To Love Is To Be Happy (A Poem I Love)

To Love Is to Be Happy

To love is to be happy and do what you want.
Be with. Don’t be with.
Smile. Don’t smile.
Be loving. Don’t be loving.
Be affectionate. Don’t be affectionate.
Give or say what you want. Take or ask for what you want.
Do your own thing.
If the one you love gets unhappy, it’s not because you are not loving them enough. Their happiness does not depend on you. If you find you want them to be happy, it is because you want it. It’s not because you are a loving person or feel the need to prove to them that you are loving.
You are loving if you are happy. You will be loving if you are not afraid.
If you are happy with someone in order to be a nice, loving person, then your happiness will depend on them seeing you as loving. Every time you don’t feel particularly loving or giving, you will feel like a failure as a lover. Every time they don’t act loving and they don’t give you what you ask, you will also feel like a failure as a lover.
When you feel like a failure, guilty, ungiving, and unfeeling, you will need to run away. You will be repulsed by your lover and play right into their fear of failure. If you believe you are a failure because you are not able to accept what is offered to you, or because you find that you are not able to get the kind of love you want, you will then be over attracted to your lover, playing right into their fear of failure again.
This kind of view of being a lover is really worth failing at. You only fail to love if you get unhappy. In this kind of relationship you only get unhappy because you believe you failed to love. If you don’t feel or do something that prevents your lover from being unhappy you are not failing to love.
You fail to love if you get unhappy about it.
You fail to love if you are afraid of your lover being unhappy.
If you want evidence that you are a loving person, you will only find it in your happiness. If you are happy, you are loving everyone. When you are happy, you are glad for everyone’s happiness.
A lover is not someone you are more happy with. A lover is someone you are with happily. When you are happy, you will want more things with some people than others. When you are happy, you will want to give to some people more than others. If a lover is different or special, it is because you are both wanting very much together.
With a lover you are glad for everything they do when they are happy. You may find that if you are not so glad, it is because they are not so happy and are not especially doing what they want. You are aware of any fear in them and loss of happiness. You know each other perfectly in the sense that you are as aware of their gladness and happiness as you are of your own. This experience is not because you are afraid of their unhappiness, but because you want them to be happy. You love them and want the gladness you will both have when they are happier. A lover is someone you want to be glad with together.
Lovers are two people who come together to learn how not to be unhappy and who look forward to more gladness together. They come together not to learn how to be loving to someone, but to grow in happiness. You want to see happiness and gladness in them and you want them to see and experience it in you. You want to help each other have more happiness and less fear. The only way to help create this is to be happy yourself and to do what you want. Don’t be unhappy about their unhappiness.
Problems and games set in after one gets unhappy either with themselves or you. They usually experience it as failing to love you and resent your desiring something that they are afraid of failing at. This fear of failing at being loving makes them more concerned with looking loving than being happy. They feel tested by you. They are quick to believe and imagine that they are hurting you by not giving or doing what they believe you want. They don’t realize that no matter what you may have wanted, you certainly didn’t want them to be unhappy.
The games begin if you believe that you have not been loving enough or that you can overcome their unhappiness by being more loving yourself. Then you try to be extra loving, understanding, forgiving, and eager to fix things to show how loving you are. That will turn them off more. You are now both afraid of being unloving. Now you are being loving in order to get them to love you. You feel you simply want them to be happy, but in fact, you are needing them to be happy so that they will show how loving you can be. You even hope to inspire them to be loving. You both want to achieve what is the cause of the problem, lovingness.
Real love is to be happy and to just want them to be happy. You make your choice. Do you want to be happy and love or do you want to be loving instead? The difference is a choice of intention. The behavior may be the same but the motivation is vastly different. Motivated by fear, you will merely be loving your lovingness.
A lover is someone with whom you don’t have to be loving in order to get what you want.
When your lover does not accept what you offer, just let yourself know that you do what you want. Do not be unhappy because it seems that you were wrong. Don’t demand that they take what you offer in order to be nice and loving toward you. Don’t demand acceptance. Don’t demand that they be happy. Do not test yourself to see if you are unloving or unhappy.
Unhappy loving is being nice when you don’t really feel like it and doing what you don’t want really want to do. You feel conflicted or split because it is obvious that sometimes unhappy people will want proof of your love. If you are more concerned with appearing loving, you will either do what they want without feeling like it, feeling resentful, or you will be turned off and refuse even if you really want to do it.
Being happy is something you can do for someone, even if they need it as proof of your love, but do it as a conscious choice. If you get unhappy about their unhappiness, your motivations will be unclear. You are always unhappy every time you hold to the belief that you should get love by being loving or that you should return love by feeling loving.
Do not be concerned if your lover is not loving. You can know you are happy and love if you are allowed to say yes or no freely and if your lover is allowed to say yes or no to your offers. You love and are happy if you allow another to say no and realize they do not have to accept your gift.
Our real desire is not to succeed or fail at being lovers or teachers or students or friends, but just to be happy. I do not fail you if you or I fail to be happy. You do not fail me if you or I are unhappy. I can be happy because I can be and want to be. You can be happy because you can be and want to be.

