Differences

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with an appreciation of how unlike me you are.

In all probability, we have some number of things in common. Clearly, we're both fluent in English and both denizens of the Internet. You seem to have some curiosity about matters of religion and/or tolerance for unusual religious viewpoints, or I would have expected you to click away after reading the banner of this blog and the opening lines of the post. We're thoughtful, I believe, you and I. By this point in my musings, all the non-contemplative types have almost certainly gone elsewhere. And if this is not your first visit to my blog, then we probably share some common attitudes and wishes for what the world could be like.

But we're different, too, and if we were to converse our way through a few dozen topics, we would undoubtedly find many points of disagreement and perhaps even conflict.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

I recently encountered, for the first time in many years, a classmate of mine from high school. There was a time (possibly almost the entire time I knew her) when I thought this person was the most beautiful girl in the school -- maybe even in the world, at least for a moment or two. She was very sharp, a keen and clever mind with a rich, intelligent smile and the kind of happy laugh that made you feel very accomplished if you managed to evoke it. But we were on a different wavelength, this girl and I. We were both honors students, both writers, both middle-class suburban children at the outer edges of popular culture and some social norms. Both intellectuals. The same age. In most of the same classes. Yet she didn't understand my writing at all. She once told me something along the lines of, "You're a really good writer. I just wish you would write something serious."

Meanwhile, I dismissed her as a stuffy, narrow-visioned aesthete who looked down on entertainment and was only interested in rarefied, cerebral, self-indulgent explorations of form or technique and dreary, reality-centered themes on human existence.

As the years after high school passed and I widened the scope of my acquaintances, developed a greater appreciation for people whose interest diverged from mine, I often thought of this girl. What if, instead of shrugging her off as my diametric creative opposite, I had been willing to engage her on the basis of our kindred talents, had perhaps explored what it was that so interested her in higher literature, had attempted to make her understand the value I found in fantasy and satire? Might we both have been enlarged? Become fast friends? Dated?

Over time, I grew convinced that I should have connected with her, not just passed through the same halls and classes. That we should have been more to each other than we were. That perhaps our lives should have remained deeply interwoven through all the years since we last saw one another.

And then a few months ago, I ran across her online. She is a regular contributor to a website where she reviews films, and I read a number of her articles, and discovered ... we're still just as different as we were in high school. She likes movies, I like movies, but our responses to them are very far apart. Her reviews are dismissive of films I found entertaining, or, if she gives a thumbs-up to a movie I liked, she singles out for criticism things that I thought were the best parts of the show.

All of which is actually terrific.

It turns out I was wrong about the possibility of us connecting more strongly in high school. I simply wasn't prepared, at that point in my life, to engage someone with an interpretive framework so contrary to mine. Perhaps she was more mature and might have been willing to engage me, but clearly, neither of us would have changed the other's mind in any significant way. It would have required me to be a different person than I was at that time.

In contrast, today I could easily be friends with someone whose aesthetic sensibilities conflict with mine. I enjoy comparative discussions involving disparate viewpoints, so long as they are respectful and good-humored. I got a kick out of reading her reviews and remembering fondly this likable person who happened to disagree with me on some subjects I considered central to my identity.

That we were different then annoyed me. That we are different today cheers me, both because it reminds me that I was actually a pretty good judge of people as a teenager (though not necessarily as good a judge of myself), and also because I now value variety, which tells me how much I have grown.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the crossing of paths unlike our own, and for what it tells us about ourselves and about the world.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Scheherazade

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a story.

Embrace Love

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a suggestion: do not wish for love or yearn for love. Instead, look around you and welcome it.

For me, at least, there is no other way to believe in a world moving forward. If I wait for the good, I simply will not notice when it comes, because the wide profile of the bad will obscure it. Too long I have scraped by and turned inward, nursed a variety of alienations, resented the obvious need for acts of giving. At every turn, I have let ugliness get the better of me, let it turn me away from relationships, society, the world.

I cannot force extroversion upon myself, but I can and must acknowledge that I need others, and that needing them necessitates loving them, and giving of myself to them without expectation of a return. This giving will never be fully reciprocated by 100% of its beneficiaries, but love is about appreciation, not expectation, and if you do not give, as a natural response to appreciating someone, how can you really be said to appreciate them at all?

