the Opposite Of Pretending (OOP!)

message and a bottle

Mar 28, 2024

dear friends, fans, family, fellow folks, friends again, friends forever,

i’m grateful that you’re here!
thank you for being here and for being you, the you that is here.
and now, for a quick fun thing my grandmother said once, followed by a longer piece that i wrote in the aftermath of my grandmother dying in march 2020, followed by a list of places i’ll be performing soon which have nothing to do with my grandmother except that without her, i wouldn’t exist to perform anywhere!

first, the quick fun thing my grandma iris said, about this photo i shared to social media some years ago:

MY CAPTION:
”standing in nature, wearing nature on my shirt, holding nature in a bottle, all being nature.”

MY GRANDMA’S COMMENT:
“Nice place. Shirt and you, OK too.”

boom!

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next, here is a message that i sent to a good friend a few years back, a little while after my grandma iris died. my friend and i had been talking about caring for our loved ones and the concept of “pretending” and i had wanted to share a little more about it. i recently revisited this piece and found meaning and enjoyment in it and thought others might like to receive as well. i shared it once before here only for paying subscribers, and now here it is for all! thanks for receiving. please enjoy as desired and possible! here we go!

Good day, my friend.
Hello.
How are you?
I love you.

Thanks for reaching out this morning. I hope your work day is going well.

I was just thinking more about the concept of "pretending," and how we all do it to some extent, potentially, in conversations with loved ones or anyone really. And I just want to reformulate it in this way:

Sometimes a loved one will tell us a story, or we will tell a loved one a story, about our day, about a person that the other person doesn't know, about a topic that isn't our main topic of interest, about something, whatever it is, and we listen. And we listen with care, because we love the person. In a way, I think that that is the Opposite of pretending.

Like, when I've been on the phone with my grandmother, and she has said "I'm just happy to hear your voice," my joke has always been, "but she doesn't care about the specific things that I'm saying." And that may be true in a way. She loves ME. (Even though she has died, I speak of her love in the present tense due to love's eternal nature.) So it doesn't matter WHAT I'm saying. And to her, just hearing my voice for a minute or two each week was enough, sometimes more than enough. For her.

I would say that for you and me, our relationships with our loved ones often have more depth, more than simply listening to the sound of their voices. But at the root, there is a sameness. The root is care, of love for the person. That is why we listen, why we WANT to listen, why we are there and want to be there. Why we offer our time and attention and care, because we have it. And they do it for us.

(And also of course, the reason that we choose people to be with in friendship or in relationship, the reason people become our chosen family, platonic, romantic, whatever it is, the reason often includes REASONS. We like talking to them about certain things. We have things in common. We are on the same page about enough things, or on the same page enough about things. Some combination of quality and/or quantity.)

You love X, and she loves you. As your time machine friend, I am here to offer all the memories I have of how wonderful things are between you, certainly when they are at their best, or when they are at their average, their normal.

And so I offer this reframing of "pretending," to say that that's not what any of us are doing. You. X. Me. Rini. We listen to one another because we care. Because often we care actively about the same things, the same topics of import, the same life priorities, the ways we live, the ways we choose to live and eat and art and work and care for others. And always, we care passively as well. We care for our loved ones and we care for ourselves.

And like I offered earlier, I know in my relationship, sometimes our tanks run low. On food, on sleep, on time alone. On capacity to care for ourselves. Rini has shared with me, and I'm sure I've shared with you, the concept that we are always either offering love or calling for it (from A Course In Miracles). Or some combination. Everything in life is either a call for love or an offering of love. Sometimes in a relationship we are both calling for it at the same time. And that offers a challenge in those moments. In the past day, it seems that X's tank ran low. She was offering love with her presence, until a point where she realized that she needed to call for love, for space, so she could replenish her tank. So she could care for herself, and recharge, and then be capable of being there with you, in ways that are real, and are always real. Love is the only real thing, it's been said. By me, right now. At least.

So. I hope your work day is going well. I hope this finds you well, and helps, or at least doesn't hurt. I love you. I'm here for you. I'm glad that you called, for love. Or texted. In today's age, everything is either an offering of love, a call for love, or more likely a text for love. Thank you for texting, my friend. I'm glad we got to talk, I'm glad you got to share all that you did, I'm here for whenever you'd like to chat more, about this and/or of course other things. (Or... Only this, forever!)

I love you, friendbrother.

finally, or pre-finally, here are some questions for YOU:

1) how are you doing? how have you been? what is new and good?
2) how do you feel about nature?
3) how do you feel about grandmothers? or MY grandmother?
4) how do you feel about pretending?
5) how are you doing NOW?

Arty Har-Hars

the Opposite Of Pretending (OOP!)

message and a bottle

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