To Love by Halves

I don’t know how

To love by halves and measures,

To share myself in parts and pieces,

To give you only the parts of myself that you will find acceptable,

To hide the things that make me me beyond your reasoned ken,

I’ve never been able to keep myself from pouring out into each person

The total beautiful ecstasy of being who I am

And in like turn,

How can I receive only parts of you?

How can I take the Love you’re offering me

Without the terror that comes with some of the choices you make?

Or how could I reject you because I think what you’re doing is “wrong” or “sinful” or “not enough,”

Even in my most religious days, I could not in my heart pretend we weren’t One,

Though I thought it was possible to hate a part of you while loving another,

And yet I never knew how to reject you in part and love you in part,

And so I took you as whole whether or not I liked it

But oh, I’ve learned through trials and traumas

That sometimes I have to pull away and hide myself from prying eyes,

Not in shame, for I have learned to love all of who I am,

But out of respect for the relationship that would end

If you decided to hate the sin and not the sinner,

To cut me into parts and pieces and choose only a part of me to accept, relate with, and love,

For I am whole now, and what Yahweh has joined together let no man tear asunder

What God has joined together, let no man tear asunder…

And yet,

I cannot help but wonder if it might be healthier to learn to love by halves,

To be satisfied with superficialities,

And trust with trivialities,

To joke about the weather and lament at sporting losses,

To connect in commonalities,

Friendships that only happen at certain moments and certain places

Where we engage in activities based on something we both enjoy doing,

But outside of that, we do not talk at all,

And if I ever needed help,

I could not call or reach out and expect any reciprocation

They say that it’s not common to go deep,

That most of us have only one or two people with whom we share our hearts,

And it’s not like I want to spend all day every day

In the depths of our Beings,

But I wonder if it should be this way,

Or if it is only this way because everyone else has learned already

What I am learning now…

Not everyone can be trusted with everything,

Not everyone will value the whole,

Will have the capacity for the greater knowing

Will desire the deeper things,

And sometimes when you go beyond their comfort zones,

They will, mob-like, attack with torches and pitchforks,

And so it’s better to lock your heart behind great stone walls

And wait for the three or four who are brave enough to cross the moat

And climb to the top of the tower to meet the royalty that awaits within

It never even occurred to me before to love by halves,

That some people might not need to know everything about me,

Might not want to share in the beauty of what I see,

I thought that those who hurt and rejected me were the strange ones,

And that someday I’d find my people who were able to see more,

But now I think that maybe I’m the odd one,

Maybe I should learn to love by halves and measures, parts and pieces,

And maybe that will be satisfying to some,

Maybe for that relationship, that will be enough

Or maybe I’ll hide here safely in my tower,

And secretly love completely anyway

Sending out energies and frequencies that rearrange the whole cosmos

And maybe open up some eyes to see greater depths

And meet me there in the darkest places

To love in new and greater ways,

Maybe I’ll learn a new way to love…