dreamer awakening

"I’d rather be complete than competitive. Any competition that requires that I reject a part of me is not worth it."

"Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.

A mature person does not fall in love, he or she rises in love. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. Now they cannot manage and they cannot stand. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have the integrity to stand alone.

A mature person has the integrity to stand alone. And when a mature person gives love, he or she gives without any strings attached to it. When two mature persons are in love, one of the great paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone. They are together so much that they are almost one. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. Only freedom and love."

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As I get older, as time goes by, I care less and less and less about whether someone can talk pretty. I care about action. At the end of the day, I don’t care how well you can articulate your perfectly punctuated anti-oppressive political points, I don’t care how many buzzwords fall from your mouth, I don’t care if you name-drop a thousand acronyms or theorists – I care if you will show up. I care if you will fucking show up.

And I know that showing up is complicated when you struggle with whether or not you can get outta bed. Sometimes showing up means biking to a friend’s house with coconut water & ginger ale & Saltines when she has stomach flu. Sometimes it means sharing your leftover pain meds from your emergency root canal when a friend has a pain spike. Sometimes it means making soup in a friend’s kitchen, stocking his fridge & freezer, blowing him a kiss across his bedroom & miming tucking him up under his sheets, because you can’t actually tuck him in or kiss him good-bye, because your own immune system is fragile enough as it is. And sometimes it means texting a little emoticon heart from your own sick bed, where you are laid up with a shoulder that aches so bad when the weather gets damp (which is a lot in San Francisco), or stomach that can’t digest a fucking thing, or clogged-up sinuses, or a throat on fire, or a wet raspy cough. Sometimes it just means saying Honey, I love you. Honey, my sick heart reaches out to your sick heart. Honey, I wish I could be there, and I can’t, but I can do this. You mean the world to me. Sister. Brother. Love.

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