The only reasonable expectation of others is that they should be beautiful. And there is beauty in all of us if only we look.

Find it.

Appreciate it.

Love it.

And shrug your way through the rest.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the love that can spring from me, if I simply make the effort to allow it.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Keeping It Simple

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a simple thought:

Small things are sometimes enough.

Thank you, Goddess of Love, for that which is at once compact and enormous.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

What Is Love?

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a thought that has closed out my evening.

Love does not consist of finding that one person who completes you. Love is the greater understanding that you are larger than the thoughts and feelings rattling around inside your head, and that to find your larger self, you must connect to others.

In other words, love is not the process of filling a hole within yourself, but the act of embracing your incompletenes and accepting that it can never be solved, because only in your incompleteness are you able to bridge the divides that lie between yourself and your fellow human beings.

Only because you are not whole do you have any reason to touch them. Only because you are not whole are they a blessing for you to delight in. Only because you are not whole are others worthwhile.

Love is the recognition that your own emptiness enables all friendship, all mutuality, all romance, all loyalty, all empathy, all communication -- every bond that we as people may share.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the blank slate with which we may invite you to write your stories upon our hearts.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

A Thought

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a simple notion:

Love is possible only for those who believe in it.

Thank you, goddess of love, for belief.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Question Those Whose Livelihoods Are Built Upon Anger

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a note of caution.

We live in an age of media figures, and many of those figures have developed as their stock in trade a certain manufactured outrage. Their harangues are visible nightly on the television and audible at all hours on talk radio, and while I personally perceive them to be tilted heavily to one side of the political spectrum, there are certainly examples on both the left and the right.

It's no wonder that they deal in anger. It's a potent fare, and one that can be cultivated with relatively little expense or effort. And because it naturally disengages our ability to reason clearly, its inclusion in any messaging product makes the quality of that product much less critical. If I can succeed in making you angry about a topic, I can sway your opinion more easily than if you remain dispassionate. An unmoved listener requires more evidence to be convinced than an enflamed one does.

I bring this up not to dissuade you from one political position or another, but merely to point out that a state of anger, while potentially very motivating, ultimately undermines the impulse toward peace, the impulse toward love. The merchants of anger therefore cannot move our world in a more peaceful direction, and do not have the interests of a more loving universe in their hearts. They may actually be well intentioned, in a misled way. But they cannot inspire us to greatness -- only to rash action or impotent frustration.

The next time something on television or radio angers you, ask yourself whether you are angry at the information itself, or if the person delivering the information is purposefully phrasing it with the intention of making you angry. If the information is what rouses your ire, take that emotion and find a way to act constructively on it. On the other hand, if it is the messenger who is goading you to fury, consider whether he or she has your best interests at heart.

In any event, remember that anger is most suitable when it is a response to injustice, and that justice requires both reason and compassion. Then cool your thoughts and contemplate what can be done in a way that will better and brighten the world for those around you.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the ability to temper one's temper.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Make a Habit of Living

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with advice that I have long known yet somehow dropped of late from my routine.

The state of joy is only very rarely one that is delivered to us. More often by far, it is fought for, won, and earned through effort. When we long for joy, when we languish wearily awaiting a state of delight, we should not be surprised at its failure to appear.

There are times when the doing of things does not seem worthwhile. We all experience that feeling, the lassitude that says, "What is the point?" But the sensation of ennui, of purposelessness, is an illusion. It is a mask that creeps across the world because we have allowed ourselves to disconnect from that which fundamentally drives us.

The more we act, the more we work toward dreams, toward desires -- the more we do -- then in return, the more we are alive.

Weekly, daily, hourly, we should make effort.

We should undertake.

We should habituate ourselves to action.

Because when the doing of things is reflexive, the accomplishing of things is guaranteed -- even if not every accomplishment goes as expected.

Thank you, goddess of love, for good habits.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Where We Are

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with this:

There.

A point in space, surrounded by infinity.

That's important: surrounded by infinity.

