Caring

At this fragile time, others have characterized my relationship with my beloved as “caring for her.”  While it’s a perfectly understandable assessment, that’s not how I experience it.  

I don’t feel I’m doing anything for her.  I’m simply attempting to honor my own sense of personal integrity.  I’m attempting to act as best I can in harmony with the spirit of love we’ve been cultivating for more than 40 years.

When two people are dancing together as a couple, are they serving one another?  I don’t think so, not primarily.  What they serve is the intention of the dance, the choreographer’s intention––an intention they each hold in their heart.  For my beloved and me that intention is intimacy with the Great Choreographer, the universe Herself.

One of our daughters we adopted because she was in need of parents and our sense of right action made saying yes the only option.  It seemed to others that we were doing something for her, but not to us.

This isn’t altruism.  This is “Who am I going to be or die trying, and what must I do to honor that aspiration?”  My life is an adventure of continually discovering my answers.  

I wonder if something similar happens with soldiers in combat.  Stories suggest they perform their duties out of loyalty to their comrades, an outgrowth of a tremendous reciprocal bond.  And while that’s fair enough, I think something bigger may be going on as well: being loyal to the integrity it takes for a group of people to collaborate with the utmost presence of mind and heart––the requirement for survival in a life-threatening environment.  

(In fact, responding to the call for exceptional integrity is such a rewarding experience for some soldiers that they find their way back to danger again and again.  They may say they do this out of loyalty to their brothers and sisters in arms, but I wonder if their loyalty isn’t more fundamentally to the feeling of being as fully alive as they can be.)

Professional team athletes, when they’re traded, usually flow from one team to another rather fluidly.  Could it be that their loyalty isn’t so much to a particular team as it is to playing the game as best they can in concert with whatever teammates they have around them?

The beauty of this, it seems to me, is the universe’s reminder that the so-called service we provide others is how we awaken within ourselves an appreciation for our fathomless capacity to love.  

Then life gets really interesting as we learn to focus that love not just on this person or that, but on every breath we take.