Love’s Confusing Joy

They say to write about the joy.

Rumi, especially, says that life is meant for “love’s confusing joy.” When I re-read, for the thousandth time, his words written back in the twelfth century, last night, in my own bed, these 760 years later, they resonated in a new way:

“If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee.
If you want the unseen world you are not living with your truth.
Both wishes are foolish, but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is loves confusing joy.”

I saw my first Christmas ad today, and it made me want to scream and cry – not out of joy at all, but out of deep loneliness and something else I cannot quite place. That first verse about wanting what visible reality can give – it’s that same emotion of commercialized emptiness. Of missing the point entirely.

Craving for the unseen world is a permeating condition for those walking the spiritual path, isn’t it? We want to be, as Rumi would write, “in the Presence.” We want to be interdimensional beings of light and love, unaffected by the “lower vibrational energies” of emotional discourse and able to “transcend” the suffering of the human condition … but we are not here to transcend. We are here to experience.

We have come to be fully human, on purpose. We have a soul contract to expand the consciousness of the Universe – not to float around in idle joy, but to swirl upon the waves and rivulets of All that Is.

To wish for only that which we can manifest is as foolish as wishing to transcend, Rumi wrote.

What we really want is love’s confusing joy.

Confusing. Confusing because Christmas is marketed joy and on the heels of the darkest night; confusing because love is equally ferocious when gripping us or letting us fall.

Confusing because, Rumi writes in a different piece,

“The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.”

I have wondered lately about the Laws of the Universe. We simultaneously believe in karma, that what we put out will come back to us, and in a system of balance – nothing created or destroyed, but equally potent in all directions. We know the prophecy of the wounded healer, that those with great pain are best able to facilitate great healing.

In my darkest days, I assure myself that my capacity to withstand the dark is a counterpoint to the bright joy that I am destined to hold. Or, the depths of my loneliness and the lengths of time and space it occupies is a gravitational vacuum calling in massive connection, making space for everlasting companionship.

Devastation is a doorway to love* – and love is confusing. But we are promised that it is also joyous. And we want it more than anything.

*A note on “love,” not from Rumi but from me, Brittany:

I write a lot about love. While it is true that I am a “hopeless romantic,” in search of a fiftieth wedding anniversary – a Great Love, a True Partner, a One and Only – it is equally true that I am driven by love in its purest, most applicable sense.

I was born into a loveless situation, orphaned, abused – you know these stories already. My whole life, I have been seeking for love: for family, for a joyous noise that drowns out the echo chamber of silence that lives like a cave inside my head, keeping safe my abandoned inner child.

There is an empty space inside our hearts for community – to share our daily lives, our triumphs and struggles, rituals and rests, with a tribe that no longer exists. I read somewhere that a child emotionally needs 5-6 adults to “raise them,” and yet many of us are living in a vacuum of less (one, in my case).

Where the Internet has allowed us to build imaginary social bridges to span great distances of time and space in a sense of “connection” with each other, it has robbed us of deep, daily, involved friendships. Robbed us of loyalty in favor of FOMO and blocking, swiping and matching, friending and lurking.

Where our love of humanity should be, our political affiliations have taken up residence. Where a longer table should be built, we have walls and bombs, guns and laws. Where freedom should allow us to love as we wilt, we have hatred for the expressions thereof. We are taught to judge, to pick a side, to post some kind of “I SUPPORT ____” slogan and to “set boundaries” rather than to listen, to hear, to reach out and touch, to stop fucking yelling stuff and just hug somebody.

So yes. Love is confusing in that it is inaccessible at scale and largely distorted into a disfigured fools gold iconography of what it was always meant to be. When we hear “love,” we think of a romance novel cover. An engagement photo shoot. An old couple on a park bench. Not a world of children holding hands. Not mothers, grandmothers, and daughters sitting by a fire together in community. Not men championing each other, lifting the sails, charting by the stars. We think about vampires and teenagers and celebrities . . . and we are confused by this because it is very much “what visible reality can give,” and we are unknowingly employed by this confusion – when what we really want is deep abiding joy and the secure familiarity of tribal love to hold us in our times of devastation.