How to Make Love Last

I told her I loved her.
Your love is all about you, she replied;
it has nothing to do with me.
You love who you imagine me to be,
because no one can know who someone else really is.
I told her I would work to discover who she really was,
as much as possible, and love that person.
You can’t choose who you love, she replied;
your body chooses which bodies it loves,
and you’re just along for the ride.
Emotionally, any woman you perceive to be attractive,
energetic, fit, intelligent, creative,
thoughtful, independent, present — you’re going to love her.
I told her I would try to be more discerning,
more conscious of who I love, and love her more deliberately.
There are a thousand kinds of love, she replied;
you have them all conflated, mixed together
in one messy, undistinguished chemical blob.
Soon, the chemicals will stop flowing,
and all that will be left is your body wanting my body,
and then that will end and there will be nothing, only loss.
I told her I would study the works of Tom Robbins,
who said the only important question
is how to make love last.
Love is making you crazy, she replied;
you have important work to do, and these addictive feelings
are distracting you from it, making you foolish
and fearless and reckless and dangerous.
I told her it was the absence of love that makes me crazy;
When I’m not in love I’m disconnected, buried in my head,
and I don’t care enough about anything.
Then get a dog, she replied;
there are many kinds of love more grounded
and less exhausting than what you claim to feel for me.
I told her I loved her abundantly and unconditionally
and that I could also love other people, creatures,
places, music, ideas, activities. I had room for it all.
Then you don’t need me, she replied;
you are free.
Yes, I know, I told her. But I still love you.
Then there is no hope for you, she replied;
so go ahead and love me.
So I stopped telling her I loved her,
and showed her how I loved her instead.
One day she was talking with me, wandering along the beach,
telling me what she cared about,
what she was afraid of, what she loved doing,
what she craved and longed for and hoped for and mourned.
And I realized that, all along,
as she was telling me how she couldn’t love me,
she was showing me how much she did.

How to Save the World - Three Ways of Being

As part of my research for my latest creative work, I reread my friend Indigo Ocean’s book Being Bliss. It’s a remarkably ambitious work that’s recently been reprinted, and Indigo is fearless in telling her own harrowing story to illustrate that the journey she recommends for us is possible for anyone. Here’s a brief synopsis of the book:

• The thesis of the book is that you can achieve self-realization through a combination of setting intention (being clear about your goals, day by day) and living in accordance with that intention (through a regular practice of paying attention and being alert to what is really happening, self-empowerment and discernment in what you choose to do and not do, and letting go, being open to and leaving space for the realization of that intention).
• Much of the book is focused on ways to free ourselves the self-limiting thoughts that keep us fearful, disconnected, and caught up in our egos and the stories in our heads. She stresses that the objective is not “self-improvement” but the realization of one’s true nature. She quotes Osho as saying “When you think about freedom, you think as if you will be there and free. You will not be there; there will be freedom. Freedom means freedom from the self, not freedom of the self.”
• The book includes several exercises (each to be repeated for three days) designed to give even the skeptic a sense of the possibility of achieving this freedom, and it introduces a broad spectrum of different meditation techniques that you can try until you find one that works best for you.
• She describes her own ‘Ascension’ yoga practice. It starts with aerobic activity of your own choosing, and then a choice of your own asanas (yoga poses) with shavasana (lying on your back in a relaxed, deep breathing position) before the first and in between each few poses. The shavasana breaks should be contemplative, appreciative and as full of positive energy as you can manage. The final poses should be balancing poses, and the concluding shavasana should be one of total relaxation and gratefulness, and for the setting of positive intentions as you end the practice.
• She also summarizes a form of ecstatic dance consistent with this practice that might work better for those who struggle with meditation, and the form might be of interest to DJs who put together ecstatic dance sets. She recommends that if you dance alone that you do so free of disturbances and as much as possible with eyes closed. The music set she recommends is the following sequence of song types (~5 minutes each): (1) simple rhythm (connection to 1st chakra), (2) funky rhythm (2nd chakra), (3) hard driving (3rd chakra), (4) a beloved melody (4th chakra), (5) moving/inspiring (6th chakra). [My first playlist using this sequence worked quite well; it was (1) Pumped Up Kicks (Foster the People), (2) Young Black Pearl (Shydeeh), (3) Doly (Quatre Etoiles), (4) Om Namo Bhagavate (Deva Premal -- the non-chanted version), (5) Shine (Joni Mitchell), followed by a suite of Empire of the Sun, T-Vice and Cinematic Orchestra songs.]
• The book concludes with some practices for grounding when you’re trying to cope with negative emotions, and some counsel on relationships, specifically about how helping each other heal is a sacred responsibility for us all in this broken modern culture.

In writing the book, Indigo tacitly keeps coming back at each subject from three different perspectives, to appeal to readers with fundamentally different worldviews about how to make ourselves, and the world, more ‘blissful’. I would call them the Rational, the Spiritual, and the Natural ‘ways of being’. The table at the top of this post describes what I think are the key elements of these worldviews. I think it could be very useful to think about, for those of us who often find ourselves working at cross-purposes with people who share our political and philosophical sensibilities but see the world through these different lenses. Many of us may straddle or vacillate between them, and many books have been written trying to ‘reconcile’ rational and spiritual worldviews, but perhaps it’s more important that we just appreciate the differences and how and why they have arisen, and accept them.
Indigo takes great pains in her book to use the ‘language’ of all three worldviews, so she doesn’t alienate readers regardless of where they are coming from. We would be wise to do likewise, I think.