Choosing love is like kicking a snowball downhill. If you kick it like a football, flinging it through the air aiming at two upright goalposts, you’ll instead shower yourself in powder. You must gently, with the top of your foot, start the snowball rolling.
Choosing love means choosing. Saying yes means aligning to the commitment contained in those three small letters. You don’t start by falling in love, though. That’s not the actual beginning place.
Well, really it’s hard to say where love begins. Is it like the tango where the dance starts when the lovers' eyes meet? Or perhaps the dance starts when they circle each other. Perhaps it starts when they touch hands. Perhaps it starts when he cues her to take the first step. Perhaps it starts when she steps backward, inviting the penetration of him into her space.
It matters not – what I’m trying to say is that there’s a moment before the drop that feels not much at all like falling. Indeed it feels much more like all the accumulated moth dust of carry-on handbags that didn’t fit in the bin and unwanted items that still haven’t been carted off to the charity shop.
The moment before you fall is the moment of standing on the hill in the cold wishing it were just a little bit better weather. This isn’t quite how you’d imagined it— it never is. Life isn’t like that. Things don’t turn out as you thought and even when they do, that fact is so astonishing you can’t quite let the bigness of it in. Either way, you’ll be surprised and caught unawares. This simultaneous, disorienting sensation of less-than-I-asked-for, exactly-what-I-asked-for, plus bigger-than-what-I-asked-for denotes you’re at the top of this snowy hill.
Here we come at last to meet the fragile snowball at our feet.
We know on a deep level saying yes means something and that we don’t know what it means. This is the essence of commitment. We can’t ever fully know what we’re committing to. That’s the devil, the demon inside the machine of romantic attachment, the raw beating heart of aliveness that is the thing we’re all chasing when we think to ourselves… “I want to fall deeply in love one day.” It is the thing we at once most fear and most desire.
Such are the vagaries and wildness of desire.
Once we start the snowball down the hill it will keep rolling seemingly without our further prodding. This terrifies us. It threatens to outrun us, to mow someone over, to draw the bark of a neighbor’s dog, to melt on the dining room carpet and embarrass us. There’s no telling where the avalanche of the heart will end up and we goddammed well know it.
Still, we kick the snowball lovingly and get her rolling along, picking up size. We’ve said yes now, even though there’s a part of us that never, ever feels ready for anything as big as love.
As the ball goes, she gets a bit lumpy and comes to a stop rather sooner than we would’ve thought. Now the thing that seemed out of control for moving forward seems out of control for stopping. We’ve hit a dreaded relationship plateau.
Good.
Now’s time to run up ahead, catch up, and tend to those lumps. Fill the dents and smooth her out. Remove the moldy branch that’s sticking out the side. Personally, it’s very hard for me to believe that I’m going to be able to be loved deeply by someone. Part of me thinks it’s just never going to happen for me. That's my particular flavor of daddy issues. It's the moldy branch in my snowball.
The branch might be buried too deep inside the ball to take it out without breaking apart the whole thing so we just leave it where it is.
There’s another slope just ahead a short distance, and this time we can push together with our beloved. We’re in partnership. I have my ball and you have yours, and now we can help each other.
Now we go for round two and push our snowballs down the next hill. This time they get even bigger and roll even faster. We wonder if they will consume the neighbor’s chihuahua or other slow-moving creatures in their happy mayhem.
The sex starts to be scary good. The whirring of the animal-beast within speaks in undeniable words of authority. Any part of us that fears the beast sends up emergency fireworks and sounds the sirens. “This is NOT GOOD. Are you listening? It sure doesn’t look like you’re listening! Remember how bad this went last time? We cannot do that AGAIN. You promised us we wouldn’t do this again.”
The now-giant snowball rolls out into the dry gravel and the sun soon takes its toll. Before you know it the snow has melted down until only the rock inside of yours and the moldy branch inside of mine are left restless on the ground.
“See, we knew this would happen” demand the sirens.
So we wait and we rest and we wait and we look into each other's eyes and let the spaces between the words tell the truth. I pick up your rock, really more the remains of rubble than a smooth stone, and put it in my tiny pocket. You hold my moldy branch in your right hand and then in your left. Without a word we start walking, now hand in hand.
How long do I carry yours and you carry mine? Is that ok? Is that even safe? Isn't that co-dependent? Why does helping each other sometimes feel good and sometimes not good?
I can’t say what’s next. Your story will be yours. My story will be mine. His will be his. Theirs will be theirs. It's all gonna do what it's gonna do. The point isn't to know the answer to tomorrow's question.
I know not what’s over the other side of the ridge, but I’m grateful to be able to see this far. I always seem to have just enough of the map to not fall off the edge of Earth and when I/we do fall off that edge, I will invite you to draw a new map with me.
I look forward to that day.
From Oaxaca, big squeezes,
Cris and Team Dragon
P.S. It’s always a good day to draw a card.
P.P.S. My trusty bedraggled companion, David Leroy, and I made it 3600 miles in my converted Hondy Odyssey!! Welcome me home, please. We had a tejate to celebrate. It’s the combo of a dried flower of the tree that grows here, the ground seed of the mamey fruit (a lovechild of cooked sweet potato and avocado), cacao, and coconut fat floating on the top.