Thursday, October 06, 2005Starshine: Postcard from Santa BarbaraFriday night, two weeks ago:Driving north on the 101, on that magical stretch of road where the cliffs rise up huge and proud on your right and the beaches and ocean stretch out with infinite promise on your left. The road slips through it like a ribbon of grace. I see a shooting star cascading down in the sky ahead of me. It takes my breath away. It has been years since I've seen a shooting star, maybe since my dad died. At that time, every time I saw one I'd think it was him winking at me from the great beyond. I think that again, and immediately am covered with waves of tingling chills. I am here en route to the Santa Barbara Book and Author's Festival to showcase the book. I am here after finishing a huge endeavor. Some of the time, most of it, I have felt alone, on the frontier. Suddenly I feel the embrace of my father reaching out with pride from beyond the grave. As the chills cascade up and down my legs and back, I decide to capture the thought, hold it out and examine it a bit. This seems to be what I've been doing recently: taking apart this thing called "love" in my life, bolt by bolt, examining each little spring and armature, cleaning it up, meditating on how the engine works . . . and doesn't work. I find myself thinking that the word "love" itself is problematic. We use it to describe everything from how we feel about popcorn and movies, to acts of sexual congress, to how we feel about our latest haircut (hopefully), to the thing that is what the world needs now. I think: I can't understand this thing "love" while using the word "love." It's as overworked and misunderstood as that other word: "God." (Which makes the sentence "God is love" both impossible to understand and completely intuitive, in the same measure, at the same time.) For this love thing, I decide I'm going to start breaking down its components and work with it that way for awhile. Instead of calling the sun "sun," I'm going to understand it in terms of light and heat and sustenance, and track its behavior by sunrises and sunsets. In order to understand these pieces I need to know what it feels like to envelope someone in this thing, and how it feels to be enveloped. I know without thinking what it feels like to envelope someone else. I have my kids to teach me that. That feeling is one of absolute delight in their existence, and a refusal to accept their non-existence with a belief so strong it quivers with intensity. It is a feeling of pride, protection, surprise and delight at their individuality. It is a feeling of being constantly being blessed by their presence in my life. Then I switch over. How does it feel to be the receiver on the other end of these feelings? I draw a total blank. I get confused. My heart starts doing a shuffle, rocking back and forth with vague thoughts and hopeful suggestions. I start extrapolating: well, if it feels like THIS with the kids, then I must be feeling THIS from someone else. Yeeeeahhhh, my heart says doubtfully, straining to try to play the new game. I remember that time when I felt that someone really was loving me in a way that that kind of felt like that. Even though that receiving part is rusty and (maybe) broken, it's obvious what love should feel like. Even though I haven't seen the stone or really believe in its existance, I can see the ripples on the pond and acknowledge they are real. So the job is to examine the ripples and then, with a leap of faith, understand that the cause for them is tangible in both space and time. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 10:05 PM  
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