ISABEL puma KENNER

Finite life vs. infinite love

There’s a feeling that it’s time to dig my roots tenfold into the earth. Nobody prepares you for the feeling of meeting somebody you want to root yourself with. Shaking hands and kissing cheeks with someone who can alter the trajectory of your entire life. There’s no warning. There’s an unwavering sense of wanting to be better, stand straighter, talk slower, laugh fully. Everything is done at full capacity. That’s what love at first sight feels like. There’s no half-way on anything. That said, anything that is half-way gets you nervous, questioning, antsy. You want to fill in the gap between you, the gap between the life you have now and the life you’re living forever.

We’re not eternal and our choices and their impact alike are finite. Yet being in love makes us feel infinite. Grief is the difference remaining when the reality of finite vitality meets infinite impact. Grief is what’s left behind when their presence is subtracted and nothing but feeling remains. That’s the same difference you feel when you’re falling in love. Presence, presence, presence, more, more, more. Love me infinitely, presently, fully, forever. Sleeping in the same bed, showering in the same shower, swimming in the same sea, breathing the same breath, crying to the same song in the same way, but completely different.

Spending the rest of your life with somebody can be the direct source of life’s capacity for infinite, eternal transcendence – just as much as stagnancy, demise & complacency. Bukowski said “Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality. You lose what individualism you had. If you have enough, of course, you retain some of it. But most don’t have enough. So you become watchers of game shows, you know, things like that… Then you get married like marriage is a victory. And you have children like children is a victory. Most things most people do are a total grind. Marriage, birth, children. Something they have to do because there’s nothing else to do. There’s no glory in it, there’s no steam, there’s no fire.”

Retaining individualism means teaching people how to treat you, showing them where to go. There can be this petrified silence in the face of someone you desire. Allowing them room to make you into anything they want you to be. Allowing them to lead the way into the rest of your days on this planet in this body with this consciousness. Show them where to go. Teach people how to treat you. The way you hold your torso. And place your feet. And twirl your hair.  And touch their heart and their skin. And the way you smile and smell and speak. And how lightly you tread on Earth. And how you regard your opportunity of life. And how your body moves. And your muscles activate. And your bones rest. And the way your ankles and wrists swirl. The art you make. The art you love. The character you choose to play. The daily quests, weekly missions & monthly boss fights.

Sex, love & desire puts us directly in touch with the feeling of forever. Forever meaning the direct experience of the finite time we’re given. All its unraveling possibility, and yet this quiet sense of predestined parameters. As well as the irrefutable need for risk, exploration, experimentation, comparing, contrasting, recording, teaching, learning, speaking, listening along the way. The urge to unite with another is elementally indistinguishable from the urge to unite with the fulfillment of our potential. We speak of codependency through the framework of excessive need, want, reliance. However, we mustn’t mistake this excess with the unyielding, reckless burning of desire for someone who ushers us into our own greatness. It’s not the intensity with which we love that we should fear, but the lack of direction, intention, clarity & order with which we handle this unruly raw potential.

There are many ways our modern narratives of performative therapy-infused jargon deteriorates our ability to channel and act out our most natural life-source, the stream of our emotions, naturally and effectively. One of which is our obsession with codependency in a culture enmeshed with individualism. We have become afraid to admit we’re loving deeply and madly. We keep a handful of lovers in our back pocket at any given moment. We question whether we’ll wake up one day and the person we seem to be steadily treading a path towards reciprocal, built love decides this isn’t for them, and the modern potential for that parting of ways to be remarkably sudden, cold & betrayal-worthy. We’re treating each other as though we are concepts rather than entire worlds with deep wells of emotions, complexes, histories & responses attached. 

The fact is we can love someone undeniably, but our fear of codependency can naively lead us right into its open arms and open fangs; or better yet lead us directly into timidity, retreat & neglect of a divine opportunity to unite with a personified representation of our fullest potential. Codependency is perceived as a reliance upon another to stand on your own two feet. It’s associated with getting extremely used to having someone around and giving them a large space in our life to roam free and make us feel strong. It’s – I can’t do this without them, I don’t know who I’d be without them, I can’t imagine my life without them. We’re led astray when we mistake grief, the difference remaining when the reality of finite vitality meets infinite impact, with reliance. The fact of the matter is one day this person will be gone from this body on this earth, and so will you. The fact of the matter is that marriage doesn’t make us immortal. Love doesn’t make us immortal. Although it sure as hell feels like one step closer to living forever when we’re loving someone forever.