Too easily, we think of what is missing, what we lack.

But infinity allows for no true void. Everything is there. Everyone.

She. He. You.

We long for that touch.

Where is it?

There.

In the sea of all that enfolds us.

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Thank you, goddess of love, for everything.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Birthdays

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with wishes of happiness and joy.

Although we should not need any special occasion to celebrate our love for those in our lives who are particularly special to us, it is nonetheless a gift that tradition tells us to commemorate birthdays. We get busy, we get neglectful, and we sometimes forget, in the course of days or weeks, to speak of and show our affection with the frequency we ought to. Birthdays give us a nice prod, which is something that we as human beings often need.

Today is my most exceptionally excellent friend Strumpet's birthday, and I hope that it is the absolute best that it can be, because she is a blessing upon my life.

Thank you, goddess of love, for friends and birthdays, and the chance to share with others the warmth that they both make us feel.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

A Brief Time in a Garden

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a scene.

I am on a bench in an enormous garden. A stream moves and speaks through the greenery behind me, speaks of the blue overhead, streaked with fragile white clouds. It speaks of beauty hurrying past me, from so far away to yet farther still. Its voice hangs there, constant and quick -- a small cousin to the mighty river a few miles distant, somehow louder in tone for all its lesser size. The air is cool. The only noise is the stream, although murmurs of birds and distant park-goers can also be heard.

Noisy, rushing, alive, vibrant -- how is a stream so peaceful when it is also all these things?

The answer must be that peace is not stillness. Peace is not quiet.

Peace is the calm that comes of doing what is your nature while the world moves on around you.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the subtly spoken words of a brook on its way to the sea.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Brightness and Air

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with an allegory.

Along a mountain pathway, I came to a place where the trail split. I had been climbing some time already, across rocky ground, sharp and ugly. Away in the distance, when I paused to look up, the sky and horizon showed me unreachable beauty. But close at hand, the terrain had only scrapes and exhaustion to give me.

At the split in the trail, I faced a choice. To one side the way became even steeper, but led up past boulders and jagged outcrops toward a sunlit summit, where I knew from the guidebook that green trees and a bubbling spring could be found, along with a quaint little hiker's refuge that had been built there long ago. The other path led down, straighter and easier -- into the mouth of a cave. The shadows inside had an unhealthy cast, as though even light found the air of the cave stale ... debilitating.

Who makes the choice to descend into darkness, to be shut off from any offer of comfort, just because the pull of gravity makes that direction less an investment in effort? Who picks cold, blanketing blackness over a strenuous push toward achievement, toward the splendor of all the world?

The proper choice seems so obvious, does it not?

Climb the mountain. It is gorgeous up there. You will be able to see so far.

Climb the mountain.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the path that should so plainly be taken.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Selfish or Selfless?

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a need to help.

It's some years now since I started this blog, and while I did so mainly in an attempt at self-administered therapy, I've also always had a hope that my thoughts here would make themselves useful to others as well. This may be selflessness or it may be egotism -- most likely a combination of both.

Whatever it is, the desire has gotten stronger of late. As I ask myself why, the answer I come up with is that I yearn to know that my thoughts are important to others.

This is different than knowing that I am important to others. I have friends and family to whom, clearly, I am indispensable. But I also have this interior world, which is constantly churning and only occasionally given voice to those around me.

And this place within that I think of as my self wishes to be useful -- wishes to matter.

I have something inside me that finds less expression than it wants, that receives less recognition than it hungers for.

Is this impulse in some way the exact opposite of what it wants to be? It desires to help, yet that desire seems to be quite self-centered, does it not?

Recognition.

Importance.

Do we really give only so that we may in turn receive these things?

Or do we give because it feels good -- and because all too many things in this world do the reverse?

I don't have a ready answer.

If we do the best that we can, if we strive to be the best that we can, and if what we get in return does not make us sufficiently happy -- then how are we to retain any sense of worth?

And without that sense of worth, how do we go on?

Hope can sustain us, but what can sustain hope?

Perhaps a better question to ask, instead of these bleak and unanswerable ones, is, "Do others feel as I do?"

