Day 74
receiving
One of the epiphanies I encountered as I moved through the end of my first marriage was this:
While much is made of one’s ability to love, not enough is made of one’s ability to receive love.
In a culture that is obsessed with individual success, there can be no less obsession with skill, for the self-made human that scales the highest ladders available is the one who has mastered all of the necessary skills. In the context of the less material, but no less valuable area of “success” that we call interpersonal relationships, there is little doubt that the skill of loving is paramount. One’s ability to love is the foundation of their success as a parent, spouse, adult-child, sibling, or friend. Even one’s ability to love their work is one of the cornerstones of success in a career.
In my early adulthood, I held fast to this belief and nurtured my ability to love as if my very life depended on it. I was proud to have been raised in a loving family where I was taught to love, not just in word, but, in deed. I waltzed into my marriage at nineteen with a silly amount of confidence because I knew the secret to success: all I had to do was Love him. And truly, I did.
When, ten years later, it became clear that no amount of loving was going to cure our marriage, I was not only devastated, but confused. How could I have been so wrong?
This is when I was granted the insight that my marriage did not fail because I did not love enough, or because the love was of poor quality, but because love has to be received in our depths in order to be experienced in a way that touches those places in ourselves that are wounded, in order that we might begin to be healed, in order that we might become the great lovers we long to be. If we are unable to receive love, we are unable to be transformed by it; and Love’s most sacred and true purpose is to transform us. It takes even the most adept lover and challenges her to surrender her pride and naïveté, it asks her to break and to become vulnerable, that she might not just give love, but also learn to receive it. Love teaches that success in love is not only—not even mostly—dependent on our ability to perform it for the sake of self and others, but also to embody it, which one can not do if one does not take it in.
The greatest gift children give us is to model, which they all do, the skill of receiving love. A child that is suspicious of love is a child that has been damaged already by the lack of love, or worse, has been fed and given shelter, but is otherwise abused. This is why we consider child-abuse the most abhorrent crime—it robs a child of their ability to receive love, which makes it impossible for them to embody it, even if they somehow learn to perform it. So, later in life, they may be able to act loving, to even give love to someone, but being unable to take love in and allow it to continually transform them creates limitations that are often overcome only through leaving those they love and who love them, so that they can start over in the early stages where love does not require transformation to grow and remain relevant.
So, we must balance the skill of giving love with the skill of receiving love. At the root of my decision to leave the city and return home to the mountains was the intuition that here, surrounded by this wildness, there is nothing to do but receive love. Of course, receiving it in great gulps, with tears in my eyes on many days, I feel it working in me and moving me to love back. Finally, I begin to taste love-embodied. I feel it, like electricity in my bones, and there is nothing to do but let it use me. Even way out here, separated from “the world,” I know that I am loving more deeply and more effectively because I am not doing love. I am love.
