Your Love Is A Metaphor.

It is possible that the version of you that I see doesn't exist. I exalt you. To my eyes, you are practically ethereal, there is no creature like you. I could make a list of things about you that endear you to me, but it's not about that, it's about how you make me feel. It is about the realm of emotion you enable my heart to access, in that you are merely a catalyst, for my union with my soul. I think it was Anais Nin who once wrote that the mystic and the poet are similar beings, except that the mystic aims at union with God and the poet at union with oneself. I thought I agreed with her, but in loving you, I found, these paths all lead to the same place. I used to wonder why all poets seemed to follow the same path. They all start with writing about oneself, then the world, then love and eventually devotion. It was that last part that I couldn't fathom, how does one go from exploring the depths of the soul to worship?

I think I get it now.

God is a metaphor. You are my path to that metaphor. I used to think, perhaps because of my politics and social beliefs, that the extent of God was the enforcement of morality and I want nothing with that world. It is not for me. Nor do I want to believe in an entity that may or may not exist, may or may not be benevolent, may or may not have any control, may or may not matter. I think god is conflated so completely with organised religion, that I am afraid of even venturing in that direction, but I cannot close my eyes when art leads me to God. In this version, god is love and the practise of love is prayer. It's not so simple to explain, perhaps it's not so difficult either and even if I do get it wrong, it seems the type of venial sin that could be forgiven because it was committed by a yearning heart. You are not god to me, you are the entity that enables me to access god, you are the channel through which I learnt to believe in emotion that is bigger than me. In sentiment that exists for no reason but to reinforce our own humanity to ourselves. My heart wasn't enough for the amount of love I wanted to give you so I had to harvest the hearts and souls of other creatures to show you what I felt, and in that I broke the chain of resistance between my soul and my heart. In loving you, I had to teach myself love.

You expose me.

I hide in my writing. I hide because as interesting as I may seem on paper, that is the only version of me that is palatable to most people. You know those words? Strange. Intense. Weird. Those words sound like fun descriptors when you are young, you reclaim them and you make them your identity, but sit inside the cloak of intensity for a while, when it is sewn into your skin and you cannot change, I promise you, no one will want to talk to you. If I said these words to you over dinner at a restaurant or as we chatted while we waited for the bus, which I undoubtedly would if I am allowed to steer any conversation, you would look at me like I was crazy. Every single thing I write sounds like bullshit when it's spoken in personal conversation, but I can't help it, it is who I am. It's not something I am doing to people. Yet I know it is mostly unwelcome so I hide in my writing where it is acceptable, but you expose me. I cannot hide from you and in being completely myself with you, even when it meant being uncomfortable and violently human and emotional about things which are disallowed sentiment in this words of philistines, I am completely myself with you.

That is how you access the house of God, right? Stripped? You strip me to a lack of shame and I don't care anymore. I can be naked in my love for every being, every creature, I can show my heart to anyone, I can give it entirely to every person, every puppy, every leaf on a tree and they can all trample over it as well. I can see that the need to protect yourself from the hurt of the world is unnecessary. I can walk with my heart stretched all over my skin and it's not scary. I can see now that it is futile to fear hurt. It is needless. It isn't even self-preservation, it is self-deprivation because in its most natural state, the heart wants to love and the pain we all fear that makes us deny that to our hearts, that pain isn't even a hurdle to it. That pain is part of love. In loving you, I found an endless repository of love. In the practise of that love I found the meaning of prayer. It's not empty promises aimed at a faceless deity, it's acts of love unto everything in the world.

There is a song I have been listening to repeatedly, in which the singer asks,

'*Should I love or should I pray? It doesn't matter. They are the same thing.*

I get that now. I love you and so I found god. God is a metaphor and in it lies my soul. The mystic and the poet are the same person and the only true union is with one's own soul. Yet the soul is an unknowable entity, it doesn't exist in the body or anywhere in the world, so maybe your soul and my soul are the same thing, maybe all the soul is, is humanity. Whether in alliterative verses or worship maybe we are all led, eventually, to humanity.

You are my path to my humanity.

It's a lot to carry so I give you the promise of my delusion. In my love for you I am delusional, the version of you I see probably doesn't exist. I exalt you, but I also exonerate you from carrying that. You can leave me to my literary devices and I will craft you, my muse, from inside the humanity to which you have brought me, and you may continue to exist, unperturbed, still of this world.