We are a gregarious species. People need to love and be loved. A steady diet of solitude starves the soul. Yet we criticize, tease, attack, defend, and separate ourselves from each other in myriad ways. We crave intimacy and fear it. We’re taught that safety lies in defense. But defense strangles love.
My life is a journey… an adventure along the path of love. Looking back, it is as if I left home like a churlish boy who packs his favourite shirt and comic into a kerchief, ties it to a stick, throws it over his shoulder and wanders off to seek … to seek Heaven knows what. Certainly at the time I could not have into words that my journey has been to seek the gardens of love.
Along the way, unprepared as I was, thorns tore at the flesh of my heart, spears and flames of fear have scarred it. And on this journey I have met so many walking wounded. Now I see the wounds from these past skirmishes as badges of courage. “Better to have loved and lost,” goes the saying, “than never to have loved at all.” And yet wouldn’t it have been a more fruitful voyage if I’d been prepared with the tools and equipment to be vulnerable to the beauty of the flowers of love I met along the way… and still stay safe?
More recently, say in the last 30 years, I’ve been picking up such tools: communication skills, ways to express anger without endangering others, ways to accept responsibility and to leave others to theirs. And so many more.
For seven years I had a column in our local newspaper. There was no restriction of topic, so I wrote about anything I wished. By and large, however, my intention was to write about intimacy, or to be intimate. My assumption was that others like me want more intimacy in their lives and would love to know how. And so I wrote mostly about my own observations, struggles and adventures in intimacy... and called the column “Heart To Heart”.
I was allotted 500 words or less. I found the process stimulating; and the limitation forced me to hone my writing skills: economy of sentence, economy of thought, economy of message.
It was fun. And... it took several hours out of my week to compose a page. So after seven years I felt I’d done enough; there were other demands on my time.
When the column went silent, several fans emerged from the woodwork to express their disappointment, and so I resolve to republish some of them here. Perhaps they will attract donations.