A little love

Sometimes it’s blinding, like on a clear, cold winter day when you look out onto a field of pure, white snow. You throw your arms open and wish you could sprint and never get tired, or that you could climb or shovel or dig or ski or snowshoe or fly. You succumb your body to gravity and the snow encloses you, slides icily down your back and numbs your wrists in between your sleeves and your mittens. And it’s perfect, that moment, because there’s nothing else in the world but you and the snow, and you love it, you love absolutely everything about it. For that instant your mind blurs into the snow and merged, you reach perfection. You take off your jacket because it insulates you too much from the snow…you shiver and let the chill run through you, you embrace the cold and laugh as a snowball bites into your cheek.
Sometimes it’s blinding like the snow, this love for humanity. Because you can’t concentrate on anything except how you love people so much you just want to give them a hug and listen to their stories and watch them be fascinated by physics or Mozart or Shakespeare. You watch them work all summer in a snack bar to pay for their son’s trip to Mexico with his girlfriend, and help them remember to pick up the hot dog buns on their way home from church, and you try to explain that you don’t think you’re better than them, that you just have so many thoughts going on in your head that they don’t want to understand, how can they expect you to be interested in what kind of paper towels work best? And you’re so angry that they don’t care about the rest of the world the way you do and that they worship the American flag as if it were a beautiful savior and it’s blasphemous to say I like Swiss knives better than American knives but somehow that just makes you love them more because they don’t know how it feels to have the world on their shoulders and you don’t know how it feels to love a son so much that you’d work all summer just so he can see Mexico.

Sometimes it’s torture, like in What Dreams May Come when he goes to hell to get his wife and all he wants is to experience what she is experiencing, because he needs to be able to say “I understand and I love you.” Like when their mind only sees work and their body only feels tired and you can't comprehend the pain because bread has never been God for you. Or when their nine year old eyes stare at you from a national geographic and their nine year old hands hold a rifle and their nine year old feet run from a raped childhood and you can't even cry because you love them but there are thousands of them and when you were nine you got stuck in a tree and had to be rescued by a best friend's dad. Or when they're serving life for knifing a kid in a fight and you can blame it on the ghetto or the system but they didn't have to pull the knife and they're not sorry for what they did and you want to forgive them but the kid was your friend's brother and someone should have loved the convict earlier but now the kid is dead. Or when they decide to go to war and they don't tell the truth and the protestors mean nothing and the dead children mean nothing and the trapped civilians mean nothing and the ruined lives mean nothing and they go to their ranch for vacation but you've never flown in your own jet or had lobbyists breathing down your back or fought against 1/4 of the country who thinks your IQ is embarrassing. Or when they enlist and are shipped to fight in that war but don't see a day of combat and when the chance comes all they want is to kill and you want them to be strong and loving but you've never been the target of a sniper's gun.

But always it's perfect, because it's all we have that connects us and it's all we are when our agendas are gone and our walls are torn down;
Always it's right, because without it we can only be alone and we are even less than what we were when we were born because even as babies someone held us;
Always it's just, because what we deserve is to be loved and to love and Always it's what makes us human.