by Bruce Di Marsico, 1975
Edited by Debrah Di Marsico

The Sap Son

The Sap Son

Those other souls from the Underworld kept you too long
and look at how hard it is to breathe above water, suffocating
for swimming too close to the edge, Hold on!
I’m here still beside you to show you the way.

If you stay in place too long the trees will split
their branches open wide to contain your beauty
so that those women don’t fight for your attention
Love and Death fed you by their breasts, and see?

It was inevitable that your blood would spill
between your passion and your rage
during that time of year you were left alone
All the while, they were in the next room.

Beauty had a price now didn’t it?
And floating between the two worlds
drowning and floating and drowning and floating
all the while they keep looking on for you to return to them

In paintings since, they show you always suffering
the angst is what they want to remember
for beauty was not what they would relate to you by
and so they re-enact the suffering so well known to them

Take a cue from Pandora, my love
for when she opened her box, the entire world fell over
pieces of her reflected back what they couldn’t bare to see and
failed to hold onto, Hope.

Close the chest you just crawled out from Adonis.

FNA-April 2009

In Love Times Two

 

 

    

I have a confession to make: I’m in love with two different men at the same time. It happened right around the same time. I wasn’t even looking for love to happen particularly. I find the more you try and make it happen, the less likely it will. Not to say that you shouldn’t be proactive in finding your “soul mate” but that doesn’t always equate to posting as many online profiles on dating web sites as you can find. (A side service I’ve actually considered is helping guys write dynamic dating ads that will surely get the women to respond. I have read far too many that detract, not ATTRACT women to them. Email me if you need help guys..) What it does mean though is that you should be as proactive about living YOUR life to the fullest and maximizing your single life to stock up on all those great areas of your life that may slide once LOVE arrives at your door again. I’ve always enjoyed my single days to getting more things I enjoyed done: working, traveling, reading, cooking, hanging out with my girlfriends, and of course, writing. So it was in this precise mindset that I stumbled upon two men, connected to each other, at precisely the same exact time.

     My mother and three younger sisters are the hippest women I know. They’re the kind of women that are so effortlessly cool that people swarm around them for simply their “know-to” and “effortless dressing up.” If I had to “celebricize” the women in my life, I’d say my mother was Diane Keaton, and my sisters are Sienna Miller, Jennifer Aniston, and Kate Moss. They don’t even try to be cool, they ooze it. So when any of us have the habit of stating the words, “You GOTTA try this place..,” we listen. So just when I thought Schenectady was becoming the Pittsburgh of New York State in coolness, my mother and younger sister said, “Nooo, Farrrr–ahhhh, you have GOT to stop by the Schenectady’s Farmer’s Market!” I hit it the first week with my youngest sister who was about to land her own booth selling knitwear and handmade jewerly. (Check her stuff out: she’s my Muse and extremely talented) I walked around sampling the various homemade jams, produce, loose-spun teas and apple cider doughnuts. You can listen to live music and get a massage as well. I proceeded to do the very “uncool” thing you’d do in these sorts of hip environments and that is to crack out your laptop. I admit it: I’m a techno junkie. I pump myself up on white chocolate Lattes and burn through emails, research, and articles at lightning speed. I can get into my “Zone.” Precisely the kind of place which you’d think would make you the “least approachable” regarding the finding of love. I mean seriously here: was the man I was going to be spending the rest of my life with between tasting homemade pestos and raspberry jams and listening to folk music all before 11am?

