Relating

&, for what it's worth, it is hard.

You can download the ebooks for the first three volumes of Surrender Now using these links.

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Relationship is not a safe harbour: the term (noun, singular) rings like an unfulfilled promise, a notion of stability that eclipses the vital intransigence of relating (verb, present participle).

Social relationships — that is, who you know and what they do — are at best parasitic and at worst pathological. The dynamics of relating vibrate at an existential level; the hazards that are posed in relation to others are the clearest mirror of Self.

I am speaking of the waves of mood and feeling that surge and sweep between self and other when a connection is sustained over time; the evolving flux of associations and impressions that bind people through the hazards of experience. It is the quality of such connections that I imbue with the significance of family, of community, of sangha.

Certain connections serve a time, a place, a mood, a specific purpose. Others come about to bring a greater refinement of one essence into focus, and thus take time: time enough to withstand disasters, celebrate moments of joy; enough time to get furious with each other and forgive, forgive again.

This level of relating is a discipline both of love and awareness; it requires commitment not strictly to the other, but to the other as Self. But beyond this, there is the love that withstands death itself: revealing death as illusory, a joke of perspective.

Ordinary grief (when you lose someone important in your world) causes one to redefine oneself in relation to the world. In order to rehabilitate in the wake of such grief, one establishes a new centre of gravity to contextualise the loss, which over time may even emerge as a measure of personal growth.

The grief of bereavement (when you lose someone who is enmeshed with your being) is of a whole different order. For you have lost that part of yourself irremediably, lost the innocence and the wisdom of that self, lost the purpose in living that your love for that person awakened.

In order to come to terms with the enormity of that severance, the identification of self in relation to other drops. No self to grieve, no other to be lost; one's connection to the dead becomes a tangible, living element of oneself, a presence of power that allows one to exist untethered to a limited notion of self.

Relationship is not a safe harbour. One is always adrift, always untethered in relating; to assuage the grief of that instability, we pretend to be loyal to the dream of self in order to meet the expression of the other.

The greatest feat of my existence has been to love recklessly. I have loved with abandon, loved into the depths of despair, have worn myself ragged from the strain of loving — and have been indefatigably loved by every person who has ever mattered.

It is not relationships that define a person — for they end when people die, or lose faith in the connection — but the quality of relating that evolves through the art of loving, the ineluctable empathy that true friendship brings.

(And in this way, Raphael, I was never your mother: we were compatible presences performing a brief, milky dance to the music of the infinite; and our love lives on in that music.)

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