It’s in the dark, moist environment of a fear of death that the bacteria of codependence can fester and multiply. By facing death we’re facing our reverence for life and what it asks of us. By facing life we can face love with the respect it deserves. When we think about never seeing someone ever again, their soul leaving their body and our possibility of direct communication with them dwindling to a mere internal headache echo chamber of a played out conversation, our disposition shifts. Suddenly we see and feel that person for exactly what they are to us. We feel the ache of the wrongdoings based on this misguided belief that they’ll be here forever; that they’ll pester us in that one way forever, they’ll be impossible to get through to forever. When the reality is we’re hardening ourselves to the potential of honoring the relationship differently by dropping our guards and treating this connection as a transcendent opportunity for truth-telling, heart-bearing & chalance – no matter how extremely difficult.

Codependency is, in a sense, hiding. Hiding from the opportunity to declare something about your feelings in the face of another. To learn who you are deeply, on your own two feet, in the face of another. To know those weaknesses that always seem to escape your grasp. To know those strengths that make your soul dazzle and catch the light right into your chest and bubble up into your smile with a deep warmth. To know the fears that undermine your sense of worth and carry immense weight in shame, avoidance, phobias, self-harm, procrastination, excuses, complaints. Codependency is sitting next to one another avoiding eye-to-eye, across the table confrontation. It is stand in the same space that I occupy so I don’t need to know how it feels to stand alone. When the most exhilarating sensation is to stand across from another that you deeply admire and to be seen as fully and fantastically as you see them. Nothing honors the opportunity of life quite as deeply: standing tall in the face of the fear of being separate, being seen, examined, sized-up, deemed unworthy, disapproved, shallow, undeveloped.

It’s not codependency that we’re fearing, but vulnerability, risk, chance. We go on a second date with equal parts fear and hope, pushing and pulling us. There’s no need to silence either one, but to allow them to pull us along steadily as we take a backseat and allow ourselves to perform our authenticity. Our shortcomings, flaws, triumphs, grace & all other natural inclinations. That being said there’s something very early on that tells us if this is a place we’d want to stay a while. Something that’s very different from imagining who this person could be in a perfected fairytale ten, twenty years down the line. It’s rather something that carries warmth in the present moment by the way they ask you questions, make you laugh, touch you & look at you. It’s the way they approach their life, and don’t encroach upon yours, but still they want in; and they want you in on theirs. The sharing, the come join, the where next.

The clouded disposition we approach the raw potential of love with is the same cloud we carry around our self-ownership and pride. The responsibility we carry ourselves with. The underlying self-disdain and cynicism leading us right into arms of those we can’t help but nit-pick, or who always seem to find our flaws, and we never quite like who we are around them, or them around us. Yet the moment we treat ourselves like the rare, ephemeral, fully-formed and expressed beauty we are, we find someone who makes our life feel easy. They support us in the feeling of floating that comes with centering ourselves in our divine right of expression, truth & purpose. This is what I believe people mean when they say you must love yourself first. However, please god let us not forget that we need each other. That loving oneself is only but a half-truth without loving another. Friend, family, lover, sexual deviant, foe, pet, object, pursuit, song, meal, flower, grain of rice, blade of grass, strand of hair, smell of air, sound of water, texture of fire, completeness of earth.

To call your lover baby is to return them to the primordial state of coexistence, and core needs. To remind each other that we need to feel small to feel big. That to love somebody is to lay our skin down and bare our temporal, god-granted inner workings that can stop beating and circulating and housing us at any time. To surrender to our fleeting opportunity of life and to declare something in it. To remember we were born into this world and we will die out of this world. To share deeply and vulnerably our appreciation of our beauty and another’s beauty. To find somebody that shares our feeling of reverence for the life we’ve been granted. To indulge our desire to caretake and support the expression of life and to live, live, live amidst the reality that every day we’re expending our precious time and moving closer to absence, death, and the closure of this time here. This time together. What a motivating contrast. What a waste to lay still and quiet in the face of it. What a waste to not dig our teeth into each other’s skin and indulge in this animated beauty with the most profound degree of respect, intention & chalance.