How true love comes about…(continuation of post-Valentine thoughts)

To continue with my post-Valentine post….

Here is how our conversations or better yet, exchange of mails started. He would write about his failure to make a young woman he once again fancies to fall in love with him. And here’s one of my answers:

Honestly, I’m now as confused as a young girl
wondering about what love really is, feeling a bit
shaky on the ‘podium’ where I’ve been standing, having
lost some of my panache so it seems. The realization
that falling in and out of love could turn out to be a
unique experience for every person has mainly caused
the erosion of my confidence. I feel that like a
charlatan, I have been rattling on and I must ask for
your forgiveness.

But I had promised you and I’m fulfilling it. As you
read, please remember that I’m expressing ideas I
distilled from my own experience and those of friends
who have confided in me. I’ll try to organize my
thoughts as neatly as I can but I might not succeed; I
guess you know by now how fluid and circular my train
of thought could be. I’ll also try to summarize main
points and present these as points to reflect on or
perhaps items like in a test. So, here goes:

Getting to know the other
Love and loving, even liking, are often confused or
interchanged in most circumstances at the start of a
relationship that what happens in courtship (for want
of a term to mean the first stage) often determines
whether or not the attraction between two people will
develop into a steady relationship or fizzle out.

Meeting ‘the one’ is an event that can either be
ordinary or breathtaking. Attraction is the usual
signal, and at times, alchemy or chemistry. The moment
of attraction is almost magical if it’s present. Or
like the headiness that comes with good wine, rather
slow but then, overwhelming. Such a moment then begins
to take over because the memory of it lingers on or
haunts you. If the following ‘elements’ keep coming
back to memory, then the ‘meeting’ was somehow fatal:

1. Physical attraction that’s mutual
2. Laughter or a feeling of lightness
3. Meeting of minds

All three may not happen instantly or during the first
meeting. But even if only one does, it’s a good point
with which to start. Points no. 2 and 3 often get you
far. The first one, while an ideal factor, is often
the hardest to deal with because it’s what blinds you
and the ‘desired one’ into plunging right ahead where
you should have been careful.

Beyond the first meeting
To like another person means to want to be with her if
possible through all hours. It means wanting to share
all your hours with her in much the same way as you
want her to share hers with you. This second stage
still belongs to ‘getting to know each other’ or
courtship in the ‘old world.’ No commitment is being
made here but exclusivity is becoming more and more
implied as you both want to spend more time together.

While you are compelled to spend such time alone with
the ‘desired one’ all the time, it’s wiser to diffuse
time together by including friends or peers. While you
are compelled to spend such time, too, in exclusive,
romantic places, it’s wiser to share time you spend in
an ordinary way such as simply sipping coffee at
Starbucks, browsing at Power Books, strolling by the
bay or jumping into one of those trips to Corregidor.
(My examples, of course, are arbitrary not really
knowing how you spend your time off work except
playing tennis, visiting ruins of old churches,
browsing in art galleries, reading, dancing (?), aside
from lunching out or dining with friends, or I’m just
guessing.)

But anyway, what you should achieve in this stage of
the ‘friendship’ is getting to know the ‘desired one’
as a person as much as revealing yourself as a person
to her. Details matter a lot during this stage. You
get to learn more about each other and what you learn
may or not matter. Your answer to these questions will
determine whether or not you want to pursue the
relationship and bring it to a higher level:

1. do you have the same tastes?
2. if not, do you agree on some if not most points?
3. is it easy for both of you to go along with the
other?
4. is laughter easy?
5. does caring for the other and being concerned about
what the other feels the quality that smoothens some
disagreements, in case these come up?
6. do you care about everything she’s made of such as
her family, origins, past, etc., in other words her
unique story? Does she about yours? Are you genuinely
interested in her as a person? Is she about you?

If the answers to these questions become more and more
of a ‘yes!’ a commitment tends to become more or less
implied. The moment for ‘pledging’ ripens.

