismiss or otherwise be in some sort of oppositional mode in regard to the plain and simple fact that they were, in fact, some of the happiest experiences of my life. It's okay that they were. It's true that they were. And that's enough to honor. Another reminder and gift from Vuong's novel: we must honor the truth of our own experience. It is crucial to our sense of wholeness to hold the truth of it close, and not talk ourselves out of it.