My life responds to Tennessee: "We have not long to love..."

We Have Not Long to Love

By Tennessee Williams

We have not long to love.

Light does not stay.

The tender things are those

we fold away.

Coarse fabrics are the ones

for common wear.

In silence I have watched you

comb your hair.

Intimate the silence,

dim and warm.

I could but did not, reach

to touch your arm.

I could, but do not, break

that which is still.

(Almost the faintest whisper

would be shrill.)

So moments pass as though

they wished to stay.

We have not long to love.

A night. A day...

*I took this photograph a decade ago, and I am grateful I did, because it fills me with the awe of impermanence and the beauty of goodbyes.

On my bookshelf rest more than ten books on love. I'll write about them another time. Today I want to write about the felt sense of not having long to love. I feel it like a horizon at sunset. It is the mourning noted inside the apex of the bond. So this is my reflection on fleeting friendships, the love we carry, and the ways we are transformed by one another.

Finite affection and a vanishing field. Love felt through disappearance.

Faith that love exists beyond the falling away: an ephemeral devotion to relationship and belonging across and through a kaleidoscope of bonds over time. It's not exactly the fear of abandonment here. It is more existential. Not "will they leave," rather "nothing gold can stay."

The friends of my early adulthood who stood beside me this evening as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean no longer stand beside me. A decade later, I know the felt sense of holding someone dear while also sensing, ever so faintly, the future absence of their warmth and living into that absence. It is not fear. It is not clinging. It is the knowledge of a sun dipping below. It is the wisdom of the horizon. While love gathers and warms, it is already dispersing at the very moment it beautifully stuns.

Having experienced this emotional state of grief in the loss of friendships, I practice embracing the vanishing field.

"Light does not stay."

The temporal awareness that is braided in attachment and bonding becomes a key to belonging as an immanent field rather than a stable place, and reminds me love is experienced through spiralic time and not against it, in spite of it, or linear to it.

I came into the world through the sunrise of these connections, and grew into myself in them. In hindsight, it is poignant that this trip was the beginning of the disconnection in physical time space, and some of my first lessons of letting go in friendship. The way non-attachment and love without clinging to fixed form have woven throughout my life has taught me. We can overwork land, and we can overwork singular relationships. My bonds have shifted, decayed, rested and regenerated. After all this time, I think I can respond to what Tennessee is saying here...

Love is not located in one relationship, it is a field we all move through, a web we weave, and land we intentionally allow to lie fallow. We are all connected. Bonds end, but relationality will sustain us through the night and begin again at dawn. Love migrates like birds on the jet stream: leaving, returning, all in one sky.

Relational belonging outlives any tie and is the sky. And perhaps it is not that we have not long to love, rather that we have not long to love in any one configuration, one migration, one growing season.

"The tender things are those we fold away."

To love with this awareness is devotion without possession. It is what the Relational Cultural theory calls, "connection across the lifespan." The Buddhists call "impermanence," "non-attachment/clinging," and what the forest calls succession. In earth-based spiritual traditions and therapies this might look like perceiving love as part of the great cycles of birth, growth, decay, and renewal.

We have forever to love, Tennessee. Love moves through forms that do not last.

No bond is isolated; we are all immanently coming and going. Blanche's final line in "A Streetcar Named Desire" was "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." We are not self-sufficient. We survive through relationship. Often through the kindness of folks we have yet to call friends, we are caught and held in the ways we most need.

“All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

is Change.

God

is Change.”

―Octavia E. Butler

The two friends I was with on this trip didn’t know each other until the road from our chilly Minnesota winter to this California sunset. I remember the soft cream wool of the fisherman’s knit sweater I lent my friend on that trip. She loved it and never returned it. I remember the way my other friend soothed me through spontaneously made-up songs on her ukulele, for years and years.

I remember the way the three of us bonded by making confessions in the car, the sights of the United States flying by the windows. I remember that one of us was learning to drive, and that we almost ran out of gas in the middle of Oklahoma.

I remember that as I drifted from their lives, they stayed friends. I feel grateful to have introduced them and to have walked with each of them for a little while.

My experience with them changed me, and that mattering to each other, that self-changing, shimmering connection, and letting it go is the most real magic I know. My lesson has been to hold both ending and beginning, and to be stretched wide through the night by them. To trust in life to bring me into connections in the pulse of life that are in service of becoming and unbecoming, coming together and coming apart like the dawn and the dusk. So the magic here is the transformative power of ephemeral, attentive, mutually felt love.

The kind of love that exists fully in a short span of time, reshapes your inner life, and then persists in memory, gratitude, lessons and reverence.

Bonds may decay, yet they are part of the soil of self. I am brought to the web, the source, the mystery. The right-timing of me passing my best friend along to a new friend who could meet her needs better than I could at the time.

I realize I've tucked this tender memory away into the night and silences of our separation. "Intimate the silence, dim and warm. I could but did not, reach to touch your arm."

The ways I have changed, and been changed, by love are most beautiful at sunset, and have stuck with me at sunrise.

I'd love to hear the way this post resonates with you. Do you too have friendships which have set and taught you about how to rise?

Rewild your time. Steward your soul.

Warmly,

Nomi

Would you like to come outside and play with me?