Tag: poetry

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

–Rūmī

I wonder if at times I am just guilty of hearing only what I want to hear.  If perhaps I’ve been deceiving myself in my pursuit of some sort of meaningful relationship.  That in my looking, I’ve become blind to love itself.

Over the past year it feels like I’ve been constently beaten down in this pursuit.  I have to wonder if some of those bruises are self-inflicted.   Am I ascribing feelings of love to feelings of lust?  I fell for a couple different people this past year.  Each time however fate seemed to have other things in store (pending moves were issues in both cases, though not by any means the only issues).  I’m waiting for the day to arrive that the chorus of the Dire Straits song “Romeo & Juliet” will no longer be true.

Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start,
And I bet, then you exploded in my heart,
And I forget, I forget, the movie song
When you gonna realize, it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?

Right now I am stuck in this paradox of extreme spring fever and an indifference towards relationships.  I don’t need something completely serious…but I don’t want just a random hookup either.  From experience, I know that the random hookup won’t make me any happier.

So I’m left with just faith.  I believe, as Rūmī suggests, I will find what was in me all along.  It brings me hope and with that hope I maintain at least some level of happiness.  There are days that it is a struggle to believe in that hope and happiness. These days I rely on my faith and also on poetry.  Sometimes what I need is time in prayer.  Other times, the prayer comes through the poetry of others.  Some days I just need to write.  It doesn’t always make sense.  It isn’t always poetry.  It is just love.  I don’t need to “understand” it.  I just need to give myself to it.  Without condition.  Without requition.  In many ways this has become my religion.  Love and my faith in it.