Isn't It Love We're Sent Here For?

"Isn't it love, that keeps us breathing?
Isn't it love we're sent here for?
Wasn't it love that we were feeling?"

--"Always You,"
John M Shanks, Robert Thiele, Steven M. Krikorian
(recorded as "You" by Bonnie Raitt)

Someday, the lady is going to come back, and call me to come with her.

I am reasonably confident that it is only a decision; yet, once upon a time, she made me promise, and there does come a day when the promise is kept, and all that remains is the light, and the wind.

Here I am until then, learning about the love that brought her, the love that keeps her away.

Why else be human?

What good is it, without something to bring us here, something to make us stay?

- - -

Everybody has questions about love and its differences. Everybody has wishes and dreams. Everybody has disappointments. Heavy energy seems to accompany all of this, and people watch closely -- if you visualize holding an arrow at the ready in a bow, then you get the idea.

Anybody who has ever bowed up, and gone hunting for the center of the sky, will tell you the same thing. You can cock that arrow and stay relaxed, or you can tense up and shake. On the one hand, there is an open possibility, while on the other, there is just a target.

That could be love or it could be Austin, sitting at the bar, throwing down whiskey like water, crying like a gypsy's guitar. If that's the only reason you shaved your head and wear wine-colored underwear, better get on back to Texas. That bow is still in your hand like an invisible air tattoo.

That could be love or it could be the mountains, sitting in the meadows, laughing like a fool, while the sun and the clouds send shadows to seduce the ground. If you don't have a target, I guess you're alright, but that's an inherited value judgment from a foreign organization.

I never knew any love worth a damn that was organized.

It could be love, or it could be habitual: your painfully wonderful, always mysterious, disappearing-reappearing weapon. It comes to your hand the way a deer raises its head upon hearing a twig snap. It leaves when you glance away. In between, there is all sorts of door locking, and panties under the pillow, and maybe that music you hear while you're turning the dial. That faraway station that comes and goes.

"Housekeeping... 'ousekeeping!" Oh, lord, honey... we got to get up and find your car.

Trying to find that station, you drive on down to Austin, or you take the busy bus to Saigon, or you sail away to Cebu. The carefully armed ladies and gentlemen, searching for stations, coming and going, become poetry for each other. Poetry is born for anthology regardless of whether you cage it in a book or write it on the wall.

It could be love, but it sure gets crowded, and crowded dreams always turn into nightmares. Generally speaking, when people have nightmares, they really want to wake up. When they have sweet dreams, they want to keep on sleeping. Either way, sometimes in dreams we seem to be running to and fro.

- - -

When we start on down Buddha Road, the signs say "All Sentient Beings."

But, we're so damn confused, the first thing we do is turn our back on ourselves: on all the peccadillos that make us human. Isn't it funny how things try to twist themselves that way? We make these robes into Moral Costume. This becomes our armor. The armor we wear when there is a knock on the door. While we close our eyes the way a child does, and think others don't see us. While we're hiding from him, or her.

You can spend as much time as you want, giving and taking, but when the lady calls I am almost positive about what she'll tell you. She'll tell you that all those sentient beings are staring back at you from the mirror. She'll tell you that all the whiskey, weapons, and tears were as unnecessary as those travels you thought you took to those places in the poems.

She'll tell you that all your lovers are you in disguise.

Now, I could go on writing, and I could write in all the traditional ways about malfunctioning emotions -- the standard party line about expectations and attachments -- but, if you've found your way here, you've already heard that a thousand times.

This is just a little ramble on the ambiguous topic of love.

Or, maybe its a song on a distant station. Not the one that comes and goes, mind you, but the other one... the soft one, that stays around forever.

Isn't that what we're sent here for?

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