“It was a time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Love In The Time Of Cholera.”
“Love In The Time Of Cholera” is one of the great love stories of all time, I believe, and I have always loved the way Marquez defines love. It is the way I feel about love, that it takes us to the other shore.
The Internet can be quite a wonderful thing sometimes, especially when it is not used to promote misery or anger. I wrote this morning about my discomfort with the idea that I could love a chicken, surely not in the way I love Maria or other humans. Human and animal love is different for me I wrote. This prompted a wonderful discussion about the nature, definition and boundaries of love. I should say I have felt the most powerful love for animals – Orson, Rose, Elvis, Simon, Lenore, Izzy, among others. Animals have shaped my worked, supported and defined my life.
My love for Maria or for my daughter is different. It is, I hope, selfless and without boundary. People talk about their wish for unconditional love, but I believe true love is very conditional. In order to be loved, there are things I feel I must do – be sensitive, listen, compromise. With Maria, I have learned to open up to emotion. Hard for me, but to do otherwise would be to diminish the love we have for one another. She has great love for the animals, and I photograph it all of the time, but it is different from a love’s love, a father’s love, even a friend’s love. Humans make choices. Animals don’t. Humans have consciences. Animals don’t. Humans can leave and are not, theoretically, dependent. Animals have no choice but to adapt to us, and to reflect our attention and need. Their survival depends on it. And animals are different. Donkeys are different from dogs, dogs are different from cats, all are different from chickens or sheep, at least to me. To love all things equally is noble, but also for me diminishes the idea of individuality, of our being unique, sentient, thinking beings.
I am trouble at the idea that love for a chicken means the same thing as love for Maria. For me, this is not so. Yet I believe love is everywhere, in everything, surely animals. So yes, sure, we can love chickens or dogs or cats. But it is not the same for me. I would be sorry to lose those distinctions. With Valentine’s Day approaching, a fine discussion to have. Come and join if you wish.
Meg was in the feeder again, where she is not supposed to be. “Meg,” I said, “why do you go in the feeder?” She looked at me oddly.
I told Meg that this Valentine’s Week for me, and I explained to her that while I am fond of her, I cannot honestly say that I love her. I don’t. When I think of love, I think of my feeling for Maria, or for my daughter, and I feel nothing like that for any chicken. To lump Meg in with that – or even the love I feel for Frieda and Lenore – is to diminish its power, worth and meaning.
Meg seemed to take this in stride, and wobbled over to the garbage can where I keep the birdseed and I gave her a handful of seed and she was very happy. I do love doing that.
Meg has what she needs, I think. I do not think I can ever truly love a chicken. Or a sheep.
I have so much love for so many wonderful women that one day doesn’t cut it, and so this is Valentine’s Week for me, a celebration of love, and our need for it and our search for it. I’ve tucked Valentine’s Day cards all over the house and I love hearing Maria’s delight as she finds them. Do we not all wish to be loved?
I love Maria, my daughter Emma, my friend Mary Muncil and my other friends, my dog Lenore, Frieda, Mother and Minnie, my donkeys Lulu and Fanny, my farm, the Mother, my birth Mother, who is gone. A friend told me this week that Valentine’s Day was very depressing for him, because he sought love in his life and and he couldn’t find it and he wanted to know what I thought about it, and I declined, because love is a personal thing, and I have strong feelings about it and he wanted sympathy, and I don’t have any for people who say they want love but can’t find it. I know much better than that.
But he pressed and so I told him him he wouldn’t like it, but I would tell him what I think, as one who did not have love for a long time, and who found it. Do not blame life, I told him, if you do not have love. Do not tell me poor-me-pity stories. Do not whine about something you have chosen not to find. When I was living with dogs, cows, donkeys, goats, sheep, cats and chickens, I whined that I did not have love, and then I understood that there was no room for it in my life, and that love is everywhere, hanging off of the trees, in the sky, in all of the people driving by in cars, across the street and in the supermarket. Down the road. If you are open to it, it will find you, and you will find it. If you whine about love, you will never find it. You will never find it on the news. You will never find it if you fill your life with anger, drama, pity, sadness, misery and argument.
You will find it if you understand that it is your responsibility, not life’s, and your decision, not a crapshoot. Love does not come out of the sky, and hit you on the head. It is a leap of faith. It is what the world is about. It comes from the very center of you, no matter what you look like, sound like, feel like. It is, as God told the prophets, why he created the earth, why the world endures, the whole point. Nothing else matters or comes close to it. When you understand that, I said, you will stop blaming life for the lack of love in your life, and you will make room for it, and it will be right there for you. Love is not a lament, and it does not come from loneliness or lament. It comes from the leap of faith that opens the door for it, and invites it in. I found love when I understood that all of the things I was filling up my life with meant nothing in comparison to it, and then, almost mystically, it appeared. Where was it? Right in front of my nose. Right across the street. Don’t whine to me about love, I told my friend. Find it. Right away. Stop wasting time.
He was quiet. I don’t know if he liked what I said, or heard it. He said he had to go.
“Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” – Gabriel Garcia, Marquez, “One Hundred Years Of Solitude.”
