eye contact is love

Hey, reader.  How are you doing?  I’m going to go out on a limb and say something that may be vexing: Eye contact is love.

I’m saying that because eye contact is on my mind.  A lot of my homies are neurodivergent.  Eye contact can be hard, I admit.

But mostly I crave it.  Just I can be intimidated because in my worldview, eye contact is love.  I’m not necessarily ready to love everybody right now, or at the precise moment it’s eye contact time.  Sometimes I can’t force myself to do that.

Not because I don’t want it– no indeed.  Because I want it more than anything in the world.

story

My dear one was telling me about work.  They mentioned they’d been misunderstood with body language, so they needed to watch it.  Eye contact is a way of engaging people implying a capacity that does not exist.

“So I might need to stop making eye contact,” my dear one said.

I felt a strong objection inside.

“Sometimes eye contact can be a way to acknowledge someone’s humanness,” I said.  “So even if it causes an upset response, it might be good.”  Even if the receiver of eye contact seems agitated about my dear one not helping them, they might live to see another day.

My friend thanked me for my thoughts.  In a busy restaurant, sometimes a waiter will refuse to make eye contact.  That’s infuriating, and that’s just a restaurant.  Being ignored hurts.

eye contact is love

Ming thinks eye contact is overrated.  I’m sorry to be centered on my own culture.  Ming says in the past, they’ve endured personal growth workshops where hand gestures, eye contact, and other non-verbal communication is valued in a hierarchical way.  White ways of being are lauded.

Yes–white, from money, and corporate ways of being are considered best in those settings.  But let’s go for love, not money.  Love requires authenticity.

My intention is to love all the people I can, which can be through…

• eye contact
• working for justice
• mutual aid
• redistributing wealth
• healing humor
• supporting the defenders of Parent Earth
• feeding hungry people
• modeling fat dance, disabled dance, and unconditional validity
• community care
• consent
• respectful intimate relationship
• civil disobedience
• jail support
• radical mental health
• disabled interdependence with my spouse Ming
• art that stokes a new feeling
• writing that stokes a new idea
• disrupting the status quo
• creative reuse of would-be trash

sun

I saved a worm that I saw in a parking lot after a rain.  Ming and I were near the labyrinth at our friend’s church so I could catch some rays.  You probably could guess I was praising God by singing.  I was showing God my big solar panel tummy, feeling the pleasure of being me.

Yes, the sun had come out, and I was afraid the worm would fry on the pavement.  So I found a thin twig and picked up the worm with the twig, then flung it into the grass.

It was shocking how the worm coiled up, upset because it probably thought I was a bird ready to eat it.  The encounter was intense because I think of worms as stupid creatures.  But the reactive movement of the worm implied a powerful consciousness.  The worm has feelings like me.  It freaked me out how much life was in this one worm.

It was just a whim that made me want to save the worm.  That was part of what freaked me out as well.  What’s life for?  Do I exist to save worms?  Do I exist to love people?  What did Mother God and my ancestors put me here to do?

questions for discussion

How do you like to share love?

How do you like to praise God?

When’s the last time you saved a worm?

Do you like to rest in the places of worship of your friends?

This song talks about how with just a glance, someone was captured in love.  Do you believe eye contact can be that powerful?

I’ve enjoyed darshan with a couple Hindu saints and my guru.  Amma gives hugs, another saint does eye contact, and there’s collecting the dust of the feet.  Would you enjoy darshan?

There was an art exhibit about water at the university in Corvallis, and Ming took this picture of me.

I can see Ming better with my eyes closed.  So true that eye contact can only do so much.  Please feel free to disregard all of this.