Understanding the neuron in love
“There can be no love without justice”
- bell hooks
A deal with truth, fact of the body meets the fiction of the mind. A fictional reality built into existence by structured behaviors we attribute to ourselves and each other.
Knowledge is associated with light. The whitening of enlightening sets the stage for violence, trauma, and inequity. Making all of what we can see and know with certainty. In our bodily understanding of “others” we can only comprehend in terms of pain, harm, or risk for such.
Pain is not the only lens; healing is not the only direction for growth.
I’m learning this as someone whose twenties (and late teens) have been dedicated to healing from traumatic childhood experiences. Bringing light to what was once a mind, numb and drowning in darkness’ depths. Learning to balance light with the dark. Allowing new understandings to hold and comfort past fears.
Spending so much time in the dark takes its toll. In these recent years I can see how far I’ve come. My mind is calmer, content feels near. I can feel the softening of the relation between my thoughts and body/ bodily expression.
In this calm, however, I am in unknown territory. For so long, the dark was something that was hidden and had to be explored and now that it is more balanced and coming into light, the perspective is shifting.
No longer building up but out (or maybe simultaneously). Filled with fear, I’m realizing I don’t know how. I’ve become good at growing up in that way but now sharing externally gives new direction to my fear. The light is now the unfamiliar. The unknown.
Or is it just being known differently? Growing apart of love instead of towards it. Is that the difference?
Light and dark depends on positioning.
Shifting from a perspective guide by fear to that of love.
Where once the relation to light was hidden, obscured, and unrecognizable. Now the light, emitting from a deeper place is embraced and understood as a part of the dark
In this space of understanding, healing occurs, and now we are tasked to live and create from the liberation of unification
Healing from epistemological displacement, where separation is key.
A societal knowledge, structured by judgment and violence,
Meets a self-understanding in love that holds societies shadows and supports them in the light of the universe.
Once distanced by fear inducing binaries, we now know what stands between what is known and unknown, is where you let your eyes roam.
A Poem
How do I understand the neuron in love? The neuron as self.
The neuron as it simultaneously consists of and constantly comes into body.
To be a part of, but also the reason. To be
A kind of purposeful chaos, meaningful meandering
Evolution is beyond individual comprehension. Apprehension exists
Yet we know the steps to grow, it is internal and inherent.
Evolution is experiential and circumstantial.
Always right even when wrong. Not a moment unsung
Collective learning
Attuning and pruning
Hold yourself true so I can connect to you like I know how to.
The only thing I know to do
I come into being
Across time, space, distance
Joining, unifying across separation
I know to be singular is only to come into a greater whole again
A symbol and representation of how as individuals we function relationally and this brings forth our rationality. Our cognitive ability to be aware of how we come into reality.
A communal growth and harmonized oneness that helps us to attend, divert, plan, and take action
Towards potential for an unrecognizable more, a more beyond comprehension because it comprises of it all
The many sizes of love as it is transformed across dimensions until it is recognizable again. Felt and experienced at each and every infinite level.
A cellular body, looking for recognition
A neuronal embodying of love.
Across gap junctions. A chemical answer to an inter dimensional call.
We learn how molecules so small can transcend into action and creation
The neuron says show me how we connect, how I influence you. You, me, and our environment interdependently. We are a collective we you see.
My deepest insides and internal state of being intricately linked to and supported into being by those who come before and after me.
Does love feel like an action potential?
A spark, a shift in being that cannot be ignored and demands a response.
A call of action
Unifying reactions of excitement and stillness as one.
Inhibition understands its place tucked amongst excitement.
Balance is home. Stable in rhythmicity.
Some calls are meant to ebb and flow.
Like a river meeting structure, creating a mountainous cove
Do neurons know grief?
As they loose connection, when calls go unanswered
Haunted by periods of depression, driven forward by a potential for an initiation into something new. Focusing on the response presently offered.
How can I be in tune with those in tune with me?
Am I listening for responses I am no longer able to hear and thus no longer for me?
The neuron to me, as me, a story of love. Self-love that comes into being via collective recognition. Driven by an inherent communal pulse, a knowing of where to go, how to be, love and connect according to what feels right internally.
The neuron is a story of balance between individuals and collective. The strive towards harmony and unity across separation.
I see the neuron as an agent of love. An entity that listens, understands, grows and supports the growth of other entities.
In its existence and connections, we learn lessons of unconditional love. Love that tells us how it is, love that gives us space to tell it how we know and want it be.
That allows and is not attached to outcome only to learning. Committed to growing.
Calling and responding.
Lessons of resilience, self-sacrifice, empowerment, and mass organization. Lessons on life from how the micro comes into the macro to only influence the micro again.
A continual mirroring and building of self, thus creating understanding
Just because love is not seen does not mean it is not there.
To understand the microscopic in love, as love, opens us to a world of power previously obscured and unrecognizable.
A language once unheard becomes one that is felt, and automatically makes sense.
A love that brings us into being, exceeding all reasoning
But in love feeling is knowing. In love the feeling is light
To understand the neuron from a different perspective, I lead with feeling. A shared and common language. One we speak fluently. That of love and life is one that comes naturally.
In love, as life, we come face to face with our truth, our absurdity.
How we stand on the cusp of just being able to grasp it all, yet still unable to see. How do you grasp what you see? With your mind, intellectually. How do we grasp with what we cannot see? With feeling, emotionality.
How do we hold both equally for greater information on how to be? How to listen intimately and intensely to the reservoir of song meant for our feet.
The neuron teaches me a kind of self-love that says you are small, but your role in being is important. Your conditions, feelings of internality are influential and there’s a need to communicate that. Just because it is not easily defined or regularly understood does not mean there is not a place and function for it.
More importantly it speaks to how what we feel and know about ourselves is a part of this greater call for life.
Although what is known is not seen, we have power in our ability to bring this feeling into reality. To recognize a call deep within and birth that into existence.
Emergent from darkness, an internal power with a memory of home seeks externality
Thus, actualizing this internal power.
In these bodies we are divinity embodied and undefined.
Some conditions for recognition exist outside of what can be deduced from reason.
Logic and rational thought are modern additions to this ancient life.
Just because what we know is not seen, does not mean its power is out of reach.
Only that it needs to be engaged with differently, from another directionality.
Embraced as one, I allow the light that emerges from the dark to guide me into new understandings.
The realness of fiction and falsehood of reality are one in the same
But now I ask, how will I act knowing there is a new way to play the game?