Disrobing

You say you want to know the beloved but you don't lift the filters that keep you from seeing. How can you know what another sees, feels, thinks, desires without dropping, for a moment, the screens and lenses through which you define the world? You see what your pain has made to be real and true, not what is actually there. You must learn to listen to the story the other tells, to crawl into it, embrace it as dearly as you embrace your own, sleep with it, touch its cheek in the deepest night. You must stand naked in her gaze. You must imagine to the point that you feel what the beloved feels, taste the sweet or bitter truth that she carries. Then you might begin to know, to take to heart an alien land you have never before visited. If you can do this, your boundaries may begin to crack open, like an egg, and you will flow into a yet larger horizon, having lost what you thought was the end, entering the pain of beginning again.