Finding It
This is a guest post from Pas de Deux series contributor Noël Rozny
We sneak up on it in the dead of night, with our guns cocked and loaded.
Love, that elusive beast.
We try to hunt it down, but it escapes us. It has become endangered – teetering on the verge of extinction, in this wasteland of romantic comedies, divorce, and the casual hook up. We’ve forgotten how to find it, so we look for it in all the wrong places: underneath the bottom of beer bottles, stuck to the back of a designer label, tucked in the furthest corner of our wallet. We hunt and hunt and hunt and the harder we do, the more intangible love becomes.
We try to grab it and hold on, but we can’t.
How can we? It’s not a bucket but a web: silver, diaphanous strands connecting the elements of our lives: who we are, our inner genius, strung into our family who gave us our very DNA, wrapped into our purpose for being in the world that wakes us up in the morning, tied into the one who fills in our gaps and levels out the rough edges.
Love is not one concrete object that you can see or touch or compartmentalize, but many delicate things woven together to become like mesh. Impenetrable.
But we forget this.
We try so hard to grab it that the threads slip through our fingers. With our inept fumbling and reaching, we put too much pressure on one strand, causing the web to break.
We have forgotten to listen to our instincts, because the distant rumble of the media and hallmark holidays and empty sentiments drowns them out.
We have forgotten to be gentle, to be patient.
We have forgotten how to sit quietly in the clearing and wait for love to show itself. For a mist of dew to illuminate the web, showing first one strand, and then the next. Then how all the strands come perfectly together, holding one another in place.
We have forgotten that we are born knowing how to find love.
All we need to do is put our ear to the ground and listen.
Photo Credit: Creative Commons Search – Neal Fowler
Pas de Deux Contributor – Noël Rozny
Noël Rozny is a web editor and content manager who loves hot yoga, the written word, and all things social media. By day, she writes and edits the career and education blog, mypathfinder. By night, she works on freelance projects and her blog, frenchchristmas. Find her on Twitter @noelrozny.
Song: All Is Full Of Love – Bjork
Did you know I have a private newsletter that goes out ONLY to subscribers? It offers stories of travel adventures, writing brilliance, links to great content around the internet and other crazy shaningans.