Note of caution: Be careful in handling ‘signs of
passion’ whether in showing it or receiving it.
Exclusivity breeds passion and all its fangs such as
jealousy, possessiveness, and insecurity. Passion
often expresses itself as turmoil of fear, rage,
expectancy and disappointment. It’s not a healthy
sign. Passion will consume both of you.

 Next post: engagement

 

Before I loved you…(post-Valentine)

…

I had written your name,

thinking

about a poem. Then,

I knew you, seeing

flowers tumble

in my head, weeds

tangled underneath,

birds on twigs, altering

the lines of songs. I crept

away, my poem

in my breast, the poem 

about your name turned

into a poem about

how a poem does not always

write itself the way

it begins, the way

it is born.

 

This poem was written for the friend mentioned in the earlier post–it could have been written by him because it’s exactly what happens to him and exactly how he feels every time it happens. He has been in agony for lost loves or ’wrong’ loves for a long long time. He and I had plunged into his inner spaces for the past eight years, going and back forth to what went wrong or why. He finds clarity sometimes but then black clouds begin to thicken in his vacant skies again.

 

True love is…

… that which has emerged from
the crucible of loving. It comes only after the
roughness of the self gets chiseled, scraped,
burnt, and polished. It’s a scary thought to learn
that true love demands an almost total loss of self
for the beloved.

If lovers realize on their wedding day the
actual weight of their marriage vows, they’d turn
around and gallop away. But on their wedding day,
lovers are often hardly aware of what’s going on. Most
couples take a few years to wake up, others as early
as the second year. No matter, the ‘polishing’ in the
crucible goes on ’till death do us part’. If ‘true
love’ takes over’, heaven descends to earth; if it
doesn’t, hell ascends.

Beauty objectively magnetizes the ‘eye’. In nature, in
art, in objects we see — indeed, how much more
physical beauty. Yet, like I’ve been telling you,
quoting from ‘The Little Prince’ , ‘it’s only with the
heart that one can rightly see; what’s essential is
invisible to the eye.’ Even in art, this is true,
right?

Think then about the heart’s secret dreams,
wants, desires — these are what make us focus on that
one person who could be extremely attractive or
someone whom no one perhaps would think beautiful. It could
happen in an instant or in a few more meetings. The
‘chemistry’ or the mutuality could also spark both and
strike with the ‘pain’ of romantic longing in an
instant. But it may or may not last.

Romance is not all of love — it’s what gives love the
moonlight glow or shimmer in the sky. It’s the first
breath of spring, the soft vapor of twilight, the
purple brush of dawn on still sleepy eyes, the pink
death of day at sunset, the soft quiver of a first
kiss  — I could go on and on. But none of the above
is love. Love is all other things like not getting
home on time because of traffic and getting a kiss
from the beloved instead of a bark or a sulk, or a
baby suddenly breaking out with a rash just when you
have dressed up for a romantic dinner, or late at
night when you’re supposed to snuggle in bed, the wife
of husband suddenly feels bad and you have to rush to
ER, etc….

Intimacies actually strengthen love. They shouldn’t
start it though. It should happen naturally when love
asks for it, when tenderness draws an aching to be one
in its deepest most complete, to reach and unite to
the core of one’s being. It’s then when you feel the
universe has  contracted and you have it in your
palms, your heart, your mind — that’s the beloved and
you as one. The power is quite unimaginable!

‘Love is not a feeling; it is a state of being.’
True it begins with a spark, an attraction and it
should grow into passion and desire (LFD?) but soon,
it must cool down into a warm glow like an ember
throwing off light, sustaining everything else in you
and the loved one, all of you and all of her– your
lives, your worlds – including but only at times
passion and desire. That’s why it demands time or
having to know the desired one in every way. If
everything else revealed or unraveled lifts you or the
other up, then love has been ignited, and it must soon
begin to blossom into a flame. But if even the
slightest gesture drags you down, it should be a
warning of danger.

