vote for rain

Masha recently posted:

Excited by is the not the same thing as excited about.

About is relational, implies a being withbeing forgoing foranswering to.

Which means you do something about your excitement for someone. You make it responsible. You make it a gift. You get past yourself.

That’s what makes love about Two. Becoming two. Becoming because you (learn to) make it that.

Love is not safe and easy. Love is not passive. Love is about action, about giving, about reaching out. 

In All About Love, bell hooks uses this definition of love from M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth." 

When I am in love and reach out to someone, it is as much with the hope that it will benefit them as that it will benefit me. Masha wrote recently

Avital Ronell always says that a relation is not real unless you’re rattled, unraveled. Why should meeting each other be light, forgettable? Why should it pass for easy?

Why shouldn’t you not know what hit you?

Why should you remain the same after love?

hooks quotes John Welwood describing that kind of love that changes you.

A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other’s individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on a deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension–seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence.

soul connection is what I’m looking for. Emphasizing that this kind of love is not safe or easy, and that it does not leave us unchanged, hooks goes on to say:

Often, a deeper bonding with another person, a soul connection, happens whether we will it to be so or not. Indeed, sometimes we are drawn toward someone without knowing why, even when we do not desire contact. Several couples I talked with who have found true love enjoyed telling the story of how one of them did not find the other appealing at all at first meeting even though they felt mysteriously joined to that individual. In all cases where individuals felt that they had known true love, everyone testified that the bonding was not easy or simple. To many folks this seems confusing precisely because our fantasy of true love is that it will be just that–simple and easy.

Usually we imagine that true love will be intensely pleasurable and romantic, full of love and light. In truth, true love is all about work.

When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide…Most of the time, we think that love means just accepting the other person as they are. Who among us has not learned the hard way that we cannot change someone, mold them and make them into the ideal beloved we might want them to be. Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be "unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change. 

Yes. Love should change us. As Masha posted recently:

“Be something for me 

this time. Change me, 

wind. Change me, rain.” 

-Alice Notley

Notley via Dana Ward in The Crisis of Infinite Worlds. I love when people change for the better. There is nothing better.

I couldn’t agree more. Me, I voted for the rain.