Courtyard
This is something I wrote quite a while ago. So, just to keep things fresh here, I thought I'd drop it into this blog.
Lucky. Happy. Love. Rights.
What rights have we to love? The world is unhappy. Death, sorrow, true suffering: the common state of humankind.
So, what rights do we have to love?
Isn’t love selfish?
Not at first. There is that time when love, in love we say, it is so giving. Giving, receiving, self sacrificing.
And the love ages, some say matures. We turn that giving into expecting, and demanding, and hurting, and being hurt. Love becomes the “right” to bend another to our will. The glorious courtyard becomes a battlefield. What was once ours in sharing becomes ours in confrontation.
The courtyard is divided along contested lines. Each seeking to stretch their own boundaries, to claim new territory, in admonitions, “helpful suggestions,” sarcasm, and even direct confrontations. The questioning look, the patronizing smile, the subtle edge to the voice. We create a no man’s land in the space between two sleeping backs, maintaining a distance as intractable as the noxious, smoky, torn land between the lines in The Great War. And sensing the futility in the space between us, we seek the courtyard once again. It moves from courtyard to battlefield, and back again.
When we open our eyes to the changing terrain, we see the wreckage, and sometimes we strike a truce. We search separately. We search together. And together we find new ground, a new courtyard. Usually it is far smaller than the courtyard we first walked together. Usually we furnish it with what is familiar.
And so we circle, moving around the furnishings as the moods for battle or for love dictate. We make a game of staking out the lines for battle, and we make grand gestures of erasing those lines.
Perhaps the desire we have for that courtyard is more love than anything we felt before. We want a place where we can touch each other. A place that is peaceful, safe, and larger and grander than our first impetuous courtyard that was filled with wild things.
Lucky. Happy. Love. Rights.
What rights have we to love? The world is unhappy. Death, sorrow, true suffering: the common state of humankind.
So, what rights do we have to love?
Isn’t love selfish?
Not at first. There is that time when love, in love we say, it is so giving. Giving, receiving, self sacrificing.
And the love ages, some say matures. We turn that giving into expecting, and demanding, and hurting, and being hurt. Love becomes the “right” to bend another to our will. The glorious courtyard becomes a battlefield. What was once ours in sharing becomes ours in confrontation.
The courtyard is divided along contested lines. Each seeking to stretch their own boundaries, to claim new territory, in admonitions, “helpful suggestions,” sarcasm, and even direct confrontations. The questioning look, the patronizing smile, the subtle edge to the voice. We create a no man’s land in the space between two sleeping backs, maintaining a distance as intractable as the noxious, smoky, torn land between the lines in The Great War. And sensing the futility in the space between us, we seek the courtyard once again. It moves from courtyard to battlefield, and back again.
When we open our eyes to the changing terrain, we see the wreckage, and sometimes we strike a truce. We search separately. We search together. And together we find new ground, a new courtyard. Usually it is far smaller than the courtyard we first walked together. Usually we furnish it with what is familiar.
And so we circle, moving around the furnishings as the moods for battle or for love dictate. We make a game of staking out the lines for battle, and we make grand gestures of erasing those lines.
Perhaps the desire we have for that courtyard is more love than anything we felt before. We want a place where we can touch each other. A place that is peaceful, safe, and larger and grander than our first impetuous courtyard that was filled with wild things.
posted by Curious Servant at 6:04 PM
2 Comments:
Great analogy.
I want a courtyard like that, but with no fences. Anywhere. :)
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