Cool New Haunt

I've known this woman for several years, and worked with her mom for more years. Most of what I know of her has come from her mom. This young woman has finished many things earlier than most of us: teenage rebellion; rebellion recovery; high school; college; library school. It didn't take her long after she got her MLS (Masters in Library Science) to get a job as a librarian at a University here in Portland. She is one smart cookie. Her mom used to joke she would be our Library Director one day. Now I'm thinking she's going to be an international mover-and-shaker.

Recently she moved to Dubai, yes that Dubai that most of us here know nothing about except that a company in Dubai would have run ports in the United States and George Bush would have let them. She works at the Dubai Women's College as a librarian. Right now they are understaffed and she is likely doing the work of three people. Her blog promises to be an interesting mix of anecdotes and photos of her life as an expatriate in Dubai. Until now, her posts have been sparse, but she promises she'll be posting more regularly now that she has the internet at home.

Learn about such things as the alcoholic card, sandstorms, how Dubai girls view her, and Dubai shoppings centers. I introduce you to SalazMeyer.
(photo from her blog, by her, I presume.)

This Space of Love, Part 3

If you wish to start with Part 1, go here.

Any experienced polyamorist will tell any newbie that for it to work, polyamory takes honesty and commitment. I have also said it takes a commitment to polyamory itself, to love itself. I may have said that in my zine The Great Activity, if not here.

[side note: contact me if you'd like me to send you a copy! I'll send it to you for free, but you can also buy it here, and read it in the queer archive here.]

For me, this commitment evolved into a recognition that this is a spiritual path. For me, commitment to a spiritual path necessitates a questing mind, or as we say in Zen, Don't Know Mind. I look within and ask "How can this work? What does this look like? What does this feel like?" It changes, my understanding grows, and I become more convinced the key to a happy life, to a good life, comes down to how we cultivate all our relationships, and whether we bring love to all our relationships. It takes on a form, an internal landscape that melds with my past understandings of this internal landscape, until I realize this is the material that glues it all together, that brings shape to that world, this space of love.

Rachel came across this concept, the space of love, from the UV Family, a polyamorous tribe that goes back many years. They too write of this as a process of discovery:

When we listened without judgment and shared without editing, we found that we were consistently "in love with each other." But it wasn't love as we had known it - love as a reaction to another person. It was love that came from simply removing all the resistance to each other. As we gained our sea legs on this ocean of love that we created nightly in our heart sharing ritual, we gradually began to carry it over into everyday life - we could be "in love" while cooking, gardening, walking by the ocean, with someone in a foul mood or by ourselves, because the door to love was within us. Love wasn't an emotion (though wonderful emotions went along with it) and it wasn't a response; it was more like a choice. Love was a space. It couldn't be given or received, only entered.

Not long ago, I said to someone, "In that moment, a door to love opened in my heart for you." I'm keeping that door opened. It's hard to tell if that person walked through or not. A lesson I've had to learn several times, you can't get someone to walk through that door...that has to be their choice. I've also learned it's possible to keep that door open whether the recipient is in your life or not. It is a choice to close your heart, and it is a choice to wish someone well. This inner space, it becomes a touchstone, with more doors open to more specific people, it becomes the modus operandi with more people, with many people. My space of love touches the space of love of strangers. They are oblivious to me, but I see them, I see the miracle that is their life.

There is no avoiding hierarchy in relationships. Strangers on the bus occupy my thoughts little beyond those moments we ride together. If I don't touch base at least weekly with my homies, I miss them. Steve and I have been together longer than Steve and Krissy. Steve and I live together, Krissy has her own place. I resist saying though, that I am Steve's primary, and Krissy his secondary. I already have the relationship with more power. Cultivating love for them as well as for me and us, I want to minimize the impact of those differences. I don't wish to contain and solidify our V into labels that reinforce heirarchy, because who knows what the future may bring? It's possible that creative possibilities will be shut out if we make it one thing and no other. Indeed, I think the UV family would eschew the V term, they say:

What was askew in our old notion about love was that we had thought of it as though it were a vector, which in math is something that has direction and magnitude (and in biology is a disease carrier!). Since a vector is like an arrow, we dubbed this the "Cupid" model of love.

Later:

What if another guy comes along and shoots her an arrow? Whose love will she return? After all, there's a limited supply of love arrows . . . and on and on the game goes. Fortunately, we made the discovery that love, rather than being a vector, was a space - a limitless space - that any of us could enter by letting go of our protective games. Each one of us had our own door to the room of love, one uniquely shaped in the image and likeness of our naked selves. We had to leave our masks and armor and baggage outside the room of love and could only retrieve them by leaving love. Judgment, taking offense, blame and guilt
are a few of the components of that baggage - they exist only outside the room of love.

Limitless space....hmmm...sounds a little like emptiness.

