The epiphanies of love: a tree, a rock, a cloud and bubbles

Come closer. Close enough that my love can bloom upon you. I want to talk about love. We don’t even need to talk; the space between us can just vibrate our thoughts to each other.

When I was young I had a tree-house and sitting in it surrounded by pine-boughs and the scent of sap and the cool breezes and the sky view I had my first love-epiphany. Love was beating all about us, could be drunk in through my pores and breathed out as exhalations back to the air. It was greater than loving my family or my pets or curling up in bed with Enid Blyton. It was and it was and it beat out its ebb and flow.

I learned later that this thinking was akin to that of the Romantics, but then it was all mine, my sky view/heart thrum/harmonic of love.

In year ten I read a short-story and had another epiphany. It was ‘A tree, a rock, a cloud’. It was about loving in mere moments, loving via observation and meditation until the object was close-felt, not understood exactly and certainly not owned, but felt within the viewer until their sails filled with air and billowed outwards towards the object.

In my twenties I once danced on a floor of mud in the forest with two hundred others. I had taken ecstasy and began to blow bubbles  from a child’s toy. As we dancers moved amongst the bubbles and the raindrops we merged to become one organism made of many cells, an amniotic cup of love and warmth held in the music-womb. I saw the bubbles as little moments of love, fleeting and shiny and perfect then gone.

Does it surprise you that I live this way, making myself fall into love-bubbles like a happy kid dancing in mud-puddles?  Every day so many people I work with and the moment when behind my mask of boss-girl I love them.  The patrons of my work: the smart the sane, the mad, sad and ugly. The suited, the shabby the cranky or bitchy. All of them their own universes of complexity and memory and love stories. All of them born utterly innocent then stamped or stamped on by the world. Always I seem to feel the one bright strand in their weft and weave, the one second perhaps in which to love them.

I am not a Christian; I disavow the church and most streams of ‘the spiritual’. I see, I love, I write, I love, I am harsh or not, kind or cruel, known or the other. In my tree I try to sit, to feel the air ebb and flow, smell the scent of new sap. I reach for my child’s toy and blow bubbles. I blow them because they dance.