Qualifying Connections for Relational Investments
feeling a connection is no reason to invest!
Village Eros is what I call the guiding principle that informs the standards I use to qualify connections for relationships.
Connections are my felt-sense of bonding. My interest, my attraction, my love delighting in this person in particular, my infinite compassion, my will to understanding.
Investments of time, energy, and attention make relationships, giving them form, themes, trends across time. Not every connection is worthy of investment, and that doesn't make the unworthy “bad.” If love is truly infinite, that makes it a poor guideline for investing what is finite. I don’t turn away from things because they’re “bad.” I turn toward what exactly is for me.
In Village Eros, I am tuned to a specific feeling-tone of bonds. Certain flavors of interest and attraction do not get my attention. They are examples of Thrilling Misalignment.
I attract any number of things into my field in each infinite moment. I select what I experience based on how I invest my time, energy, and attention. This is why the language of "what I'm attracting" leads us down a dead-end road. I am attracting EVERYTHING. I am experiencing what *of that* I give my attention to.
In a room where one child is screaming and one child is at peace and the sink is full of dirty dishes, I select where I place my attention based on my evaluation of what is important. Everything I have ever experienced goes into the account which informs the choice I make. Who are these kids, what do I know about them, what does the screaming mean, will attention help or inflame, how do they respond to my attention pattern?
When I wish to experience something new, especially something beyond my current imagining, I take account of this account. If I'm an exhausted parent who always evaluates that screaming is the most important thing, I might choose something else to treat as important, like the sink full of dishes. If I take account of just the behavior and not the account (the values and beliefs driving the behavior) I stay exhausted, trying strategy after strategy while remaining narrowed in on the child who is screaming. I don’t imagine beyond a value system wherein screaming is an emergency and emergency is the most important thing.
Village Eros is a rut of alignment I've sunk deeply into. It works the same way as every other limiting belief system, except that its limits are in service to me like the walls and roof of my home. It is a standard I feel with my body. Village Eros replaces the account informed by my past experience, not taking it away but choosing new and specific guidelines for investment.
These are so embodied they are hard for me to write down.
Lately I'm noticing
—I am laughing all the time we are together
—I am free of thoughts questioning, doubting, or evaluating the relationship (literally ever)
—I am eager to see them and to show up to the plans we make
But, while it's hard to write out what I'm noticing, it's easy to point myself and anyone I meet, immediately, to their own experience of the tone of love, to Village Eros. We all have at least one person in our lives who is annoyingly supportive, unfailingly loving, easy to relate with, ample with understanding and infinite of patience. Someone it just feels *right* to be around.
Often, these relationships bring up a shame so powerful that we cannot look at them unless we are commanded there and held as we do it. The shame says we have not showed up enough or we are not worthy of such regard or that this person simply doesn't really see all of the horribility I am. We might not even include them in our list of "who I'm in a relationship with" because nothing has ever been hard, and maybe that means they don't understand me at all.
In a time a decade ago when one man was blaming me for causing him pain and one man was simply present with me, a humiliating amount of my time, energy, and attention went to the man who needed his perception of me fixed.
In a time not too long ago when a man blamed me for causing him pain, my time, energy, and attention was all for my friends, a pack of seven of us descending on the river, and he and the situation with him didn't even seem worthy of talking about with them.
When connections were qualified by what I believed about their potential, by the thrill of possibility that electrified me, I was all over the place. I was centering literal strangers in my attentional field, ignoring the ones I'd already chosen, who had consistently showed up across years, loving me.
Now that connections are qualified by real world experiences of safety, resonance, compatibility, and alignment, I don't have to figure out the potential of any connection or try to achieve it. There is no more anxiety about "what we are" or "where this is going" because I'm invested in my own life which is there nourishing me beyond any singular relationship. It's easy to fit aligned people cozily into the dinners and coworking and dancing and woods walks and sunset viewings that are happening all the time.
And if it isn't easy, I simply won't be there.