A note about pain – if it comes with longing to be one
with the beloved yet barred or unreciprocated
(un-corresponded), it is mere romance and stays as
such, unless of course that which deters fulfillment
is overcome or resolved. The nature of love is not
pain but joy, bliss, and peace, of course. Like most
journeys, which love is — a journey to ultimate
fulfillment — bumps during the ride should only be
there as challenges that will carry the relationship
to a higher level. But if pain is constant, then I
believe it is mere obsession that stifles or even
strangles love to death.

Because the nature of love is joy and bliss, it finds
natural ground in friendship. Even in deep attraction,
the meeting should be of cordiality  — of closeness
yet of respect, of tenderness yet of delicateness.
But love in order to survive has to rise into sublime
friendship,.

You see desire and passion or that pain that grips you
in the guts would not help lovers cope with life’s
realities. Early on in engagement or even in
courtship, signs of a breakdown could rear any one of
passion’s ugly guises. It could explode as jealousy,
possessiveness, and neediness. Only a relationship
that understanding, caring, and selflessness has
deepened could overcome the destructive nature of
passion.

Love then is nothing less than how St. Paul has
described it, EVERYWORD of it. Love is losing one’s
self to the other, merging two halves into one. It
does appear like a struggle to the summit but if
shared in loving oneness, it ‘s all sweetness.

(Excerpts from letters exchanged between a friend, who is in perpetual agony about lost loves, and me).

 

Think beating heart on Valentine’s day

Think red on Valentine’s Day and the image of a beating heart comes to mind. Run to a flower shop for roses and a love note to give to that special someone and presume your gesture like millions of others on this day began centuries ago by a lover. But who really knows how Valentine’s Day came to be.

Vague ideas about it have always hovered in people’s minds. But a search for the real Valentine goes back to a pre-Christian practice, which was later layered over by some genuine act of “sweetness and thoughtfulness” from a “holy man”. The rite honors the Roman goddess Februato Juno in a “ lewd superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls on the fifteenth of this month.” As in most manner of conversion to Christianity, pastors substituted the honored goddess with “the name of a saint in billets given on this day,” and thus, St. Valentine.

Who is St. Valentine? The few lines written about him have spawned a legend that in fact, there are three St. Valentine.  Closer look reveals St. Valentine as not three but just one, a “temple priest jailed for defiance during the reign of the Roman emperor, Claudius, the Goth (Claudius II)” around mid-250 A.D. or the early centuries of Christianity. Valentinus was caught “marrying Christian couples and aiding Christians who were being persecuted.” While in prison, Valentinus is said to have tried to convert Claudius, who took a liking for him.  Such attempt proved fatal for the priest whom Claudius ordered beheaded at the Flaminian Gate in 269.

A clue as to why the emperor almost had a change of heart for Valentinus: the priest cured his jailer’s daughter of her blindness. A link if not quite romantic but “sweet” to today’s “love-crazed” tradition was Valentine’s having left a note for this girl where he scribbled, “From your Valentine.”

Did Valentinus ever exist? Yes, he did. Archeologists have unearthed his remains in a Roman catacomb although he was supposed to have been buried on Flaminian Way shortly after his beheading at the gate. It took another 200 years before he was canonized saint by Pope Gelasius in 496 AD and marked February 14th as his feast in honor of his martyrdom.

St. Valentine wears red, the color of blood to represent martyrdom. In his portraits, roses and birds surround him. In Christian tradition, he intercedes or is the patron saint of engaged couples (for a happy marriage), the young (and confused), those with epilepsy, or those plagued by fainting spells, bee keepers, and travelers.

 For the shy and the lazy, the feast of St. Valentine’s should make a great excuse to declare love just this once a year.

 

… not what I write about but ‘Who are you? Who am I?’

My two worlds on opposite sides of the hemisphere—this often turn up during chats with friends and even acquaintances when they learn that I write.   

When back home in Manila, curiosity about how I trudge through a snow storm brings on the urging: how I insulate myself or do I just cocoon under piles of wool in front of a fire place? Beyond imagining, that’s winter to folks who dwell under endless summer skies.