      This is where I KNOW GOD has a sense of humor. He knew I was getting too smug in my productive singledom to let me rest up and be content, as is. I was actually contemplating adopting Cambodian children a la Angelina style. Or no! I could hand pick the genes of my future offspring via an in-vitro clinic in INDIA. Buy 100% hassle free brillance all for less than 5K in India. And for those of you who doubt I would have done it, you’re reading a blog by a woman who actually made her friends and family attend her “Horse Baby Shower” in Saratoga Springs last spring when she bought a thoroughbred and wanted the same exact treatment as those twenty somethings in the area who send out an average three baby showers before they turned thirty. I was delighted when people gift wrapped carrots when attending the shower. So I was perfectly ok and actually finding myself thinking I’d be one of those “French mistress chic” women who wore trench coats and bed head effortlessly. And of course, that’s when GOD decided to place at my very table the one country I left out in my United-Colors-of-Benetton-adventures-in-dating tour: QUEENS. I was hit hard by a Latin Lover. (affectionately now known to my closest posse in short as LL, and for who I will spot my first tattoo over) His eyes were like that of a Siberian tiger……….piercing fierce and Cape Cod grey. I had an appreciation for cinnamon skin after my three year relationship to the Indian version of Angelina Jolie to which he possesed the juiciest lips and tall, athletic, cinnamon-toned body this side of the ocean. Hey: he made me actually follow through with living in New Jersey. Need I say more? So, imagine my surprise when GOD decided to perfect the painting with a touch of tan, slightly grey hair, (gasp! My first OLDER lover! My sisters will throw me another shower called “She’s left the twenty-somethings behind!”) and the most amazing smile ever. Top that with the ability to dress like he’s stepped off an Italian film set and I was…………bitten. And I didn’t need to see the movie TWILIGHT either.

     Did I mention I actually attended the market that Sunday with a male friend who became so uncomfortable by the energy presented that morning that he opted to get up and leave? It was certainly undeniable to say the least……….so imagine my surprise that on another Sunday a few weeks later, I would run into another great man, and no less, with LL attached to my arm……We decided to stop by the library to rent some movies. The library was having a $1 book sale so we decided to browse. It was then that I spotted him around the Psychology section. Angelic and grabbing. It was Thomas Moore. His words were written on his sleeve: THE SOUL OF SEX. The book read like something I would have written personally had I thought of the brillant idea myself. And it goes down so nicely with a glass of pignot noir too. I think every devoted sacred sexuality student should go online and buy. Here’s a few link reviews on it:

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Sex-Thomas-Moore/dp/0553815261

     So while falling in love, I have been reading about the wonderful unfolding and unraveling of EROS that can occur when you succumb to love. And succumb was something I needed a bit of a refresher in. How come we seem to allow ourselves to be completely ruled daily by stress, anxiety, unknowingness and misery but yet we have a hard time allowing OURSELVES to enjoy the process of “falling in love” and even more important, allowing our friends and family to positively reinforce the event? This second part is something I am noticing was becoming more and more difficult for people to actually do: be HAPPY that you’re experiencing it. It’s as if the entire world is suspicious of it in that KGB-questioning-probing sort of way.

“Where were you last night?”

“Why didn’t you answer my texts last night?”

“What do you know about this guy really?”

And although many times in the past I willingly allowed myself to be hypnotized by their caution spell, thus placing my position in the “you must give a lot more time to see THAT side of me buddy” I ultimately decided to play out a different approach this time: to simply indulge myself guiltlessly and succinctly. Why must I make someone prove themself in order to make me feel good today? I could be dead tomorrow? How important is it for me to know what he was like with a girlfriend ten years ago, or how he keeps his apartment? And must I really “intellectualize to death” the unfolding of orgasms into bliss if I won’t settle in and succumb to the desire that I want it to happen in the first place?

     Moore was very understanding of the news when I announced I had to let him go. Our time together lasted no more than 48 hours when I rushed through every possible emotion one could muster over engaging conversations regarding sexuality throughout the ages. He re-ignited for me the fact that Aphrodite lives on in every women today, if she’ll simply put away her chores and to-do list long enough to notice. I was free to go and enjoy all that sexuality was suppose to offer: a release from the mundane into the surreal. It is in that place where Eros swallows Ego and allows bliss to shine through the body to which the entire world can notice that certain something different about you. I know that those closest to me notice LL’s effect on me. I tell them to watch how effortlessly cool it can be to fall in love….again.