About Beans and Love

This is an essay I wrote... a long time ago!

​Much earlier today I put a crock pot of black beans and pinto beans on to cook slow. I carefully chopped onion, garlic, green chilies, red peppers, and basil leaves and put it all on top of the beans. Later, when I went to add the tomato paste, I found I had put far too many beans in — they had expanded — so I needed to scoop out half the container. The beans are always good and tasty; I just always have trouble waiting for the magic to take place between the time they are little more than brown stones and the time they become edible morsels. All day I have eaten the beans at various stages, telling myself I will wait until I can eat an awesome bean and cheese burrito, but when that time comes I'm sure I won't be hungry.

Today I am supposed to do an enormous amount of work at home, but I can't. I grow tired of the busy whir of computer hard drives. I am as restless as the wind in the trees outside my window. At least for now I will sit. If I smoked, I'd have a cigarette. If I was an alcoholic, I'd have a drink. But now I will eat half-cooked beans because I am sicker that I have been for years. I am wounded by this sickness. Put simply … I fell in love. This time I wasn't looking and tripped in. I have fallen deeply into the trap, and it will likely take me some time to crawl my way out of it.

Meanwhile, the object of my affections probably wants nothing to do with me now. I let fly with two super-intense poems, where I captured (in great detail) the inner workings of my feelings as I recalled every second of interaction between us when we met by chance on the night of a full moon. I am now sure this was a little much for her. You'd think I would have learned the lessons of the past in this regard — but I haven't.

I am always so thrilled to connect this way with another human being that I lose all sense of proportion. I put too much into the pot. I fill it until the contents has no room to boil. Then I wait for days and weeks in an anxious, nervous state; waiting for a phone call, a note, a letter, and E-Mail response… anything that will indicate that the tome hit its mark. So I sample the mailbox far too often. I do not heed my own advice to my love-sick friends ("Don't wait for the mail or it will never come!"). The response from these unfortunate women never comes.

Rollo May, in his piece entitled "Paradoxes of Sex and Love"  (1969) wrote:

"It is a strange thing in our society that what goes into building a relationship — the sharing of tastes, fantasies, dreams, hopes for the future, and fears from the past — seems to make people more shy and vulnerable than going to bed with each other. They are more wary of the tenderness that goes with psychological and spiritual nakedness than they are of the physical nakedness in sexual intimacy."

Read More