I once described how spring bursts in red camellias for one, the likes I’ve never seen that I thought was a rose. But a friend gaped at me through space, searching for a camellia. Fluid as silk, softer than an angel’s whisper so much so that a little girl at church couldn’t but be compelled to press the blossom on her cheek like it were a kiss that stayed; I filled in that space where my friend had slipped in.

I float on winged-feet, I once wrote about walking under canopies of cherry blossoms once at the Mall in Washington, Riverside in Baltimore, the Brooklyn Gardens in NY, on Union Square in Manhattan, at Burrard and Osler streets in Vancouver where I now live. But what could I compare the blossoms, shaped like bulbous clouds that the wind couldn’t move? I hinted what to me came closest to the feeling—summers when the kakawati, an indigenous tree that rose with upturned palms, spread-out fingers high up as if to stake a patch of sky in clumps of blooms part pink part lavender but in whole fragile as dawn that stayed. I reminded my friend of campus festivals where coeds used branches in full kakawati bloom in a dance where each sway balance, each sweep and swing of arms formed arcs and rings of such spring dream. My friend’s blank questioning turned into a spark of words asking for more of my imaging.

Light as it must be the first day of creation this too had struck me in the Redwoods, I began an erstwhile column I had been urged to write for a local daily. But still, it is hail that once rattled our class in fiction writing to look away from the board mapping words that recreate life that kin and friends read and recalled in my mail.

In writing sessions I’ve attended in New York, my classmates at first treated my exercises as rather suspect. A teacher once dismissed a biographical flash fiction I submitted as too gothic. But another coaxed me to lay on layers of my culture in my stories after I wrote an episode on cooking chicken from its wriggling, croaking, blinking live though tied up as if manacled to the throat-slitting, the boiling and plucking of feathers, the chopping of its parts and the aromatic broth served. Yet another focused on how I strung words to form images—how come I write like a Latin American?

My very Spanish name here in Vancouver seems like a spotlight, which draws questions people I meet beg for answers.  While I’d rather describe morning haze streaked with purple at dawn, I’m weaving words as history. But there, or here, at least, my story begins. 

The ultimate question that is often left un-asked then is not about what I write or how I write it but who are you? Who am I?

 

Enamored with Words

Writing for me is as inexorable as breathing, but I honestly don’t know why I write. It has always been what I do. I’ve never really sat down to think about it. When I sit down to mull over something or muse about anything, I end up writing about it.

I don’t even know when I write. Most times, my thoughts skitter in a space that I imagine is paper. For example, a snowfall isn’t a snowfall for me until snowflakes dance on a blank page and pile up like a bale of tulle for a bridal train. When I see autumn leaves, they turn into bits of rainbows and splinters of old suns. Spring is not rain until rain falls on my keyboard, skeins of silk to drape a queen. When I have transformed images I see or hear or touch into living things on paper, then, only then, do I know the writing has taken over.

Words are things, thoughts, and feelings for me, not often the other way around. And these are not always the startling so-called figures of speech, but often, simple words. For example, the word “sad” first appears out of a haze as a droopy figure, then as a puffy face engorged with tears. And the usual closing, used by friends in the mail, “warm regards,” touches me like a hug.

I guess I write because I’m enamored with words, and images constantly haunt me to become words.

© Alegria Imperial 2005 Published in Pen in Hand, a newsletter of the Maryland Writers Association and www.tinylights.com under Guiding Lights

 

Rejection Note

These words dropping onto this blank screen leaked off a bottle of emotions I had dammed. It has been months ago since a rejection note sneaked into my inbox—a single line in bold letters; it’s not the first, but the latest of ten I have received so far. Reading the note, I felt sand in my eyes, pain that brings on tears.

Why must rejection wring the mind so? I had long struggled to understand. No matter how cavalier I talk of my writing, rejection feels like murder at times. It must be during those times when I wrote too hard and too long so much so that an illusion of perfection shrouded me, or the fragile cave—my heart—from which I always imagine I write.

From what do words get birthed anyway? This has always been a mystery to me akin to my search for God. But this I believe in, the universe came to be—out of nothing—because God so decreed it with words.