For if the answer is "yes" then the course becomes clear: find those others, and find a way to make them feel worthwhile.

Sooner or later, someone will do the same for you.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the ability to think things through.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

The Sigh of a Breeze Through Green Boughs, and

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with two sensations that began and ended my day.

A number of less pleasant things happened in between, but I had the good luck of at least two moments of beauty, each far more worthy of being focused upon than the annoyances and aggravations that separated them.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the veil of clouds that parts just long enough to reveal our crescent moon, backlit with Earthshine and hanging just under one achingly bright planet.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

My goal of the moment

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a kernel of purpose: to try to make things better.

This is what I do, and all I can do.

Try to make things better.

Try to encourage people to be nicer.

Try to have a sense of humor.

Look for smiles.

Defuse anger.

Plead the case of hope.

Remember the deepness and the breadth of love.

This is what I do, and all I can do.

Thank you, goddess of love, for meaning.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Request

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a request for hope.

If you can spare a moment to pray to whatever deity you hold dear, I'd appreciate your asking, "Please let there be good news for Devotee's friend who has cancer."

Longtime readers of this blog will recognize that I have no expectations that prayers will or won't be answered.

But I'm assuming they can't hurt.

Thank you, goddess of love, for friends -- however long we have them.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Valentine's Day 55

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a poem for you on Valentine's Day.

May pure desire

stride through your door

tall and dark

or with flame-red hair

looking through eyes

that see only you

speaking with lips

that tell true

May you know

within a single glance

that Fate has spoke

and not mere chance

that Cupid's bow has sweetly sung

and your heart,

however old,

is young

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Thank you, goddess of love, for this day celebrating all your work.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

A bit of a lecture. Listen in if you care to.

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a brief and simple message.

If you wish to be cared for, you must first care.

If you wish to be loved, you must first love yourself, and then be willing to extend that love to others.

If you wish for a hero to ride in and save you, you must first be willing to become a hero yourself.

You and I -- we are the best this world has to offer. If we wait to be saved, instead of acting ourselves, then we deserve whatever disappointments that we get.

Thank you, goddess of love, for reflections -- they show us where the work must begin.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Rinse and Repeat

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a sense being on a too-familiar path.

I conceived of this religion from a point of desperation, a borderland where hope for humanity and the expectation of happiness seemed in danger of falling behind me, while ahead lay only desolation.

Have you been to this place? Have you seen too clearly the warts and wickedness that people choose to show the world, while joy and decency appear only as far-off heat shimmers in a desert? Having reached and been disappointed by too many mirages, do you now doubt that the desert itself has any end at all?

Well, if you are reading this, then you have proof that things are not so bad as you fear.

I am no mirage. I am real. I care about people -- I care about how the world turns out. If you feel the same way, then we have cause for jubilation. This life is not all carelessness and hurtfulness and callous disregard for others.

You are there, and I am here, and between us, I assure you there are a thousand like us, a legion caught by our own ability to imagine a world much better than this one.

What we must do, you and I, is to stop seeing that imagination as a curse that holds us in a place ever-inferior to our mind’s green landscapes, and see it instead as a gift and a tool.

For without those who can imagine a better world, how can the world ever improve itself?

Let us step off the path that leads into the desert -- because the desert, too, is just a figment of our imaginations.

Stand with me, clear-eyed, in the real world, and remember that all our imaginings have been spurred by true things, by things we have actually seen. Having seen good, we can create better. We must simply have the will to try.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the ability to recognize, to remember -- to rededicate.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

Philosophy from a 1914 Pulp 55

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a not-so-literary reference to a book that I have not actually read. Nonetheless, it is a source of wonder to me.

Pellucidar:

The interior world

Vivid ever with its unsetting sun

a realm of eternal day

untameable

wild with life of every imagined sort

and with those too

that have yet to be dreamed

Vastness

gloried and mysterious

shrouded in stone

A sky inside - impossibilities made real

Fear not

Doubt not

Find your way ...

to Pellucidar

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Thank you, goddess of love, for Edgar Rice Burroughs, a man who walked a fascinating path between the real and the fantastic -- perhaps because he understood that what is real is also fantastic.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee