A wandering heart

Krysta was teasing me, though not as much as I tease myself, for what I referred to as my wandering heart. I have a tendency to become enamored. I see wit and charm and a clever smile and, well, I see it. Krysta has recently accepted a maxim that "love is pain," an equation that has set her own heart at ease. Love, I suppose, has treated her with no great gentility. She loves no less than I do. She seems to approach the day with love, to send it out in lolling waves. Often it comes back her way, but sometimes with greater turbulence than desired.

I do not think of love as pain, except in the way that love can develop as attachment, and like any "good" Buddhist, I understand that attachment eventually produces suffering. (Though I like to reflect on "attachment to attachment" as just as prone to producing suffering as more obvious forms of attachment.) Krysta's radiating love is reinforced, even encouraged by her new understanding of "love is pain." Earlier tonight she did something between chiding and cautioning me because of my delight in amorous sentiments. To her, "love is pain" and therefore these little affections are just a road to suffering, that even the company of such compatriots will become painful. I don't find this to be true.

A wandering heart, that's what it is. I am happy to love, to receive a sharp-toothed smile and lend out music, literature, film. I let my love follow rivulets--the shores of which are marked with lends and gifts--out into the world and appreciate where they might come back and where they might go on to intersperse with others. I have taken to thinking of myself as a menace of sorts, letting these streams out into the world that might precipitate unpleasant circumstances. These little reflective condescensions, I suppose, are intended to keep me in check but don't really change much of anything. Rather than a maxim, I temper myself. I have lost more than one book and more than one DVD to a romantically inclined favor, and what scars do I have to show for it? My scars are more to do with bike accidents than misguided affection.

In senior year I was told by more than one friend that our place was the most comforting, welcoming place to be. It felt increasingly like a loving place, an open and warm and generous place. Gift-giving--lends and favors I group in with gifts, though they are temporally bound--is about creating a generous environment, a hearth around which wandering hearts might warm themselves, recuperate, reflect. I may be making myself into a menace, an affection fiend, but it is a posture that makes sense to me. Loving is more about giving, about being, about virtue and character to me than it is about physicality and gazing through darkness at one another.

In "Buddhism and Civil Rights," David Chappell (not the other Chappelle) writes, " Compassion is often considered an emotion in the West, but in Buddhist tradition it is presented as an insight: once we have seen that we are related to others, that we are the same kind, we develop a sense of kinship and kindness becomes an expression of this insight in action." I have been talking about love, but this sense of compassion makes a good deal of sense to me with regards to love. Whether that love is romantic, amicable, familial, or more general (Civic or global love? That sounds too vague to my ears.), we end up with a giving out, a mindset or lens out onto the world that ultimately shapes how others perceive the original viewer. I look out with love, looking for love, sending out love; my heart wanders in the world and I am happy enough to learn what comes following it back to me.