I feel I am a being out of nothing. My words, thus, burst onto a screen from the void. Why then must rejection affect me so? I and what words I string together as soon as they slip into some kind of form should turn into objects like asteroids flinging their way through the universe. I, who worked on it, and that which they have birthed into, should no longer bear any of me.

And yet, complex as is my tiny mind, it also bloats with greed and feels as if words it has put into shape become the universe. How dare then, does anyone reject it?

But I am grateful for each rejection note; it shoves me back into place. The eye does not see the self in whole, only in parts. Rejection hurts only in part. As in every object in the universe, other parts of me that have been spared soon take over and begin to birth again.

 

Lessons from Divo

Divo showing off

Divo gazes at me, his marble-eyes translucent as still water with no obvious thought in them. I am scooping teaspoons of his tuna meal from a can, crooning, “Wait, Divo. Good boy.” When I scrape bits of the meal stuck in the can, he knows I’m about ready to bring his plate to his feeding corner. It is then when he leaps onto the kitchen ledge, creeps close to my right shoulder intimately as if he would give me a kiss or whisper to me. I feel both though he expertly leaves a space where my heart expands. We repeat this ritual in the morning for his dinner. We have both grown with it—he, into a sleek 12-pound tabby, I, into a cat-lover, a commitment undeterred by shifting seasons, moods, and the lure of a lake spa.

If Divo were human, his gesture would most likely be a crisp, ‘thanks’ the first time that is. He would take later feedings for granted as if it were his right and I am obliged to give it. I could shore up my withering self esteem from an increasing draught by invoking the well of unconditional commitment. I may even perhaps rise in spirit and feed him like I would a heavenly master. Still deep in that chamber between beats of my agonist and antagonist, I know I would long for something more.

Word books pair ‘gratitude’ and ‘appreciation’ as twins. I have never really thought about their difference until after months of feeding Divo. His never-without-‘thanks’ gesture—giving back to me what I give him—has heaped value on my task of feeding him. This thought then emerged: Gratitude may end with an act; appreciation begets a chain of acts that could lead to transformation.

I was not aware this idea had changed me like an invisible dye until Juliet threw up her hands one day in disgust with what she thought an absurd excuse for turning down a few dinner invitations because I couldn’t pass up a not-quite-kiss. But she calmed down counting the tasks I have taken on in our jobs—as part of who Divo has turned me into is as committed at work, valuing what is given by doing more. My constancy, simplicity and perhaps now, devotion to my duty because of his appreciation, have turned priceless.  I am transformed.

When an editor thanks me for a piece I submit, for instance, I thank her instead—as I have had Aleesha in each issue that she accepted my article. For me it is no mere bouncing of the word “thanks”, I once wrote Susan, another editor, as that which is given—the opportunity to write—if appreciated is enlarged in meaning and significance. I said in that email, as I did to Aleesha in much the same words, that “my writing is blooming because of the value you’ve been giving it.”

That exchange with Susan called to mind how an editor of a small daily in Manila wrote me back when I thanked him for putting an interview I wrote in the front page, boxed it for prominence, and even added on a cartoon that pleased my subject. “Your letter brought on smiles in the ‘boiler room’, and not steam but cool rain drenches us. You turned a regular assignment into a celebration,” he said. But it was I not the ‘boiler guys’ who doubled in my puny height because of how they treated my piece.

I walk lightly yet I feel full these days. I tend to smile easily as well. Yet, when I travel, worry over who would feed Divo weighs on my baggage. It is needless really. Gary who takes my place even brings in his kids who walk Divo in the courtyard, scattering laughter that rise like balloons to the corridors where doors of our suites are lined. Chances are Marie who hears them would reach for her Irish wool cardigan, limp to the corridor, and from the railing catch those candied squeals Divo brings on. Imagining the scene enlarging from bundles of wordless appreciation tossed back and forth, I then would snuggle in my plane seat and let sleep steal in.

By Alegria Imperial as published in timelessspirit.com