Disbelieving Scarcity


She is just as needy as I am. She is just as hungry as I am. She is just as helpless as I am. So, she’s my kitten. That’s that.

She’s also the person I used to be. She lives with excitement in her eyes.

She’s also everyone I can’t love because they are too much for me. She smothers me. She’s needy. She needs everything from me at all hours of the day. She knows no boundaries. And should she? She’s a baby. She sees no separation yet between herself and me.

I can’t accept people like that. It’s very hard for me to extend compassion and patience to those who don’t allow me my independence. Very hard for me to care for someone who smothers.

And yet, I’m her mother. We make it, day by day.

It’s a spiritual exercise for me in not killing the things that make me angry. Not pushing away the things that are needy toward me. Not choosing when to give love and when to withhold it.

It is therapy to take care of something so helpless when you’re helpless yourself. It is therapy to hold someone else’s questions in the empty hands of your own questioning. It is therapy to practice loving without condition when I don’t know what love is anymore.

There’s fulfillment in loving another living being. It’s a way of being alive and being full and real. There’s always goodness in loving, there’s always goodness in trusting. I really believe that.

 And I believe we can love from our emptiness. We only have to accept what is real, no matter how broken and horrific reality is. We don't have to have anything special to offer after that. 

 Love requires only our honesty, acceptance of what is, and the choice to gaze at the trueness of another with open eyes. "The light in me recognizes the light in you." Not that I am anything particularly important, but that I'm a vessel of light, and you are too. I think that's the place love stems from.

 I just know that the times I have felt the most empty, the most structurally unsound, the most lost and without purpose, have been the times I've been able to love not on my own terms. Because I realize if we live in a world of scarcity, I've already lost what little I hoarded for myself, and have no need to protect anything anymore.

 That's why I can say love is not a zero-sum game. Giving it to you will not take it from me. Because when I lose love, I find it's still here for me to give. Out of nothing. In fact I have the capacity to love a pet I never would've glanced at before. That's the powerful thing about love. 

 And it makes me really believe it could be the most foundational thing in life.

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