Agape

There is no such thing as “love” in reality. What we seek to describe by that word is emotion experienced in certain highly personal channels, charged with possessiveness, shadowed by jealousy, with its counterpart “hate” ever ready to take its place.

- Wei Wu Wei

The silence of the soft, grassy knoll enveloped me. I peered through the giant oaks, lavishly adorned with spanish moss which hung wistfully from their vast, twisted branches. I sat alone, atop a cotton blanket, and I thought of you.

I grieved my story of us, a love whose flame had only grown with our parting. In my solemnity, I could feel life doing her work — killing the self’s clinging to your image.

I looked up into the bright cloudless sky, and gleefully beheld a pair of hawks screeching, soaring, and gliding overhead, dancing as the wind carried them through the air. They swooped down, landing in a great oak towering just in front of me. They perched within its branches, their sharp gaze piercing through to the center of my aching heart.

Side by side they remained, free. And then it was that I knew the meaning of love…of real love, not the grotesque, sweet, sticky phrase we sell to one another with rings and impossible promises.

One of the hawks gazed into my soul, and said to me, “Were I tethered, I could not fly free.”

There they were: apart and together. Unbound. Untethered. Unrestricted. Free to be, to do, to fly as life yearned.

How many times have you heard one say hungrily to their lover, “You used to be so loving…how I wish you would be that way with me again!”? And, still, how many times have you seen one desperately endeavor to change, to coax, to mold their lover into their own half-rotten image of our incomplete version of love?

Isn’t it so? That our tethering of our lover cages that which is most precious in them? Stifles the wildness which we so earnestly and tenderly fell in love with?

Ball and chain. Put your man on a leash. Control your woman. Tame your lover. Our ideas of love are founded on, are rooted in, restriction, imprisonment, control. How can we possibly find peace among this warped vision of love?

In our efforts to create a love which feels safe, which drearily coddles our fears of being rejected and abandoned, we suffocate the freedom from our lover’s chest. We clasp our fingers around their throats and squeeze the savage, undomesticated nature from their soul. Or, rather, we try.

Only, perhaps years later, to be disappointed by their complacency, by their insincerity, by their inauthenticity. Isn’t it so?

This, the hawk said, lies at the core of our discontent in human love. The thing we most treasure in our lover is also the thing we most fear: the untamable beauty of their unfiltered, unpredictable humanity.

Agape — the truest and realest of human love — exists only within the dimension of infinite freedom. A full surrendering to what is. Granting our lover the freedom to stay or to go, without the stranglehold of our own stories or beliefs impinging the full expression of their innate wildness.

The hawks displayed this agape, I noticed, with a perfection which is unrivaled among our slumbering intimacies.

The hawks stayed with me for a few moments longer, and then one took flight while the other remained. Remained, allowing the other the freedom to fly unencumbered, untethered, alone. To go wherever life beckoned. Unattached and in full surrender to the possibilities. Infinite freedom.

And I thought of you, my love. How you will blossom only with your wildness intact, with the infinite freedom to be fully lived by life itself, without restraint or expectation. 

A wave of agape, of the deepest gratitude, washed through my breast, as I thought in humility of the blessings afforded by your remaining forever unchained, forever a child of the wind. As I thought of the beauty of you in your unhindered unfolding.

The second hawk took flight, meeting the other in the sky, soaring both together and apart.
I gazed into the grass with a full heart, and as I took in the resounding fullness of this feeling of agape, I watched as a hawk’s shadow soared across the blades of grass in front of me.

And I knew, that if all I ever see of you again is your shadow on the earth as you soar in full freedom across the sun, that will be enough.