I've said it before, one of the most profound characteristics of these to paths of mine, polyamory and Buddhism, is the liberation they bring. When I chose to step down those paths, I don't think I realized what radical choices they could be. Rachel invokes cognitive behavior therapy, saying, "When I remember that it's where I want to be (this choice, or space, of love), and "go there," then problems don't loom so large, and resentful or angry feelings towards H., or my teenager, or my mom, often dissipate."

We are not alone in our perception of the world-altering nature of this choice of love. On Alternet, Courtney E Martin talks about love as a radical act:

It is the moment we critically and consciously choose how to shape our love that we move towards freedom. It is a critical response to our commercialized culture of romance, a rejection of that which feels outdated, a vision of a more inclusive, more authentic, more liberating relationship. In fact, the moment we choose to shape our love is the first, most critical step in shaping the whole God damn world.

Taming the Hydra

Steve asked me this morning why I used the word "gloomy" since I don't seem to be gloomy. The thing is, when I'm with others, or with him, I am happy. It's when I'm alone that I descend into couch-potato lethargy, when it becomes paradoxically difficult to move out of the house and be among others. I told him that's part of why I said it, I wanted to bring it out of hiding and dispel it, keep it from being my secret alone. The other day I was cleaning out and organizing a closet (alone) and inexplicably felt sad. I sat down to meditate, to let come what would come, but nothing arose. Just sad. Nothing apparently triggered it. While sitting there, my homie called and I confessed to her to my sadness and my inability to find the trigger. I simply talked to her about various things, and afterward I realized I felt cheerful again. I am held and made whole by others. Saying these things, I realized I need to break that pattern of sinking deeper into the couch, so I sit in the neighborhood diner where there's not too many people, but I'm not alone. I'm better able to look at the bad news that depresses me.

Rachel over at Terrible Wonderful World eloquently expresses a similar mixture of grief and dismay, though more eloquently. "How do I begin to express the cold fury, the wrenching grief I feel? Day after day after day, we hear about more people being blown to bits in places far away--far away, but where I have family. Yes, I have family over there. We all have family over there. (Brothers and sisters...in the human family.)" Alone on a walk, she ponders the state of things. She says, "Where is my optimism this morning? My faith in human wisdom? My hope for the future? Must be here somewhere...[searching pockets]...though I can't seem to find 'em at the moment. A laugh or two will help... Another thing that helps: remembering last night. The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but some refuge can be found in the arms of my lover. H., you are a dear, sweet man." This helped me clarify my own confusing inconsistency, it is through being with others, loving others, that I find peace and happiness. Here in the cafe and bar, I am happier to be sharing breathing space with my neighbors, even if I don't know them.

And that leads me into my thoughts on interconnection, and how that could be our salvation in this world bent on a hellish distopian post-oil future. I don't have all my thoughts pulled together, certainly it's not complete, but maybe by putting it out there I and others can give it shape. I visited my other homie and his family last night and gave voice to a piece of that thought. We need to build our communities, our connections, and create our future for ourselves. We need to create our own sustainable neighborhoods, our towns. I mentioned this also to my visitors from Albany the other day. They said they need to bring me into their circle...that they fantasize about building a town that is self-sustaining. I seem to recall reading about a town in California that is doing this very thing. Could it be Davis? I said, "We need to ignore what our government is doing." By that I meant that we not participate in the consumerist imperialist policy of the plutocracy that controls our government and the mainstream media, as best we can. My friend's wife aptly realized it was not a thought that would work well in the Heartland, but we all realized we do have a chance here in Portland and Oregon. We already are building the infrastructures that we will need, not only community groups but the city itself.

I have learned from working with the loose peace network here that it isn't a figurehead, it isn't a single iconic figure that makes things happen, but a bunch of folks working together doing their little pieces of the whole. It takes enough people willing to step to the edge of their comfort zone, and it becomes easier as we forge ties, learn how to deal with the inevitable conflict. It is harder, and lonely, to view the march towards Armageddon alone. While the powers that be march closer to that goal (it sure feels like that, with rumbles of attacking Iran) those of us left behind can continue with this task of building a sustainable future. Of course we can't completely ignore them, we must continue to voice our differences, but we must also quietly go about our business the way we envision it.

Peaked oil, global warming, and perpetual war are heady ingredients for difficult times ahead. Visions of Soylent Green rattle around in my head, with updated science and the anti-science religious movement. We are not helpless though, we can effect a more hopeful transformation. It takes individual changes toward sustainability, and it takes towns and cities that plan development for walking, biking, and local agriculture. It takes caring relationships, people who nurture ties whether business or friendships, while not going back to the 'good ol' boys' days.

So just how does one survive the hydra? Heracles could chop off the heads, but he needed help from another to cauterize the wound and keep new heads from growing. In Buddhism we have the image of a sword that cuts through delusion. Our own karmic hydras can definitely be as vicious and grow new heads, and their blood as poisonous. We can't survive alone, and we must face this monster. In the end, Hercules couldn't kill it completely. He buried the final head alive.

(image from wikipedia)