Love letter

Dear friend,

In The little book on the human shadow, William Bly writes that we spend the first 25 years of our lives putting the parts of ourselves that we cannot accept into a bag that we drag around with us everywhere we go, and then we spend the rest of our lives working to take all those parts back out again.

Another way of looking at it is that we spend our lives building walls that shield us from the glaring light of true friendship, while simultaneously working to tear down those walls. It is as if we each build a little garden for ourselves, separated from our friends’ gardens by walls of varying heights and thicknesses. As we hear the loving voices of our friends so close by yet so inaccessible, we cast ourselves around our garden in a rage, hoping to catch a glimpse of life on the other side of our walls.

And sometimes, we do catch such a glimpse.

The question then is what to do. You and I have, by fate or fortuitous accident, torn down a little of the wall that separates us. We have shared a little of ourselves with each other. We have caught a glimpse of life in the other’s beautiful lonely garden. We have become friends. What should we do about this?

We could of course ignore the fact, do nothing, continue our lives unchanged, casting ourselves about our gardens alone, attempting to knock down more walls alone.

Or we could cling to this one connection, pinning all our hopes and fears on this one person that we have glimpsed, and thereby erect an even larger and more dissatisfying wall around a two-person garden.

But as you know well, these lead only to more walls.

I propose that we join forces in friendship, and turn this powerful connection against all the walls that imprison us, neither ignoring the power of the connection that has been gifted to us, nor clinging to it. This, in my understanding, is true friendship, and it seems to me that we ought to wield it confidently, lovingly, and uncompromisingly, for the walls that imprison us are high and strong, and the forces that maintain them are powerful.

As we pick away at the walls surrounding our garden, we encounter and exchange greetings with others. Sometimes we break a large enough hole in a wall that we are able to cross into another garden, and live there for as long as we have the courage to do so. But if we ultimately retreat back to our own garden to continue working alone with pick and shovel, we will not get far. In zen they say that you cannot measure the depth of the ocean with a bucket, nor the circumference of the earth with an inchworm. In the same way, we cannot break down our walls by working alone.

The way forward is to join forces with the true friends we meet on the other side of our walls; to open ourselves completely and uncompromisingly to this love; to face this love with such total integrity that it grows until it threatens to destroy everything we care about, and then to go further and let it in fact destroy everything that we care about; to come to such steadfast stillness that this love ripples outwards like an unstoppable ocean, cleaving all the walls of the world into tiny pieces and leaving all living beings blinking in happy bewilderment at a world without walls.

But let us not get lost in the grandiose. You and I, my friend, have shared in love. We have shared our stories. We have shared our presence. Yes, of course we have each shared intimacy with others in the past and present, and yet this particular connection is unlike any other. Let us not turn away from it. Let us not turn inwards around it. Let us instead hold hands in true friendship, turn together in defiance of the world’s walls, open our hearts completely, and end all life as we know it.

In friendship,

Kōshin